Epilogue

Abstract

Halfway between slagging off the Duke of Wellington and describing Don Juan’s first appearance at the court of Catherine the Great, Don Juan’s narrator realizes that he has lost his train of thought. Never mind, he instructs the reader, let it go:

It will one day be found with other relics of a former world,

When this world shall be former, underground,

Thrown topsy-turvy, twisted, crisped, and curled …

Like all the worlds before …

So Cuvier says. And then shall come …

… [a] new creation, rising out,

From our old crash …

The people of the future will look back on the creatures of 1823 as:

some mystic, ancient strain

Of things destroyed and left in airy doubt,

Like to the notions we now entertain

Of Titans, giants, fellows of about

Some hundred feet in height, not to say miles,

And mammoths and your winged crocodiles. (IX 289–304).

Byron’s mention of Cuvier is really what detonates this passage. Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) did not originate the idea that species can become extinct, but he was its most cogent proponent.