At first, they execrated 'Don Juan.' Murray was afraid to publish it.

Women were determined not to read it.

In 1819, Dr.William Maginn of the Noctes wrote a song against it in the following virtuous strain:-- 'Be "Juan," then, unseen, unknown; It must, or we shall rue it.
We may have virtue of our own: Ah! why should we undo it?
The treasured faith of days long past We still would prize o'er any, And grieve to hear the ribald jeer Of scamps like Don Giovanni.' Lord Byron determined to conquer the virtuous scruples of the Noctes Club; and so we find this same Dr.William Maginn, who in 1819 wrote so valiantly, in 1822 declaring that he would rather have written a page of 'Don Juan' than a ton of 'Childe Harold.' All English morals were, in like manner, formally surrendered to Lord Byron.

Moore details his adulteries in Venice with unabashed particularity: artists send for pictures of his principal mistresses; the literary world call for biographical sketches of their points; Moore compares his wife and his last mistress in a neatly-turned sentence; and yet the professor of morals in Edinburgh University recommends the biography as pure, and having no mud in it.

The mistress is lionized in London; and in 1869 is introduced to the world of letters by 'Blackwood,' and bid, 'without a blush, to say she loved'-- This much being done to all England, it is quite possible that a woman like Lady Byron, standing silently aside and surveying the course of things, may have thought that Mrs.Leigh was no more seduced than all the rest of the world, and have said as we feel disposed to say of that generation, and of a good many in this, 'Let him that is without sin among you cast the first stone.' The peculiar bitterness of remorse expressed in his works by Lord Byron is a further evidence that he had committed an unusual crime.