In Chapter 6, I focus on the swift transitions that so distressed many of the poem’s first readers. In the London Magazine, for example, John Scott deplored ‘the quick alternation’ in Don Juan ‘of pathos and profaneness, – of serious and moving sentiment and indecent ribaldry.’ Scott added, ‘This is not an English fault.’The chapter will trace how soon the habits that struck Scott as foreign came to be thought of as supremely English as Shakespearean, and what that means not just for the reception of Don Juan but for how people’s understanding and not just of the history of literature but of the world around them had changed.