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functional method of didactic texts, what McGann terms “the Horatian plain style”. 172Ridenour covers this at some length:The plain style is, to be sure, that of the so-called musa pedestris (Byron’s“pedestrian Muses”) of Horace (Serm. II.VI.17). The most important fact aboutit is that, as Pope observes (following Cicero and Quintilian), it “instructs” – ittells the truth.[…]In the Dedication Byron is speaking from behind the traditional satiric mask.He is a modest man (content with pedestrian muses) who writes “honestsimple verse” – in other words, the plain blunt man we have been taught torecognize in Augustan satire. 173The plain style itself is a rhetorical manoeuvre, and the sincerity is a tool with apurpose, as is the obscenity which is an element of that plainness. Part of the purposebehind the obscenity is naturalism, plain speaking in the plain and even coarselanguage of real conversation. Don Juan places upon the page the language of thesmoking-room and the bedroom, breaking through the hypocrisy of social discourseby laying everything bare.The obscenity is not an end in itself, but merely a facet of the rhetor working to showlife as it is, “To build up common things with common places” (14.7.56). In part, thisphrase is reference back to the Horatian epigraph at the beginning of the poem, on thedifficulty of speaking upon common things. Classicism is an underlyingcharacteristic of Byron’s thought, as seen in the Preface’s reference to the poetics of“the best and wisest of our fathers” (McGann 5.82:36-7). In addition, the phrase in14.7.56 is a pun on classical rhetorical technique, in which ‘common places’, or τοποι,are the subjects (hence ‘topics’) of rhetorical discourses and especially subjectschosen for examples to prove arguments. The poem discusses common topics,although more precisely the common topics of everyday discourse than the commontopics of literature. The value of this naturalism is that it radically transgresses the172 McGann, Don Juan in Context, p.73.173 George Ridenour, The Style of Don Juan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), pp. 9, 16-17.100