The most rural of these gentlemen is my friend Leigh Hunt, who lives at Hampstead.  I believe that I need not disclaim any personal or poetical hostility against that gentleman.  A more amiable man in society I know not; nor (when he will allow his sense to prevail over his sectarian principles) a better writer.  When he was writing his “Rimini,” I was not the last to discover its beauties, long before it was published.  Even then I remonstrated against its vulgarisms; which are the more extraordinary, because the author is any thing but a vulgar man.  Mr. Hunt’s answer was, that he wrote them upon principle; they made part of his “system!!” I then said no more.  When a man talks of his system, it is like a woman’s talking of her virtue.  I let them talk on.  Whether there are writers who could have written “Rimini,” as it might have been written, I know not; but Mr. Hunt is, probably, the only poet who could have had the heart to spoil his own Capo d’Opera.

With the rest of his young people I have no acquaintance, except through some things of theirs (which have been sent out without my desire), and I confess that till I had read them I was not aware of the full extent of human absurdity.  Like Garrick’s “Ode to Shakspeare,” they “defy criticism.”  These are of the personages who decry Pope.  One of them, a Mr. John Ketch, has written some lines against him, of which it were better to be the subject than the author.  Mr. Hunt redeems himself by occasional beauties; but the rest of these poor creatures seem so far gone that I would not “march through Coventry with them, that’s flat!” were I in Mr. Hunt’s place.  To be sure, he has “led his ragamuffins where they will be well peppered;” but a system-maker must receive all sorts of proselytes.  When they have really seen life—­when they have felt it—­when they have travelled beyond the far distant boundaries of the wilds of Middlesex—­when they have overpassed the Alps of Highgate, and traced to its sources the Nile of the New River—­then, and not till then, can it properly he permitted to them to despise Pope; who had, if not in Wales, been near it, when he described so beautifully the “artificial” works of the Benefactor of Nature and mankind, the “Man of Ross,” whose picture, still suspended in the parlour of the inn, I have so often contemplated with reverence for his memory, and admiration of the poet, without whom even his own still existing good works could hardly have preserved his honest renown.

I would also observe to my friend Hunt, that I shall be very glad to see him at Ravenna, not only for my sincere pleasure in his company, and the advantage which a thousand miles or so of travel might produce to a “natural” poet, but also to point out one or two little things in “Rimini,” which he probably would not have placed in his opening to that poem, if he had ever seen Ravenna;—­unless, indeed, it made “part of his system!!”