THE ITALIAN INFLUENCE Shortly after the momentous year 1816, an extraordinary development took place in the form and spirit of Byron’s satiric work in verse. Up to this date, as we have seen, his satires of any literary value had followed, as a rule, the general plan and manner used by the authors of such typical productions as the _Dunciad_, the _Rosciad_, and the _Baviad_. In some ephemeral verses, it is true, he had shown signs of breaking away from the English classical tradition; but few, if any, of these unimportant occasional poems had been printed in book form. They had appeared in newspapers or in letters to correspondents, and Byron himself would have made no claim for their permanence. His published satires, then, had deviated little from the standard set by Pope and Gifford, a fact all the more remarkable because his work in the other branches of literature in which he had distinguished himself had revealed a wide discrepancy between his utterances as a critic and his practice as a poet. The enthusiastic and often extravagant eulogist of Pope had been the author of the romantic _Childe Harold_ and _The Giaour_. In one field of letters, however, Byron had preserved some consistency; before 1818, considered as a satirist, he must be classed as one of the numerous disciples of the great Augustan. The publication of _Beppo_, February 28, 1818, may serve roughly to denote the visible turning-point between the old era and the new one to come. It is significant that this poem is written, not in the characteristically English heroic couplet, but in the thoroughly foreign ottava rima. Responsive to an altered and agreeable environment, Byron found in Italy and its literature an inspiration which affected him even more profoundly than it had Goethe only a few decades before. The results of this influence, shown to some extent in his dramas though more decidedly in his satires, justify terming the years from 1817 until his death his Italian period. A mere mention of its contribution to satire indicates its importance: it produced _Beppo_, _The Vision of Judgment_, and _Don Juan_. Of these poems, _Beppo_ is, strictly speaking, a satiric novella; _The Vision of Judgment_ is a travesty; and _Don Juan_ is an “epic satire.” They are, however, all three closely related: first, in that, unlike most of the earlier satires, they are narrative in method; second, in that they are infused with what we may call, for want of a better phrase, the Italian spirit. What this spirit is we may well leave for future discussion. It is enough here to point out that it is characterized by a kind of playfulness, half gayety and half mockery, often tinged with irony and reflecting a cynical tolerance, and that it adopts a style informal and colloquial, in which the satirist unbends to his readers and feigns to let them into his confidence. The bare outlining of these features alone proves how far Byron departed from the usually serious,