Hitherto I have not noticed Don Juan otherwise than incidentally.  It was commenced in Venice, and afterward continued at intervals to the end of the sixteenth canto, until the author left Pisa, when it was not resumed, at least no more has been published.  Strong objections have been made to its moral tendency; but, in the opinion of many, it is the poet’s masterpiece, and undoubtedly it displays all the variety of his powers, combined with a quaint playfulness not found to an equal degree in any other of his works.  The serious and pathetic portions are exquisitely beautiful; the descriptive have all the distinctness of the best pictures in Childe Harold, and are, moreover, generally drawn 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.