The _Descent of Liberty_,[53] 1815, is a masque celebrating the triumph of Liberty, in the person of the Allies, over the Enchanter, Napoleon. There is little plot or human interest; the natural, the supernatural, and the mythical are confusedly interwoven. The pictorial effect, however, is one of great richness and color, and some of the songs and passages have fine lyrical feeling and melody. It is interesting in this connection to note a vague general resemblance between the _Descent of Liberty_ and Shelley's _Queen Mab_ (1812-13) in the worship of Liberty, in the hope and promise of her ultimate triumph, and in the wild imagination which Hunt probably never again equalled. It is not likely, however, that Hunt knew Shelley's poem at the time he was writing his own. _The Story of Rimini_, produced in 1816 and dedicated to Lord Byron, is the most important of Hunt's works in a consideration of his relations with the enemies of the Cockney School[54] and with Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Byron criticised it severely. Shelley thought it carried uncommon and irresistible interest with it, but he agreed with Byron in thinking that the style had fettered Hunt's genius.[55] Keats wrote a sonnet[56] on _Rimini_ in 1817, and in his own works shows unmistakably the influence of Hunt's poem in diction and versification. The story is founded, of course, on the Francesca episode in the fifth canto of the _Inferno_ of Dante. It was a dangerous thing for Hunt to undertake an elaboration of the marvelous episode of Dante. Had he been a man of greater genius it would have been a risk; as it was, he produced a diffuse and sentimental narrative which bears little resemblance to the singular perfection of the original. On the other hand, the _Story of Rimini_ does possess indubitable merits: directness of narrative, minute observation, sensuous richness of pictorial description, and occasional delicate felicity of language.[57] Byron wrote of the third canto which he saw in manuscript: "You have excelled yourself--if not all your contemporaries--in the canto which I have just finished. I think it above the former books; but that is as it should be; it rises with the subject, the conception seems to me perfect, and the execution perhaps as nearly so as verse will admit. There is more originality than I recollect to have seen elsewhere within the same compass, and frequent and great happiness of expression." The faults he said were "occasional quaintnesses and obscurity, and a kind of harsh and yet colloquial compounding of epithets, as if to avoid saying common things in a common way."[58]