I have to thank you for letting me see your two new cantos [the 3rd and 4th], which I return.  What sublimity! what levity! what boldness! what tenderness! what majesty! what trifling! what variety! what tediousness!—­for tedious to a strange degree, it must be confessed that whole passages are, particularly the earlier stanzas of the fourth canto.  I know no man of such general powers of intellect as Brougham, yet I think him insufferably tedious; and I fancy the reason to be that he has such facility of expression that he is never recalled to a selection of his thoughts.  A more costive orator would be obliged to choose, and a man of his talents could not fail to choose the best; but the power of uttering all and everything which passes across his mind, tempts him to say all.  He goes on without thought—­I should rather say, without pause.  His speeches are poor from their richness, and dull from their infinite variety.  An impediment in his speech would make him a perfect Demosthenes.  Something of the same kind, and with something of the same effect, is Lord Byron’s wonderful fertility of thought and facility of expression; and the Protean style of “Don Juan,” instead of checking (as the fetters of rhythm generally do) his natural activity, not only gives him wider limits to range in, but even generates a more roving disposition.  I dare swear, if the truth were known, that his digressions and repetitions generate one another, and that the happy jingle of some of his comical rhymes has led him on to episodes of which he never originally thought; and thus it is that, with the most extraordinary merit, merit of all kinds, these two cantos have been to me, in several points, tedious and even obscure.

As to the PRINCIPLES, all the world, and you, Mr. Murray, first of all, have done this poem great injustice.  There are levities here and there, more than good taste approves, but nothing to make such a terrible rout about—­nothing so bad as “Tom Jones,” nor within a hundred degrees of “Count Fathom.”

The writer goes on to remark that the personalities in the poem are more to be deprecated than “its imputed looseness of principle”: 

I mean some expressions of political and personal feelings which, I believe, he, in fact, never felt, and threw in wantonly and de gaiete de coeur, and which he would have omitted, advisedly and de bonte de coeur, if he had not been goaded by indiscreet, contradictory, and urgent criticisms, which, in some cases, were dark enough to be called calumnies.  But these are blowing over, if not blown over; and I cannot but think that if Mr. Gifford, or some friend in whose taste and disinterestedness Lord Byron could rely, were to point out to him the cruelty to individuals, the injury to the national character, the offence to public taste, and the injury to his own reputation, of such passages as those about Southey and Waterloo