Though in imputing to himself premeditated plagiarism, he was, of course, but jesting, it was, I am inclined to think, his practice, when engaged in the composition of any work, to excite thus his vein by the perusal of others, on the same subject or plan, from which the slightest hint caught by his imagination, as he read, was sufficient to kindle there such a train of thought as, but for that spark, had never been awakened, and of which he himself soon forgot the source.  In the present instance, the inspiration he sought was of no very elevating nature,—­the anti-spiritual doctrines of the Sophist in this Romance[54] being what chiefly, I suspect, attracted his attention to its pages, as not unlikely to supply him with fresh argument and sarcasm for those depreciating views of human nature and its destiny, which he was now, with all the wantonness of unbounded genius, enforcing in Don Juan.

Of this work he was, at the time of my visit to him, writing the third Canto, and before dinner, one day, read me two or three hundred lines of it;—­beginning 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.’”