accomplishments of a different description; and may boast, if the boast
can please him, of being the most licentious of modern versifiers, and
the most poetical of those who, in our times, have devoted their talents
to the propagation of immorality. We regard his book, indeed, as a
public nuisance; and would willingly trample it down by one short
movement of contempt and indignation, had we not reason to apprehend,
that it was abetted by patrons who are entitled to a more respectful
remonstrance, and by admirers who may require a more extended exposition
of their dangers.

There is nothing, it will be allowed, more indefensible than a
cold-blooded attempt to corrupt the purity of an innocent heart; and we
can scarcely conceive any being more truly despicable, than he who,
without the apology of unruly passion or tumultuous desires, sits down
to ransack the impure places of his memory for inflammatory images and
expressions, and commits them laboriously to writing, for the purpose of
insinuating pollution into the minds of unknown and unsuspecting
readers.

This is almost a new crime among us. While France has to blush for so
many tomes of "Poesies Erotiques," we have little to answer for, but the
coarse indecencies of Rochester and Dryden; and these, though
sufficiently offensive to delicacy and good taste, can scarcely be
regarded as dangerous. There is an antidote to the poison they contain,
in the open and undisguised profligacy with which it is presented. If
they are wicked, they have the honesty at least to profess wickedness.
The mark of the beast is set visibly on their foreheads; and though they
have the boldness to recommend vice, they want the effrontery to make
her pass for virtue. In their grossest immoralities, too, they scarcely
ever seem to be perfectly in earnest; and appear neither to wish nor to