to represent and exhibit the great things of the world--Love and War,
and Death by sea and land, and Man, half-angel, half-demon--the comedy
of his fortunes, and the tragedy of his passions and his fate.

_Don Juan_ has won great praise from the great. Sir Walter Scott
(_Edinburgh Weekly Journal_, May 19, 1824) maintained that its creator
"has embraced every topic of human life, and sounded every string of the
divine harp, from its slightest to its most powerful and
heart-astounding tones." Goethe (_Kunst und Alterthum_, 1821 [ed.
Weimar, iii. 197, and _Sämmtliche Werke_, xiii. 637]) described _Don
Juan_ as "a work of boundless genius." Shelley (letter to Byron, October
21, 1821), on the receipt of Cantos III., IV., V., bore testimony to his
"wonder and delight:" "This poem carries with it at once the stamp of
originality and defiance of imitation. Nothing has ever been written
like it in English, nor, if I may venture to prophesy, will there be,
unless carrying upon it the mark of a secondary and borrowed light....
You are building up a drama," he adds, "such as England has not yet
seen, and the task is sufficiently noble and worthy of you." Again, of
the fifth canto he writes (Shelley's _Prose Works_, ed. H. Buxton
Forman, iv. 219), "Every word has the stamp of immortality.... It
fulfils, in a certain degree, what I have long preached of
producing--something wholly new and relative to the age, and yet
surpassingly beautiful." Finally, a living poet, neither a disciple nor
encomiast of Byron, pays eloquent tribute to the strength and splendour
of _Don Juan_: "Across the stanzas ... we swim forward as over the
'broad backs of the sea;' they break and glitter, hiss and laugh, murmur
and move like waves that sound or that subside. There is in them a
delicious resistance, an elastic motion, which salt water has and fresh
water has not. There is about them a wide wholesome air, full of vivid
light and constant wind, which is only felt at sea. Life undulates and