An impediment in his speech would make him a perfect Demosthenes.

Something of the same kind, and with something of the same effect, is Lord Byron's wonderful fertility of thought and facility of expression; and the Protean style of "Don Juan," instead of checking (as the fetters of rhythm generally do) his natural activity, not only gives him wider limits to range in, but even generates a more roving disposition.

I dare swear, if the truth were known, that his digressions and repetitions generate one another, and that the happy jingle of some of his comical rhymes has led him on to episodes of which he never originally thought; and thus it is that, with the most extraordinary merit, _merit of all kinds_, these two cantos have been to _me_, in several points, tedious and even obscure.
As to the PRINCIPLES, all the world, and you, Mr.Murray, _first of all_, have done this poem great injustice.

There are levities here and there, more than good taste approves, but nothing to make such a terrible rout about--nothing so bad as "Tom Jones," nor within a hundred degrees of "Count Fathom." The writer goes on to remark that the personalities in the poem are more to be deprecated than "its imputed looseness of principle": I mean some expressions of political and personal feelings which, I believe, he, in fact, never felt, and threw in wantonly and _de gaiete de coeur_, and which he would have omitted, advisedly and _de bonte de coeur_, if he had not been goaded by indiscreet, contradictory, and urgent _criticisms_, which, in some cases, were dark enough to be called _calumnies_.

But these are blowing over, if not blown over; and I cannot but think that if Mr.Gifford, or some friend in whose taste and disinterestedness Lord Byron could rely, were to point out to him the cruelty to individuals, the injury to the national character, the offence to public taste, and the injury to his own reputation, of such passages as those about Southey and Waterloo and the British Government and the head of that Government, I cannot but hope and believe that these blemishes in the first cantos would be wiped away in the next edition; and that some that occur in the two cantos (which you sent me) would never see the light.