[271] Buratti’s career is treated at length in Vittorio Malamani’s monograph, Il Principe dei satirici Veneziani (1887). An edition of his poetry, in two volumes, was printed in 1864.
[272] Buratti’s after-life brought him once into relation with Byron. On the birth of a son to Hoppner, the British Consul at Venice, Byron presented the father with a short madrigal:—
“His father’s sense, his mother’s grace,
In him, I hope, will always fit so;
With—still to keep him in good case—
The health and appetite of Rizzo.”
The Count Rizzo Pattarol, named in the last line, had the verses translated into several languages, in the Italian version changing the word “appetite” to “buonomore.” This piece of vanity so excited the mirth of Buratti that he commemorated the affair in an epigram. Byron, however, seems to have paid no attention to the incident.
[273] There is less of the mock-heroic in Don Juan than is ordinarily supposed. It has little in common with the classical Mock-Epic, represented in English by the Dunciad, the Scribleriad, and the Dispensary, poems which use the epic machinery of gods and goddesses, ridiculing the manner of the Greek and Roman epics through the method of parody. Don Juan, on the other hand, is unrelated to the work of either Homer or Virgil. Nor does it burlesque the Italian epics: its characters, modern and unconventional as they are, are not, even in a humorous sense, heroic, and the matter dealt with is borrowed from none of the Italian romances. The fact that exalted emotions are made absurd, or that fine feelings are jeered at does not warrant us in classing Don Juan with the mock-heroic poems. Indeed, the mere absence of the typical addresses to the Muse—they occur only twice in Don Juan (II., 7; III., 1)—indicates that Byron did not imitate the epic form.
[274] Letters, vi., 50.
[275] Letters, iv., 217.