'I am highly dilighted [sic] with your two last little poems. They breathe a vein of poetry which you never once touched before and there is something in "The Siege of Corinth" at least which convinces me that you have loved my own stile of poetry better than you ever acknowledged to me. Some of the people here complain of the inadequacy of the tales to the poetry I am perfectly mad at them and Mr Jeffery [sic] among the rest for such an insinuation. I look upon them both as descriptive poems descriptive of some of the finest and boldest scenes of nature and of the most powerful emotions of the human heart. Perdition to the scanty discernment that would read such poems as they would do a novel for the sake of the plot to the disgrace of the age however be it spoken in the light romantic narrative which our mutual friend Scott has made popular this is the predominant ingredient expected and to a certainty the reviewers will harp upon the shortcoming of it in your poems as a fault'.