[296] Young had condemned war in _Satire VII._, 55–68; Cowper had spoken against it in the _Task_, in the lines:-- “War is a game which, were their subjects wise, Kings would not play at.” Leigh Hunt and Shelley held exactly Byron’s opinions, and expressed them repeatedly. [297] It is possible that Byron, in his description of this assemblage, was influenced to some extent by T. L. Peacock, the friend of Shelley, who had published _Headlong Hall_ (1816) and _Nightmare Abbey_ (1818). In these books Peacock had created a sort of prose Comedy of Humors by forming groups of curious eccentrics, each one obsessed by a single passion or hobby, and by giving each figure a name suggestive of his peculiar folly. [298] _Don Juan_, XI., 86. [299] _Letters_, v., 542. [300] _Don Juan_, I., 205. [301] _Don Juan_, III., 78–87. [302] _Don Juan_, III., 5. [303] _Ibid._, III., 3. [304] _Ibid._, III., 25. [305] _Ibid._, VI., 6. [306] _Ibid._, II., 205. [307] _Ibid._, VI., 27. [308] _Ibid._, I., 178; XI., 36. [309] _Ibid._, VI., 14. [310] _Ibid._, VI., 2. [311] In Canto II., the entire shipwreck episode is a symposium of accounts of other wrecks taken from Dalzell’s _Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea_ (1812), _Remarkable Shipwrecks_ (1813), Bligh’s _A Narrative of the Mutiny of the Bounty_ (1790), and _The Narrative of the Honourable John Byron_ (1768), the last named work being the story of the adventures of Byron’s grandfather. His account of the siege and capture of Ismail in Cantos VII. and VIII. is based, even, in minute details, on Decastelnau’s _Essai sur l’histoire ancienne et moderne de la Nouvelle Russie_. [312] _Don Juan_, III., 101–109. [313] _Ibid._, II., 17–23. [314] _Ibid._, XI., 10. [315] Byron attributed the unpopularity of _Don Juan_ with the ladies, and particularly with the Countess Guiccioli, to the fact that it is the “wish of all women to exalt the _sentiment_ of the passions, and to keep up the illusion which is their empire” and that the poem “strips off this illusion, and laughs at that and most other things” (_Letters_, v., 321). It was the opposition of the Countess which induced him to promise to leave off the work at the fifth canto, a pledge which he fortunately disregarded after keeping it for several months. [316] _Childe Harold_, II., 7. [317] _Don Juan_, VI., 22. See also I., 215; III., 35. [318] _Ibid._, V., 21. [319] _Ibid._, XI., 82, 86. [320] _Ibid._, II., 34. [321] _Don Juan_, XII., 86. [322] _Poetry_, VI., 79. [323] _Don Juan_, IX., 73. [324] _Ibid._, XIII., 100. [325] _Don Juan_, III., 96. [326] See _Ibid._, I., 9; II., 8; III., 110; IV., 113; VI., 57, and numerous other instances.