In spite of its romantic trappings Don Juan is as "true" as anything by Maupassant or Chekhov or Somerset Maugham, and the reason is Byron's infallible sense, as his style matured, for the immediacy of a situation and of those taking part in it. In the midst of Eastern local color, which could be as vapid as Lalla Rookh, the oriental tales in verse by his friend Thomas Moore, he has a Shakespearean sureness for the touch that makes all live...

Wherever Juan goes, even into the kitchen where he sees "cooks in motion with their clean arms bare," his creator seizes on the vital impression. Though Byron in fact corrected lavishly, and had second or third thoughts like any other writer, it remains true of him, as he said, that when composing he was like a tiger, which if it misses its first spring goes growling back to the jungle.