When Byron was accused of violating canons of correctness, his critics usually suggested that he erred from classical aesthetic ideals. Throughout the eighteenth century Horatian criticism had represented a cultural force opposed to forms of digression. A review of Tristram Shandy in the Journal Encyclopédique of 15 April 1760 warned:

Sterne himself genuflected to this critical orthodoxy when he wrote to an early reader of the manuscript of volumes i and ii of Tristram Shandy: ‘I like Your Caution of the Ambitiosa recidet ornamenta – as I revise My book, I will shrive My conscience upon that sin.’ His offer to cut away ‘sinful’ superfluity acknowledges – albeit wryly – the traditional association between digression and transgression. Like Sterne, Byron's respect for Horatian standards of correctness coexisted with the composition of a work which defied those notions. This chapter examines the ways in which conflicting notions of decorum in private and public contexts affect the texture, and therefore the meaning, of Byron's poetry.