him into a martyr.  But he is a good man.  When I saw ‘Rimini’ in MS., I told him that I deemed it good poetry at bottom, disfigured only by a strange style.  His answer was, that his style was a system, or upon system, or some such cant; and, when a man talks of system, his case is hopeless:  so I said no more to him, and very little to any one else.

“He believes his trash of vulgar phrases tortured into compound barbarisms to be old English; and we may say of it as Aimwell says of Captain Gibbet’s regiment, when the Captain calls it an ’old corps,’—­’the oldest in Europe, if I may judge by your uniform.’  He sent out his ‘Foliage’ by Percy Shelley * * *, and, of all the ineffable Centaurs that were ever begotten by Self-love upon a Night-mare, I think this monstrous Sagittary the most prodigious. He (Leigh H.) is an honest charlatan, who has persuaded himself into a belief of his own impostures, and talks Punch in pure simplicity of heart, taking himself (as poor Fitzgerald said of himself in the Morning Post) for Vates in both senses, or nonsenses, of the word.  Did you look at the translations of his own which he prefers to Pope and Cowper, and says so?—­Did you read his skimble-skamble about * * being at the head of his own profession, in the eyes of those who followed it?  I thought that poetry was an art, or an attribute, and not a profession;—­but be it one, is that * * * * * * at the head of your profession in your eyes?  I’ll be curst if he is of mine, or ever shall be.  He is the only one of us (but of us he is not) whose coronation I would oppose.  Let them take Scott, Campbell, Crabbe, or you, or me, or any of the living, and throne him;—­but not this new Jacob Behmen, this * * * * * * whose pride might have kept him true, even had his principles turned as perverted as his soi-disant poetry.

“But Leigh Hunt is a good man, and a good father—­see his Odes to all the Masters Hunt;—­a good husband—­see his Sonnet to Mrs. Hunt;—­a good friend—­see his Epistles to different people;—­and a great coxcomb and a very vulgar person in every thing about him.  But that’s not his fault, but of circumstances.[22]

“I do not know any good model for a life of Sheridan but that of Savage.  Recollect, however, that the life of such a man may be made far more amusing than if he had been a Wilberforce;—­and this without offending the living, or insulting the dead.  The Whigs abuse him; however, he never left them, and such blunderers deserve neither credit nor compassion.  As for his creditors,—­remember, Sheridan never had a shilling, and was thrown, with great powers and passions, into the thick of the world, and placed upon the pinnacle of success, with no other external means to support him in his elevation.  Did Fox * * * pay his debts?—­or did Sheridan take a subscription?  Was the