never be brought to believe even the truth.  The world is not fond of ingenious distinctions between the theory and the practice of morals.  The public are justified in refusing to hear a man plead in favour of his character, when they hold in their hands a work of his in which all respect to character is forgotten.  We must reap the fruit of what we sow; and if evil and unjust reports have arisen against Leigh Hunt as a man, and unluckily for him it is so, he ought not to attribute the rise of such reports to the political animosities which his virulence has excited, but to the real and obvious cause—­his voluptuous defence of crimes revolting to Nature.

The publication of the voluptuous story of Rimini was followed, it would appear, by mysterious charges against Leigh Hunt in his domestic relations.  The world could not understand the nature of his poetical love of incest; and instead of at once forgetting both the poem and the poet, many people set themselves to speculate, and talk, and ask questions, and pry into secrets with which they had nothing to do, till at last there was something like an identification of Leigh Hunt himself with Paolo, the incestuous hero of Leigh Hunt’s chief Cockney poem.  This was wrong, and, we believe, wholly unjust; but it was by no means unnatural; and precisely what Leigh Hunt is himself in the weekly practice of doing to other people without the same excuse.  Leigh Hunt has now spoken out so freely to the public on the subject, that there can be no indelicacy in talking of it, in as far as it respects him, at least....

There is no need for us to sink down this unhappy man into deeper humiliation.  Never before did the abuse and prostitution of talents bring with them such prompt and memorable punishment.  The pestilential air which Leigh Hunt breathed forth into the world to poison and corrupt, has been driven stiflingly back upon himself, and he who strove to spread the infection of loathsome licentiousness among the tender moral constitutions of the young, has been at length rewarded, as it was fitting he should be, by the accusation of being himself guilty of those crimes which it was the object of “The Story of Rimini” to encourage and justify in others.  The world knew nothing of him but from his works; and were they blameable (even though they erred) in believing him capable of any enormities in his own person, whose imagination feasted and gloated on the disgusting details of adultery and incest?  They were repelled and sickened by such odious and unnatural wickedness—­he was attracted and delighted.  What to them was the foulness of pollution, seemed to him the beauty of innocence.  What to them was the blast from hell, to him was the air from heaven.  They read and they condemned.  They asked each other “What manner of man is this?” The charitable were silent.  It would perhaps be hard to call them uncharitable who spoke aloud.  Thoughts were associated with his name which shall be nameless by us; and at last