ABSTRACT
John Churton Collins (1848–1908), as a passionate advocate of Literature as opposed to ‘Language’, was the stormy petrel of English studies in the eighties and nineties (see Stephen Potter, The Muse in Chains, 1937, pp. 183–201; and D. J. Palmer, The Rise of English Studies, 1965, pp. 65, 78–103). His essay ‘The Collected Works of Lord Byron’ (a review article on the Letters and Journals, ed. R. E. Prothero, and the Poetical Works, ed. E. H. Coleridge) appeared in the Quarterly Review for April 1905, and was reprinted with minor but significant revisions in his Studies in Poetry and Criticism, 1905, pp. 78–123. The following extract (op. cit., pp. 116–23) deals with Don Juan and Byron's claims to greatness as a poet.
