liberty either to be your own advocate at the bar, or to give a brief to your champion Mr Hazlitt.
The first of your foaming exclama- tions was, " my accuser is a liar." Let us see what you mean by this polite and laconic asseveration. He has filed against you a bill, which may be di- vided into eight several counts. Do you mean to say that the whole in- dictment is a falsehood, or do you con- fine your indignation to any indivi- dual section of the charge? Your temper is in such a state, that I can- not place much reliance on your ca- pacity of dissecting even the most per- spicuous of compositions. I will save you the trouble.
The charges which I have brought against your literary life and conver- sation are these : 1. The want and the pretence of scholarship ; 2. A vulgar style in writing ; 3. A want of respect for the Christian religion ; 4. A con- tempt for kingly power, and an inde- cent mode of attacking the govern- ment of your country ; 5. Extrava- gant admiration of yourself, the Round Table, and your own poems ; 6. Af- feetation ; 7. A partiality for indecent subjects, and an immoral manner of writing concerning the crime of incest, in your poem of Rimini ; 8. I have asserted, that you are a poet vastly in- ferior to Wordsworth, Byron, and Moore !
The truth of these propositions I offer- ed to prove to the satisfaction of the pub- lic, without however binding myself to bring them forward in any particular order of arrangement. But you ex- claim, tha I am a liar. Answer me these questions before I answer any of yours. Are you a profound scholar ? Are you a genteel and elegant writer of English? Are you a pious Christian? Are you not the editor of the Examin- er? Do you not think the Round Table worthy of standing on the same shelf with the Spectator, and Rimini of being bound up with the Inferno? Are you a simple and unaffected writer ? Have you not gloated over all the de- tails of an incestuous amour in a man- ner calculated to excite in young and sentimental minds, not horror, but sympathy for the guilty lovers? Do you presume to say that you wish to be considered as occupying the same sta- tion in poetry with the authors of the Excursion, Childe Harold, and Lalla Rookh ? Let me know which of the eight counts it is that has provoked your resentment, and rest assured, that upon that very count my first evidences shall be produced.
Excepting in so far as your compli- ance with this demand may give oc- casion for it, it is not by any means my intention to depart from the plan which I originally proposed. I mean to handle each of these topics in its turn, and now and then to relieve my main attack upon you, by a diversion against some of your younger and less important auxiliaries, the Keateses, the Shellys, and the Webbes. Did you ever suppose, that having formed and announced such a plan, I should be the fool to weaken the effect of its ex- ecution, by telling you my name the moment you were pleased to demand it ? If you think me a fool, why do you read my papers at all ? If you do me the honour to suppose that I am capable of reading and comprehending your writings, that is all I want you or any body else to do. I am desirous of addressing myself to the public upon these subjects, in the character of one who understands your works and their tendency. What could you or the public gain by learning by what name I am called ? If I please at any time to disclose myself, that will be done with a better grace after I have finish- ed my series of papers " on the Cock- ney School" than now, when I have little more than commenced it. Did you hope to irritate me by calling names in the Examiner ? The unknown and insignificant Z., shares the abuse of that journal, with those who may well keep him in countenance. Do the politicians who have decided that Mr Pitt was " a dull" " common man," destitute of either " understanding, imagination, sensibility, wit, or judgment" Do the philosophers who have called Mr Locke a blundering plagiary, and styl- ed King David a Methodist, the first who made a regular compromise be- tween immorality and religion, and a man of the same stamp with Louis XIV. and Charles II. Do the sweeping moralists, who have pronounced every Scotchman to be by impulse a scoun- drel, and every Irishman by principle a knave Do these oracular dogmatists imagine that Z. shall be offended be- cause they choose to christen him a reptile ?
You have found, it seems, two ex- cellent writers who have taken up
