as a perfectly sincere comment on the most sincere, and therefore in many respects the most effective, of his works.  He has, after his way, endeavoured in grave prose and light verse to defend it against its assailants; saying, “In Don Juan I take a vicious and unprincipled character, and lead him through those ranks of society whose accomplishments cover and cloak their vices, and paint the natural effects;” and elsewhere, that he means to make his scamp “end as a member of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, or by the guillotine, or in an unhappy marriage.”  It were easy to dilate on the fact that in interpreting the phrases of the satirist into the language of the moralist we often require to read them backwards:  Byron’s own statement, “I hate a motive,” is, however, more to the point: 

  But the fact is that I have nothing plann’d,
  Unless it were to be a moment merry—­
  A novel word in my vocabulary.

Don Juan can only be credited with a text in the sense in which every large experience, of its own accord, conveys its lesson.  It was to the author a picture of the world as he saw it; and it is to us a mirror in which every attribute of his genius, every peculiarity of his nature, is reflected without distortion.  After the audacious though brilliant opening, and the unfortunately pungent reference to the poet’s domestic affairs, we find in the famous storm (c. ii.) a bewildering epitome of his prevailing manner.  Home-sickness, sea-sickness, the terror of the tempest, “wailing, blasphemy, devotion,” the crash of the wreck, the wild farewell, “the bubbling cry of some strong swimmer in his agony,” the horrors of famine, the tale of the two fathers, the beautiful apparitions of the rainbow and the bird, the feast on Juan’s spaniel, his reluctance to dine on “his pastor and his master,” the consequences of eating Pedrillo,—­all follow each other like visions in the phantasmagoria of a nightmare, till at last the remnant of the crew are drowned by a ridiculous rhyme—­

  Finding no place for their landing better,
  They ran the boat ashore,—­and overset her.

Then comes the episode of Haidee, “a long low island song of ancient days,” the character of the girl herself being like a thread of pure gold running through the fabric of its surroundings, motley in every page; e.g., after the impassioned close of the “Isles of Greece,” we have the stanza:—­

  Thus sang, or would, or could, or should, have sung,
    The modern Greek, in tolerable verse;
  If not like Orpheus quite, when Greece was young,
    Yet in those days he might have done much worse—­