of cantos I and II, in a letter (12 August 1819) to publisher John Murray, Byron said: "You ask me for the plan of Donny Johnny; I have no plan—I had no plan; but I had or have materials.... You are too earnest and eager about [Don Juan] a work never intended to be serious. Do you suppose that I could have any intention but to giggle and make giggle?—a playful satire, with as little poetry as could be helped, was what I meant." After the completion, but before the publication of cantos III, IV, and V, in a letter (16 February 1821) to Murray, Byron said: "The Fifth [canto] is so far from being the last of Don Juan, that it is hardly the beginning. I meant to take him the tour of Europe, with a proper mixture of siege, battle, and adventure, and to make him finish as Anacharsis Cloots in the French Revolution.... I meant to have made him a Cavalier Servente in Italy, and a cause for a divorce in England, and a Sentimental Werther–faced man in Germany, so as to show the different ridicules of the society in each of these countries, and to have displayed him gradually gâté and blasé, as he grew older, as is natural. But I had not quite fixed whether to make him end in Hell, or in an unhappy marriage, not knowing which would be the severest." Artistic recognition In 1821, in a letter about the cantos III, IV, and V, the poet P. B. Shelley told Byron of his "wonder and delight" at the presentation of events, because in the composition and style, "this poem carries with it at once the stamp of originality and defiance of imitation. Nothing has ever been written like it in English, nor, if I may venture to prophesy, will there be, unless carrying upon it the mark of a secondary and borrowed light.... You are building up a drama such as England has not yet seen, and the task is sufficiently noble and worthy of you." About canto V, Shelley told Byron that "Every word has the stamp of immortality.... It fulfils, in a certain degree, what I have long preached of producing—something wholly new and relative to the age, and yet surpassingly beautiful". In 1824, Walter Scott said that in Don Juan Lord Byron's writing "has embraced every topic of human