Their
patronage is, at the best, of no more value than that of a mob gathered by
a showy Shakespearian revival, and it has laid the volume open to the
charge of being adapted "laudari ab illaudatis." But the welcome of the
work in other quarters is as indubitably duo to higher qualities. In
writing _Don Juan_, Byron attempted something that had never been done
before, and his genius so chimed with his enterprise that it need never be
done again. "Down," cries M. Chasles, "with the imitators who did their
host to make his name ridiculous." In commenting on their failure, an
Athenaeum critic has explained the pre-established fitness of the ottava
rima--the first six lines of which are a dance, and the concluding couplet
a "breakdown"--for the mock-heroic. Byron's choice of this measure may
have been suggested by Whistlecraft; but, he had studied its cadence in
Pulci, and the _Novelle Galanti_ of Casti, to whom he is indebted for
other features of his satire; and he added to what has been well termed
its characteristic jauntiness, by his almost constant use of the double
rhyme. That the ottava rima is out of place in consistently pathetic
poetry, may be seen from its obvious misuse in Keats's _Pot of Basil_.
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