"Don Quixote" and "Modern Chivalry"

Abstract

Hugh Henry Brackenridge, author of Modern Chivalry, born in Scotland in 1748, brought to America when he was five, lived until 1816, alert, industrious, almost quixotic in his zeal for the welfare of individuals and of democratic developments in the colonies and the infant nation. A poverty-stricken but excellent student, he began teaching at the age of fifteen, entered Princeton at twenty with James Madison and Philip Freneau. Graduating in 1771, he went back to school-teaching and continued his studies and writing. His urge to help others made him, in turn, army chaplain, lawyer, state assemblyman, and Justice of the Supreme Court. Although Brackenridge loved democracy, he recognized many failures in its practice and fought hard by means of satirical verse and fiction to remove them. So valid are his writings that he has been called our best contemporary observer of the development and glorious possibilities of America. Brackenridge's satire is at its best in Modern Chivalry, published in six volumes from 1792 to 1815. In it, like Cervantes in the Quixote, he tried to laugh away the absurdities in thought and conduct which he observed in his fellow men. Like Cervantes, he used as the vehicle for his satire the story of a wandering master and his dull, roguish servant. So numerous, indeed, are the similarities between Don Quixote and Modemr Chivalry that they delight the student of Spanish who is also interested in the literary history of early America. The first likeness which greets one in the two books is the ending of the two prologues: And with this, God grant you health, and do not forget me. Vale. Thus speaks Cervantes; and Brackenridge says: Wishing the reader all manner of happiness, for the present, Vale-Valete. Like Quixote, Captain Farrago, the master, a man about fifty-three years of age, of natural good sense and considerable reading, often gives various authors and fictional characters as justification or even as pretended authorization of his speech and action. A spectator of the confusion and quarrelling preceding the horse races, Captain Farrago