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.