The poetry of Mr. Hunt is such as might be expected from the personal character and habits of its author.  As a vulgar man is perpetually labouring to be genteel—­in like manner, the poetry of this man is always on the stretch to be grand.  He has been allowed to look for a moment from the anti-chamber into the saloon, and mistaken the waving of feathers and the painted floor for the sine qua non’s of elegant society.  He would fain be always tripping and waltzing, and is sorry that he cannot be allowed to walk about in the morning with yellow breeches and flesh-coloured silk stockings.  He sticks an artificial rose-bud into his button hole in the midst of winter.  He wears no neckcloth, and cuts his hair in imitation of the Prints of Petrarch.  In his verses also he is always desirous of being airy, graceful, easy, courtly, and ITALIAN.  If he had the smallest acquaintance with the great demigods of Italian poetry, he could never fancy that the style in which he writes, bears any, even the most remote resemblance to the severe and simple manner of Dante—­the tender stillness of the lover of Laura—­or the sprightly and good-natured unconscious elegance of the inimitable Ariosto.  He has gone into a strange delusion about himself, and is just as absurd in supposing that he resembles the Italian Poets as a greater Quack still (Mr. Coleridge) is, in imagining that he is a Philosopher after the manner of Kant or Mendelshon—­and that “the eye of Lessing bears a remarkable likeness to MINE,” i.e., the eye of Mr. Samuel Coleridge.[1]

[1] Mr. Wordsworth (meaning, we presume, to pay Mr. Coleridge a
    compliment), makes him look very absurdly,

  “A noticeable man, with large grey eyes.”

The extreme moral depravity of the Cockney School is another thing which is for ever thrusting itself upon the public attention, and convincing every man of sense who looks into their productions, that they who sport such sentiments can never be great poets.  How could any man of high original genius ever stoop publicly, at the present day, to dip his fingers in the least of those glittering and rancid obscenities which float on the surface of Mr. Hunt’s Hippocrene?  His poetry is that of a man who has kept company with kept-mistresses.  He talks indelicately like a tea-sipping milliner girl.  Some excuse for him there might have been, had he been hurried away by imagination or passion.  But with him indecency is a disease, and he speaks unclean things from perfect inanition.  The very concubine of so impure a wretch as Leigh Hunt would be to be pitied, but alas! for the wife of such a husband!  For him there is no charm in simple seduction; and he gloats over it only when accompanied with adultery and incest.