Thank you for your volume,

which I received three hours ago – long enough to have read the principal poem,

and a large portion of the minor ones. They do you great credit. Nothing can be better than the descriptive and sentimental parts. In the reasoning ones you sometimes appear to me to have fallen into Charles Lloyd’s prosing vein. The verse, indeed, is better than his, but the matter sometimes (though rarely) like much of his latter compositions, incapable of deriving any advantage from metre. The seventh stanza

is the strongest example of this. On the other hand, this is well compensated by many rich passages, and a frequent felicity of expression.

Your poem, if it had suited your object so to have treated it, might have derived farther interest from a view of Bonaparte’s

system of policy, the end at which he aimed, and the means which he used. I believe that no other individual ever occasioned so much wretchedness and evil as the direct consequence of his own will and pleasure. His partisans acknowledge that the attempted usurpation of Spain

was his sole act; and it was so palpably unjust, that the very generals who served him in it condemn it without reserve. That war in its progress and consequences has not cost so little as a million of lives, and the account is far from being closed.

You will not like Bonaparte the better, perhaps, if I confess to you that, had it not been for him, I should perhaps have assented to your general principle concerning the unlawfulness of war, in its full extent. But when I saw that he was endeavouring to establish a military despotism throughout Europe, which, if not successfully withstood abroad, must at last have reached us upon our own shores, I considered him as a Philistine, or a heathen, and went for doctrines, applicable to the times, to the books of Judges and of Maccabees.