and Byron echoes precisely the same idea:

She is generous to her favorites: Casti makes her confess,

And Byron refers particularly to her Kindness:

“Love had made Catharine make each lover’s fortune.”223

Tomasso himself is described in language which might apply to Juan:

The scene in which Tomasso has just been especially favored by the Empress and is receiving congratulations from courtiers is paralleled by that in which Juan is being flattered after a warm greeting by Catharine.225 Another curious coincidence occurs in the efforts of the court physician to cure the apparent debility of Tomasso and Juan.226 These similarities are striking enough to furnish some probability that Byron was familiar with the plot of Il Poema Tartaro, and, consciously or unconsciously, reproduced some of its features in Don Juan.

Casti’s satire in this poem, as in Gli Animali Parlanti, is comprehensive. Like Byron, he ridicules the Russian language,227 attacks literary fads, criticises customs-duties,228 and enters into a vigorous denunciation of war. In speaking of soldiers who clash in civil strife, he says, with bitter truth:

Byron makes a charge of the same kind in portraying mercenary warriors as,

The whole of Canto VI in Il Poema Tartaro may be compared with Byron’s description of the siege of Ismail in Don Juan, VII and VIII. Both scenes are presented with grim and graphic realism, without any softening of the horrors and disgusting incidents of warfare.

In Il Poema Tartaro, more than in his other productions, Casti ventured to resort to genuine personal satire. He assailed not only Catharine, but also Potemkin, Prince Henry of Prussia, Gustavus III of Sweden, the Sultan of Egypt, and the king of Denmark, to mention only figures who have a prominent place in history. His method being still usually indirect and dramatic, Casti seldom lets himself appear as accuser, but puts criticism of these sovereigns into the mouths of his characters, especially Tomasso’s friend, Siveno, who acts as the favorite’s mentor and guide. A whole race may arouse Casti’s anger—

but he is too wise to let himself be entangled in any controversy. This discretion does not, necessarily, imply cowardice or fear, for his indirect attacks are often as malignant as any of Byron’s more direct invectives, and their victims cannot be mistaken. Byron, however, always wished to meet his enemies face to face, while Casti preferred to reach his in a less open way.

In general, the methods employed in Il Poema Tartaro are those used in Gli Animali Parlanti. There are the same short digressions, illustrated in such passages as,

in which the author pulls himself away in order to continue his narrative, and which have frequently almost the same phraseology as Byron’s “Return we to our story.” Sometimes the digressions take the form of philosophical reflections on various abstract subjects such as death, mutability, or love:

We meet often with the familiar insistence on the veracious character of the author’s writing.233 Irony occurs intermittently, mingled at times with sarcasm.

One peculiarity of Casti’s manner deserves particular attention, although it is not unique with him and is derived originally from the earlier burlesque poets. This is his habit of shifting the mood from the serious to the ludicrous by the use of unexpected phrases. Examples of this sudden turn in thought are numerous in Il Poema Tartaro. When the report of rebellion arrives at the Russian court, the description of terrible alarm ends with the couplet,

The exiled Empress, coming upon her old favorite, Tomasso, cries,

No reader of Don Juan needs to be reminded how often Byron cuts short a sentimental passage with a remark which makes the entire situation ridiculous. The secret of this continual interplay between gravity and absurdity had never been mastered by Frere; undoubtedly it is one of the tricks for which Byron was particularly indebted to Casti and to Casti’s predecessors, Pulci and Berni.

Casti’s style and language is usually flat and insipid, undistinguished by beauty or rhythm. “His diction,” says Foscolo, “is without grace or purity.” He is often coarse and unnecessarily obscene. These considerations make it improbable that Byron could have been affected by Casti’s poetic style, for, despite the sensuousness of some portions of Don Juan, the English poet rarely allowed himself to sink into the positive indecencies so common in Casti’s work.

On the other hand, the two men are united by their aims and motives. With all that is petty and offensive in Casti’s satire, there is mingled a real love of liberty and an unswerving hatred of despotism. No other poet in English or Italian literature of the latter eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries attempted an indictment of his age, at once so hostile and so comprehensive as those which Casti and Byron tried to make. More significant still, Casti, unlike Pulci, Berni, and Frere, was modern in spirit, and played with vital questions in society and government. He was close to Byron’s own epoch, and the objects of his wrath, as far as systems and institutions are concerned, were the objects of Byron’s satire. Up to a certain point, too, Byron followed Casti’s methods: he is colloquial, discursive, and gossipy; he cares little for plot structure; he employs irony and mockery, as well as invective; and he skips, in a single stanza, from seriousness to absurdity. The differences between the two poets are to be attributed chiefly to the Englishman’s genius and powerful personality. He was more of an egotist than Casti, more vehement, more straightforward, more impulsive, and was able to fill Don Juan with his individuality as Casti was never able to do with Gli Animali Parlanti and Il Poema Tartaro.

Certain facts in the relationship between Casti and Byron seem, then, to be clear. At a period before the composition of Beppo, Byron had read and enjoyed in the original Italian, the Novelle and Gli Animali Parlanti. Numerous features in Beppo and Don Juan which resemble characteristics of Casti’s poems had, apparently, existed combined in no English work before Byron’s time. In addition, internal evidence makes it a possibility that Byron was familiar with Il Poema Tartaro, and that he borrowed from it something of its material and its spirit. The probability is that Byron was influenced, to an extent greater than has been ordinarily supposed, by the example and the methods of Casti.

Byron’s acquaintance with Pulci and Berni did not, apparently, begin until after the publication of Beppo. On March 25, 1818, he wrote Murray, in speaking of Beppo: “Berni is the original of all—Berni is the father of that kind of writing, which, I think, suits our language, too, very well.”236 On February 21, 1820, while he was busy with his translation of Pulci’s Morgante Maggiore, he said of Pulci’s poem, to Murray: “It is the parent, not only of Whistlecraft, but of all jocose Italian poetry.”237 These assertions indicate that Byron classed Beppo and Don Juan with the work of the Italian burlesque writers, eventually coming to recognize Pulci as the founder of the school.

Luigi Pulci (1432–1484), a member of the literary circle which gathered at the court of Lorenzo de’ Medici in the latter half of the sixteenth century and which included, among others, Poliziano, Ficino, and Michelangelo, composed the Morgante Maggiore, “the first romantic poem of the Renaissance.” Designed probably to be read or recited at Lorenzo’s table, it was finally completed in February, 1483, as a poem in ottava rima, containing twenty-eight cantos and some 30,000 lines.238 Although the plotting and consummation of Gan’s treason against Charlemagne lends a crude unity to the romance, it is actually a series of battles, combats, and marvellous adventures loosely strung together. The titular hero, Morgante, dies in the twentieth canto. The matter is that of the Carolingian legend, now so well-known in the work of Pulci’s successors.

Historically, as the precursor of Berni, Ariosto, and the other singers of Carolingian romance, Pulci occupies the position of pioneer. For our purposes, however, the significance of his work lies less in the incidents of his narrative, the greater part of which he purloined, than in the poet’s personality and the transformation which his grotesque and fanciful genius accomplished with its material. Through much humorous and ironic digression, through some amusing interpolated episodes, through a balancing of the serious and the comic elements of the story, through a style popular in origin and humorous in effect, and through the creation of two new characters, the giant Margutte and the demon Astarotte, he made his poem a reflection of his own bourgeois individuality, clever, tolerant, and irrepressible in its inclination to seize upon the burlesque possibilities in men or events.

That the Morgante Maggiore is a burlesque poem is due not so much to deliberate design on Pulci’s part as to the unconscious reflection of his boisterous, full-blooded, yet at the same time, meditative nature. It is unwise to attribute to him any motive beyond that of amusing his audience. In spite of its apparent irreverence, the Morgante was probably not planned as a satire on chivalry or on the church, Pulci—“the lively, affecting, hopeful, charitable, large-hearted Luigi Pulci,” as Hunt called him—was at bottom kindly and sympathetic, and his work displays a robust geniality and good-humor which had undoubtedly some influence on Don Juan. We rarely find Pulci in a fury; at times his merriment is not far from Rabelaisian, however always without a trace of indignation, for his levity and playfulness seem genuine. This very tolerance is perhaps the product of Renaissance skepticism, which viewed both dogmatism and infidelity with suspicion. Deep emotion, tragedy, and pathos are all to be met with in the Morgante, but each is counter-balanced by mockery, comedy, or realism. It is this recurring antithesis, this continual introduction of the grotesque into the midst of what is, by itself, dignified and serious, that is the distinctive peculiarity of Pulci’s manner. The mere turn of a phrase makes a situation absurd. There is no intensity about this Florentine; he espouses no theories and advocates no creeds; he is content to have his laugh and to set others chuckling.

This summary may be of service in suggesting one reason why, in the later cantos of Don Juan, we sometimes are met with a tolerance almost sympathetic, widely differing from the passionate narrowness of English Bards. Pulci, unlike Byron, was not a declared satirist; his theme was in the past, steeped in legend and myth; but something of his spirit, difficult to analyze as that spirit may be, tempered and modified the satire of the older Byron.

Byron’s first definite reference to Pulci occurs in a portion of Don Juan written in November, 1819:

However, Don Juan, III, 45, presenting a possible parallelism with the Morgante, XVIII, 115, would indicate that Byron was familiar with Pulci’s poem at least some months before.240 On February 7, 1820, he wrote Murray: “I am translating the first canto of Pulci’s Morgante Maggiore, and have half done it.”241 In speaking of the completion of the translation, of which he was very proud, he told Murray, February 12, 1820: “You must print it side by side with the original Italian, because I wish the reader to judge of the fidelity; it is stanza for stanza, and often line for line, if not word for word.”242 In the Preface to the translation, printed with it in The Liberal, July 30, 1823, Byron uttered his final word on the Italian writer: “Pulci may be regarded as the precursor and model of Berni altogether.... He is no less the founder of a new style of poetry lately sprung up in England. I allude to that of the ingenious Whistlecraft.” It is evident, then, that Byron estimated Pulci’s work very highly, that he was acquainted, probably, with the entire Morgante Maggiore and had studied the first canto, at least, in detail, and that he considered him the original model of Berni and Frere.

It remains to point out specific qualities in manner and style which link the two poets together.243 Towards the narrative portion of the Morgante, Byron seems to have been indifferent. In Don Juan there is but one clear allusion to the Carolingian legend:

There is a fairly close parallel already pointed out between the response of a servant to Lambro in Don Juan, III, 45, and Margutte’s speech in the Morgante, XVIII, 115. There are, however, no other incidents in Don Juan which resemble any part of the earlier poem.

Pulci’s realism, a quality which is usually in itself burlesque when it is applied to a romantic subject, is shown in his fondness for homely touches and minute details, in his use of words out of the street and proverbs from the lips of the populace. The interjection of the lower-class spirit into the poem helped to make the Morgante in actuality what Frere had tried to produce in The Monks, and the Giants—a treatment of heroic characters and deeds by a bourgeois mind. The spectacle of the common vulgar details in the every-day life of men supposedly great naturally somewhat degrades the heroes. When Byron portrays General Suwarrow as

“Hero, buffoon, half-demon, and half-dirt,”245

he is following the methods of Pulci, who made his giants gluttons and his Rinaldo a master of Billingsgate.246 In the Morgante warriors are continually being put into ludicrous situations: Morgante fights his battles with a bell-clapper; Rinaldo knocks a Saracen into a bowl of soup247; and the same noble, turned robber, threatens to steal from St. Peter and to seize the mantles of St. Ursula and the Angel Gabriel.248 Pulci compares Roncesvalles to a pot in much the same spirit that Byron likens a rainbow to a black eye.249 Pulci is fond of cataloguing objects, especially the varieties of food served at banquets; and Byron shows the same propensity in describing in detail the viands provided for the feast of Haidée and Juan, and the dinner at Norman Abbey. Pulci’s realism is also manifest in his use of slang and the language of low life. In this respect, too, Byron is little behind him: Juan fires his pistol “into one assailant’s pudding”; slang phrases are frequently introduced into Don Juan, and elevated poetic style is made more vivid by contrast with intentionally prosaic passages.

Another peculiarity of Pulci is his tendency to make use of many Tuscan proverbs and to coin sententious apothegms of his own. The framework of the octave lends itself easily to compact maxims in the final couplet, and perhaps it is due to this fact that Don Juan and the Morgante are both crammed with epigrams. In Pulci’s poetry one meets on nearly every page with such apt sayings as

“La fede è fatta, come fa il solletico”250

and

“Co’ santi in chiesa, e co’ ghiotti in taverna.”251

One example out of the many in Don Juan will suffice for quotation:—

“Adversity is the first path to truth.”252

Possibly the fact that the Morgante was first recited to the members of Lorenzo’s circle is chiefly responsible for Pulci’s habit of turning often to his listeners, inviting them, as it were, to draw nearer and share his confidence. Thus he confesses:

Byron speaks repeatedly in this sort of mocking apology:

Both poets assume, at times, an affected modesty: thus at the very end of the Morgante Pulci asserts that he is not presumptuous:

So Byron refers to his own lack of ambition:

At the end of nearly every canto of the Morgante is a promise of continuation, so phrased as to seem conventional: e. g.,

“Come io diro ne l’altro mio cantare.”

The same custom became common with Byron, in such lines as,

There is, however, one important distinction between the two poets in their use of the digression: Pulci employs it for cursory comment on his story, or for chat about himself; Byron utilizes it not only for these purposes, but also for the expression of satire. It is in his digressions that he speaks out directly against individuals, institutions, and society in general. The Morgante is a tale, with an occasional remark by the author; Don Juan is a monologue, sustained by a narrative framework.

Pulci’s comparison of his poetry to a boat is introduced so frequently that it may possibly have suggested the figure to Byron. A typical instance of its usage may be quoted in the lines:—

Byron’s employment of the metaphor is also somewhat frequent:—

It should be added that the brief “grace before meat,” so apparently truely devotional in phraseology, which Pulci prefixed to each of his cantos, and the equally orthodox epilogues in which he gave a benediction to his readers, are his own peculiarity, borrowed unquestionably from the street improvisatori. There is nothing corresponding to them in Don Juan.

Both Pulci and Byron were men of wide reading, and not averse to displaying and making use of their information. Pulci treats the older poets without reverence: he quotes Dante’s “dopo la dolorosa rotta” without acknowledgment260; he burlesques the famous phrase about Aristotle by having Morgante call Margutte “il mæstro di color che sanno”; and he alludes to Petrarch with a wink:—

This recalls Byron’s exhortation at the end of Don Juan, I, when, after quoting four lines from Southey, he adds:

In a similar way Byron gives four lines from Campbell’s Gertrude of Wyoming, and comments upon them in Don Juan, I, 88–89.

This discussion would be incomplete if it did not mention Pulci’s fondness for philosophical reflection, meditations on life and death, on joy and sorrow. Volpi has attempted to demonstrate that Pulci, like many so-called humorists, was really, under the mask, a sad man. In making good this thesis he takes such lines as these as indicative of Pulci’s true attitude towards the problems of existence:—

However this may be, it is certain that Pulci, in his more thoughtful moods, inclined to pessimism and intellectual scepticism.

“Pulci’s versification,” says Foscolo, “is remarkably fluent; yet he is deficient in melody.” Another critic, the author of the brief note in the Parnaso Italiano, mentions his rapidity and his compression: “Tu troverai pochi poeti, che viaggino so velocemente, come il Pulci, il qualo in otti versi dice spesso piu di otte cose.” For this fluency and its corresponding lack of rhythm, the conversational tone of the Morgante is largely responsible. The many colloquial digressions and the use of common idioms hinder any approach to a grand style. Pulci’s indifference to the strict demands of metre, his employment of abrupt and disconnected phrases, and his frequent sacrifice of melody to vigor and compactness, are also characteristic of Byron’s method in his Italian satires. Although Don Juan contains some of Byron’s most musical passages, it nevertheless gives the impression of having been, like the Morgante, composed for an audience, the speaker being, perhaps, governed by rough notes, but tempted from his theme into extemporaneous observations, and caring so little for regularity or unity of structure that he feels no compunction about obeying the inclination of the moment. It is not without some acuteness that he alludes to,

Specifically in the field of satire, Pulci’s work, important though it was in some features of style and manner,264 exercised its greatest influence on Byron’s mood. The chastening effect of Byron’s life on his poetic genius had made him peculiarly receptive to the spirit of Pulci’s poem; and accordingly the Italian poet taught him to take life and his enemies somewhat less seriously, to be more tolerant and more genial, to make playfulness and humor join with vituperation in his satire. Byron’s satiric spirit, through his contact with Pulci, became more sympathetic, and therefore more universal.

To Berni, whom he, at one time, considered to be the true master of the Italian burlesque genre, Byron has few references. We have seen how he was induced to revise his first opinion and to recognize in Pulci “the precursor and model of Berni altogether.” In the advertisement to the translation of the Morgante he asserted that Berni, in his rifacimento, corrected the “harsh style” of Boiardo. These meagre data, however, furnish no clue to the possible influence of Berni’s work upon Don Juan.

Francesco Berni (1496?-1535)265 is important here chiefly because of his rifacimento, or revision, of Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato. In accomplishing this task he completely made over Boiardo’s romance by refining the style, polishing the verse-structure, inserting lengthy digressions of his own and following a scheme instituted by Ariosto, prefacing each canto with a sort of essay in verse. Berni’s purpose, indeed, was to make the Innamorato worthy of the Furioso. His version, however, owing probably to the malice of some enemy, has reached us only in a mutilated form. As it stands, nevertheless, it possesses certain features which distinguish it from the work of Pulci on the one hand and that of Casti on the other.

The influence which Berni may have had on Byron’s satires comes mainly from two features of the former’s work: his introductions to separate cantos, and his admirable style and versification. It was Berni’s habit to soliloquize before beginning his story: thus Canto IX of the Innamorato commences with a philosophical disquisition on the unexpected character of most human misfortunes, leading, by a natural step, to the plot itself. So, in Don Juan, only one canto—the second—begins with the tale itself; every other has a preliminary discussion of one sort or another.266 It was also Berni’s custom to take formal leave of his readers at the end of each canto, and to add a promise of what was to come.267 This habit, all but universal with the Italian narrative poets, Byron followed, although his farewell occurs sometimes even before the very last stanza. A typical example may be quoted:

Berni’s style and diction are far superior to Pulci’s. Count Giammaria Mazzuchelli, in the edition of Berni in Classici Italiani, says of this feature of his work: “La, facilita della rima congiunta alia naturallezza dell’ espressione, e la vivacita de’ pensieri degli scherzi uniti a singolare coltura nello stile sono in lui si maravigliose, che viene egli considerate come il capo di si fatta poesia, la quale percio ha presa da lui la denominazione, e suol chimarsi Bernesca.” He alone of the three Italian burlesque writers considered, succeeded in creating a masterpiece of literary art.269 In this respect, then, his influence on Byron may have been salutary.

Henri Beyle (1783–1842), the self-styled M. Stendhal, is responsible for the theory, since repeated by other critics, that Byron’s Italian satires owe much to the work of the Venetian dialect poet, Pietro Buratti (1772–1832). When Beyle was with Byron in Milan in November, 1816, he heard Silvio Pellico speak to Byron of Buratti as a charming poet, who, every six months, by the governor’s orders, paid a visit to the prisons of Venice. Beyle’s account of the ensuing events runs as follows: “In my opinion, this conversation with Silvio Pellico gave the tone to Byron’s subsequent poetical career. He eagerly demanded the name of the bookseller who sold M. Buratti’s works; and as he was accustomed to the expression of Milanese bluntness, the question excited a hearty laugh at his expense. He was soon informed that if Buratti wished to pass his whole life in prison, the appearance of his works in print would infallibly lead to the gratification of his desires; and besides, where could a printer be found hardy enough to run his share of the risk?—The next day, the charming Contessina N. was kind enough to lend her collection to one of our party. Byron, who imagined himself an adept in the language of Dante and Ariosto, was at first rather puzzled by Buratti’s manuscripts. We read over with him some of Goldoni’s comedies, which enabled him at last to comprehend Buratti’s satires. I persist in thinking, that for the composition of Beppo, and subsequently of Don Juan, Byron was indebted to the reading of Buratti’s poetry.”270

A statement so plain by a man of Beyle’s authority deserves some attention. The first question which arises in connection with his assertion is naturally, what work Buratti had done before 1817, when Byron began the composition of Beppo.271 After a dissipated boyhood, Buratti had become a member of the Corte dei Busoni, a pseudo-Academy which devoted its attention chiefly to satire. Although he was the author of several early lampoons, his first political satire was recited in 1813 among a party of friends at the home of Counsellor Galvagna in Venice. It is, in substance, a lamentation over the fate of Venice, with invective directed against the French army of occupation; Malamani styles it “a masterpiece of subtle sarcasm.” Eventually, through the treachery of apparent friends, the verses came to French ears, and Buratti was imprisoned for thirty days, his punishment, however, being somewhat lightened by powerful patrons. Shortly after this episode, he circulated some quatrains of a scurrilous nature on Filippo Scolari, a pedantic youth who had criticised contemporary literary men in a supercilious way. For these insults, Scolari tried to have Buratti apprehended again, but the latter, although he was forced to sign an agreement to write no more satires, received only a reprimand. During this period he had also directed several pasquinades at an eccentric priest, Don Domenico Marienis, who seems to have been a general object of ridicule in Venice.

Such, according to Malamani, was the extent of Buratti’s work up to 1816. His masterpiece, the Storia dell’ Elefante, was not written until 1819, too late to have been a strong influence even on Don Juan. Of this early satiric verse, no one important poem was composed in ottava rima. The poems, all short and of no especial value as literature, used the Venetian dialect, as far removed from pure Tuscan as Scotch is from English. Their most noticeable characteristic is their prevailing irony, a method of satire of which Byron only occasionally availed himself. With these facts in mind, and with the additional knowledge that Byron was unquestionably influenced by the burlesque writers, it is improbable that Beyle’s theory deserves any credence. Beyle has made it clear that Byron, at one time, read Buratti’s work with interest; but he has failed to show how the English poet could have acquired anything, either in matter or in style, from the Italian satirist.272

Of other Italian poems sometimes mentioned as possibly contributing something to Don Juan, no one is worth more than a cursory notice. La Secchia Rapita, by Tassoni (1565–1635), is a genuine mock-heroic, the model for Boileau’s Lutrin and, to some extent, for Pope’s Rape of the Lock. So far as can be ascertained, Byron has no reference either to the author or to his poem; and since La Secchia Rapita preserves consistently the grand style, applying it to trivial subjects, it has little in common with Byron’s satires.273

With Il Ricciardetto, by Forteguerri (1675–1735), Byron was better acquainted. Indeed Foscolo, without giving proof for his conclusion, suggested that it might have offered some ideas to the English writer. The Italian poem, completed about 1715, after having been composed, according to tradition, at the rate of a canto a day, contains thirty cantos in ottava rima. It is an avowed burlesque, in which heroes of Carolingian romance are degraded to buffoons, Rinaldo becoming a cook and Ricciardetto a barber. In it, as Foffano says, “the marvellous becomes absurd, the sublime, grotesque, and the heroic, ridiculous.” Forteguerri’s design, however, was not directly satiric, and he was seldom a destructive critic. His mission was solely to divert his readers. Byron refers to Lord Glenbervie’s rendering of the first canto of Il Ricciardetto (1822) as most amusing,274 but he seems to have had no great interest in the original.

A point has now been reached where it is practicable to frame some generalizations as to the extent and nature of Byron’s indebtedness to the Italians. For his subject-matter, he owed them something. The Catharine II episode in Don Juan may have been suggested by Il Poema Tartaro; an occasional unimportant incident or situation may have been taken or modified from the work of Casti or Pulci. On the whole, however, Byron’s material was either original or drawn from other sources than the Italians. Even though Byron and Casti so frequently satirize the same institutions and theories, it is improbable that this is more than coincidence, the result of the natural opposition which similar abuses aroused in men so alike in temperament and intellect.

In his manner, however, Byron was profoundly affected, so much so that his own statement about Beppo—“The style is not English, it is Italian”—275 is in exact accordance with the impression which Beppo, as well as Don Juan, makes on the reader. He learned, in part from Casti, and later from Berni and Pulci, the use of the burlesque method; he adopted their discursive style, with its opportunities for digression and self-assertion, and made it a channel for voicing his own beliefs as well as for speaking out against his enemies. Accepting the hint offered by their tendency to colloquial speech, he lowered the tone of his diction and addressed himself often directly to his readers. Moreover, he acquired the habit of shifting suddenly from seriousness to absurdity, from the pathetic to the grotesque, in the compass of a single stanza. His wrath, at first untempered, was now softened by a new attitude of skepticism which turned him more to irony and mockery than to violent rage.

In utilizing the octave for his own satires, he gave it a freedom of which it had never before been made capable in English; and, by a clever employment of double and triple rhymes, and by the constant use of run-on lines and stanzas, he adjusted the measure to the conversational flow of his verse.

At a time, then, when his youthful narrowness was developing into the maturity that comes only from experience, and when, therefore, he was most susceptible to broadening influences, Byron, fortunately for his satire, was brought into contact with the Italian spirit. The result was that Don Juan joined many of the most powerful features of English Bards with the lighter elements of Berni and Casti.

The beauty of Byron’s satire at its finest in Don Juan and The Vision of Judgment, lies in the welding of the direct and indirect methods, in the interweaving of invective with burlesque, in such a way that the poems seem to link the spirit of Juvenal with the spirit of Pulci. The consequence is a variety of tone, a widening of scope, and a considerable increase in effectiveness. Byron’s general attacks are relieved from the charge of futility; his vindictiveness is mitigated by humor and a touch of the ridiculous; and his aggressiveness, though it does not disappear, is sometimes changed to a cynical tolerance.