“Ave Maria”) we are checked in our course by bathos or commonplace and thrown where the writer did not mean to throw us:  but the mocking spirit is so prevailingly present that we are often left in doubt as to his design, and what is in Harold an outrage is in this case only a flaw.  His command over the verse itself is almost miraculous:  he glides from extreme to extreme, from punning to pathos, from melancholy to mad merriment, sighing or laughing by the way at his readers or at himself or at the stanzas.  Into them he can fling anything under the sun, from a doctor’s prescription to a metaphysical theory.

  When Bishop Berkeley said there was no matter,
  And proved it, ’twas no matter what he said,

is as cogent a refutation of idealism as the cumbrous wit of Scotch logicians.

The popularity of the work is due not mainly to the verbal skill which makes it rank as the cleverest of English verse compositions, to its shoals of witticisms, its winged words, telling phrases, and incomparable transitions; but to the fact that it continues to address a large class who are not in the ordinary sense of the word lovers of poetry. Don Juan is emphatically the poem of intelligent men of middle age, who have grown weary of mere sentiment, and yet retain enough of sympathetic feeling to desire at times to recall it.  Such minds, crusted like Plato’s Glaucus with the world, are yet pervious to appeals to the spirit that survives beneath the dry dust amid which they move; but only at rare intervals can they accompany the pure lyrist “singing as if he would never be old,” and they are apt to turn with some impatience even from Romeo and Juliet to Hamlet and Macbeth.  To them, on the other hand, the hard wit of Hudibras is equally tiresome, and more distasteful; their chosen friend is the humourist who, inspired by a subtle perception of the contradictions of life, sees matter for smiles in sorrow, and tears in laughter.  Byron was not, in the highest sense, a great humourist; he does not blend together the two phases, as they are blended in single sentences or whole chapters of Sterne, in the April-sunshine of Richter, or in Sartor Resartus; but he comes near to produce the same effect by his unequalled power of alternating them.  His wit is seldom hard, never dry, for it is moistened by the constant juxtaposition of sentiment.  His tenderness is none the less genuine that he is perpetually jerking it away—­an equally favourite fashion with Carlyle,—­as if he could not trust himself to be serious for fear of becoming sentimental; and, in recollection of his frequent exhibitions of unaffected hysteria, we accept his own confession—­

               If I laugh at any mortal thing,
               ’Tis that I may not weep,