Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 002.djvu/434

 your cause. Your notice of them in the Examiner was ray first informa- tion of their existence; but, upon look- ing into their productions, I am sorry to say, that I think your partiality for the subject has induced you to rate a little too high the value of their eulo- gies. The Pamphleteer has come for- ward with words full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, to defend you from the remarks I had made on your politics and your religion. In regard to the first, he informs us that you are a true English patriot, and adds, by way of proof, that you are the con- victed libeller of your Sovereign. In regard to the second, he tells us in one page, that no man can commit a great- er crime than by offending the religi- ous prejudices of his countrymen ; and in the next, he very gravely asserts, that you are an open professor of the same respectable faith with Hume, Condorcet, and Voltaire. I desire no more. Out of your own words are ye judged. The Critic is a great admirer of you and of Mr Hazlitt. He thinks the Round Table a divine production. He says that " Mr Hazlitt's writings are incomparably fuller of ideas than Addison's." Z. is not very anxious to know what this person thinks of his writings. Are you not afraid of the old adage, " Noscitur a socio," when you are willing to associate your cause with such a set of drivellers as these ? It is curious to see of what absurdities a clever man can be guilty, when he is fairly in a passion.

It appears from the language of your last note to Z. that you have yourself misconceived my meaning in one part of my first paper. Mr Blackwood's Editor has thought proper to soften some of my expressions in the Second Edition of his Magazine, so as to pre- vent the possibility of the misconstruc- tion into which it appears you have fallen. I suspect, however, that in truth, you are the only person who have mistaken my meaning, and that it would be a difficult thing for any disinterested individual, to compre- hend in what way you have committed such a blunder. When I charged you with depraved morality, obscenity, and indecency, I spoke not of Leigh Hunt as a man. I deny the fact. I have no reason to doubt that your private cha- racter is respectable ; but I judged of you from your works, and I maintain that they are little calculated to sup- port such a conclusion. I am willing to confess to you, that there are few absurdities of which I do not believe a most affected and tasteless rhymster to be capable, even though his morals should have no share in the base qua- lities of his intellect. But the more virtuous you are, the greater must your influence be, and in exact proportion to the private worth of Mr Hunt must the corrupting effects of his vile poem be increased. Your poem is vile, profligate, obscene, indecent, and de- testable. I have already proved, and I mean to prove yet more fully, that in the Story of Rimini you have offered a laborious, and yet a smiling apology for a crime at once horrible in its ef- fects, and easy in its perpetration a crime which takes for granted the breach of brotherly confidence, and the pollution of home a crime which we had fondly imagined was extinct in England, but of which a late me- lancholy example has taught us that the beginnings are as insidious as the end is miserable. In those who have wept with tears of blood over the fa- tal errors of a Paolo and a Francesca of our own in those who have cursed the smooth villanies of Mildmay, and pitied the sufferings of the generous and unsuspecting Roseberry in those who have felt the horrors of a real story of Rimini, it will excite no won- der that a lover of virtue has poured out his bitter indignation against the husband and the father who had dared to be the apologist of adultery and incest.

To answer the charges which I have made against your works, is in your power, and in that of your friends. The sooner you shew yourself to be a classical writer, a good Christian, and a great poet, the better will it be for yourself; and the first to congratulate you and the public on the metamor- phosis, will be the present object of your resentment and your abuse. If you can shew that Rimini has no bad tendency, that the young wife of an old, or the sentimental wife of a busy husband, can study it without danger, your cause is won. Till that be, the accusation I have brought against you as its author will remain as it now is, and you will never white- wash the reputation of your poem by blacken- ing the character of one who has told you that he cannot read it without loathing.