When George III. died, Southey wrote a poem filled with absurd flattery of that monarch.  Byron had such intense hatred for the hypocrisy of society that he wrote his Vision of Judgment (1822) to parody Southey’s poem and to make the author the object of satire.  Pungent wit, vituperation, and irony were here handled by Byron in a brilliant manner, which had not been equaled since the days of Dryden and Pope.  The parodies of most poems are quickly forgotten, but we have here the strange case of Byron’s parody keeping alive Southey’s original.

Don Juan (1819-1824), a long poem in sixteen cantos, is Byron’s greatest work.  It is partly autobiographic.  The sinister, gloomy Don Juan is an ideal picture of the author, who was sore and bitter over his thwarted hopes of liberty and happiness.  Therefore, instead of strengthening humanity with hope for the future, this poem tears hope from the horizon, and suggests the possible anarchy and destruction toward which the world’s hypocrisy, cant, tyranny, and universal stupidity are tending.

The poem is unfinished.  Byron followed Don Juan through all the phases of life known to himself.  The hero has exciting adventures and passionate loves, he is favored at courts, he is driven to the lowest depths of society, he experiences a godlike happiness and a demoniacal despair.

Don Juan is a scathing satire upon society.  All its fondest idols,—­love, faith, and hope,—­are dragged in the mire.  There is something almost grand in the way that this Titanic scoffer draws pictures of love only to mock at them, sings patriotic songs only to add—­

  “Thus sung, or would, or could, or should have sung
  The modern Greek in tolerable verse,”

and mentions Homer, Milton, and Shakespeare only to show how accidental and worthless is fame.

Amid the splendid confusion of pathos, irony, passion, mockery, keen wit, and brilliant epigram, which display Byron’s versatile and spontaneous genius at its height, there are some beautiful and powerful passages.  There is an ideal picture of the love of Don Juan and Haidee:—­

  “Each was the other’s mirror, and but read
  Joy sparkling in their dark eyes like a gem.”

       “...they could not be
  Meant to grow old, but die in happy spring,
  Before one charm or hope had taken wing.”

As she lightly slept—­

                                   “...her face so fair
  Stirr’d with her dream, as rose-leaves with the air;
  Or as the stirring of a deep clear stream
  Within an Alpine hollow, when the wind
  Walks o’er it.”

General Characteristics.—­The poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge shows the revolutionary reaction against classicism in literature and tyranny in government; but their verse raises no cry of revolt against the proprieties and moral restrictions of the time.  Byron was so saturated with the revolutionary spirit that he rebelled against these also; and for this reason England would not allow him to be buried in Westminster Abbey.