credulous

Personages

it is for the parents to guide them frominfancy in the ways of virtue, propriety, and worthy Christian conduct, so that when grown up they may be thestaff of their parents’ old age, and the glory of their posterity; and to force them to study this or that science I donot think wise, though it may be no harm to persuade them; and when there is no need to study for the sake ofpane lucrando, and it is the student’s good fortune that heaven has given him parents who provide him with it, itwould be my advice to them to let him pursue whatever science they may see him most inclined to

I, Senor Don Quixote,” answered the gentleman, “have one son, without whom, perhaps, I should count myselfhappier than I am, not because he is a bad son, but because he is not so good as I could wish. He is eighteen yearsof age; he has been for six at Salamanca studying Latin and Greek, and when I wished him to turn to the study ofother sciences I found him so wrapped up in that of poetry (if that can be called a science) that there is no gettinghim to take kindly to the law, which I wished him to study, or to theology, the queen of them all. I would like him tobe an honour to his family, as we live in days when our kings liberally reward learning that is virtuous and worthy;for learning without virtue is a pearl on a dunghill. He spends the whole day in settling whether Homer expressedhimself correctly or not in such and such a line of the Iliad, whether Martial was indecent or not in such and suchan epigram, whether such and such lines of Virgil are to be understood in this way or in that; in short, all his talkis of the works of these poets, and those of Horace, Perseus, Juvenal, and Tibullus; for of the moderns in our ownlanguage he makes no great account; but with all his seeming indifference to Spanish poetry, just now his thoughtsare absorbed in making a gloss on four lines that have been sent him from Salamanca, which I suspect are for somepoetical tournament.”

squire

enmity

Don Quixote turned to look and found that it was true, and rejoicing exceedingly, he concluded that they weretwo armies about to engage and encounter in the midst of that broad plain;