because the author was to produce Don Quixote twenty years afterwards?
The scramble for copies which, as we have seen, followed immediately on the appearance of the book, does not look like general insensibility to its merits.
No doubt it was received coldly by some, but if a man writes a book in ridicule of periwigs he must make his account with being coldly received by the periwig wearers and hated by the whole tribe of wigmakers.
If Cervantes had the chivalry-romance readers, the sentimentalists, the dramatists, and the poets of the period all against him, it was because Don Quixote was what it was; and if the general public did not come forward to make him comfortable for the rest of his days, it is no more to be charged with neglect and ingratitude than the English-speaking public that did not pay off Scott’s liabilities.
It did the best it could; it read his book and liked it and bought it, and encouraged the bookseller to pay him well for others.