This plan of solemn and heroic accusation was the first public attack on his wife.  Next we see him commencing a scurrilous attempt to turn her to ridicule in the First Canto of ‘Don Juan.’

It is to our point now to show how carefully and cautiously this Don Juan campaign was planned.

Vol.  IV. p.138, we find Letter 325 to Mr. Murray:—­

      ’Venice:  January 25, 1819.

   ’You will do me the favour to print privately, for private
   distribution, fifty copies of “Don Juan." The list of the men to
   whom I wish it presented I will send hereafter.’

The poem, as will be remembered, begins with the meanest and foulest attack on his wife that ever ribald wrote, and puts it in close neighbourhood with scenes which every pure man or woman must feel to be the beastly utterances of a man who had lost all sense of decency.  Such a potion was too strong to be administered even in a time when great license was allowed, and men were not over-nice.  But Byron chooses fifty armour-bearers of that class of men who would find indecent ribaldry about a wife a good joke, and talk about the ‘artistic merits’ of things which we hope would make an honest boy blush.

At this time he acknowledges that his vices had brought him to a state of great exhaustion, attended by such debility of the stomach that nothing remained on it; and adds, ’I was obliged to reform my way of life, which was conducting me from the yellow leaf to the ground with all deliberate speed.’ {41} But as his health is a little better he employs it in making the way to death and hell elegantly easy for other young men, by breaking down the remaining scruples of a society not over-scrupulous.

Society revolted, however, and fought stoutly against the nauseous dose.  His sister wrote to him that she heard such things said of it that she never would read it; and the outcry against it on the part of all women of his acquaintance was such that for a time he was quite overborne; and the Countess Guiccioli finally extorted a promise from him to cease writing it.  Nevertheless, there came a time when England accepted ’Don Juan,’—­when Wilson, in the ‘Noctes Ambrosianae,’ praised it as a classic, and took every opportunity to reprobate Lady Byron’s conduct.  When first it appeared the ‘Blackwood’ came out with that indignant denunciation of which we have spoken, and to which Byron replied in the extracts we have already quoted.  He did something more than reply.  He marked out Wilson as one of the strongest literary men of the day, and set his ‘initiated’ with their documents to work upon him.

One of these documents to which he requested Wilson’s attention was the private autobiography, written expressly to give his own story of all the facts of the marriage and separation.

In the indignant letter he writes Murray on the ‘Blackwood’ article, Vol.  IV., Letter 350—­under date December 10, 1819—­he says:—­