ginning with the stanzas "Oh Wellington," &c. which at that time
formed the opening of this third Canto, but were afterwards reserved for
the commencement of the ninth. My opinion of the poem, both as regarded
its talent and its mischief, he had already been made acquainted with,
from my having been one of those,--his Committee, as he called us,--to
whom, at his own desire, the manuscript of the two first Cantos had been
submitted, and who, as the reader has seen, angered him not a little by
deprecating the publication of it. In a letter which I, at that time,
wrote to him on the subject, after praising the exquisite beauty of the
scenes between Juan and Haidee, I ventured to say, "Is it not odd that
the same licence which, in your early Satire, you blamed _me_ for being
guilty of on the borders of my twentieth year, you are now yourself
(with infinitely greater power, and therefore infinitely greater
mischief) indulging in _after_ thirty!"

Though I now found him, in full defiance of such remonstrances,
proceeding with this work, he had yet, as his own letters prove, been so
far influenced by the general outcry against his poem, as to feel the
zeal and zest with which he had commenced it considerably abated,--so
much so, as to render, ultimately, in his own opinion, the third and
fourth Cantos much inferior in spirit to the two first. So sensitive,
indeed,--in addition to his usual abundance of this quality,--did he, at
length, grow on the subject, that when Mr. W. Bankes, who succeeded me,
as his visiter, happened to tell him, one day, that he had heard a Mr.
Saunders (or some such name), then resident at Venice, declare that, in
his opinion, "Don Juan was all Grub Street," such an effect had this
disparaging speech upon his mind, (though coming from a person who, as
he himself would have it, was "nothing but a d----d salt-fish seller,")
that, for some time after, by his own confession to Mr. Bankes, he could
not bring himself to write another line of the poem; and, one morning,
opening a drawer where the neglected manuscript lay, he said to his
friend, "Look here--this is all Mr. Saunders's 'Grub Street.'"

To return, however, to the details of our last evening together at
Venice. After a dinner with Mr. Scott at the Pellegrino, we all went,
rather late, to the opera, where the principal part in the Baccanali di
Roma was represented by a female singer, whose chief claim to
reputation, according to Lord Byron, lay in