“Enclosed are the two acts corrected.  With regard to the charges about the shipwreck, I think that I told both you and Mr. Hobhouse, years ago, that there was not a single circumstance of it not taken from fact; not, indeed, from any single shipwreck, but all from actual facts of different wrecks[46].  Almost all Don Juan is real life, either my own, or from people I knew.  By the way, much of the description of the furniture, in Canto third, is taken from Tully’s Tripoli (pray note this), and the rest from my own observation.  Remember, I never meant to conceal this at all, and have only not stated it, because Don Juan had no preface nor name to it.  If you think it worth while to make this statement, do so in your own way. I laugh at such charges, convinced that no writer ever borrowed less, or made his materials more his own.  Much is coincidence:  for instance, Lady Morgan (in a really excellent book, I assure you, on Italy) calls Venice an ocean Rome:  I have the very same expression in Foscari, and yet you know that the play was written months ago, and sent to England:  the ‘Italy’ I received only on the 16th instant.

“Your friend, like the public, is not aware, that my dramatic simplicity is studiously Greek, and must continue so:  no reform ever succeeded at first[47].  I admire the old English dramatists; but this is quite another field, and has nothing to do with theirs.  I want to make a regular English drama, no matter whether for the stage or not, which is not my object,—­but a mental theatre.

     “Yours.

     “P.S.  Can’t accept your courteous offer.

        “For Orford and for Waldegrave
        You give much more than me you gave;
        Which is not fairly to behave,
                              My Murray.

        “Because if a live dog, ’tis said,
        Be worth a lion fairly sped,
        A live lord must be worth two dead,
                              My Murray.

        “And if as the opinion goes,
        Verse hath a better sale than prose—­
        Certes, I should have more than those,
                              My Murray.

        “But now this sheet is nearly cramm’d,
        So, if you will, I sha’n’t be shamm’d,
        And if you won’t, you may be damn’d,
                              My Murray.

“These matters must be arranged with Mr. Douglas Kinnaird.  He is my trustee, and a man of honour.  To him you can state all your mercantile reasons, which you might not like to state to me personally, such as ’heavy season’—­’flat public’—­’don’t go off’—­’Lordship writes too much’—­won’t take advice’—­’declining popularity’—­deduction for the trade’—­’make very little’—­’generally lose by him’—­’pirated edition’—­’foreign