head bishop, and Gierthmwl Wledig the head elder.
65. Three privileged harbours in the island of Britain: The harbour of Perth Ysgewin in Gwent, and the harbour of Gwygyt in Mona, and the harbour of Perth Gwyddne in Cardiganshire.
56. Three presenters of benefits, i.e. benefactors to the nation of the Cumry: The first, Hugadarn, who first shewed the way to the nation of the Cumry to plow the land, when they were in the summer country, before they came hither: The second, Coll ap Coll Frewi, who first introduced wheat and barley to this island of Britain, where till then there were only oats and rye: The third was Elltud the knight, a saint from the cathedral of Theodosius in Glamorganshire, who improved the mode of plowing the land, and who gave them a better method and art of managing their land than they knew before; that is the same that now prevails; whereas formerly the land was not cultivated but with a mattock and a plough under foot, in the same way as the Irish.
THE COCKNEY SCHOOL OF POETRY.
No III.
Our hatred and contempt of Leigh Hunt as a writer, is not so much owing to his shameless irreverence to his aged and afflicted king—to his profligate attacks on the character of the king's sons—to his low-born insolence to that aristocracy with whom he would in vain claim the alliance of one illustrious friendship—to his paid panderism to the vilest passions of that mob of which he is himself a firebrand—to the leprous crust of self-conceit with which his whole moral being is indurated—to that loathsome vulgarity which constantly clings round him like a vermined garment from St Giles'—to that irritable temper which keeps the unhappy man, in spite even of his vanity, in a perpetual fret with himself and all the world beside, and that shews itself equally in his deadly enmities and capricious friendships,—our hatred and contempt of Leigh Hunt, we say, is not so much owing to these and other causes, as to the 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 ☞ 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
