"You like Beppo, that's right. I have not had the Fudges yet, but live in hopes. I need not say that your successes are mine. By the way, Lydia White is here, and has just borrowed my copy of 'Lalla Rookh.' "Hunt's letter is probably the exact piece of vulgar coxcombry you might expect from his situation. He is a good man, with some poetical elements in his chaos; but spoilt by the Christ-Church Hospital and a Sunday newspaper,--to say nothing of the Surrey gaol, which conceited 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]