"You know my opinion of that _second-hand_ school of poetry. You also know my high opinion of your own poetry,--because it is of _no_ school. I read Cenci--but, besides that I think the _subject_ essentially _un_dramatic, I am not an admirer of our old dramatists, _as models_. I deny that the English have hitherto had a drama at all. Your Cenci, however, was a work of power, and poetry. As to _my_ drama, pray revenge yourself upon it, by being as free as I have been with yours.
"I have not yet got your Prometheus, which I long to see. I have heard nothing of mine, and do not know that it is yet published. I have published a pamphlet on the Pope controversy, which you will not like. Had I known that Keats was dead--or that he was alive and so sensitive--I should have omitted some remarks upon his poetry, to which I was provoked by his _attack_ upon _Pope_, and my disapprobation of _his own_ style of writing.
"You want me to undertake a great poem--I have not the inclination nor the power. As I grow older, the indifference--_not_ to life, for we love it by instinct--but to the stimuli of life, increases. Besides, this late failure of the Italians has latterly disappointed me for many reasons,--some public, some personal. My respects to Mrs. S.
"P.S. Could not you and I contrive to meet this summer? Could not you take a run here _alone_?"
"I sent you by last _postis_ a large packet, which will _not_ do for publication (I suspect), being, as the apprentices say, 'damned low.' I put off also for a week or two sending the Italian scrawl which will form a note to it. The reason is that, letters being opened, I wish to 'bide a wee.'
"Well, have you published the Tragedy? and does the Letter take?
"Is it true, what Shelley writes me, that poor John Keats died at Rome of the Quarterly Review? I am very sorry for it, though I think he took the wrong line as a poet, and was spoilt by Cockneyfying, and suburbing, and versifying Tooke's Pantheon and Lempriere's Dictionary. I know, by experience, that a savage review is hemlock to a sucking author; and the one on me (which produced the English Bards, &c.) knocked me down--but I got up again. Instead of bursting a blood-vessel, I drank three bottles of claret, and began an answer, finding that there was nothing in the article for which I could lawfully knock Jeffrey on the head, in an honourable way. However, I would not be the person who wrote the homicidal article for all the honour and glory in the world, though I by no means approve of that school of scribbling which it treats upon.