ment, the Romans drew out the best troops of the Britons, and sent them into the country of Arabia, and other distant regions, and they never returned. And even the Romans who were in Britain retired to Italy, until there were none of them left except women and little children: and thus were the Britons weakened, so that they could not make a stand against the inroads and oppression of their enemies for want of men and strength. The second was Gwrtheyrn Curthenan, who, after murdering Constantine (Cystenyn) the blessed, and seizing the crown of the island through violence and spoil, invited the Saxons into this island to be his defenders and guards; and gave his hand to Alis Rhonwen, the daughter of Hengist; and he gave the crown of the island to the son he had by her, whose name was Cotta; for which reason the kings of London are called the children of Alis (Plant Alis). On account of this Gwrtheyrn, the Cumry lost their lands, their rights, and their crown, in England. third was Medrod ap Llew ap Cyvefarch, when Arthur left the government of the Island of Britain under his protection, while he was marching against the emperor in Rome (where there was no emperor at that time); then Medrod took the crown from Arthur through force and rapine; and, in order to keep it, he confederated with the Saxons; and for that reason, the Cumry lost the crown of England, and the sovereignty of the Island of Britain. From the Hergest Copy of the Triads. IV. Three principal rivers of the island of Britain: The Thames (Tain), the Severn (Safren), the Humber (Hymyr). (In the South Wales copy this triad is the 66th, and runs thus: "Severn in Wales, Tain* in England, and the Humber in Deifyr and Bryneich.") The The principal cities are twenty-eight, that is to say, 1 Caer Alclwyd 2 C. Evrog 3 C. Geint 4 C. Wrangon 5 C. Lundain 6 C. Lirion 7 C. Golun 10 C. Went 12 C. Grant 13 C. Dawrill + Query Ceri? Dunbarton. Colchester. Glocester. Cerencester, if so. On the way to Aust Passage. Dorchester, Oxon. * Llyntain, the lake of Tain. Venta Silurum. Dawn in Renn. Some MS. books reckon seven more Caers: C. Lyn. C. Flawydd, C. Gei, C. Fyrddin, C. Arfon, C. Ennarawd, C. Faddon. VII. Three prime seats of the tribes of the island of Britain: Arthur,† the head sovereign, in Caerleon on Usk; Dewi the head bishop, and Maclown of Gwynedd the head elder. Arthur, the head sovereign in Penrhyn Rhionydd in the North; Cyndeyrn Garthwys the head bishop, and Garthmwl Wledig the head elder. From the South Wales Copy. 62. The three archbishops of the island of Britain: The first, Landaff, from the gift of Lleirwg ap Coel ap Cyllin, who first gave lands and privileges to those who had engaged themselves to be of the faith of Christ; the second was York, from the gift of Con. stantine the emperor, for he was the first of the Roman emperors who pledged himself to the faith of Christ; the third London, by the gift of Maxen the emperor. After that, the chief seats were Caerleon on Usk, Gelliwig in Cornwall, and Caer Rhionyeld in the North. And now they are Mynyu (St David's), York, and Canterbury. of the island of Britain: One, Caerleon 64. Three prime seats of the tribes on Usk, and there Arthur is the head sovereign (Pen-rhailk the head-oath Wledig, head bishop, and Maclgwn of on law), Dewi the saint, ap Cunedda Gwynedd, the head elder. The second is Gelliwig in Cornwall, and there also Arthur is head sovereign, Bedwini the head bishop, and Caradog, with the brawny arm, the head elder; and the third is Penrhyn Rhionydd in the North, and there also Arthur is head sovereign, and Cyndeyrn Garthwys the 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 for merly 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 selfconceit 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 We harlotry of his polluted muse. 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 lewe 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 66 heaped up justice" ever sunk that of an offending scribbler against the laws of Nature and of God. as 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 hus band's brother, ought on her death to be buried in the same tomb with her And fratricidal paramour, and that tomb to be annually worshipped by the youths and virgins of their country. therefore Leigh Hunt flew into a savage passion against the critic who had chastised his crime, pretended that he himself was insidiously charged with the offences which he had applauded and celebrated in others, and tried to awaken the indignation of the public against his castigator, as if he had been the secret assassin of private character, who was but the open foe of public enormity. The attempt was hopeless, the public voice has lifted up against Hunt,-and sentence of excommunication from the poets of England has been pronounced, enrolled, and ratified. There can be no radical distinction allowed between the private and public character of a poet. If a poet sympathizes with and justifies wickedness in his poetry, he is a wicked man. It matters not that his private life may be free from wicked actions. Corrupt his moral principles must be,-and if his conduct has not been flagrantly immoral, the cause must be looked for in constitution, &c. but not in conscience. It is therefore of little or no importance, whether Leigh Hunt be or be not a bad private character. He maintains, that he is a most excellent private character, and that he would blush to tell the world how highly he is thought of by an host of respectable friends. Be it so, and that his vanity does not delude him. But this is most sure, that, in such a case, the world will never be brought to believe even the truth. The world is not fond of ingenious distinctions between the theory and the practice of morals. The public are justified in refusing to hear a man plead in favour of his character, when they hold in their hands a work of his in which all respect to character is forgotten. We must reap the fruit of what we sow; and if evil and unjust reports have arisen against Leigh Hunt as a man, and unluckily for him it is so, he ought not to attribute the rise of such reports to the political animosities which his virulence has excited, but to the real and obvious cause his voluptuous defence of crimes revolting to Nature. The publication of the voluptuous story of Rimini was followed, it would appear, by mysterious charges against Leigh Hunt in his domestic relations. The world could not understand the nature of his poetical love of incest; and instead of at once forgetting both the poem and the poet, many people set themselves to speculate, and talk, and ask questions, and pry into secrets with which they had nothing to do, till at last there was something like an identification of Leigh Hunt himself 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 ; and since he has most unjustly accused us, and our brethren the Quarterly Reviewers, of seeking to destroy his reputation, it is worth while to hear him speak for himself. The exhibition he makes in a late Number of the Examiner is singular, and, on many accounts, painful. "As a specimen of the calumnies directed against those who enrage the world by differing with them, and who will practise neither their want of charity towards others, nor their gross and exclusive indulgence towards themselves, we lay before our readers the following extraordinary accusations. We do not know whether our contempt of their falsity would have allowed us to do this had they been mentioned to us in a different style; but we think we can per ceive, that the writer of the letter on the subject is really a well-wisher, and we will give an answer to a single honest and kind person, which we might deny to thousands of malignant accusers and unconscious flatterers, like the Quarterly Reviewers,miserable gabblers behind walls, who take care at once to accuse and to exempt,-to endeavour to injure, and to save themselves from the consequences of their falsehood. Our Correspondent, after saying that the Editor of this paper must be astonishedbut he had better publish the whole letter your family, and your wife as the most abject of your slaves, (of course not a willing one), that you are so entirely devoted to the gratification of your passions, and so comletely given up to sensuality, that no female of your acquaintance is secure from your addresses, for not any ties are considered by you as sacred, if they come in contact with your inclination; and that a sister of Mrs Hunt's resides with you, who is the mother of at least one child, of which you are the father. When I heard this account, my first thought was to send it to you instantly, in order that I might judge, by the notice you took of it, whether it was true; my second dismissed it altogether as a vile fabrication, nor has it ever occurred to my memory since, till I read the article in the Quarterly, where the writer so evidently accuses you of these things, which, if you are innocent of, you certainly cannot comprehend his meaning, that in justice I have been induced to send you every information in my power, to enable you to repel and prove his accusation false. In the hope that you can, and will do so, I remain your sincere WELLWISHER.' "An assailant of all the women that came in his way ! A tyrant to his wife! And the father of children by her sister!-Really, the Editor of this paper never knew his prodigious effect on the bigotted and the worldly-minded till now! He was prepared for and has borne a good deal of calumny, both real and imaginary, in differing with them; and he has always let it run silently from off him, like rain from a bird's wings. He must give the present shower a shake, if it is only to oblige his well-wisher. He says, then, that the whole of these charges are most malignantly and ridiculously false, so as to make those who are in habits of intercourse with him alternately give way to indignation and laughter. He knows several ladies, whom he respects and admires, and even (with permission of poor Giffard) likes to see happy; but he believes they are no more afraid of him than of the light at their windows: and as to being a tyrant to his wife, and the father of nieces and nephews,-whatever may be the charity of his opinions, the charge is really a little too ludicrously uncharitable towards them, under all circumstances. He looks at his wife and his family, and shakes his shoulders and their own with laughing-which, by the way, is rather an iniquitous custom of his. It might as well be said of him, that he had Mr Giffard's temper, or used his grandmother's shin-bone for a switch." 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, VOL. III. has been driven stiflingly back upon himself, and he who strove to spread the infection of a 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 to him the beauty of innocence. What was the foulness of pollution, seemed 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 publish them all to the world, and that too in a tone of levity that could have been becoming only charges against him of wearing yelon our former comparatively trivial low 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 breathed from the shin-bone of his own poor old deceased grandmother. What a mixture of the horrible and absurd! And the man who thus writes is not a Christian, for that he denies -but, forsooth, a poet! one of the "Great spirits who on earth are sojourning!" But Leigh Hunt is not guilty, in the above paragraph, of shocking levity alone,-he is guilty of falsehood. It is not true, that he learnt for the first time, from that anonymous letter (so vulgar, that we could almost suspect him of having written it himself) 3 M what charges were in circulation against him. He knew it all before. Has he forgotten to whom he applied for explanation when Z.'s sharp essay en the Cockney Poetry cut him to the heart? He knows what he said upon those occasions, and let him ponder upon it. But what could induce him to suspect the amiable Bill Hazlitt, "him, the immaculate," of being Z.? It was this, he imagined that none but that foundered artist could know the fact of his feverish importunities to be reviewed by him in the Edinburgh Review. And therefore, having almost as fine an intellectual touch" as "Bill the painter" himself, he thought he saw Z. lurking beneath the elegant exterior of that highly accomplished man. "Dear Hazlitt, whose tact intellectual is such, That it seems to feel truth as one's fingers do touch." But, for the present, we have nothing more to add. Leigh Hunt is delivered into our hands to do with him as we will. Our eye shall be upon him, and unless he amend his ways, to wither and to blast him. The pages of the Edinburgh Review, we are confident, are henceforth shut against him. One wicked Cockney will not again be permitted to praise another in that journal, which, up to the moment when incest and adultery were defended in its pages, had, however openly at war with religion, kept at least upon decent terms with the cause of morality. It was indeed a fatal day for Mr Jeffrey, when he degraded both himself and his original coadjutors, by taking into pay such an unprincipled blunderer as Hazlitt. He is not a coadjutor, he is an accomplice. The day is perhaps not far distant, when the Charlatan shall be stripped to the naked skin, and made to swallow his own vile prescriptions. He and Leigh Hunt are Et cantare pares"Shall we add, "Arcades ambo "et respondere parati ?" Z. FOX AND PITT. [The following sketch is translated from a MS. letter of the Baron Von Lauerwinkel.] "I SHALL not easily forget the impression which was made upon me when I first found myself within the walls of the House of Commons. I was then a young man, and my temper was never a cold one. I had heard much of England. In the dearth of domestic freedom her great men had become ours; for the human mind is formed for veneration, and every heart is an altar, undignified without its divinity, and useless without its sacrifice. "A lover of England, and an admirer of every thing which tends to her greatness, I contemplated, notwithstanding, with the impartiality of a foreigner, scenes of political debate and contention, which kindled into all the bigotries of wrath, the bosoms of those for whose benefit they were exhibited. Absurdities which found easy credence from the heated minds of the English, made small impression on the disinterested and dispassionate German. While rival politicians were exhausting against each other every engine of oratorial conflict, their constituents eyed the combatants, as if every fear and every hope sat on the issue of the field, and prayed for their friends, and cursed their enemies, with all the fervour of a more fatal warfare; but the calm ed by the mists of prejudice, though spectator, whose optics were not blindhis reason might make him wish_the success of one party, was in no danthe valour of those who were opposed ger of despising the honest zeal or to them. With whomsoever the victory of the combat was to him a sufficient of the day might be, the existence very proof, that the great issue was to be a good one-that the spirit of England cion, on which the confidence of her was entire that the system of suspipeople is founded, was yet in all its vigour and that therefore, in spite of transient difficulties and petty disagreements, her freedom would eventually survive all the dangers to which, at that eventful period, by the mingled rage of despotism and democracy, its most sacred bulwarks were exposed. My eye formed acquaintance apace with the persons of all the eminent senators of England; but their first and last attraction was in those of Pitt and Fox. The names of these illustrious rivals had long been, even among foreigners, familiar as household words;' and I recognised them the moment I perceived them, from their |