¹ William H. Marshall, The Structure of Byron's Major Poems (Philadelphia, 1962), p. 176. But see Ernest J. Lovell, Jr., “Irony and Image in Don Juan,” The Major English Romantic Poets: A Symposium in Reappraisal, ed. Clarence D. Thorpe, Carlos Baker, and Bennett Weaver (Carbondale, Ill., 1957), pp. 129–148.

² Marshall, pp. 176–177.

³ P. 177.

⁴ I have considered neither the “fright at the implications of what he recounts,” because it is hard to pin down, nor the juxtaposition of speakers with different views of Wordsworth, since even if the second passage does refer to Wordsworth, which is not certain, it is to a different aspect of him from that which is attacked in the earlier section.

⁵ Truman Guy Steffan has observed that Don Juan does not offer us “God's plenty.” The Making of a Masterpiece, Vol. i of Byron's Don Juan: A Variorum Edition, ed. Steffan and Willis W. Pratt (Austin, Texas, 1957), p. 130.

⁶ András Horn, Byron's “Don Juan” and the Eighteenth Century English Novel, Swiss Studies in English, No. 51 (Bern, 1962), p. 46.

⁷ The Works of Lord Byron, Poetry, ed. E. H. Coleridge (Clouders, 1898–1905), Vol. vi.

⁸ This account parallels that by Steffan, pp. 208–215.

⁹ “Apart from the obvious moral passion in many passages, we are in no doubt as we read that Byron admires courage, generosity, compassion and honesty, and that he dislikes brutality, meanness, and above all self-importance, hypocrisy and priggery.” “‘Chequered as is seen our human lot’, it is still better to be alive than dead, better to be young than old, better to be generous than cautious, and better to be compassionate than censorious.” Helen Gardner, “Don Juan.” London Magazine, v (July 1958), 58–65, 64, 65.

¹⁰ See Horn (above n. 6), p. 12. Horn cites G. Wilson Knight, Lord Byron: Christian Virtues (London, 1952), p. 78. See also Lovell (above, n. 1), pp. 139–140 (on Adeline); also my The Style of Don Juan (New Haven, Conn., 1960). See also Byron's letter to John Murray, 8 Oct. 1820 (on the possibility of revolution in Italy): “We are all looking at one another, like wolves on their prey in pursuit, only waiting for the first faller on, to do unutterable things. They are a great world in Chaos, or Angels in Hell, which you please; but out of Chaos came Paradise, and out of Hell—I don't know what; but the Devil went in there, and he was a fine fellow once, you know.” Letters and Journals, ed. R. E. Prothero (London, 1901), v, 92.

¹¹ As does Gardner, p. 64.

¹² One problem in reading Don Juan comes from resistance to the notion that images or ideas with ideological content can be used as terms in an argument which does not on the one hand simply “mean” the ideology they suggest or on the other simply negate it. Byron's use of the Christian myth of the Fall in Don Juan, for example, is analogous to “Catholicism” as a term in Federico Fellini's film “8$frac12.” The Catholic system acts in the film as a term that helps us grasp the implications of what it means to be making the film, though it is not what the film means. The myth of the Fall serves Byron as a term for expressing a kind of thing he finds happening in experience, including the experience of writing the poem. By using it metaphorically he can state senses in which experience is and is not coherent for him, and something of what this implies. It does not have to come up often in order to do this. It need only present itself as the radical form of a particular kind of event which is constantly enacted in the poem.