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Our hearts first in the depths of Lethe’s spring,Ere what we least wish to behold will sleep:Thetis baptized her mortal son in Styx;A mortal mother would on Lethe fix. (4.4.25-32).This appeal to sympathy is derived from a worldview so pessimistic that trueknowledge becomes an obstacle to happiness. The forgetfulness induced by Lethe,then, is one solution, and laughing is another. This last idea recurs through the poem,which proclaims its unlimited derision:I hope it is no crimeTo laugh at all things – for I wish to knowWhat, after all, are all things – but a Show? (7.2.14-6).Of course, a fundamental element of the process of laughing at all things is the stageof judging all things, so as to find them ridiculous. This makes the facetiousness itselfa genuinely critical enterprise, universal in its scope. As an exercise of judgement, itis also the exercise of a value system, the basis of a moral system. Thus, the speakeris able to remark that “Laughter now-a-days is deemed too serious; /A jest at Vice byVirtue’s called a crime” (13.1.2-3). Via the obvious analogy between this generalisedcomment and the specific example of the attacks on the facetiousness of Don Juan,the speaker claims the position of Virtue. This is somewhat facetious, but notentirely. To Bryan Waller Procter, Byron reiterates what he had written earlier toMurray, “They mistake the object of “Don Juan”, which is nothing but a satire onaffectations of all kinds, mixed with some relief of serious feeling and description”(10.116, 5/3/23). Satire is meaningful, not meaningless, ridicule. He tells Kinnaird,“I mean it for a poetical T[ristram] Shandy – or Montaigne’s Essays with a story for ahinge” (10.150, 14/4/23); both of these literary models are light-hearted in tone, butnonetheless earnestly inquiring into numerous modes of human life.Encouragement might well have been provided by the knowledge, acquired via a clerkof the Parisian publisher Galignani, that people were reading it: “of all my works Juanis by far the most popular and sells best – especially with the women – who send by89