"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 edition'--'severe criticisms,' &c. with other hints and howls for an oration, which I leave Douglas, who is an orator, to answer. "You can also state them more freely to a third person, as between you and me they could only produce some smart postscripts, which would not adorn our mutual archives. "I am sorry for the Queen, and that's more than you are." [Footnote 46: One of the charges of plagiarism brought against him by some scribblers of the day was founded (as I have already observed in the first volume of this work) on his having sought in the authentic records of real shipwrecks those materials out of which he has worked his own powerful description in the second Canto of Don Juan. With as much justice might the Italian author, (Galeani, if I recollect right,) who wrote a Discourse on the Military Science displayed by Tasso in his battles, have reproached that poet with the sources from which he drew his knowledge:--with as much justice might Puysegur and Segrais, who have pointed out the same merit in Homer and Virgil, have withheld their praise because the science on which this merit was founded must have been derived by the skill and industry of these poets from others.