ABSTRACT
Byron's closer university friend J. C. Hobhouse had, in 1808, won the Cambridge Hulsean Prize with his piece Essay on the Origin and Intention of Sacrifices, known after as his Essay Upon Entrails. It contains amongst much else of interest the following comment on the inefficacy of vicarious suffering via blood-sacrifice. Whatever the case with Hobhouse and piacular sacrifices, many of Byron's poetic protagonists are scoundrels as likely to be damned as ever', who never get anywhere near being offered the Atonement, so obdurate are they in refusing even to repent. Whilst we must avoid judging a religion by certain practitioners, it seems fair to say that however pompous and mysterious their ceremonial in Catholic Italy, believers there took transgression and atonement much more casually. Byron was much given to confession, but less so to repentance and atonement. For him, as for Margarita, the Christian moral sequence telescoped itself; for him the act of confession was the act of atonement.
