in their fields of endeavour—such as Martin Luther (1483–1546) and Galileo (1564–1642)—whose societies saw them as being outside the cultural mainstream of their times. Canto XVII concludes at the brink of resuming the adventures of Don Juan, last found in a "tender moonlit situation" with the Duchess of Fitz-Fulke, at the end of canto XVI. Dedication to Robert Southey Lord Byron scornfully dedicated Don Juan (1819–1824) to his artistic rival and enemy Robert Southey, who then was the incumbent Poet Laureate of Britain (1813–43); in stanza III Byron said: "You, Bob! are rather insolent, you know, / At being disappointed in your wish / To supersede all warblers here below, / And be the only Blackbird in the dish; / And then you overstrain yourself, or so, / And tumble downward like the flying fish / Gasping on the deck, because you soar too high, Bob, / And fall, for lack of moisture quite a-dry, Bob!" This reference seems to be a dig at unsuccessful copulation. Moreover, the poem's Dedication further pursued artistic quarrels—of subject and theme, composition and style—with the Lake Poets, whom Byron addressed: Collectively: Individually: Precisely: About the works of Wordsworth, Byron said Tis poetry—at least by his assertion" (IV.5), and Henry James Pye, the previous poet laureate, Byron criticised by pun: "four and twenty Blackbirds in a pye" (I.8), edged wordplay derived from the nursery song "Sing a Song of Sixpence". Critical reception Background In the early 19th century, despite the piecemeal publication of the poem in 1819, the contemporary literary critics said that Don Juan was an immoral poetical work in which narrative Lord Byron was too free in satirising the social subjects of the poem, which made persons and personages readily identifiable. Concerning the poem’s origins, Byron said that Don Juan resulted from the "humorous paradoxes ... provoked by [the] advice and opposition" of friends and colleagues, rivals and enemies. In a letter (19 September 1818) to the Irish poet Thomas Moore, Byron spoke of satirical intent: "I have finished the first canto ... of a poem in the style and manner of Beppo [1818], encouraged by the good success of the same. It [the new poem] is ... meant to be a little quietly facetious upon every thing. But I doubt whether it is not—at least as far as it has gone—too free for these very modest days." A month after the publication