Don Juan; or, the Battle of Tolosa: a Poem, in Three Cantos.

First edition (pp. 88). Duodecimo (18 cm) in red half leather over marbled boards, five raised bands, gilt titles to spine; marbled endpapers, ribbon place marker. 

The battle in which Moorish forces were defeated by a Christian army was fought in the twelfth century and was said to mark the beginning of the end of the Moorish hegemony. Into all this, the anonymous author introduces Don Juan, a character originating in the fifteenth century, and much carrying off of noble maidens (usually by moonlight). Presumably the author held in mind certain broad parallels with the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, with or without Don Juan and the maidens. A mischievous library bibliographer has in one instance entered the parenthetic note "forgery" against this title, suggesting the poem was intended to deceive readers of Byron; but while Byron forgers and fabricators were legion, especially when the opportunity arose to supply a posthumous seventeenth canto for Byron's great poem, this Don Juan was composed in a plodding pedestrian style no one could mistake for Byron's.  Best understood as an example of the work of a lesser poet who was, nevertheless, seized by a great occasion to which he struggled to do justice. 

Tips worn; otherwise a fine copy.