Читать книгу Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (With Byron's Biography) - Lord Byron - Страница 267

Actium—Lepanto—fatal Trafalgar.

Stanza xl. line 5.

Actium and Trafalgar need no further mention. The battle of Lepanto [October 7, 1571], equally bloody and considerable, but less known, was fought in the Gulf of Patras. Here the author of Don Quixote lost his left hand.

"His [Cervantes'] galley the Marquesa, was in the thick of the fight, and before it was over he had received three gun-shot wounds, two in the breast and one on the left hand or arm." In consequence of his wound "he was seven months in hospital before he was discharged. He came out with his left hand permanently disabled; he had lost the use of it, as Mercury told him in the 'Viaje del Parnase,' for the greater glory of the right."—Don Quixote, A Translation by John Ormsby, 1885, Introduction, i. 13.]