ack with a coarse facetious familiarity, as if he were his chaplain
whom he had invited to dine with him, or was about to present to a
benefice. The reverend divine might submit to the obligation, but he has
no occasion to subscribe to the jest. If it is a jest that Mr. Bowles
should be a parson, and Lord Byron a peer, the world knew this before;
there was no need to write a pamphlet to prove it.

The _Don Juan_ indeed has great power; but its power is owing to the
force of the serious writing, and to the oddity of the contrast between
that and the flashy passages with which it is interlarded. From the
sublime to the ridiculous there is but one step. You laugh and are
surprised that any one should turn round and _travestie_ himself: the
drollery is in the utter discontinuity of ideas and feelings. He makes
virtue serve as a foil to vice; _dandyism_ is (for want of any other) a
variety of genius. A classical intoxication is followed by the splashing
of soda-water, by frothy effusions of ordinary bile. After the lightning
and the hurricane, we are introduced to the interior of the cabin and
the contents of wash-hand basins. The solemn hero of tragedy plays
_Scrub_ in the farce. This is "very tolerable and not to be endured."
The Noble Lord is almost the only writer who has prostituted his talents
in this way. He hallows in order to desecrate; takes a pleasure in
defacing the images of beauty his hands have wrought; and raises our
hopes and our belief in goodness to Heaven only to dash them to the
earth again, and break them in pieces the more effectually from the very
height they have fallen. Our enthusiasm for genius or virtue is thus
turned into a jest by the very person who has kindled it, and who thus
fatally quenches the sparks of both. It is not that Lord Byron is
sometimes serious and sometimes trifling, sometimes profligate, and
sometimes moral--but when he is most serious and most moral, he is only
preparing to mortify the unsuspecting reader by putting a pitiful _hoax_
upon him. This is a most unaccountable anomaly. It is as if the eagle
were to build its eyry in a common sewer, or the owl were seen soaring
to the mid-day sun. Such a sight might make one laugh, but one would not
wish or expect it to occur more than once![C]

In fact, Lord Byron is the spoiled child of fame as well as fortune.
He has taken a surfeit of popularity, and is not contented to delight,
unless he can shock the public. He would force the