The “vanity” of the book lies in the wordy amatoriousness of its style. We have perhaps pushed the practice of accounting for all fashions in literature by imitation too far. It is quite as possible to explain Lyly without Guevara as it would be to account for Góngora without Lyly. Given the desire to write in a fine peculiar form, and the adoption of some trick with words follows naturally, while the number of tricks which can be played is not indefinite. Yet it is at least as likely that Sir Philip Sidney was set on his peculiar form of affectation by the _Libros de Caballerías_, published from thirty to forty years earlier, and certainly known to him. Such sentences as these send us back at once to Feliciano de Silva: “Most beloved lady, the incomparable excellences of yourself, waited on by the greatness of your estate, and the importance of the thing whereon my life consisteth, doth require both many ceremonies before the beginning and many circumstances in the uttering of my speech, both bold and fearful.” And, “Since no words can carry with them the life of the inward feeling, I desire that my desire may be weighed in the balances of honour, and let Virtue hold them; for if the highest love in no base person may aspire to grace, then may I hope your beauty will not be without pity.” Turn to the first chapter of Shelton’s _Don Quixote_, and you meet with those “intricate sentences” from Feliciano: “The reason of the unreasonableness which against my reason is wrought, doth so weaken my reason as with all reason I doe justly complaine on your beauty.” And, “The High Heavens which with your divinity doe fortifie you divinely with the starres, and make you deserveresse of the deserts that your greatnesse deserves,” &c.[81]
We must not push the comparison too far. Sidney had qualities of imagination which raised him far above the Spaniard, and he never rings the changes on the same word so fatuously as Feliciano and other later authors of _Libros de Caballerías_. Yet the juggle on the two forces of the word “desire” is quite in the Spanish taste. The immediate success of _Don Quixote_ in England may be explained not only by the permanent merits of Cervantes’ romance, but by the fact that we had our examples of the literary affectation which he attacked. The practice of labouring the expression of sentiment, of repeating, qualifying, and counterbalancing, would inevitably lead to long straggling sentences, while it was also a direct invitation to the frigid conceits in which Sidney abounds.