story of Rimini is not wholly undeserving
of praise. It possesses some tolerable passages, which are all quoted in
the Edinburgh Reviewer's account of the poem, and not one of which is
quoted in the very illiberal attack upon it in the Quarterly. But such
is the wretched taste in which the greater part of the work is executed,
that most certainly no man who reads it once will ever be able to
prevail upon himself to read it again. One feels the same disgust at the
idea of opening Rimini, that impresses itself on the mind of a man of
fashion, when he is invited to enter, for a second time, the gilded
drawing-room of a little mincing boarding school mistress, who would
fain have an _At Home_ in her house. Every thing is pretence,
affectation, finery, and gaudiness. The beaux are attorneys'
apprentices, with chapeau bras and Limerick gloves--fiddlers, harp
teachers, and clerks of genius: the belles are faded fan-twinkling
spinsters, prurient vulgar misses from school, and enormous citizens'
wives. The company are entertained with lukewarm negus, and the sounds
of a paltry piano forte.

All the great poets of our country have been men of some rank in
society, and there is no vulgarity in any of their writings; But Mr.
Hunt cannot utter a dedication, or even a note, without betraying the
_Shibboleth_ of low birth and low habits. He is the ideal of a Cockney
Poet. He raves perpetually about "greenfields," "jaunty streams," and
"o'er-arching leafiness," exactly as a Cheapside shop-keeper does about
the beauties of his box on the Camberwell road. Mr. Hunt is altogether
unacquainted with the face of nature in her magnificent scenes; he has
never seen any mountain higher than Highgate-hill, nor reclined by any
stream more pastoral than the Serpentine River. But he is determined to
be a poet eminently rural, and he rings the changes--till one is sick of
him, on the beauties of the different "high views" which he has taken of
God and nature, in the course of some Sunday dinner parties, at which he
has assisted in the neighbourhood of London. His books are indeed not
known in the country; his fame as a poet (and I might almost say, as a
politician too) is entirely confined to the young attorneys and
embryo-barristers about town. In the opinion of these competent judges,
London is the world--and Hunt is a Homer.

Mr. Hunt is not disqualified by his ignorance and vulgarity alone, for
being the founder of a respectable sect in poetry.