and there, but with the substratum of originality, and with poetry about it that will stand the test. I do not say this because he has inscribed it to me.' And to Leigh Hunt himself Byron reports praise of the poem from Sir Henry Englefield the dilettante, 'a mighty man in the blue circles, and a very clever man anywhere,' from Hookham Frere 'and all the arch _literati_,' and says how he had left his own sister and cousin 'in fixed and delighted perusal of it.' Byron's admiration cooled greatly in the sequel, with or even before the cooling of his regard for the author. But it is an instructive comment on standards of taste and their instability that cultivated readers should at any time have endured to hear the story of Paolo and Francesca--Dante's Paolo and Francesca--diluted through four cantos in a style like that of the above quotations. When Keats and Shelley, with their immeasurably finer poetical gifts and instincts, successively followed Leigh Hunt in the attempt to add a familiar ease of manner to variety of movement in this metre, Shelley, it need not be said, was in no danger of falling into Hunt's faults of triviality and under-breeding: but Keats was only too apt to be betrayed into them. Hunt had spent the first months after his release in London, but by the end of 1815, some time before the publication of _Rimini_, had settled at Hampstead, where he soon made himself a sort of self-crowned laureate of the beauties of the place, and continued to vary his critical and political labours with gossiping complimentary verses to his friends in the form both of sonnet and epistle. The gravest of the epistles is one addressed in a spirit of good-hearted loyalty to Byron in that disastrous April when, after four years spent in the full blaze of popularity and fashion, he was leaving England under the storm of obloquy aroused by the scandals attending his separation from his wife. This is in Hunt's reformed heroic couplet: the rest are in a chirruping and gossiping anapaestic sing-song which is perhaps the writer's most congenial vein. Here is a summer picture of Hampstead from a letter to Tom Moore:-- And yet how can I touch, and not linger a while, On the spot that has haunted my youth like a smile? On its fine breathing prospects, its clump-wooded glades, Dark pines, and white houses, and long-allied shades, With fields going down, where the bard lies and sees The hills up above him with roofs in the trees? Now too, while the season,--half summer, half spring,-- Brown elms and green oaks--makes one loiter and sing; And the bee's weighty murmur comes by us at noon, And the cuckoo repeats his short indolent tune, And little white clouds lie about in the sun, And the wind's in the west, and hay-making begun?-- and here an autumn night-sketch, from a letter expressing surprise that the wet weather has not brought a visit from Charles Lamb, that inveterate lover of walking in the rain:--