"I am tired of promiscuous concubinage"

An excerpt from Byron's letter to John Murray, from Venice, May 18, 1819:

"She proposed to me to divorce my mathematical wife--and I told her that in England we can't divorce except for female infidelity--"and pray, (said she), how do you know what she may have been doing these last three years?"--I answered that I could not tell--but that the status of Cuckoldom was not quite so flourishing in Great Britain as with us here."

And from September 9, 1819, from Ravenna, to Murray:

"Mr. Keats whose poetry you enquire after--appears to me what I have already said;--such writing is a sort of mental masturbation--he is always flogging his Imagination.--I don't mean that he is indecent but viciously soliciting his own ideas into a state which is neither poetry nor any thing else but a Bedlam vision produced by raw pork and opium."

Later that same year, on December 9, from Ravenna, to Murray:

"I intended to have written to you at some length by this post,--but as the Military Commandant is now lying dead in my house--on Fletcher's bed--I have other things to think of."

From Venice, to Douglas Kinnaird, October 26, 1818:

"As to Don Juan--confess--confess--you dog--and be candid--that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing--it may be bawdy--but is it not good English?--it may be profligate--but is it not life, is it not the thing?--Could any man have written it--who has not lived in the world?--and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis a vis?--on a table?--and under it? I had such projects for the Don, but the Cant is so much stronger than the Cunt--now a days,--that the benefit of experience in a man who had well weighed the worth of both monosyllables--must be lost to despairing posterity."


And finally, from Pisa, to Thomas Moore, March 4, 1822:

"Do not let me be misunderstood, however. If you speak of your own opinions, they ever had, and will have, the greatest weight with me. But if you merely echo the monde, (and it's difficult not to do so, being in its favour and its ferment,) I can only regret that you should ever repeat any thing to which I cannot pay attention. But I am prosing. The gods go with you, and as much immortality of all kinds as may suit your present and all other existence."