ordles, promiscuous
dancing and the Common Prayer-book, and all the other enormities and
backslidings of the time, may perhaps be offended at this idle tale, we
are afraid they will receive their answer in the tone of the revellers
to Malvolio, who, it will be remembered, was something a kind of
Puritan: "Doest thou think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no
more cakes and ale?--Aye, by Saint Anne, and ginger will be hot in the
mouth too."

ON LEIGH HUNT

[From _The Quarterly Review_, January, 1816]

_The Story of Rimini, a Poem_. By LEIGH HUNT. fc. 8vo. pp. 111. London,
1816.

A considerable part of this poem was written in Newgate, where the
author was some time confined, we believe for a libel which appeared in
a newspaper, of which he is said to be the conductor. Such an
introduction is not calculated to make a very favourable impression.
Fortunately, however, we are as little prejudiced as possible on this
subject: we have never seen Mr. Hunt's newspaper; we have never heard
any particulars of his offence; nor should we have known that he had
been imprisoned but for his own confession. We have not, indeed, ever
read one line that he has written, and are alike remote from the
knowledge of his errors or the influence of his private character. We
are to judge him solely from the work now before us; and our criticism
would be worse than uncandid if it were swayed by any other
consideration.

The poem is not destitute of merit; but--and this, we confess, was our
main inducement to notice it--it is written on certain pretended
_principles_, and put forth as a pattern for imitation, with a degree of
arrogance which imposes on us the duty of making some observations on
this new theory, which Mr. Leigh Hunt, with the weight and authority of
his venerable name, has issued, ex cathedra, as the canons of poetry and
criticism.

These canons Mr. Hunt endeavours to explain and establish in a long
preface, written in a style which, though Mr. Hunt implies that it is
meant to be perfectly natural and unaffected, appears to us the most
strange, laboured, uncouth, and unintelligible species of prose that we
ever read, only indeed to be exceeded in these qualities by some of the
subsequent verses; and both the prose and the verse are the first
eruptions of this disease with which Mr. Leigh Hunt insists upon
inoculating mankind.

Mr. Hunt's _first_ canon is that there should be a _great freedom_ _of
versificati