live in hopes. I need not say that your successes are mine. By the
way, Lydia White is here, and has just borrowed my copy of 'Lalla
Rookh.'

"Hunt's letter is probably the exact piece of vulgar coxcombry you
might expect from his situation. He is a good man, with some
poetical elements in his chaos; but spoilt by the Christ-Church
Hospital and a Sunday newspaper,--to say nothing of the Surrey
gaol, which conceited him into a martyr. But he is a good man. When
I saw 'Rimini' in MS., I told him that I deemed it good poetry at
bottom, disfigured only by a strange style. His answer was, that
his style was a system, or _upon system_, or some such cant; and,
when a man talks of system, his case is hopeless: so I said no more
to him, and very little to any one else.

"He believes his trash of vulgar phrases tortured into compound
barbarisms to be _old_ English; and we may say of it as Aimwell
says of Captain Gibbet's regiment, when the Captain calls it an
'old corps,'--'the _oldest_ in Europe, if I may judge by your
uniform.' He sent out his 'Foliage' by Percy Shelley * * *, and, of
all the ineffable Centaurs that were ever begotten by Self-love
upon a Night-mare, I think this monstrous Sagittary the most
prodigious. _He_ (Leigh H.) is an honest charlatan, who has
persuaded himself into a belief of his own impostures, and talks
Punch in pure simplicity of heart, taking himself (as poor
Fitzgerald said of _himself_ in the Morning Post) for _Vates_ in
both senses, or nonsenses, of the word. Did you look at the
translations of his own which he prefers to Pope and Cowper, and
says so?--Did you read his skimble-skamble about * * being at the
head of his own _profession_, in the _eyes_ of _those_ who followed