t after the publication of 'Don
Juan:' the second is 'Blackwood' in 1825.

'In the composition of this work, there is, unquestionably, a more
thorough and intense infusion of genius and vice, power and profligacy,
than in any poem which had ever before been written in the English, or,
indeed, in any other modern language. Had the wickedness been less
inextricably mingled with the beauty and the grace and the strength of a
most inimitable and incomprehensible Muse, our task would have been easy.
'Don Juan' is by far the most admirable specimen of the mixture of ease,
strength, gaiety, and seriousness, extant in the whole body of English
poetry: the author has devoted his powers to the worst of purposes and
passions; and it increases his guilt and our sorrow that he has devoted
them entire.

'The moral strain of the whole poem is pitched in the lowest key. Love,
honour, patriotism, religion, are mentioned only to be scoffed at, as if
their sole resting-place were, or ought to be, in the bosoms of fools. It
appears, in short, as if this miserable man, having exhausted every
species of sensual gratification, having drained the cup of sin even to
its bitterest dregs, were resolved to show us that he is no longer a
human being, even in his frailties, but a cool, unconcerned fiend,
laughing with a detestable glee over the whole of the better and worse
elements of which human life is composed; treating well-nigh with equal
derision the most pure of virtues, and the most odious of vices; dead
alike to the beauty of the one, and the deformity of the other; a mere
heartless despiser of that frail but noble humanity, whose type was never
exhibited in a shape of more deplorable degradation than in his own
contemptuously distinct delineation of himself. To confess to his Maker,
and weep over in secret agonies the wildest and most fantastic
transgressions of heart and mind, is the part of a conscious sinner, in
whom sin has not become the sole principle of life and action; but to lay
bare to the eye of man and of woman all the hidden convulsions of a
wicked spirit, and to do all this without one symptom of contrition,
remorse, or hesitation, with a calm, careless ferociousness of contented
and satisfied depravity,--this was an insult which no man of genius had
ever before dared to put upon his Creator or his species. Impiously
railing against his God, madly and meanly disloyal to his sovereign and
his country, and brutally outra