The narrator advances a strict and idealistic historiographical theory in which it’s the historian’s job to record everything precisely and objectively. It is evocative of the sort of historical method that Thucydides advanced in his History of the Peloponnesian War, which is excerpted here:

And with reference to the narrative of events, far from permitting myself to derive it from the first source that came to hand, I did not even trust my own impressions, but it rests partly on what I saw myself, partly on what others saw for me, the accuracy of the report being always tried by the most severe and detailed tests possible. My conclusions have cost me some labour from the want of coincidence between accounts of the same occurrences by different eye-witnesses, arising sometimes from imperfect memory, sometimes from undue partiality for one side or the other… [I]f it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content. In fine, I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.

Of course, any attempt at writing an “objective” history will run into countless issues, even if value-judgements are excluded from the historical account. Within any historical writing, the historian must make narrative judgments about what is important to include and what isn’t. Thus, Cervantes characterizes his narrator as idealistic, and sets him up to fail in his own attempt at objectivity.

These brief portions of narrative (from the end of chapter 8 to the end of this chapter when Don Quixote’s narrative resumes) along with the prologues are ostensibly the only parts of the entire novel that are the narrator’s original content. Up until this point, Don Quixote’s narrative was written by another Castilian historian, and the narrator will go on to find an Arabic history of Don Quixote, which the narrator gets translated into Castilian and claims that, “he translated the whole just as it is set down here.” Thus, the narrator advances a strict historiographical theory in which he tries to preserve the original historical records or Don Quixote’s adventures without altering them. And this is one of the major ways in which Cervantes parodies the chivalric novelists concern with underscoring the historicity of their narratives, despite being obviously false.

Additionally, Cervantes injects some more tongue-in-cheek humor by having his narrator describe Don Quixote’s adventures as “such an interesting tale,” when, of course, Cervantes himself invented the tale.

The narrator is here referring to himself or herself when they say “the second author.” With these lines, Cervantes reveals that the narrative up to this point has not been the original work of this “second author,” but rather the narrative of another Castilian author who happened to write about Don Quixote as well (of course, the entire novel is the fictional creation of Cervantes, but within the world of the novel, this narrator didn’t write the narrative up to now). This establishes the “second author,” our narrator, as a sort of compiler or editor.

The “Second Part” refers to the second part of the first volume, not the second part of the entire novel, which was published years later.

King Henry V is responding to Westmoreland’s wish that the English army had more troops:

WESTMORELAND
O that we now had here
But one ten thousand of those men in England
That do no work to-day!

He responds with rhetorical questions that emphasize his confidence that Westmoreland shouldn’t wish for more troops, and he takes this opportunity to inspire and unite the entire army.

Although the origin of this tendency can probably be traced back to pre-Socratic philosophers, the most famous example of this is found in Plato’s dialogue, The Republic, which proposes that the ideal state would be run by philosopher kings.

This was said in response to a student proposing that moral truths could only be discovered through philosophy and not through historical or political thought.

Incidentally, this same student was the only one who was placed into Professor Nakhimovsky’s section for the spring term.

This forward was composed in the style of Herodotus’s History, which opens: