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noting that it would have been “more agreeable, and certainly more easy” to havemade Harold more amiable, and claiming for Harold the role of negative examplealready mentioned (85-90). Of course, Byron is here responding to the criticism, butnot responding to it upon the terms in which it is presented, nor, indeed, is he resistingthose directly: he neither admits culpability for having produced a ‘wrong’ characterin Harold, nor denies responsibility as a poet-preacher. In fact, in stating thatHarold’s purpose was “to show that early perversion”, Byron is actually assuming thatdidactic role, and claiming to be fulfilling it in presenting the negative example. Thefact that he was not fulfilling it in the particular way which the critics preferred is nota sign of simple, direct opposition to their ideological position, but rather evidence ofan intention to subvert it, by accepting its forms only to apply them to different ends.Byron is preaching, but he is not preaching orthodoxy; instead, he is reconstructingthe standards of orthodoxy.Recent ResponseRecent criticism has paid much less attention to Childe Harold’s ‘moral failings’, andit has not expended much effort upon analysis of the religious features of the work.Addressing this omission, Stuart Curran notes that the appreciation of CHP’s religiousaspects is “curiously absent from the voluminous critical literature” on the poem. 73The consistent omission of a certain topic from a discourse can be self-reinforcing,producing a self-perpetuating ‘discourse of silence’.Alan Rawes, discussing CHP as a ‘confessional’ text, identifies a generalsecularisation of Romantic Studies as Hopps and Stabler do, and connects this withreadings of Byron. While Rawes extends the period considerably farther back, hedoes also acknowledge a particular, recent trend:readings of the poem as secular confession have a long history, going back atleast as far as Walter Scott’s claim, in his anonymous 1817 review of ChildeHarold III, that there are so many allusions to the author’s personal feelings73 Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p.153.33