He would have looked back with remorse on a literary life of near thirty years, during which his rare powers of diction and versification had been systematically employed in spreading moral corruption.

Not a line tending to make virtue contemptible, or to inflame licentious desire, would thenceforward have proceeded from his pen.

The truth unhappily is that the dramas which he wrote after his pretended conversion are in no respect less impure or profane than those of his youth.

Even when he professed to translate he constantly wandered from his originals in search of images which, if he had found them in his originals, he ought to have shunned.

What was bad became worse in his versions.