ABSTRACT

[Byron] Don Juan (1819); Edinburgh Monthly Review, II (Oct. 1819), 468–486. The reviewer (presumably not the same who treated Mazeppa so cursorily) takes the opportunity to review Byron’s works from The Giaour on. (We can guess that he is a young man, born after 1795.) Note the allusion to “Cocknies” (p. 478), continuing the spirit of the attacks in Blackwood’s. The cant of pp. 482 ff. provides an index both to what Byron was attacking in the later cantos of Don Juan and the reasons for the fall of his reputation as a popular idol. The Edinburgh Monthly Review thought so highly of this article that portions of it were reprinted in a four-page advertisement for the journal.