While he was being hailed as a leader of the romantic school of poetry, he was still defending the principles of Pope, praising the work of Crabbe, Rogers, and Campbell, and disapproving of the verses of the members of the Lake School. He dedicated _Don Juan_, in a mocking and condescending fashion, to Southey, and described him in the sketch of the bard “paid to satirise or flatter” who sang to Haidée and Juan the beautiful lyric, _The Isles of Greece_.[301] He ridiculed _The Waggoner_ and _Peter Bell_, treating Wordsworth with an hostility which is almost inexplicable in view of Byron’s indebtedness in _Childe Harold_, III and IV to the older poet’s feeling for nature. Only in minor respects had Byron’s position changed; he was more appreciative of Scott and less vindictive towards Jeffrey; and he had found at least one new literary enemy in the poetaster, William Sotheby. In general there was little for him to add to what he had already said in _English Bards_. His otherwise progressive spirit had not extended into the field of literary criticism. It is not at all surprising that a large portion of _Don Juan_ should be devoted to two subjects in which Byron had always been deeply interested--woman and love. Nor is it at all remarkable, in view of his singularly complex and variable nature, that the poem should contain not only the exquisite idyll of Haidée but also line after line of cynical satire on her sex. Though Byron’s opinion of women was usually not complimentary, sentiment, and even sentimentality of a certain sort, had a powerful attraction for him. If many of his love affairs were followed and even accompanied by cynicism, it was because the passion in such cases was sensual, and in reaction, he went to the other extreme. The influence of the Guiccioli, however, manifest in his descriptions of Haidée and Aurora Raby, was beneficial to Byron’s character, and his ideas of love were somewhat altered through his relations with her. At the same time the conventional assertions of woman’s inconstancy and treachery so common in his earlier work recur frequently in _Don Juan_. Love, according to Byron’s philosophy, can exist only when it is free and untrammelled. The poet’s too numerous amours and the general laxity of Italian morals had joined in exciting in him a prejudice against English puritanism; while his own unfortunate marital experience had convinced him that “Love and Marriage rarely can combine.”[302] The remembrance of his married life and his observation in the land of his adoption were both instrumental in forming his conclusion: “There’s doubtless something in domestic doings, Which forms, in fact, true love’s antithesis.”[303] When marriage, then, is so unalluring, the logical refuge is an honest friendship with a married lady, “of all connections the most steady.”[304] When Byron does speak of women with apparent respect, it is always well to search for irony behind. If he says, evidently with emotion: