This is no place for discussing the fundamental morality or immorality of _Don Juan_. The British public of Byron’s day, basing their judgment largely upon the voluptuousness of certain love scenes and upon some coarse phrases scattered here and there through the poem, charged him with “brutally outraging all the best feeling of humanity.” There can be no doubt that Byron did ignore the ordinary standards of conduct among average people; though he asserted “My object is Morality,”[321] no one knew better than he that he was constantly running counter to the conventional code of behavior. Nor can any one doubt, after a study of his letters to Murray and Moore, that he felt a sardonic glee in acting as an agent of disillusion and pretending to be a very dangerous fellow. This spirit led him to employ profanity in _Don Juan_ until his friend Hobhouse protested: “Don’t swear again--the third ‘damn.’”[322] By assailing many things that his time held sacred, by calling love “selfish in its beginning as its end,”[323] and maintaining that the desire for money is “the only sort of pleasure that requites,”[324] Byron drew upon himself the charge of immorality. The poem, however, does not attempt to justify debauchery or to defend vicious practices; Byron is attacking not virtue, but false sentiment, false idealism, and false faith. His satiric spirit is engaged in analyzing and exposing the strange contradictions and contrasts in human life, in tearing down what is sham and pretence and fraud. Judged from this standpoint, _Don Juan_ is profoundly moral. Fortunately, in this poem the design of which was to exploit the doctrine of personal freedom, Byron had discovered a medium through which he could make his individuality effective, in which he could speak in the first person, leave off his story when he chose, digress and comment on current events, and voice his every mood and whim. The colloquial tone of the poem strikes the reader at once. He censures himself in a jocular way for letting the tale slip forever through his fingers, and confesses with mock humility, “If I have any fault, it is digression.”[325]