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the dangerous sophistry and impious acclamations of Satan, the effects ofwhich, however fatal they proved to Cain, we do not much apprehend on themind of a sober reader. The church is in no danger from these.This same review denounced not Cain but the outcry against it as “sheer nonsense.” 451Frederick Denison Maurice, writing for the Athenaeum, makes essentially the samemoral value argument for Cain as Lockhart makes for Don Juan. 452The positive reviews raise a significant methodological question: how can moderncritics use contemporary responses as indicators of the drama’s contextualunorthodoxy when contemporary responses contradict one another? One solutionmight be to use the majority of responses as an indicator of a majority consensus, butthis solution falls afoul of two related aspects of the critical trade of the day: the firstis that a number of periodicals simply borrowed opinions or even material from othersto fill their own columns, a habit which inflates the apparent consensus beyond theactual one; the second is that the operations of politics within culture can similarlyskew results, especially when the monarch was rumoured to be upset. 453 Further, theByronic Hero had made Byron’s works a soft target for conservative critics, whomight well have expected to find impiety in the work simply because Byron hadwritten it. All of these factors contribute to creating a false appearance of concerteddisapprobation: not only did several very able contemporary critics and literaryfigures fail to find the drama impious at all, 454 those who did claim to find it impiousfailed to agree upon how it was impious, which suggests that their orthodoxies, thebases against which they measured the drama’s perceived deviations, are not identical451 Monthly Magazine (February 1822), 10-15, RR, IV.1686-91): p.13 (1689), p.10 (1686). For otherwholly positive reviews, vide Examiner, December 23, 808-10, and December 30, 827-8, 1821, RR,III, 1010-1016: p.809 (1013).452 ‘Lord Byron’s Monument’, in Athenaeum and Literary Chronicle, Athenaeum and LiteraryChronicle, 48 (24 September, 1828), 751-2 (p.751).453 Vide Gentleman's Magazine, XCI-ii (December 1821), 537-41; supplement for XCI-ii (January1822), 613-5, RR, III, 1120-7: p.613 (1125), and also Coleridge V.204.454 Q.v. Walter Scott’s acceptance of the dedication of the work (Coleridge V.206), and the excerpt inthe Galignani Edition, p.624, from “Mr. Campbell’s Magazine” (New Monthly Magazine and LiteraryJournal).284