At the time when he was occupied with this great work, he was confessedly in the enjoyment of the happiest portion of his life.  The Guiccioli was to him a Myrrha, but the Carbonari were around, and in the controversy, in which Sardanapalus is engaged, between the obligations of his royalty and his inclinations for pleasure, we have a vivid insight of the cogitation of the poet, whether to take a part in the hazardous activity which they were preparing, or to remain in the seclusion and festal repose of which he was then in possession.  The Assyrian is as much Lord Byron as Childe Harold was, and bears his lineaments in as clear a likeness, as a voluptuary unsated could do those of the emaciated victim of satiety.  Over the whole drama, and especially in some of the speeches of Sardanapalus, a great deal of fine but irrelevant poetry and moral reflection has been profusely spread; but were the piece adapted to the stage, these portions would of course be omitted, and the character denuded of them would then more fully justify the idea which I have formed of it, than it may perhaps to many readers do at present, hidden as it is, both in shape and contour, under an excess of ornament.

That the character of Myrrha was also drawn from life, and that the Guiccioli was the model, I have no doubt.  She had, when most enchanted by her passion for Byron—at the very time when the drama was written—many sources of regret; and he was too keen an observer, and of too jealous a nature, not to have marked every shade of change in her appearance, and her every moment of melancholy reminiscence; so that, even though she might never have given expression to her sentiments, still such was her situation, that it could not but furnish him with fit suggestions from which to fill up the moral being of the Ionian slave.  Were the character of Myrrha scanned with this reference, while nothing could be discovered to detract from the value of the composition, a great deal would be found to lessen the merit of the poet’s invention.  He had with him the very being in person whom he has depicted in the drama, of dispositions and endowments greatly similar, and in circumstances in which she could not but feel as Myrrha is supposed to have felt—and it must be admitted, that he has applied the good fortune of that incident to a beautiful purpose.