Page:Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron (1824).djvu/136

 a question of great importance in the literary world of property. He would neither protect me nor Murray. But the manner in which it was got up was shameful! All the declamatory parts were left, all the dramatic ones struck out; and Cooper, the new actor, was the murderer of the whole. Lioni’s soliloquy, which I wrote one moonlight night after coming from the, ought to have been omitted altogether, or at all events much curtailed. What audience will listen with any patience to a mere tirade of poetry, which stops the march of the actor? No wonder, then, that the unhappy Doge should have been damned! But it was no very pleasant news for me; and the letter containing it was accompanied by another, to inform me that an old lady, from whom I had great expectations, was likely to live to an hundred. There is an autumnal shoot in some old people, as in trees; and I fancy her constitution has got some of the new sap. Well, on these two pleasant pieces of intelligence I wrote the following epigram, or elegy it may be termed, from the melancholy nature of the subject:—