Horace Smith

Pray, my dear friend, have you read the little volume of Rejected Addresses? If you have not, you positively must. It is absolutely delightful; and it is extremely magnanimous in me to think and to say so; for the author has contrived to affront me in the tenderest point — not my verses; there, thank Heaven! my happy insignificance protected me — but in my name. If there was one thing in which I took a pride, it was in that old, respectable name of mine.... After all, he is so clever that I must forgive him. I am not sure that I do not like the prose addresses, Cobbet's and Johnson's, better than the verse; though Fitzgerald's loyal effusion, the whole of Wordsworth's, and part of Southey's, Coleridge's, and Scott's, are admirable for the nice imitation of style which is intermixed with the broad burlesque.