odious and unnatural harlotry of his polluted muse. We were
the first to brand with a burning iron the false face of this
kept-mistress of a demoralizing incendiary. We tore off her gaudy veil and
transparent drapery, and exhibited the painted cheeks and writhing limbs
of the prostitute. We denounced to the execration of the people of
England, the man who had dared to write in the solitude of a cell, whose
walls ought to have heard only the sighs of contrition and repentance, a
lewd tale of incest, adultery, and murder, in which the violation of
Nature herself was wept over, palliated, justified, and held up to
imitation, and the violators themselves worshipped as holy martyrs. The
story of Rimini had begun to have its admirers; but their deluded minds
were startled at our charges,--and on reflecting upon the character of
the poem, which they had read with a dangerous sympathy, not on account
of its poetical merit, which is small indeed, but on account of those
voluptuous scenes, so dangerous even to a pure imagination, when
insidiously painted with the seeming colours of virtue,--they were
astounded at their own folly and their own danger, and consigned the
wretched volume to that ignominious oblivion, which, in a land of
religion and morality, must soon be the doom of all obscene and
licentious productions.

The story of Rimini is heard of no more. But Leigh Hunt will not be
quiet. His hebdomadal hand [**Pointing hand symbol] is held up, even on
the Sabbath, against every man of virtue and genius in the land; but the
great defamer claims to himself an immunity from that disgrace which he
knows his own wickedness has incurred,--the Cockney calumniator would
fain hold his own disgraced head sacred from the iron fingers of
retribution. But that head shall be brought low--aye--low "as heaped up
justice" ever sunk that of an offending scribbler against the laws of
Nature and of God.

Leigh Hunt dared not, Hazlitt dared not, to defend the character of the
"Story of Rimini." A man may venture to say that in verse which it is
perilous to utter in plain prose. Even they dared not to affirm to the
people of England, that a wife who had committed incest with her
husband's brother, ought on her death to be buried in the same tomb with
her fraticidal [Transcriber's note: sic] paramour, and that tomb to be
annually worshipped by the youths and virgins of their country. And
therefore Leigh Hunt flew into a savage passion against t