He had read, albeit with angry disapproval, Coleridge's " Critique on ( Charles Maturin's ) Bertram ", where Coleridge describes the legendary Don Juan as a figure not unlike Childe Harold, or for that matter, Byron himself : " Rank, fortune, wit, talent, acquired knowledge, and liberal accomplishments, with beauty of person, vigorous health . . . all these advantages, elevated by the habits and sympathies of noble birth and natural character, are . . . combined in Don Juan, so as to give him the means of carrying into all its practical consequences the doctrine of a godless nature . . . Obedience to nature is the only virtue . " Again, " It is not the wickedness of Don Juan . . . which constitutes the character an abstraction, . . . but the rapid succession of the correspondent acts and incidents, his intellectual superiority, and the splendid accumulation of his gifts and desirable qualities as coexistent with entire wickedness in one and the same person . " It is therefore conceivable that Byron read these passages as either a suggestion or a challenge, or both.
