One noticeable feature about these comments is their sincerity:  reviewing, however occasionally one-sided, had not then sunk to be the mere register of adverse or friendly cliques; and, with all his anxiety for its verdict, Byron never solicited the favour of any portion of the press.  Another is, the fact that the adverse critics missed their mark.  They had not learnt to say of a book of which they disapproved, that it was weak or dull:  in pronouncing it to be vicious, they helped to promote its sale; and the most decried has been the most widely read of the author’s works.  Many of the readers of Don Juan have, it must be confessed, been found among those least likely to admire in it what is most admirable—­who have been attracted by the very excesses of buffoonery, violations of good taste, and occasionally almost vulgar slang, which disfigure its pages.  Their patronage is, at the best, of no more value than that of a mob gathered by a showy Shakespearian revival, and it has laid the volume open to the charge of being adapted “laudari ab illaudatis.”  But the welcome of the work in other quarters is as indubitably duo to higher qualities.  In writing Don Juan, Byron attempted something that had never been done before, and his genius so chimed with his enterprise that it need never be done again.  “Down,” cries M. Chasles, “with the imitators who did their host to make his name ridiculous.”  In commenting on their failure, an Athenaeum critic has explained the pre-established fitness of the ottava rima—­the first six lines of which are a dance, and the concluding couplet a “breakdown”—­for the mock-heroic.  Byron’s choice of this measure may have been suggested by Whistlecraft; but, he had studied its cadence in Pulci, and the Novelle Galanti of Casti, to whom he is indebted for other features of his satire; and he added to what has been well termed its characteristic jauntiness, by his almost constant use of the double rhyme.  That the ottava rima is out of place in consistently pathetic poetry, may be seen from its obvious misuse in Keats’s Pot of Basil.  Many writers, from Tennant and Frere to Moultrie, have employed it in burlesque or more society verse; but Byron alone has employed it triumphantly, for he has made it the vehicle of thoughts grave as well as gay, of “black spirits and white, red spirits and grey,” of sparkling fancy, bitter sarcasm, and tender memories.  He has swept into the pages of his poem the experience of thirty years of a life so crowded with vitality that our sense of the plethora of power which it exhibits makes us ready to condone its lapses.  Byron, it has been said, balances himself on a ladder like other acrobats; but alone, like the Japanese master of the art, he all the while bears on his shoulders the weight of a man.  Much of Don Juan is as obnoxious to criticism in detail as his earlier work; it has every mark of being written in hot haste.  In the midst of the most serious passages (e.g. the