LEIGH HUNTS CRITICISM. 85 



regarded me with a sardonic grin. My posture, I sus- 

 pect, must have seemed sufficiently stiff and constrained 

 for that of a traveller/ 



He next touches upon some book-purchases in 

 which he and his correspondent have a common interest. 

 ' There is a neat pocket-copy of Johnson's Lives that 

 will do well for the beech tree ; I have besides got a 

 copy of Paley similar to the one you had from Mrs I ; 

 a copy of Smollett's Humphrey Clinker (my heart warmed 

 to this book, for, though many years have passed since 

 I last perused it, it was one of my earliest favourites), 

 and a minute copy of Childe Harold. I saw in Douglas's 

 Leigh Hunt's Journal. The notice of our little book is 

 a highly gratifying one; is it not well that it is the 

 highest names who praise it most ? Hunt characterizes 

 it as "a highly amusing book, written by a remarkable 

 man, who will infallibly be well known." I am placed 

 side by side with Allan Cunningham ; there is a but, 

 however, in the parallel, which 1 suspect Allan will not 

 particularly like. " But," says Hunt, " Mr M , besides 

 a poetical imagination, has great depth of reflection ; and 

 his style is so choice, pregnant, and exceedingly like an 

 educated one, that if itself betrays it in any respect to be 

 otherwise, it is by that very excess ; as Theophrastes 

 was known not to have been born in Attica by his too 

 Attic nicety." 



' My poor friend, Miss Dunbar of Boath, is dead ; 

 she died on the evening of Monday, the 30th June. The 

 severe and ever-recurring attacks of her cruel disease 

 had undermined a constitution originally good, and it at 

 length suddenly gave way under the pressure of what 

 seemed to be comparatively a slight indisposition. She 

 is gone, and I have lost a kind and attached friend. 

 But it would be selfish to regret that suffering so ex- 



