enture reappears, and his idealization of primitive life, caught from
Rousseau and Chateaubriand. There is more repose about this poem than in
any of the author's other compositions. In its pages the sea seems to
plash about rocks and caves that bask under a southern sun. "'Byron, the
sorcerer,' he can do with me what he will," said old Dr. Parr, on reading
it. As the swan-song of the poet's sentimental verse, it has a pleasing if
not pathetic calm. During the last years in Italy he planned an epic on
the Conquest, and a play on the subject of Hannibal, neither of which was
executed.

In the criticism of a famous work there is often little left to do but to
criticise the critics--to bring to a focus the most salient things that
have been said about it, to eliminate the absurd from the sensible, the
discriminating from the commonplace. _Don Juan_, more than any of its
precursors, _is_ Byron, and it has been similarly handled. The early
cantos were ushered into the world amid a chorus of mingled applause and
execration. The minor Reviews, representing middle-class respectability,
were generally vituperative, and the higher authorities divided in their
judgments. The _British Magazine_ said that "his lordship had degraded his
personal character by the composition;" the _London_, that the poem was "a
satire on decency;" the _Edinburgh Monthly_, that it was "a melancholy
spectacle;" the _Eclectic_, that it was "an outrage worthy of
detestation." _Blackwood_ declared that the author was "brutally outraging
all the best feelings of humanity." Moore characterizes it as "the most
painful display of the versatility of genius that has ever been left for
succeeding ages to wonder at or deplore." Jeffrey found in the whole
composition "a tendency to destroy all belief in the reality of virtue;"
and Dr. John Watkins classically named it "the Odyssey of Immorality."
"_Don Juan_ will be read," wrote one critic, "as long as satire, wit,
mirth, and supreme excellence shall be esteemed among men." "Stick to _Don
Juan_," exhorted another; "it is the only sincere thing you have written,
and it will live after all your _Harolds_ have ceased to be 'a
schoolgirl's tale, the wonder of an hour.' It is the best of all your
works--the most spirited, the most straightforward, the most interesting,
the most poetical." "It is a work," said Goethe, "full of soul, bitterly
savage in its misanthropy, exquisitely delicate in its tenderness."
Shelley confe