Perspective of Satire

Great satires have at their center not merely some observation about stupidity or pride, but some profound , though not necessarily complex ,grasp of the nature of reality,things as they truly are.The satire are those who,knowingly or unknowingly, pervert this natural best of life.We have already seen that at the center of Don Juan is a realized sense of life as civilization and nature are swept forwardly their own pressure into new conditions of being and ultimately to oblivion.This is an usual view of reality for a satirist to hold -Byron is one of the very few romantic satirists -but it is finally the key to his satire.In every case what he holds up to ridicule is some attempt to restrain life, to find and force it unto some narrow permanent form.This is the burden of the attack on the Lake poets,who,however unjust the charge are treated as dunches not because they traffic in mystifying metaphysics and seek job in Excise,But because they are Lake poets,because they are islanders who try to contain man in their poems while knowing nothing of man`s 'fiery-dust' and never having seen the 'sea of ocean' that 'vast,salt,dread eternal deep...'

The kind of bondage which is ridiculed in these institutions and activities also appears in the lives of the characters of the story.Young women are bound into marriage with older men against their desires;children are forbidden the exercise of their natural instincts and interests by a religious and scholastic training which seeks to make them 'still and steady' by means of instructions in the 'dead languages;female formed by nature for life and love are turned into narrow prudes and bluestockings; men are imprisoned and chained together in slave gangs and one gallery benches;women are denied free choice and locked in carefully guarded harems;subjects are treated as personal possessions by rulers and
imperious lovers tyranny over one another Hypocrisy,the first object of attack,is but special ,though most virulent form unnatural restraint which buries man`s real nature under layers of pretense.