"Quixotic" in History

I found this interesting blurb from Talks on Temperance, by Frederic William Farrar (1881):

I know our attempt to resist the evil has been called Quixotic, and that we have been charged with a want of judgment. Be it so… I am not in the least degree afraid to be called Quixotic. I have enough experience of life, and have read enough of history to know that there has hardly ever been any single man who is been in the least degree more in earnest than his fellows, who has not been called Quixotic. In these days of a somewhat armchair kind of Christianity… to be called Quixotic, may be a testimony to which some honor may attach when it takes the form of an endeavor to do good to our fellow man. I am quite sure Luther would have been called Quixotic; Whitfield would have been called Quixotic, and also Howard and Wilberforce. To be called Quixotic very often means no more than this, that a man has been called into wakefulness of his peril, while others are slumbering around him through the mist. It means often that he is fired with a noble and necessary enthusiasm, having realized the dimensions of an evil to which others are blinded by familiarity. (pages 29-30)

I'm taken by the phrase "to be called Quixotic, may be a testimony to which some honor may attach when it takes the form of an endeavor to do good to our fellow man" because it seems that by this time the popular image of Don Quixote has become divorced from the actual novel. Because nearly every time Don Quixote endeavors to do good to his fellow man, he fails miserably.