The poem, as will be remembered, begins with the meanest and foulest
attack on his wife that ever ribald wrote, and puts it in close
neighbourhood with scenes which every pure man or woman must feel to be
the beastly utterances of a man who had lost all sense of decency. Such
a potion was too strong to be administered even in a time when great
license was allowed, and men were not over-nice. But Byron chooses fifty
armour-bearers of that class of men who would find indecent ribaldry
about a wife a good joke, and talk about the 'artistic merits' of things
which we hope would make an honest boy blush.

At this time he acknowledges that his vices had brought him to a state of
great exhaustion, attended by such debility of the stomach that nothing
remained on it; and adds, 'I was obliged to reform my way of life, which
was conducting me from the yellow leaf to the ground with all deliberate
speed.' {41} But as his health is a little better he employs it in
making the way to death and hell elegantly easy for other young men, by
breaking down the remaining scruples of a society not over-scrupulous.

Society revolted, however, and fought stoutly against the nauseous dose.
His sister wrote to him that she heard such things said of it that _she_
never would read it; and the outcry against it on the part of all women
of his acquaintance was such that for a time he was quite overborne; and
the Countess Guiccioli finally extorted a promise from him to cease
writing it. Nevertheless, there came a time when England accepted 'Don
Juan,'--when Wilson, in the 'Noctes Ambrosianae,' praised it as a
classic, and took every opportunity to reprobate Lady Byron's conduct.
When first it appeared the 'Blackwood' came out with that indignant
denunciation of which we have spoken, and to which Byron replied in the
extracts we have already quoted. He did something more than reply. He
marked out Wilson as one of the strongest literary men of the day, and