Another uncommon feature of _The Monks, and the Giants_ is its adoption of a vocabulary drawn from the language of every-day life. Whistlecraft, the imaginary author, is, we are led to understand, a rather talkative bourgeois. In fitting his diction to this middle-class artisan, Frere introduced many expressions which seem unpoetic, and consciously avoiding any effort at elevated speech, aimed at a kind of colloquial talk, illustrated in such contractions as, “I’ll” and “I’ve” and slang phrases like “play the deuce.” The vigor and picturesqueness of this conversational style impressed Byron and doubtless had some influence in leading him, in _Beppo_, to sink into street-jargon, well adapted to the tone of his poem. To some extent, as Eichler indicates, this informal diction coaxed him away from the correctness of Pope, and enabled him to give freer rein to his shifting moods. The fictitious Whistlecraft has a habit, corresponding somewhat to a peculiarity of the Italian burlesque poets, of digressing from the main thread of the story in order to gossip about himself or his opinions. The first lines in the poem, “I’ve often wished that I might write a book Such as all English people might peruse,”[189] set a conversational key. The introduction of eleven stanzas is devoted to a prefatory monologue, and in the body of the work there are digressions in the same vein, never long continued, and each in the nature of a brief aside to the reader. Sometimes they are merely interpolations having reference to the narrator’s method: “We must take care in our poetic cruise, And never hold a single tack too long.”[190]