40 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
Europe to England, where her innocence is again juxtaposed
to the banality and trivial intrigues of society. And Juan
Loved the infant orphan he had saved,
As patriots (now and then) may love a nation;
His pride too felt that she was not enslaved
Owing to him.2s
For the child stands as a symbol of oppression. At a time
when Don Juan was about to fall heart and soul into the pat-
tern of tyranny, he was rescued by the act of rescuing this
child. It is she also who is before him at the Russian Court
and in England as a reminder of his love of Bberty. It is true
that Byron disposes of her in the twelfth canto by placing her
under the tutelage of a stately, precise, and virtuous old lady,
but tire child is not forgotten by Don Juan or the reader;
and we cannot be sure that Byron did not have plans for her
in subsequent lines.
The fact that the girl is a Turk, against whom Don Juan,
as a soldier in the Russian Army, is fighting, bears witness
to the fact that the poet was interested in the cause of liberty
for all people, not just for the Greeks. Italians, or others with
whom he was in sympathy. In short, what Byron says is:
I wish men to be free
As much from mobs as kings—from you as me.29
The part Byron played in the Greek fight for independence
is too well known and too complex to be discussed here. Suf-
fice it to say that we now know that he did not go to Greece
out of any feeling of boredom or philhellenic enthusiasm.
Richard Edgecumbe and Harold Nicholson, in their studies of
Byron’s activities in Greece, did away with that misconcep-
tion long ago. Indeed, some of his contemporaries realized
the importance of his part in the Greek fight for liberty, as