Page:Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron (1824).djvu/221

 very reason because it did shine, and in boudoirs. Who does not write to please the women? And Rogers has succeeded: what more can he want or wish?

“There was a Mrs. once fell in love with Shelley for his verses; and a Miss Stafford was so taken with the ‘Sofa’ (a very different one from Cowper’s,) that she went to France and married Crebillon.

“These are some of the sweets of authorship. But my day is over. Vixi, &c. I used formerly (that olim is a bad and a sad word!) to get letters by almost every post, the delicate beauty of whose penmanship suggested the fair, taper fingers that indited them. But my ‘Corsair’ days are over. Heigh ho!”

“But what has all this to do with Rogers, or ‘The Pleasures of Memory?’ Is there one line of that poem that has not been altered and re-altered, till it would be difficult to detect in the patchwork any thing like the texture of the original stuff?”

“Well, if there is not a line or a word that has not been canvassed, and made the subject of separate epistolary