from nature, while the satire is for the
most part curiously associated and sparklingly witty. The characters
are sketched with amazing firmness and freedom, and though sometimes
grotesque, are yet not often overcharged. It is professedly an epic
poem, but it may be more properly described as a poetical novel. Nor
can it be said to inculcate any particular moral, or to do more than
unmantle the decorum of society. Bold and buoyant throughout, it
exhibits a free irreverent knowledge of the world, laughing or
mocking as the thought serves, in the most unexpected antitheses to
the proprieties of time, place, and circumstance.

The object of the poem is to describe the progress of a libertine
through life, not an unprincipled prodigal, whose profligacy, growing
with his growth, and strengthening with his strength, passes from
voluptuous indulgence into the sordid sensuality of systematic
debauchery, but a young gentleman, who, whirled by the vigour and
vivacity of his animal spirits into a world of adventures, in which
his stars are chiefly in fault for his liaisons, settles at last into
an honourable lawgiver, a moral speaker on divorce bills, and
possibly a subscriber to the Society for the Suppression of Vice.
The author has not completed his design, but such appears to have
been the drift of it, affording ample opportunities to unveil the
foibles and follies of all sorts of men--and women too. It is
generally supposed to contain much of the author's own experience,
but still, with all its riant knowledge of bowers and boudoirs, it is
deficient as a true limning of the world, by showing man as if he
were always ruled by one predominant appetite.

In the character of Donna Inez and Don Jose, it has been imagined
that Lord Byron has sketched himself and his lady. It may be so; and
if it were, he had by that time got pretty well over the lachrymation
of their parting. It is no longer doubtful that the twenty-seventh
stanza records a biographical fact, and the thirty-sixth his own
feelings, when,

Poor fellow! he had many things to wound him,
Let's own, since it can do no good on earth;
It was a trying moment that which found him
Standing alone beside his desolate hearth,
Where all his household gods lay shiver'd round him:
No choice was left his feelings or his pride,
Save death or Doctors' Commons.

It has been already mentioned, that while the poet was at Dr
Glennie's academy at Dulwich, he read an accou