from Canto I

31

And if our quarrels should rip up old stories,
     And help them with a lie or two additional,
I’m not to blame, as you well know, no more is
     Any one else—they were become traditional;
Besides, their resurrection aids our glories
     By contrast, which is what we just were wishing all:
And science profits by this resurrection—
Dead scandals form good subjects for dissection.

32

Their friends had tried at reconciliation,
     Then their relations, who made matters worse;
(‘Twere hard to tell upon a like occasion
     To whom it may be best to have recourse—
I can’t say much for friend or yet relation):
     The lawyers did their utmost for divorce,
But scarce a fee was paid on either side
Before, unluckily, Don Jóse died.

33

He died: and most unluckily, because,
     According to all hints I could collect
From counsel learned in those kinds of laws,
     (Although their talk’s obscure and circumspect)
His death contrived to spoil a charming cause;
    A thousand pities also with respect
To public feeling, which on this occasion
Was manifested in a great sensation.

34

But ah! he died; and buried with him lay
     The public feeling and the lawyers’ fees:
His house was sold, his servants sent away,
     A Jew took one of his two mistresses,
A priest the other—at least so they say:
     I ask’d the doctors after his disease,
He died of the slow fever call’d the tertian,
And left his widow to her own aversion.

35

Yet Jose was an honourable man,
     That I must say, who knew him very well;
Therefore his frailties I’ll no further scan,
     Indeed there were not many more to tell;
And if his passions now and then outran
     Discretion, and were not so peaceable
As Numa’s (who was also named Pompilius),
He had been ill brought up, and was born bilious.

36

Whate’er might be his worthlessness or worth,
     Poor fellow! he had many things to wound him,
Let’s own, since it can do no good on earth;
     It was a trying moment that which found him
Standing alone beside his desolate hearth,
     Where all his household gods lay shiver’d round him;
No choice was left his feelings or his pride
Save death or Doctors’ Commons—so he died.

37

Dying intestate, Juan was sole heir
    To a chancery suit, and messuages, and lands,
Which, with a long minority and care,
     Promised to turn out well in proper hands:
Inez became sole guardian, which was fair,
     And answer’d but to nature’s just demands;
An only son left with an only mother
Is brought up much more wisely than another.

38

Sagest of women, even of widows, she
     Resolved that Juan should be quite a paragon,
And worthy of the noblest pedigree:
    (His sire was of Castile, his dam from Arragon).
Then for accomplishments of chivalry,
     In case our lord the king should go to war again,
He learn’d the arts of riding, fencing, gunnery,
And how to scale a fortress—or a nunnery.

39

But that which Donna Inez most desired,
     And saw into herself each day before all
The learned tutors whom for him she hired,
     Was, that his breeding should be strictly moral;
Much into all his studies she inquired,
     And so they were submitted first to her, all,
Arts, sciences, no branch was made a mystery
To Juan’s eyes, excepting natural history.

40

The languages, especially the dead,
     The sciences, and most of all the abstruse,
The arts, at least all such as could be said
     To be the most remote from common use,
In all these he was much and deeply read;
     But not a page of any thing that’s loose,
Or hints continuation of the species,
Was ever suffer’d, lest he should grow vicious.