I love the language, that soft bastard Latin,
Which melts like kisses from a female mouth.

Byron’s couplet is a characteristically provocative compliment to Latin: he praises it not as austere “classical” speech but as sensuous, pliant, and physically pleasurable in sound. The deliberately coarse epithet (“soft bastard”) both shocks and undercuts reverence for learned languages, suggesting Latin’s later, mixed, and living afterlife (medieval, ecclesiastical, Romance) rather than a pristine, museum-piece purity. The simile of melting “like kisses” emphasizes euphony and mouth-feel—language as embodied experience—while also aligning linguistic taste with erotic taste. In effect, Byron turns philology into desire, making aesthetic judgment inseparable from temperament and appetite.