accordance with his present creed of taste, morals, politics, and
religion. It so happened that the very passages of highest
inspiration to which I had alluded were among the condemned and
rejected rubbish which it is his purpose to cast into the gulf of
oblivion. To whisper you the truth, it appears to me that his
passions having burned out, the extinction of their vivid and
riotous flame has deprived Lord Byron of the illumination by which
he not merely wrote, but was enabled to feel and comprehend what he
had written. Positively he no longer understands his own poetry.

This became very apparent on his favoring me so far as to read a few
specimens of Don Juan in the moralized version. Whatever is
licentious, whatever disrespectful to the sacred mysteries of our
faith, whatever morbidly melancholic or splenetically sportive,
whatever assails settled constitutions of government or systems of
society, whatever could wound the sensibility of any mortal, except
a pagan, a republican, or a dissenter, has been unrelentingly
blotted out, and its place supplied by unexceptionable verses in his
lordship's later style. You may judge how much of the poem remains
as hitherto published. The result is not so good as might be
wished; in plain terms, it is a very sad affair indeed; for, though
the torches kindled in Tophet have been extinguished, they leave an
abominably ill odor, and are succeeded by no glimpses of hallowed
fire. It is to be hoped, nevertheless, that this attempt on Lord
Byron's part to atone for his youthful errors will at length induce
the Dean of Westminster, or whatever churchman is concerned, to
allow Thorwaldsen's statue of the poet its due niche in the grand
old Abbey. His bones, you know, when brought from Greece, were
denied sepulture among those of his tuneful brethren there.