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 confessed, “It fulfils in a certain degree what I have long preached, the task of producing something wholly new and relative to the age, and yet surpassingly beautiful.”  And Sir Walter Scott, in the midst of a hearty panegyric:  “It has the variety of Shakespeare himself.  Neither Childe Harold, nor the most beautiful of Byron’s earlier tales, contain more exquisite poetry than is to be found scattered through the cantos of Don Juan, amidst verses which the author seems to have thrown from him with an effort as spontaneous as that of a tree resigning its leaves.”