"
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.
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