Don Quixote: Renaissance humor with a modern translation A Spanish knight, about fifty years of age, gave himself up so entirely to reading the romances of chivalry, that in the end they turned his brain, and nothing would satisfy him but that he must ride abroad on his old horse, armed with spear and helmet, a knight-errant, to encounter all adventures, and to redress the innumerable wrongs of the world. As is the case in this epic tale by Cervantes, modern man is not immune to prolonged sustained suggestion. All irony criticizes the imperfect ideas and theories of mankind, not by substituting for them other ideas and other theories, less imperfect, but by placing the facts of life, in mute