" _Blackwood_ declared that the author was "brutally outraging
all the best feelings of humanity." Moore characterizes it as "the most
painful display of the versatility of genius that has ever been left for
succeeding ages to wonder at or deplore." Jeffrey found in the whole
composition "a tendency to destroy all belief in the reality of virtue;"
and Dr. John Watkins classically named it "the Odyssey of Immorality."
"_Don Juan_ will be read," wrote one critic, "as long as satire, wit,
mirth, and supreme excellence shall be esteemed among men." "Stick to _Don
Juan_," exhorted another; "it is the only sincere thing you have written,
and it will live after all your _Harolds_ have ceased to be 'a
schoolgirl's tale, the wonder of an hour.' It is the best of all your
works--the most spirited, the most straightforward, the most interesting,
the most poetical." "It is a work," said Goethe, "full of soul, bitterly
savage in its misanthropy, exquisitely delicate in its tenderness."
Shelley confessed, "It fulfils in a certain degree what I have long
preached, the task of producing something wholly new and relative to the
age, and yet surpassingly beautiful.
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