with Paolo, the incestuous hero of Leigh Hunt's chief Cockney poem. This
was wrong, and, we believe, wholly unjust; but it was by no means
unnatural; and precisely what Leigh Hunt is himself in the weekly
practice of doing to other people without the same excuse. Leigh Hunt
has now spoken out so freely to the public on the subject, that there
can be no indelicacy in talking of it, in as far as it respects him, at
least....

There is no need for us to sink down this unhappy man into deeper
humiliation. Never before did the abuse and prostitution of talents
bring with them such prompt and memorable punishment. The pestilential
air which Leigh Hunt breathed forth into the world to poison and
corrupt, has been driven stiflingly back upon himself, and he who strove
to spread the infection of loathsome licentiousness among the tender
moral constitutions of the young, has been at length rewarded, as it was
fitting he should be, by the accusation of being himself guilty of those
crimes which it was the object of "The Story of Rimini" to encourage and
justify in others. The world knew nothing of him but from his works; and
were they blameable (even though they erred) in believing him capable of
any enormities in his own person, whose imagination feasted and gloated
on the disgusting details of adultery and incest? They were repelled and
sickened by such odious and unnatural wickedness--he was attracted and
delighted. What to them was the foulness of pollution, seemed to him the
beauty of innocence. What to them was the blast from hell, to him was
the air from heaven. They read and they condemned. They asked each other
"What manner of man is this?" The charitable were silent. It would
perhaps be hard to call them uncharitable who spoke aloud. Thoughts were
associated with his name which shall be nameless by us; and at last the
wretched scribbler himself has had the gross and unfeeling folly to
punish them all to the world, and that too in a tone of levity that
could have been becoming only on our former comparatively trivial
charges against him of wearing yellow breeches, and dispensing with the
luxury of a neckcloth. He shakes his shoulders, according to his rather
iniquitous custom, at being told that he is suspected of adultery and
incest! A pleasant subject of merriment, no doubt, it is--though
somewhat embittered by the intrusive remembrance of that unsparing
castigator of vice, Mr. Gifford, and clouded over by the melancholy