Juan, detected by his wife in an intrigue, is completely nonplussed.

"Fie!" cries Elvire, mockingly (in Browning's happy paraphrase),-- "Fie! for a man of mode, accustomed at the court To such a style of thing, how awkwardly my lord Attempts defence!" In this emergency, Browning, as it would seem, steps in, and provides the arch-voluptuary with a philosophy of illicit love, quite beyond the speculative capacity of any Juan in literature, and glowing with poetry of a splendour and fertility which neither Browning himself nor the great English poet who had identified his name with that of Juan, and whom Browning in this very poem overwhelms with genial banter, ever surpassed.

The poem inevitably challenged comparison with Byron's masterpiece.

In dazzling play of intellect, in swift interchange of wit and passion, the English nineteenth century produced nothing more comparable to the _Don Juan_ of Byron than _Fifine at the Fair_.
It cannot be denied that the critics had some excuse who, like Mortimer, frankly identified Browning with his hero, and described the poem as an assertion of the "claim to relieve the fixity of conjugal affection by varied adventure in the world of temporary loves."[58] For Browning has not merely given no direct hint of his own divergence from Juan, corresponding to his significant comment upon Blougram--"he said true things but called them by false names"; he has made his own subtlest and profoundest convictions on life and art spring spontaneously from the brain of this brilliant conqueror of women.

Like Goethe's Faust, he unmistakably shares the mind, the wisdom, the faith, of his creator; it is plausible to suppose that the poet indorses his application of them.
This is unquestionably a complete mistake; but Browning, as usual, presumed too much upon his readers' insight, and took no pains to obviate a confusion which he clearly supposed to be impossible.
[Footnote 58: Mrs Orr, _Life_, p.297.Her own criticism is, however, curiously indecisive and embarrassed.] It was on the strand at Pornic that he encountered the fateful gipsy whom he calls Fifine.