Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: course of such reflections as I may eventually be led into in taking up the volumes of your Lordship's poetry. I say this with more concern than I am willing to confess; but we are not the makers of our own minds and judgments, though it be our duty to improve them. It is a bad school that gives us matter without method; and in such a school I have, alas! learnt but too much of the little I can boast to know. Half a man's thoughts become refuse when they are not regulated, and that, I have reason to fear, will be found eminently to be the case with mine. Your Lordship, however, discursive in every sentiment and feeling of your soul, will not be the person to condemn me. Both you and myself must herein become amenable to a higher tribunal. Permit me then, my Lord, in the first instance, and as a preparation for what may hereafter follow, cursorily to advert to the subjects of your earlier poems. It is necessary to do this, both because these are the works upon which, I conceive, much of your best fame is founded, and because I wish to shew that your present lost state of mind has not come suddenly upon you, but that from the very cradle of your genius you have forced your muse into the service of immorality. For, if I mistake not, in these earlier productions will be found the seeds of that full harvest of impiety and licentiousnesswhich flourishes with such vigour in your " Cain" and " Juan." It will not be necessary, nor indeed am I able, to arrange such of your poems as I shall notice, in their precise order of time as to publication. I enter, I am aware, this field of discussion late and ignorant. I have access to no complete edition of them, and perhaps may now and then have fallen in with the most incorrect. I will advert to them, therefore, as they happen to come in de...