Note 190 — Chapter XLIII

Byron, Don Juan, xiii. 11. Borrow probably knew well enough where the lines came from. Don Juan had not been published more than fifteen years at the time, and was in the zenith of its popularity. But Byron and his ways were alike odious to the rough manliness of Borrow (see Lavengro, ch. xxxix.), and, in good truth, however much the poet “deserves to be remembered,” it is certainly not for this line, which contains as many suggestiones falsi as may be packed into one line. Yet the “sneer” is not in the original, but in Borrow’s misquotation; Byron wrote “smiled.” The idea of the poet having spent a handful of gold ounces in a Genoese posada at Seville and at a bull-fight at Madrid, that he might be competent to tell the world that Cervantes sneered Spain’s chivalry away, is superlatively Borrovian—and delicious. The entire passage runs thus—