Don Quixote1700 · public domain
The lively rogue of the tradition. Motteux, working partly from a French version, gives Cervantes a broad, farcical English full of energy, and for two centuries it was how most English readers met the Don. It is also unreliable: it invents, it coarsens, and it drops the odd howler (his opening plants La Mancha in the kingdom of Aragon, which it is not). Read Motteux for fun and for the flavour of an older comic English, not to know exactly what Cervantes wrote.