LETTER VIII. Oct. 22, 1815. MY DEAR HUNT, 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 appears 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. In short, I must turn to the faults, or what appear such to me: these are not many, nor such as may not be easily altered, being almost all verbal;-and of the same kind as I pretended to point out in the former cantos, viz. occasional quaintness and is owing to my having given it away. Letters have been given away also, or I should have had more for the reader's amusement. One of the Cantos of the story of « Rimini;» I believe the third. obscurity, and a kind of a harsh and yet colloquial compounding of epithets, as if to avoid saying common things in the common way; << difficile est propriè communia dicere,» seems at times to have met with in you a literal translator. I have made a few, and but a few, pencil marks on the MS. which you can follow or not, as you please. The poem, as a whole, will give you a very high station; but where is the conclusion? Don't let it cool in the composition! You can always delay as long as you like revising though I am not sure, in the very face of Horace, that the « nonum,» etc. is attended with advantage, unless we read «months" for ❝ years. >> I am glad the book sent' reached you. I forgot to tell you the story of its suppression, which shan't be longer than I can make it. My motive for writing that poem was, I fear, not so fair as you are willing to believe it; I was angry, and determined to be witty, and, fighting in a crowd, dealt about my blows against all alike, without distinction or discernment. When I came home from the East, among other new acquaintances and friends, politics and the state of the Nottingham rioters,- (of which county I am a landholder, and Lord Holland Recorder of the town), led me by the good offices of Mr Rogers into the society of Lord Holland, who with Lady Holland was particularly kind to me: about March, 1812, this introduction took place, when I made my first speech on the Frame Bill, in the same debate in which Lord Holland spoke. Soon after this, I was correcting the fifth edition of «E. B.» for the press, when Rogers represented to me that he knew Lord and Lady Holland would not be sorry if I suppressed any farther publication of that poem; and I immediately acquiesced, and with great pleasure, for I had attacked them upon a fancied and false provocation, with many others; and neither was, nor am sorry, to have done what I could to stifle that ferocious rhapsody. This was subsequent to my acquaintance with Lord Holland, and was neither expressed nor understood, as a condition of that acquaintance. Rogers told me he VOL. I. 12 thought I ought to suppress it; I thought so too, and did it as far as I could, and that's all. I sent you my copy, because I consider your having it much the same as having it myself. Lady Byron has one; I desire not to have any other; and sent it only as a curiosity and a me mento. LETTER IX. 13, Terrace, Piccadilly, Sept.-Oct. 30th, 1815. MY DEAR HUNT, Many thanks for your books, of which you already know my opinion. Their external splendour should not disturb you as inappropriate-they have still more within than without. I take leave to differ from you on Wordsworth, as freely as I once agreed with you; at that time I gave him credit for a promise, which is unfulfilled. I still think his capacity warrants all you say of it only—but that his 1 Sic in MS. performances since « Lyrical Ballads," are miserably inadequate to the ability which lurks within him: there is undoubtedly much natural talent spilt over « The Excursion;» but it is rain upon rocks-where it stands and stagnates, or rain upon sands-where it falls without fertilizing. Who can understand him? Let those who do, make him intelligible. Jacob Behmen, Swedenborg, and Joanna Southcote, are mere types of this arch-apostle of mystery and mysticism; but I have done-no I have not done, for I have two petty, and perhaps unworthy objections in small matters to make to him, which, with his pretensions to accurate observation, and fury against Pope's false translation of the << Moonlight scene in Homer,>> I wonder he should have fallen into :-these be they:of Greece in the body of his book— He says that it is a land of Rivers, fertile plains, and sounding shores, The rivers are dry half the year, the plains are barren, and the shores still and tideless as the Mediterranean can make them; the sky is any |