Because it reflects nearly every side of Byron’s variable individuality, _Don Juan_, though satirical in main intent, combines satire with many other elements. It is tragic, sensuous, humorous, melancholy, cynical, realistic, and exalted, with words for nearly every emotion and temper. It contains a romantic story, full of sentiment and tenderness; it rises into passages of lyric and descriptive beauty, evidently heart-felt; yet these serious and imaginative details are imbedded in a sub-stratum of satire. Furthermore, its range in substance and style is very great; it discusses matters in politics, in society, in literature, and in religion; it shifts in a stanza from grave to gay, from the commonplace to the sublime. It is a poem of freedom; free in thought and free in speech, unrestricted by the ordinary laws of metre. “The soul of such writing is its license,” wrote Byron to Murray in 1819. The plot of _Don Juan_, dealing, like the picaresque romances of Le Sage and Smollett, with a series of adventures in the life of a wandering hero, and interrupted constantly by the comments of the author, has little real unity. Considered as a satire, however, the poem becomes unified through the personality behind the stanzas. It is a colossal monument of egotism; wherever we read, we meet the inevitable “I.” The poet’s interest in the progress of his characters is so obviously subordinated to his desire for gossiping with his readers that the plot seems, at times, to be almost forgotten. Thus _Don Juan_ is as subjective as Byron’s correspondence; indeed ideas were often transferred directly from his letters to his verses. There are lines in the poem which restate, sometimes in the same phraseology, the confessions and the criticisms recorded by Lady Blessington in her _Conversations with Lord Byron_. Autobiographical references are very common, sometimes merely casual,[277] sometimes used as a text for satire.[278] The powerful personality of the writer, expressed thus in his work, furnishes it with a unity which is lacking in the plot. It is probable that Byron himself had only a vague conception of the structure and limits of his poem. His conflicting assertions, usually half-jocular, concerning his plan or scheme are proof that he cared little about adhering to a closely knit form. He is most to be trusted when he says: “Note or text, I never know the word which will come next.”[279] or when he confesses to Murray: “You ask me for the plan of Donny Juan: I have no plan--I had no plan; but I had or have materials.”[280] The inconsistent statements in the body of the poem are, of course, merely quizzical: thus in the first canto Byron says decidedly, “My poem’s epic, and is meant to be Divided in twelve books”;[281] when the twelfth canto is reached, he has an apology ready: