UUbb LIBRARY - ^r,-//i>/ /y -Sftnietf THE REGENT LIERART LEIGH HUNT: BY EDWARD STORED LONDON HERBERT 6f T>ANIEL 2 I ZMaddox Street W. CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION ...... g CALENDAR OF PRINCIPAL EVENTS IN LEIGH HUNT'S LIFE ....... 27 APPRECIATIONS AND TESTIMONIA ... 28 POETRY . . . 33 ABOU BEN ADHEM . . . . . 33 THE NILE ....... 34. TO THE GRASSHOPPER . . . . . 35 ON A LOCK OF MILTON's HAIR . . . 36 RONDEAU ... ... 36 TO CHARLES DICKENS . . . . . 37 THE FISH, THE MAN AND THE SPIRIT . . 37 TO HAMPSTEAD ...... J.O EPITAPH ON AN ENGLISHMAN . . . . 4 1 ESSAYS AND SKETCHES ..... 42 WINDOWS ....... 43 A 'NOW' (OF A HOT DAY) . . . . 57 A 'NOW' (OF A COLD DAY) . . . . 61 ON THE REALITIES OF THE IMAGINATION . . "O SPRING AND DAISIES .... 8 I DREAMS ON THE BORDERS OF THE LAND OF POETRY . . . . . . ! vi CONTENTS PAGE DEATHS OF LITTLE CHILDREN . . . IO2 ON SEEING A PIGEON MAKE LOVE . . 1 09 WATCHMEN . . . . . .125 ON THE GRACES AND ANXIETIES OF PIG-DRIVING . 136 COACHES . . . . . . .141 STORIES . . . . . . .176 THE FAIR REVENGE . . . . . IJJ THE DAUGHTER OF HIPPOCRATES . . .187 THE SHOEMAKER OF VEYROS . . . .198 THE HAMADRYAD ..... 2d6 THE MOUNTAIN OF THE TWO LOVERS . . 2Og CRITICISM . . . . . . .215 SPENCER . . . . . . .2l6 MARLOWE ....... 224 COLERIDGE . . . . . .230 SHELLEY . . . . . . .238 KEATS ....... 249 DANTE . . . . . . .255 SWIFT ....... 267 BUTLER ....... 269 BIOGRAPHICAL AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL . . 273 BYRON . . . . . . .274 IMPRISONMENT .... .281 KEATS, LAMB AND COLERIDGE . . . . 294 SHELLEY'S END . . . . . .311 THE LIBERAL AND LORD BYRON . . . 325 CONTENTS vii SHORTER EXTRACTS DREAMS PAGE 330 AETNA . ... -334 THE SIRENS . . . . . . T.T.6 OF THE SIGHT OF SHOPS ... RICHARDSON . . . . . . ON BOOKS . . . . . . 3? ? GENIUS ....... 365 TURKEYS ....... 366 WOMANLY GALLANTRY ..... 367 THE HOOP. ...... 268 373 ANGLING . . . . . . .376 SHAKING HANDS . . . . . 37Q A SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY ..... 383 ICONOGRAPHY ...... 304 INTRODUCTION AMONG writers, there are some for whom the love of art is a auiet domestic emotion, not an awful and glorious passion. Side by side with the lady of their dreams they pass their lives in peaceful happiness, and the charms which hold them press neither on their spirits with anguish nor frame and shape them as the vessel of an unutterable delight. Art for them is not both Heaven and Hell in its own immediate workings, but only Heaven, and a Heaven less wonderful and resplendent for the absence of its sinister counterpart. One in some such case was Leigh Hunt, or to give him his full name, James Henry Leigh Hunt. He was born on the nineteenth of October in the year 1784, at Southgate in Middlesex. His family came from the American continent, wanderers to the West, returned after years to the homeland, with an odd streak of Creole blood mixed somehow with the original English strain. His father was a jovial man of sanguine tempera- ment, a Barbadian lawyer who practised in Phila- delphia as well as in the colony. From him Leigh Hunt derived his careless and generous temperament, io LEIGH HUNT his famous animal spirits, and the good intentions and unbounded optimism for which the family was noted. His mother whose maiden name was Mary Shewell was a drooping gentle creature, 'with no accomplishments,' as her son says, ' but the two best of all, a love of nature, and a love of books.' She was a brunette with fine eyes, and it would seem, that Leigh Hunt took his physical qualities from his mother and his temperament from his father. Politics was always an ill matter for the Hunt family to meddle with, and yet it had an almost irresistible fascination for them. Leigh Hunt's concern with it was to be the cause of two years' imprisonment when he came to be an effective publicist, and it was the means of driving his father from Philadelphia to Barbadoes and thence to London. When he arrived in England, the colonial lawyer became a clergyman, with an adaptability worthy of the light-hearted genius of the family, but a world, ever afraid of and hostile to versatility, did not endorse this swift sacerdotalism, and ill-fortune came to the returned Colonials. It was after the coming of his parents to London, that Leigh Hunt was born. His boyhood, always a delicate one, was passed among the fields and suburban pleasaunces near Southgate and Enfield. It may be, that it was here and in these days, that Hunt, mixing as no doubt he did in a motley kind of society, acquired that touch and impression of INTRODUCTION i r Cockneyism which is occasionally discernible in him and his writings. Here, too, he learnt the elements of that ragged but necessary philosophy which teaches how to smile at duns and distresses, which, garbing that most wretched joke of poverty in the comicalities of humour or the shadows of forgetfulness, preserves the serious attentions of serious but poor artists for serious concerns. Before he was ten, Leigh went to Christ Hospital, and became a Bluecoat boy just at the time when Lamb and Coleridge brother alumni were leaving it for the world. During his school days, Hunt was regarded by the other boys as an incom- prehensible fellow who evaded the usual categories of school-boy character : was neither bully nor coward, athletic hero nor sneak, whose virtues, if he had any, were not manifest an aggravating characteristic which also applied to his shortcomings. He was sentimental and imaginative most unmanly virtues, theoretically, in schoolboy etiquette, yet in their translation to action provocative, perhaps, of a queer kind of jealousy and admiration among simpler yet honest peers. School life to such a one as Leigh Hunt is at the worst a brutal experience ; at the best, a sad epitome of his artist's life to come, gone through without any of the bucklers and weapons of offence which experience and necessity provide. From his college life Hunt was transplanted into an atmosphere almost too different and too congenial to his temper and habit of mind. He was made 12 LEIGH HUNT free of the brotherhood of artists early in life. Men like Benjamin West and Fuseli, who were friends of the elder Hunt became his friends too, and exemplars in the business of shirking unnecessary and sometimes necessary mundane responsibilities which every artist must acquire. He learnt from them and their like, no doubt, what would have later forced itself upon him : the terrible (and yet very natural and proper) indiffer- ence of the world to the high concerns of art and literature, which can only be compensated by a similar terrible (yet very natural and proper) in- difference on the artist's part to the high concerns of worldliness. A pleasant and sunny time this for the future Editor of the Examiner, full of gay dilletante hours, passed with books or in the studios or studies of his artistic and literary friends. Under a pretence of learning the law in his brother's office, Leigh Hunt learnt other things which pleased him better, and made himself free of the wonderlands of literature and poetry. Matters economic and financial stood at a rather better le/el for the Hunt family now. The father had some patronage and some means, and, when Leigh was writing his early verses, it was not as it had lately been, in an atmosphere and in days, passed, as he says, between ' placid readings and frightful knocks at the door.' Juvenilia, the volume of early poems was pub- lished by subscription in 1802. The elder Hunt was very proud of his precocious literary son, and he exerted himself to the utmost in procuring subscribers INTRODUCTION 13 for the book. Among these, we find the names of Copley, Cosway, Fuseli, Hoppner, Lawrence, Cipriani, West, Pye the Laureate, William Gifford of the Quarterly, and the Earl of Guilford. Juvenilia made a success, and reached a third edition within a year. Thus, before he was seventeen, Leigh Hunt strode the town as a successful author and a coming Man of Letters. Such fame is of course dangerous, but Leigh took it sanely enough, and it does not seem to have done him any harm. He soon assessed Juvenilia within some measure of its actual worth, which, of course, as poetry was very little, but, as clever imitation, extraordinary in so young a man. Precocious in all things, our poet must now become affianced. Marianne Kent, a young woman who had been interested in his writings attracted him, and the young couple entered on their rather lengthy engagement. Influence and a desire for a secured income bought him a post in the War Office, and thus, before he was twenty, he presented the appearance of what is sometimes called ' a made man.' But journalism, his own temperament, and politics soon rescued him from any possible danger of a cramping routine. Almost the next thing we see is Hunt making his mark as a slashing and romantic theatrical critic in the columns of the News, a paper founded by his brother John. Here, his independence, insight and self-confidence won him an audience sufficiently pleased with these qualities to forgive the cocksure, rather impudent knowingness which accompanied them. 14 LEIGH HUNT In the interval that elapsed between Hunt's marriage to Marianne Kent and his resignation of his post at the War Office in a rather grandiloquent letter, we find him engaged in writing plays and farces, and composing odd papers for the Examiner, with which he became associated as Editor on the demise of the Neves. The year 1 8 1 1 was a memorable one for the young poet and journalist, for it was then that Shelley, who was busy confounding Authority and outraging conventions at Oxford, wrote to the Editor of the Examiner submitting to him 'a scheme of mutual safety and of mutual indemni- fication for men of public spirit and principle, which, if carried into effect, would evidently be productive of incalculable advantages.' Hunt had, at this time, come safely through a political trial (the Scott trial) for too outspoken and revolutionary comments in the Examiner, and the publicity thereby given him had drawn Shelley to him with the powerful attraction of like for like. It was not till a little later, however, that the two became really intimate, an intimacy which Hunt has, I think, beautifully crystalised when he says in a letter to an anonymous correspondent : * I love nature and books, and think well of the capabilities of human kind. I have known Shelley. I have known my mother.' In the simple finality of the phrase ' I have known Shelley,' there is something exquisite and rare. We shall better appreciate the wit and the delicacy of mind so instantaneously and naturally INTRODUCTION 15 ready to understand Shelley, if we think of him, not as the secure poet of our days, but as the rather preposterous and even monstrous person that his contemporaries imagined him. One cannot, however, it seems, enjoy the ap- parently quite worthless and unenjoyable applause of posterity without paying for it, nor can those whose selfishness takes the dangerous form of philanthropy proceed to try and do good to folk without earning their immediate ill-will, so Leigh Hunt, poet, journalist and reformer had in his turn to suffer for his advocacy of * progressive ' thought and deed. The cause immediate was a libellous article on the Prince Regent which procured for its author two years' imprisonment, but for a long time Hunt's writings in the Examiner had been annoying the authorities. While he was in prison, many of his colleagues came to visit him ; among others, Byron, Moore, Lamb, Hazlitt, Cowden Clarke, Bentham, and Shelley. His description of the time he passed under restraint makes one of the most interesting chapters of his always interesting Autobiography. During the detention he worked at his plays and poems ; he read and studied much ; so he returned to literature and journalism with a firmer philosophy and a deeper culture. He went back to the Examiner unconvinced by the brutal argument of his governors whose wisdom he had doubted, but with a truer appreciation of their power. He lived after this episode more in literature and art than 1 6 LEIGH HUNT before, not thinking politics a less knavish or clumsy thing but only a more inevitable. The next few years of his life were passed quietly enough, troubled only by times of poverty and occasional fits of ill-health. He wrote during this period many of those miscellaneous essays and sketches wherein his butterfly talent is seen at its best. In 1821, there commenced for him the rather unfortunate and even ridiculous Italian episode. ' Put your music and your books on board a vessel,' wrote his friend of friends, ' and you will have no more trouble.' So on November the fifteenth, 1821, he embarked for Italy and Shelley, on the brig Jane, with his wife and his seven children, his music and his books, including the famous Parnasso Italiano which seems to have accompanied him everywhere. The founding and failure of the Liberal, the magazine that was to be carried on by Byron and Hunt in co-partnership and all the attendant circumstances, make an interesting, highly-debatable, and lengthy story. Hunt arrived in Italy with no means or next to none, and looked to Byron to found the journal which was to make both their fortunes. With his carelessness in money matters, he seems to have taken it for granted that Byron would also finance him during the period preceding the advent of the journalistic fortune. It is well known that Byron did advance money to Hunt, though with no particular good grace, as, perhaps, was natural, for^ INTRODUCTION 17 to a worldling like himself, the notion that a man could journey to a foreign land in a state of financial impotence and without any resources was unthink- able. It is, however, not so well known that he made Shelley security for most of the advances. The temperaments of the two literary partners were so antagonistic ; their views on literature so distinct ; their philosophy of life so different, that there was never much hope of a successful combination of their powers and talents. The Liberal expired at the fourth number, and, while its death was to Byron in the nature of a relief from a false position and an unfortunate speculation, to Leigh Hunt it meant the extinction of such prospects of an income as he then possessed. When Shelley was drowned, the link which held with difficulty these two opposing natures together was broken, and relations between Byron and Hunt became more and more strained. This is not the place to estimate fully the rights and wrongs of the quarrel. Hunt foolishly placed himself at a disadvantage, and Byron was not generous enough to ignore it. If Hunt behaved like a sponger, then certainly Byron's part was neither more distinguished or noble. Whatever may be said of Byron's poetry, he was a proper man of the world, and when Hunt and he met on that superficial plane, poor Hunt would generally get the worst of it. The most important literary result of the Italian episode in the case of Leigh Hunt was the pro- duction of Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries, 18 LEIGH HUNT a most entertaining book, whether one thinks it fair to Byron or not. The author deals in flashing phrase and lightning-like touches of insight such as we find but rarely in his other works. He regretted the book what book for some reason or other does one not always afterwards regret r in later years, and in his Autobiography he wrote of his old associate of the Liberal in phrases of the most gentle charity. Notwithstanding this, there is probably more of the true Byron in the earlier work mixed doubtless with venom than in the gentle tired wisdom of the second publication. Truth is so far and im- possible a thing, yet so desirable to man, that he is more likely and liable to utter it when he is passionate than when he is chill, just as there is safety in moderation and nothing else. The other writings which occupied Leigh Hunt during his stay in Italy are not amongst his best. He was too much troubled in finding the means to support himself and his family to allow his pen to run very happily or freely. Towards the end of 1825, when the Liberal was dead and almost forgotten, Colburn, a London publisher, came to Hunt's assistance with an offer to provide the money for the journey to England in return for some manuscripts yet to be written. The stranded essayist was only too ready to accept the generous offer which must have cost the publisher a good sum, as the exiles amounted to nine in all. When Leigh was established in London, his fortune bettered itself, and he was soon very busy in journalistic work that provided a sustenance, if INTRODUCTION 19 a precarious one. The rest of his life was passed quietly and peacefully enough as far as external incidents go. Poverty was always near him until the last decade or so of his career, and of bereavements and family troubles he also suffered his share. He was always the traditional literary man of the old times, liable to frequent changes of lodging, a prey to duns and debt, full of good intentions, short-lived economies and bursts of unwarrantable extravagance. He was a typical litterateur of the old style, as near to the Murger kind of thing as we have ever got in England, which is not very near, a Bohemian of real purpose and genuine talent, dressed in the ancient and doubtful livery of that merry-melancholy order. Carlyle's description of him and his house is very vivid and acute : * A poetical tinkerdom,' he says, ' where the noble Hunt receives you in the spirit of a king, apologises for nothing, places you in the best seat, takes a window-sill himself, if there is no other, and then, folding closer his loose-flowing muslin cloud of a printed night- gown in which he always writes, commences the liveliest dialogue on philosophy and the prospects of man.' Hunt's later years fell gently upon him. The shadows that wrapped in his life were kindly things, ghosts with tender hearts and fairy-gifts, like pensions and praises, in the folds of their gowns. One pain he suffered in Dickens' faux pas over the Harold Skimpole incident, but though it hurt 20 LEIGH HUNT him, he was not seriously affected by it. Dickens had, so he said, no notion that in adding to a not particularly pleasant literary character a few of Leigh Hunt's especial idiosyncracies, he was running the risk of a public confusion of mind and a charge of having caricatured his friend. Leigh Hunt died* on the 28th of August, 1859, in the seventy-fifth year of his age, honoured and respected by all his contemporaries. ii To turn from Leigh Hunt's life to his work is to take but a little step, or rather, perhaps, to find ourselves in the very midst of it. For writers who are also artists only think of themselves as truly living when they are engaged in their sweet labour. And Hunt was genuinely an artist, a trifle pompous and insincere at times ; marshalling his files and companies of words with half-conscious memories of the martinet Johnson and the drill-masters of the spent century, but a man of fine and delicate talent. A talent too fine, too delicate, perhaps, for such work as he mostly did and for the con- ventions under which he did it. There are things in Leigh Hunt more comparable to the work of an exquisite little master of French symbolism or the so-called decadence than to an Early Victorian writer. I find in him two distinct manners, or at least two manners that it may serve to distinguish, or one might say, two demons INTRODUCTION 21 or two fairies who inhabited him, and had, it would seem, their way with him in the most perplexingly rapid alternation. There is Leigh Hunt the nimble, fanciful, suggestive artist, and Leigh Hunt the weeping willow of sentimentality, the literary beanfeaster who learnt his cornet-playing from eighteenth century masters, so that he had a style at once classical and vulgar, riotous yet chaste. Something of this can be illustrated from a single paragraph of his writings. Speaking of a fruiterer's shop in the essay on 1 Shops ' included in this selection of his writings, he pictures for us, beautifully enough, 'the apple, with its brown red cheek, as if it had slept in the sun .... the thronging grapes, like so many tight little bags of wine.' The latter picture is delightful, but he goes on uncontent, like a man who must repeat a successful witticism, and gives us forced and mechanical phrases like ' the swelling pomp of melons the elaborate elegance of walnuts.' He can lightly call the apples in his mother-in- law's garden his apples-in-law, and limp as lamely as ' the fruity plenitude of a tart,' or 4 the cheese cake with its amenities of approach,' but a little further on. He can make us draw our breath at the subtlety and vividness of some of his strokes, and, ere we are recovered, check our enthusiasm with a bit of ready-made or a vulgar commonplace. We must think his inspiration a frail elusive thing, too fine almost for him that held it. And yet how moving and magical Hunt can be, 22 LEIGH HUNT how cleverly he can tilt the commonplace till it catches the light of truth from another angle and becomes radiant ! How well he can see what is just before his eyes that most difficult of optical feats ! How childlike and unaffected are his whimsical fancies! 'The chillness of Spring, which,' he says, ' we love ; for it is the cold of a young hand, instead of an old one.' How the phrase pleases us ! It is like an instant Spring, a douch of silver April. It makes us feel all the sweetness of youth, making us, if we are of it, deliciously aware of our power, and, if we have lost it, consoling us with the fragrance of its memory. Here are others : 'The quiet spirit of conscious- ness with which nature seems rewarded at the close of its day's labours.' A twilight impression this surely, as moving as anything of Corot or Rousseau. Again, 'the moon, that is Homer's and Shakespeare's moon as well as the one we look at ... the imprisoned butterfly beating frantically against a window-pane, as if some fine lady had gone mad against a ball-room door for not being let in. ... Musical boxes, more like a peal of bodkins than bells.' It is in such phrases as these, that we find Hunt's true quality. He is, perhaps, at his best when he has before his mind a subject, good in itself which he will treat with his charming fancies and turns of wit. When he tells a story, he betrays his weaknesses. Useless, or almost then those little grace-notes, those rippling diminuendoes^ that extremely personal rubato, Sugh things or INTRODUCTION 23 their literary equivalents must arise out of the work itself. One cannot arrange them round a piece of prescribed form. For Hunt's dramatic sense was not original or sensitive. Observe how he tells the fine story of The Daughter of Hippocrates. It is all on one plane, flat, rising up to such climax as he gives it too imperceptibly, to be either natural to life or art. It reads as though he knew everything about it before he set out to write it a plan which is a direct denial of authorship, for all writing that is worth anything is exploration, and excit- ing exploration at that. If a writer knew exactly what he was going to say beforehand, he would be too bored to say it. He only writes in order to discover a bit more of himself. In essays of pure literature, Hunt can be very fine, especially in essays that are almost metaphysical, such as The Borders of Poetry and On the Realities of the Imagination. He is nearly always at his best in work such as this, or, as I have said, in a subject whimsical in itself, like The Graces and Anxieties of Pig-driving. He has been called a sentimental writer, and so he certainly is at times, perhaps viciously so, as in parts of The Deaths of Little Children. He has very often an irritating cheerfulness, something like the determined gaiety of the commercial traveller, an impertinent optimism, which seems alternatively to patronise or explain away the benefits or short- comings of the cosmos. Leigh Hunt is a romantic writer in the sense that he is an idealistic, hopeful, 24 LEIGH HUNT magnificently credulous writer, recognising no limits to the moral, artistic, and intellectual dominion of man. Hence what we call his wide and liberal views, then of course quite otherwise designated, his humanitarianism and desire of reform, then called dangerous and incendiary radicalism. But he was, we must remember, a revolutionary and a holder of advanced theories of civilisation before Society and literary men had ' taken up ' mankind. NaYve or honest as it may please one to call him, a revolutionary in those times took himself and expected others to take him as such. One was not a Republican or a Socialist then, because it afforded a piquant and amusing contrast with such views and prejudices as, despite everything, one could not avoid preserving. In the preface to Moxon's edition of Hunt's Poetical Worfy issued in 1849, tne autnor pleads for Internationalism almost in the very words and along the lines of men like Jean Jaures. In all things literary he had a genius for sym- pathetic criticism that neither failure nor success could destroy. In his youth, he fought for Keats and Shelley ; in his old age, he protested the qualities of Browning's verse, then in critical dis- favour. Xo the rare, the delicate, the young and unapproven he had a generous susceptibility and the most frank and natural appreciation. A good fairy he of the literature of his time, a benign and amiable wizard, with a magic wand and a treasure- cave of his own, yet with a passion for neat critical INTRODUCTION 25 apropos (like the providential couplets of the pantomine variety) which should resolve the temporary distresses of the literary stage of his time. A passion too for truth was his ah, what a quest and desire ! which made folk turn to him in hatred or in love. No one can be ignored who has such a possibility in him of ultimate satisfaction for mankind. For every one is anxious to believe big things : the things which one can easily believe are so little. But we must gain our faith from a teacher, having so small an amount our- selves. No such teacher of course, was Hunt : not one to set men's feet a-marching in a tramp which should echo over his tomb long years after his death. Only a little lieutenant he of the Grand Army, a gay captain with all the charm that comes from light responsibilities, and all the force to be gained from fighting under the banner of the Right. Such delegate the orders which they receive from commanders more austere and exalted than them- selves : commanders, who by their very wisdom and authority, are incapable of direct communication with the rank and file. And even heaven, it is said, has its noble and saintly janitors who lend a welcoming hand to the blest, and mediate with a dimmed radiancy, and, perhaps a far yet comforting reminiscence of earth liness, its ultimate surprise. So Hunt for literature, as the captain for his general, the lover for the love which creates him, 26 LEIGH HUNT the poet for the poetry of which he brings back to earth dim traces, and such heart-breaking protesta- tions a little fading star-dust, by virtue of which and the faith that is in him, he can miracle of miracles ! make folk believe the all too much unproven wonders of his dreams. CALENDAR OF PRINCIPAL EVENTS IN LEIGH HUNT'S LIFE 1784 Born, igth October. 1792 Went to Christ's Hospital. 1799 Left school. 1801 Published Juvenilia by subscription. 1802 Juvenilia in 3rd edition. 1808 Began to edit the Examiner. \ 809 Married Marianne Kent. 1 8 1 1 Met Shelley. 1812 Published famous article in Examiner, for which, in 1813 He was sent to prison. 1815 Released from prison. 1816 Published The Story of Rimini. 1817 The Round Table. 1818 'Cockney School of Poets' article in Blackwood. 1821 Left England for Italy. 1822 Arrived in Italy. 1822 The Liberal '(V erse and prose from the South) issued. 1823 Ultra Crepidarius, satire on William Gifford. 1825 Left Italy. 1828 Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries. 1832 Christianism, or Belief and Unbelief Reconciled. 1832 Preface to Shelley's Masque of Anarchy (Moxon's ed.) 1844 Received annuity of 120 from the Shelley family. I 846 IVit and Humour. 1846 Stories from the Italian Poets. 1 847 Men, Women, and Books. I 847 Civil List Pension of 200 per annum allowed, i 848 A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla. 1850 The Autobiography . 1855 The Old Court Suburb. I 8 59 Died at Putney, 28th August. 27 APPRECIATIONS AND TESTIMONIA CHARLES LAMB I look upon the author of Rimini as a man of taste and a poet. He is better than so ; he is one of the most cordial-minded men I ever knew a matchless fireside companion. I mean not to affront or wound your feelings when I say, that in his more genial moods, he has often reminded me of you. There is the same air of mild dogmatism the same condescending to boyish sportiveness in both your conversations. Letter to Sou they, 1823. TO MY FRIEND THE INDICATOR Your easy essays indicate a flow, Dear friend, of brain, which we may elsewhere seek ; And to their pages I, and hundreds, owe That Wednesday is the sweetest of the week. Such observation, wit, and sense, are shown, We think the days of BickerstafF returned ; And that a portion of that oil you own, In his undying midnight lamp which burned. I would not lightly bruise old Priscian's head, Or wrong the rules of grammar understood ; But, with the leave of Priscian be it said, The Indicative is your Potential Mood, Wit, poet, prose-man, party-man, translator Hunt, your best title yet is Indicator. CHARLES LAMB APPRECIATIONS 29 SHELLEY Had I known a person more highly endowed than yourself with all that it becomes a man to possess, I had selected for this work the ornament of his name. One more gentle, honourable, innocent, and brave ; one of more exalted toleration for all who do and think evil, and yet himself more free from evil ; one who knows better how to receive and how to confer a benefit, though he must ever confer far more than he can receive : one of simpler, and in the highest sense of the word of purer life and manners, I never knew, and I had already been fortunate in friendships when your name was added to the list. From the Dedication to the Cenci. KEATS Glory and loveliness have passed away ; For if we w r ander out in early morn, No wreathed incense do we see upborne Into the east, to meet the smiling day : No crowd of nymphs, soft voiced, and young, and gay, In woven baskets bringing ears of corn, Roses, and pinks, and violets, to adorn The shrine of Flora in her early May. But there are left delights as high as these, And I shall ever bless my destiny, That in a time when under pleasant trees Pan is no longer sought, I feel a free, A leafy luxury, seeing I could please, With these poor offerings, a man like thee. The Dedication to Keats' Poems, 1817. WILLIAM HAZLITT To my taste, the author of Rimini and editor of the Examiner is among the best and least corrupted of our 30 LEIGH HUNT poetical prose-writers. In his light but well-supported columns, we find the raciness, the sharpness, and sparkling effect of poetry, with little that is extravagant or far-fetched, and no turgidity or pompous pretension. Perhaps there is too much the appearance of relaxation and trifling (as if he had escaped the shackles of rhyme), a caprice, a levity, and a disposition to innovate in words and ideas. Still the genuine master-spirit of the prose-writer is there ; the tone of lively, sensible conversation ; and this may in part arise from the author's being himself an animated talker. The Plain Speaker : On the Prose Style of Poets, 1826. He is the only poet or literary man we ever knew \vho puts us in mind of Sir John Suckling, or Killigrew, or Carew; or who united rare intellectual acquirements with outward grace and natural gentility. The Spirit of the Age, 1825. LORD MACAULAY We have a kindness for Mr Leigh Hunt. We form our judgment of him, indeed, only from events of universal notoriety, from his own works, and from the works of other writers, who have generally abused him in the most rancorous manner. But, unless we are greatly mistaken, he is a very clever, a very honest, and a very good-hearted man. We can clearly discern together with many merits, many faults both in his writings and in his conduct. But we really think that there is hardly a man living whose merits have been so grudgingly allowed, and whose faults have been so cruelly expiated. We do not always agree with his literary judgments ; but we find in him what is very rare in our time, the power of justly appreciating and heartily enjoying good things of very different kinds. In the Edinburgh Revietc, 1 840. APPRECIATIONS 31 CARLYLE A man of the most indisputably superior worth ; a Man of Genius in a very strict sense of that word, and in all the senses which it bears or implies ; of brilliant gifts, of graceful fertility, of clearness, lovingness, truthfulness ; of childlike open character ; also of most pure, and even exemplary private deportment. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE ... I have said that he was a beautiful old man. In truth, I never saw a finer countenance, either as to the mould of features or the expression, nor any that showed the play of feeling so perfectly without the slightest theatrical emphasis. It was like a child's face in this respect. . . . But when he began to speak, and as he grew more earnest in conversation, I ceased to be sensible of his age ; sometimes, indeed, its dusky shadow darkened through the gleam which his sprightly thoughts diffused about his face, but then another flash of youth came out of his eyes and made an illumination again. . . . His figure was full of gentle movement, though, somehow, without disturbing its quietude. . . . There was not an English trait in him from head to foot, morally, intellectually, or physically. In Our Old Home. W. J. Fox Companionship is the constant sensation that we have in Leigh Hunt's writings. He does not come out in state ; he does not appear as a deity used in the old plays, just to cut the knot and bring about the catastrophe ... he does not present himself in merely his singing robes to chant his lay, and then to be seen no longer ; but he walks with us, talks with us, sits with us, eats with us, drinks with us, and reads with us. Lectures. 32 LEIGH HUNT DOUGLAS JERROLD If Goldsmith could touch nothing but what he adorned, it may be said of Leigh Hunt, that he touches nothing without extracting beauty from it, and without imparting a sense of it to his readers. BYRON Hunt is an extraordinary character, and not exactly of the present age. He reminds me more of the Pym and Hampden times much talent, great independence of spirit, and an austere, yet not repulsive aspect. If he goes on, qualli ab incefto, I know few men who will deserve more praise or obtain it. He is a man worth knowing. In 1813. DICKENS One of the completes! specimens of the almost extinct literary man in the most rigorous sense of the expression, was Leigh Hunt. He passed the seventy-five years of his life in a region of literary works, journeying from land to land in that immortal territory, with all the enthusiasm and ever fresh wonder and delight of the old travellers in the marvel-haunted East ... a man who had the courage to take his stand against power on behalf of light, who never bartered his opinion or betrayed his friend. In All the Tear Round, April 12, 1862. JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL No man has ever understood the delicacies and luxuries of language better than he ; and his thoughts often have all the rounded grace and shifting lustre of a dove's neck. POETRY ABOU BEN ADHEM ABOU BEN ADHEM (may his tribe increase !) Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace, And saw, within the moonlight in his room, Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom, An angel writing in a book of gold : Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold, And to the presence in the room he said, 4 What writest thou ? ' The vision raised its head, And with a look made of all sweet accord, Answer'd, ' The names of those who love the Lord.' ' And is mine one ? ' said Abou. c Nay, not so,' Replied the angel. Abu spoke more low, But cheerly still ; and said, * I pray thee then, Write me as one that loves his fellowmen.' The angel wrote and vanish'd. The next night It came again with a great wakening light, And show'd the names whom love of God had bless'd, And lo ! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest. C 33 34 LEIGH HUNT THE NILE [Perhaps Hunt's best sonnet. The simile in the second line has a dignity and picturesque beauty to which he did not often attain.] IT flows through old hush'd Egypt and its sands, Like some grave mighty thought threading a dream, And times and things, as in that vision, seem Keeping along it their eternal stands, Caves, pillars, pyramids, the shepherd bands That roamed through the young world, the glory extreme Of high Sesostris, and that southern beam, The laughing queen that caught the world's great hands. Then comes a mightier silence, stern and strong, As of a world left empty of its throng, And the void weighs on us ; and then we wake, And hear the fruitful stream lapsing along 'Twixt villages, and think how we shall take Our own calm journey on for human sake. THE GRASSHOPPER 35 TO THE GRASSHOPPER AND THE CRICKET [Written in friendly rivalry with Keats on the set theme of ' The Grasshopper.' In treating a trivial subject such as this Leigh Hunt's light touch was more to the point than Keats' graver manner. Keats opened his sonnet with a fine note, but one more suitable for an Epic of ten thousand lines than a little poem on the Grasshopper. It began : ' The poetry of earth is never dead.'] GREEN little vaulter in the sunny grass, Catching your heart up at the feel of June, Sole voice that's heard amidst the lazy noon, When even the bees lag at the summoning brass And you, warm little housekeeper, who class, With those who think the candles come too soon, Loving the fire, and with your tricksome tune Nick the glad silent moments as they pass ; Oh sweet and tiny cousins, that belong, One to the fields, the other to the hearth, Both have your sunshine ; both, though small, are strong At your clear hearts ; and both seem given to earth To ring in thoughtful ears this natural song In doors and out, summer and winter, Mirth. 'December 30 >tb, 1816. 36 LEIGH HUNT ON A LOCK OF MILTON'S HAIR IT lies before me there, and my own breath Stirs its thin outer threads, as though beside The living head I stood in honour'd pride, Talking of lovely things that conquer death. Perhaps he press'd it once, or underneath Ran his fine fingers, when he leant, blank- eyed, And saw, in fancy Adam and his bride With their rich locks, or his own Delphic wreath. There seems a love in hair, though it be dead. It is the gentlest, yet the strongest thread Of our frail plant, a blossom from the tree Surviving the proud trunk ; as though it said Patience and Gentleness is Power. In me Behold affectionate eternity. RONDEAU JENNY kiss'd me when we met, Jumping from the chair she sat in ; Time, you thief, who love to get Sweets into your list, put that in : Say I'm weary, say I'm sad, Say that health and wealth have miss'd me, Say I'm growing old, but add, Jenny kiss'd me. TO CHARLES DICKENS 37 TO CHARLES DICKENS As when a friend (himself in music's list) Stands by some rare, full-handed organist, And glorying as he sees the master roll The surging sweets through all their depths of soul, Cannot, encouraged by his smile, forbear With his own hand to join them here and there ; And so, if little, yet add something more To the sound's volume and the golden roar ; So 1, dear friend, Charles Dickens, though thy hand Needs but itself, to charm from land to land, Make bold to join in summoning men's ears To this thy new-found music of our spheres, In hopes that by thy Household Words and thee The world may haste to days of harmony. THE FISH, THE MAN, AND THE SPIRIT TO FISH You strange, astonish'd-looking, angle-faced, Dreary-mouth'd gaping wretches of the sea, Gulping salt-water everlastingly, Cold-blooded, though with red your blood be graced, 38 LEIGH HUNT And mute, though dwellers in the roaring waste ; And you, all shapes beside, that fishy be, Some round, some fat, some long, all devilry, Legless, unloving, infamously chaste : O scaly, slippery, wet, swift, staring wights, What is't ye do ? what life lead ? eh, dull goggles ? How do ye vary your vile days and nights ? How pass your Sundays ? Are ye still but joggles In ceaseless wash ? Still nought but gapes and bites, And drinks and stares diversified with boggles ? A FISH ANSWERS Amazing monster ! that, for ought I know, With the first sight of thee didst make our race For ever stare ! O flat and shocking face, Grimly divided from the breast below ! Thou that on dry land horribly dost go With a split body and most ridiculous pace, Prong after prong, disgracer of all grace, Long-useless-limb'd, hair'd, upright, unwet, slow ! THE FISH 39 breather of unbreathable, sword-sharp air, How canst exist ? How bear thyself, thou dry And dreary sloth. What particle canst share Of the only blessed life, the watery ? 1 sometimes see of ye an actual pair Go by ! link'd fin by fin ! most odiously. The Fish turns into a Man, and then into a Spirit, and again speaks Indulge thy smiling scorn, if smiling still, O man ! and loathe, but with a sort of love ; For difference must its use by difference prove, And, in sweet clang, the spheres with music fill. One of the spirits am I, that at his will Live in whate'er has life fish, eagle, i dove No hate, no pride, beneath nought, nor above, A visitor of the rounds of God's sweet skill. Man's life is warm, glad, sad, 'twixt loves and graves, Boundless in hope, honour'd with pangs austere, 40 LEIGH HUNT Heaven-gazing ; and his angel-wings he craves ; The fish is swift, small-needing, vague yet clear, A cold, sweet, silver life, wrapp'd in round waves, Quicken'd with touches of transporting fear. TO HAMPSTEAD [Written during the author's imprisonment, August 1813] SWEET upland, to whose walks, with fond repair, Out of thy western slope I took my rise Day after day, and on these feverish eyes Met the moist fingers of the bathing air ; If health, unearn'd of thee, I may not share, Keep it, I pray thee, where my memory lies, In thy green lanes, brown dells, and breezy skies, Till I return, and find thee doubly fair. Wait then my coming, on that lightsome land, Health, and the joy that out of nature springs, And Freedom's air-blown locks ; but stay with me, EPITAPH 41 Friendship, frank entering with the cordial hand, And Honour, and the muse with grow- ing wings, And Love Domestic, smiling equably. EPITAPH ON AN ENGLISHMAN (From Destouches) HERE lies Sir John Plumpudding of the Grange, Who hung himself one morning for a change.* o k The original runs as follows : ' Ci-git Jean Rosbif, ecuyer, Qui se pendlt pour se desennuyer? 42 LEIGH HUNT ESSAYS AND SKETCHES IT is in essays and sketches that Leigh Hunt is at his best. The rigours and necessities of form are not so apparent, though not less real in this kind of work, as in drama, fiction or poetry. A little more or a little less is not a question of such immediate importance. The very title essay disarms the philosophic critic. It is something that one attempts but does not quite manage perhaps ? Yet within the limits of an accomodating though elusive technique, Hunt wrote some of the best things of his own time. Most of the following pieces first appeared in the various periodicals with which their author was connected, either as editor or contributor : the Indicator, The Examiner, The London Journal, The Companion, etc. The original source of each piece is here indicated. The two essays Window and A l Now ' were re- published in Hunt's lifetime in the pages of The Seer, from the preface to which the following characteristic note is quoted : [* Given,' writes the essayist, 'at our suburban abode, with a fire on one side of us, and a vine at the window on the other, this nineteenth day of October, 1840, and in the very green and invincible year of our life, the fifty-sixth. L. //.'] WINDOWS 43 WINDOWS [From the Seer, 1840] THE other day a butterfly came into our room and began beating himself against the upper panes of our window half open, think- ing to get back. It is a nice point relieving your butterfly he is a creature so delicate. If you handle him without ceremony, you bring away on your fingers something which you take to be down, but which is plumes of feathers ; and as there are no fairies at hand, two atoms high, to make pens of the quills, and write c articles ' on the invisible, there would be a loss. Mr Bentham's ghost would visit us, shaking his venerable locks at such unnecessary-pain-producing and reasonable-pleasure-preventing heedlessness. Then if you brush him downwards, you stand a chance of hurting his antennae, or feelers, and of not knowing what mischief you may do to his eyes, or his sense of touch, or his instruments of dialogue ; for some philosophers hold that insects talk with their feelers as dumb people do with their fingers. However, some suffering must be hazarded in order to prevent worse, even to the least and most delicate ot heaven's creatures, who 44 LEIGH HUNT would not know pleasure if they did not know pain ; and perhaps the merrier and happier they are in general, the greater the lumps of pain they can bear. Besides, all must have their share, or how would the burden of the great blockish necessity be equally distributed : and finally, what business had little Papilio to come into a place unfit for him, and get bothering himself with glass ? Oh, faith ! your butterfly must learn experience, as well as your Buonaparte. There was he, beating, fluttering, flouncing, wondering that he could not get through so clear a matter (for so glass appears to be to insects as well as to men), and tearing his silken little soul out with ineffectual energy. What plumage he must have left upon the pane ! What feathers and colours, strewed about, as if some fine lady had gone mad against a ball-room door, for not being let in ! But we had a higher simile for him than that. c Truly,' thought we, ' little friend, thou art like some of the great German o transcendentalists, who, in thinking to reach at heaven by an impossible way (such at least it seemeth at present), run the hazard of -cracking their brains, and spoiling their WINDOWS 45 wings for ever ; whereas, if thou and they would but stoop a little lower, and begin with earth first, there, before thee, lieth open heaven as well as earth ; and thou mayest mount high as thou wilt, after thy own happy fashion, thinking less and enjoying all things.' And hereupon we contrived to get him downwards, and forth out into the air sprang he, first against the lime-trees, and then over them into the blue ether, as if he had resolved to put our advice into practice. We have before spoken of the fret and fury into which the common fly seems to put himself against a window. Bees appear to take it more patiently, out of a greater knowledge ; and slip about with a strange air of hopelessness. They seem to give it up.' These things, as Mr Pepys said of the humanities at court, 4 it is pretty to observe.' Glass itself is a phenomenon that might alone serve a reflecting observer with meditation for a whole morning, so substantial and yet so air-like, so close and compact to keep away the cold, yet so transparent and facile to let in light, the gentlest of all things, so palpably something, and yet to the eye and the perceptions a kind of nothing I It seems 46 LEIGH HUNT absolutely to deceive insects in this respect, which is remarkable, considering how closely they handle it, and what microscopic eyes we suppose them to have. We should doubt (as we used to do) whether we did not mistake their ideas on the subject, if we had not so often seen their repeated dashings of themselves against the panes, their stoppings (as if to take breath), and then their recommencement of the same violence. It is difficult to suppose that they do this for mere pleasure, for it looks as if they must hurt themselves. Observe in par- ticular the tremendous thumps given himself by that great hulking fellow of a fly, that Ajax of the Diptera, the blue-bottle. Yet in autumn, in their old age, flies congregate in windows, as elsewhere, and will take the matter so quietly as sometimes to stand still for hours together. We suppose they love the warmth, or t,he light ; and that either they have found out the secret as to the rest, or Years have brought the philosophic mind. Why should Fly plague himself any longer with household matters which he cannot alter ? He has tried hard in his time ; and now he resigns himself like a wise insect, WINDOWS 47 and will taste whatsoever tranquil pleasures remain for him, without beating his brains or losing his temper any longer. In natural livers, pleasure survives pain. Even the artificial, who keep up their troubles so long by pride, self-will, and the want of stimulants, contrive to get more pleasure than is supposed out of pain itself, especially by means of thinking themselves ill-used, and of grumbl- ing. If the heart (for want of better training) does not much keep up its action with them, the spleen does ; and so there is action of some sort : and whenever there is action, there is life ; and life is found to have something valuable in it for its own sake, apart from ordinary considerations either of pain or pleasure. But your fly and your philosopher are for pleasure too, to the last, if it be harmless. Give old Musca a grain of sugar, and see how he will put down his proboscis to it, and dot, and pound, and suck it in, and be as happy as an old West India gentleman pondering on his sugar cane, and extracting a pleasure out of some dulcet recollection. Gamblers, for want of a sensation, have been known to start up from their wine, and lay a bet upon two rain-drops coming down a pane of glass. How poor are those gentry, 48 LEIGH HUNT even when they win, compared with observers whose resources need never fail them ! To the latter, if they please, the rain-drop itself is a world, a world of beauty and mystery and aboriginal idea, bringing before them a thousand images of proportion, and reflection and the elements, and light and colour, and roundness, and delicacy, and fluency, and beneficence, and the refreshed flowers, and the growing corn, and dew-drops on the bushes, and the tears that fall from gentle eyes, and the ocean and the rainbow, and the origin of all things. In water we behold one or the old primeval mysteries of which the world was made. Thus, the commonest rain-drop on a pane of glass becomes a visitor from the solitudes of time. A window, to those who have read a little in Nature's school, thus becomes a book, or a picture, on which her genius may be studied, handicraft, though the canvas be, and little as the glazier may have thought of it. Not that we are to predicate ignorance of your glazier now-a-days, any more than of other classes that compose the various readers of penny and three -half- penny philosophy, cheap visitor, like the sun- beams, of houses of all sorts. The glazier could probably give many a richer man WINDOWS 49 information respecting his glass, and his diamond, and his putty (no anti- climax in these analytical days), and let him into a secret or two, besides, re- specting the amusement to be derived from it. (We have just got up from our work to inform ourselves of the nature and properties of the said mystery, putty ; and should blush for the confession, if the blush would not imply that a similar ignorance were less common with us than it is.) But a window is a frame for other pictures besides its own ; sometimes for moving ones, as in the instance of a cloud going along, or a bird, or a flash of lightning ; sometimes for the distant landscape, sometimes the nearer one, or the trees that are close to it, with their lights and shades ; often for the passing multitude. A picture, a harmony, is observable, even in the drapery of the curtains that invest it ; much more in the sunny vine-leaves or roses that may be visible on the borders, or that are trailed against it, and which render many a poor casement so pleasant. The other day, in a very humble cottage window in the suburbs, we saw that beautiful .plant, the nasturtium, trained over it on several strings ; which 50 LEIGH HUNT must have furnished the inmates with a screen as they sate at their work or at their tea inside, and at the same time permitted them to see through into the road, thus constituting a far better blind than is to be found in many great houses. Sights like these give a favourable impression of the dispositions and habits of the people within, show how superior they are to their sophistications, if rich, and how possessed of natural refinement, if among the poorer classes. Oh ! the human mind is a fine graceful thing everywhere, if the music of nature does but seize its attention, and throw it into its natural attitude. But so little has the * schoolmaster ' yet got hold of this point, or made way with it, and so occupied are men with digging gold out of the ground, and neglecting the other treasures which they toss about in profusion during the operation (as if the clay were better than the flowers which it produced), that few make the most of the means and appliances for enjoyment that lie round about them, even in their very walls and rooms. Look at the windows down a street, and generally speaking they are all barren. The inmates might see through roses and geraniums, if they would ; but they do not think of it, WINDOWS 51 or not with loving knowledge enough to take the trouble. Those who have the advantage of living in the country or the suburbs, are led in many instances to do better, though their necessity for agreeable sights is not so great. But the presence of nature tempts them to imitate her. There are few windows anywhere which might not be used to better advantage than they are, if we have a little money, or can procure even a few seeds. We have read an art of blowing the fire. There is an art even in the shutting and opening of windows. People might close them more against dull objects, and open them more to pleasant ones, and to the air. For a few pence they might have beautiful colours and odours, and a pleasing task, emulous of the showers of April, beneficent as May ; for they who cultivate flowers in their windows (as w.e have hinted before) are led instinc- tively to cultivate them for others as well as themselves ; nay, in one respect they do it more so ; tor you may observe that wherever there is this l fenestral horticulture ' (as Evelyn would have called your window-gardening), the flowers are turned with their faces towards the street. 52 LEIGH HUNT But ' there is an art in the shutting and opening of windows.' Yes, for the sake of air (which ought to be had night as well as day, in reasonable measure, and with pre- cautions), and for the sake of excluding, or admitting, what is to be seen out of doors. Suppose, for example, a house is partly opposite some pleasant, and partly some unpleasant, object ; the one a tree or garden ; the other a gin-shop or a squalid lane. The sight of the first should be admitted as constantly as possible, and with open window. That of the other, if you are rich enough, can be shut out with a painted blind, that shall substitute a beautiful landscape for the nuisance, or a blind of another sort will serve the purpose ; or if even a blind cannot be afforded, the shutters may be partly closed. Shutters should always be divided in two, horizontally, as well as otherwise, tor purposes of this kind. It is sometimes pleasant to close the lower portion, if only to preserve a greater sense of quiet and seclusion, and to read or write the more to yourself; light from above having both a softer and stronger effect than when admitted from all quarters. We have seen shutters, by judicious manage- ment in this way, in the house of a poor man who had a taste for nature, contribute WINDOWS 53 to the comfort and even elegance of a room in a surprising manner, and (by the opening of the lower portions and the closure of the upper) at once shut out all the sun that was not wanted, and convert a row of stunted trees into an appearance of interminable foliage, as thick as if it had been in a forest. ' But the fact was otherwise ' ; cries some fastidious personage, more nice than wise ; { you knew there was no forest^ and therefore could not have been deceived.' ' Well, my dear sir, but deception is not necessary to everyone's pleasure ; and fact is not merely what you take it for. The fact of there being no forest might have been the only fact with yourself, and so have pre- vented the enjoyment ; but to a livelier fancy there would have been the fact of the imagination, of the forest (for everything is a fact which does anything for us), and there would also have been the fact of having cultivated the imagination, and the fact of our willingness to be pleased, and the fact of the books we have read, and above all, the fact of the positive satisfaction. It a man be pleased, it is in vain you tell him he has no cause to be pleased. The cause 54 LEIGH HUNT is proved by the consequence. Whether the cause be rightly or wrongly cultivated is another matter. The good of it is assumed in the present instance ; and it would take more facts than are in the possession of a 4 mere matter-of-fact man ' to disprove it. Matter of fact and spirit of fact must both be appreciated, in order to do justice to the riches of nature. We are made of mind as well as body, of imagination as well as senses. The same mysterious faculty which sees what is before the eyes, sees also what is suggested to the memory. Matter of fact is only the more palpable world, around which a thousand spirits of fact are playing, like angels in a picture. Not to see both is to be a poor unattended creature, who walks about in the world conscious of nothing but himself, or at best of what the horse- jockey and the coach-maker have done for him. If his banker fails, he is ruined ! Not so those who, in addition to the resources of their industry, have stock in all the banks of nature and art (pardon us this pun for the sake of what grows on it), and whose consolations cannot wholly tail them, as long as they have a flower to look upon, and a blood not entirely vitiated, WINDOWS 55 A window high up in a building, and commanding a fine prospect, is a sort of looking out of the air, and gives a sense of power, and of superiority to earth. The higher also you go, the healthier. We speak of such windows as Milton fancied, when he wished that his lamp should be seen at midnight in ' some high lonely tower ' ; a passage justly admired for the good-nature as well as loftiness of the wish, thus desiring that wayfarers should be the better for his studies, and enjoy the evidence of their fellow-creature's vigils. But elevations of this kind are not readily to be had. As to health, we believe that a very little lift above the ground floor, and so on as you ascend, grows healthier in proportion. Malaria (bad air) in the countries where a plague of that kind is prevalent, is understood to be confined to a certain distance from the earth ; and we really believe, that even in the healthiest quarters, where no positive harm is done by nearness to it, the air is better as the houses ascend, and a seat in a window becomes valuable in proportion. By-and-by, perhaps, studies and other favourite sitting- rooms will be built accordingly ; and more retrospective reverence be shown to the ' garrets ' that used to be so famous in the 56 LEIGH HUNT annals of authorship. The poor poet in Pope, who lay high in Drury Lane, Lull'd by soft zephyrs through the broken pane, was better off there than if he had occupied the ground-floor. For our part, in order that we may save the dignity of our three- half-penny meditations, and at the same time give evidence of practising what we preach, we shall finish by stating, that we have written this article in a floor neither high enough to be so poetical, nor low enough for too earthly a prose, in a little study made healthy by an open window, and partly screened from overlookers by a bit of the shutter, while our look-out presents us with a world of green leaves, and a red cottage top, a gothic tower of a church in the distance, and a glorious apple-tree close at hand, laden with its yellow balls. Studded with apples, a beautiful show. Some kindness of this sort Fortune has never failed to preserve to us, as if in return for the love we bear to her rolling globe ; and now that the sincerity of our good-will has become known, none seem inclined to grudge it us, or to dispute the account to which we may turn it, for others as well as ourselves. A