Don Juan (Canto I - II) [Second Edition]

London: Thomas Davison. Good with no dust jacket. 1820. Second Edition. Leather. [viii], 227 pp. Includes blanks and has what look to be original card covers bound in. Each Canto has a separate TP but pagination is continuous. A small octavo. Modern and very handsome full leather binding with 5 raised bands, red and gilt spine labels, marbled end papers. The top edge of the front card cover is worn and chipped with some foxing, the first few pages around the card covers have some foxing, otherwise the text is clean and nice. Lord Byron wrote his satyrical epic Romantic poem, Don Juan, over the period 1819-1824. This is the second edition of the first two cantos, published shortly after the first. "Lord Byron derived the character of Don Juan from traditional Spanish folk legends, however the story was very much his own. Upon publication in 1819, cantos I and II were widely criticized as immoral because Byron had so freely ridiculed the social subjects and public figures of his time. ..The poetical narrative of Don Juan is told in sixteen thousand lines, arranged in seventeen cantos, written in ottava rima ; each stanza is composed of eight iambic pentameters, with the couplet rhyme scheme of AB AB AB CC. The ottava rima uses the final rhyming couplet as a line of humour, to achieve a rhetorical anticlimax by way of an abrupt transition, from a lofty style of writing to a vulgar style of writing. In the example passage from Don Juan, canto I, stanza 1, lines 3–6, the Spanish name Juan is obviously pronounced JOO-ehn, to fit the rhyme. "Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, The age discovers he is not the true one; Of such as these I should not care to vaunt, I'll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan"; 8vo 8" - 9" tall; 227 pages .