“I do not in any way affect to be squeamish – but the character of the Middling Class in the country – is certainly highly moral – and we should not offend them – as you curtail the number of your readers – and for the rest of the subject of Don Juan is an excellent one – and nothing can surpass the exquisite beauties scattered so lavishly through the first two Cantos.“
The estimable, but exquisitely squeamish, John Murray (his publisher) warning Byron of a likely harsh reaction from conservative taste, before he published the first two Cantos, anonymously, in 1819.