All the great poets of our country have been men of some rank in society, and there is no vulgarity in any of their writings; But Mr. Hunt cannot utter a dedication, or even a note, without betraying the Shibboleth of low birth and low habits.  He is the ideal of a Cockney Poet.  He raves perpetually about “greenfields,” “jaunty streams,” and “o’er-arching leafiness,” exactly as a Cheapside shop-keeper does about the beauties of his box on the Camberwell road.  Mr. Hunt is altogether unacquainted with the face of nature in her magnificent scenes; he has never seen any mountain higher than Highgate-hill, nor reclined by any stream more pastoral than the Serpentine River.  But he is determined to be a poet eminently rural, and he rings the changes—­till one is sick of him, on the beauties of the different “high views” which he has taken of God and nature, in the course of some Sunday dinner parties, at which he has assisted in the neighbourhood of London.  His books are indeed not known in the country; his fame as a poet (and I might almost say, as a politician too) is entirely confined to the young attorneys and embryo-barristers about town.  In the opinion of these competent judges, London is the world—­and Hunt is a Homer.

Mr. Hunt is not disqualified by his ignorance and vulgarity alone, for being the founder of a respectable sect in poetry.  He labours under the burden of a sin more deadly than either of these.  The two great elements of all dignified poetry, religious feeling, and patriotic feeling, have no place in his mind.  His religion is a poor tame dilution of the blasphemies of the Encyclopaedie—­his patriotism a crude, vague, ineffectual, and sour Jacobinism.  He is without reverence either for God or man; neither altar nor throne have any dignity in his eyes.  He speaks well of nobody but two or three great dead poets, and in so speaking of them he does well; but, alas!  Mr. Hunt is no conjurer [Greek:  technae ou lanthanei].  He pretends, indeed, to be an admirer of Spencer and Chaucer, but what he praises in them is never what is most deserving of praise—­it is only that which he humbly conceives, bears some resemblance to the more perfect productions of Mr. Leigh Hunt; and we can always discover, in the midst of his most violent ravings about the Court of Elizabeth, and the days of Sir Philip Sidney, and the Fairy Queen—­that the real objects of his admiration are the Coterie of Hampstead and the Editor of the Examiner.  When he talks about chivalry and King Arthur, he is always thinking of himself, and “a small party of friends, who meet once a-week at a Round Table, to discuss the merits of a leg of mutton, and of the subjects upon which we are to write.”—­ Mr. Leigh Hunt’s ideas concerning the sublime, and concerning his own powers, bear a considerable resemblance to those of his friend Bottom, the weaver, on the same subjects; “I will roar, that it shall do any man’s heart good to hear me.”—­“I will roar you an ’twere any nightingale.”