m*mmmmmKB*mm*mmmmmmmmmmnmium»\f ■ u imi ft I THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. A NEW EDITION, REVISED BY THE AUTHOR} WITH FURTHER REVISION, AND M INTRODUCTION BY HIS ELDEST SOX. LONDON: SMITH, ELDER, AND CO., 65, CORNHILL 1S01. PRICE IULI-A-CKOWN. SB p i i i ii M i i n — rt—« »miii i «i i ii < i ii i m UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES ICl eli )UI 1 is ar is level, plain, ana in good taste; lencitous epigrams uasmng | the tissue here and tliere." [Examiner.] " The novel is one that keeps the attention fixed, and it id in a genial, often playful tone, so that, although containii; that is romantic in its incidents, there is no strain for ef* where visible. The temper is throughout excellent." _;:,ON : SMITH, ELBE2, AND - CO., 65, CORNH v^f#sL& — a-- NEW NOVELS. IE; ok, Life on the Lancashire and Yorkshire b, Thirty Years Ago. 3 vols. Post 8vo. 11. CHAUNCEY: A Man more Sinned Against than g. By Sir Arthur Hallam Elton, Bart., Author of t the Surface." 3 vols. Post 8vo. in. E CLIFFS. By Mrs. Chanter, Author of "Ferny >." 2 vols. Post 8vo. IV. TLEBANK DIARY. With Stories from Kathie Braiide's fio. By Holme Lee, Author of "Against Wind and " Sylvan Holt's Daughter," &c. 3 vols. v. TBORN; or, A Mother's Trials. By the Author of . /idy." 3 vols. Post 8vo. VI. RMATICN ; or, The Romance of Monte Beni. By kiEL Hawthorne, Author of "The Scarlet Letter," &c. Post 8vo. VII. ,'IE: A Story of Country Life. 3 vols. Post 8vo. VIII. I SINS' COURTSHIP. By J. R. Wise. 2 vols. Post IX. WIND AND TIDE. By Holme Lee, Author of " Kathie *:," " Sylvan Holt's. Daughter," &c. 3 vols. Post 8vo. ' i ".UTII, £LDEB A.ND CO., 65, GOI4NIHLL. -j^>— ^»- I II I ^HM j ' % THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. " Most men, when drawn to speak about themselves. Are moved by little and little to say more Than they first dreamt ; until at last they blnsh, And can but hope to find secret excuse In the self-knowledge of their auditors." Walter Scott's Old Play. A SEW EDITION, REVISED DY THE AUTHOR; WITH FURTHER REVISION, AND AN INTRODUCTION, BY HIS ELDEST SON. LONDON: SMITH, ELDER AND CO., 65, CORNHILL. M.DCCC.LX. t i I a Volt -ESSAYS in Criticism •Suffering and Reflection The "Examiner" Literary Acquaintance Poi [tical Characters Literary Warfare Tin; Regent and the "Examiner" Imprisonmi vr Free Again — Shelley in England Keats, Lamb, and Coleridge ■Voyage XO Italy Return to Fikst Acquaintan< e with Lord \m> Thomas -Moore . Lord Byroh in Italy — Shelley — I'isa >A . Byron 1 25 45 74 97 106 124 145 155 101 175 192 205 210 224 243 257 273 283 309 a 2 IV COXTKXTS. Chap. I'agk XXI. — Florence — Bacchus in Tuscany — The Venus de' Medici — and Italy in General . . . 327 XXII. — Return to England ..... 356 XXIII.— At Home in England .... 366 XXIV. — Literary Projects ..... 374 XXV. — Play-writing — Conclusion .... 388 XXVI. — Life Drawing towards its Close . . . 403 Postscript . . . . . .411 INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR'S ELDEST SON. This edition of the Autobiography was revised by Mr. Leigh Hunt, and brought down to the present year by his own hand. He had almost completed the passages which he intended to add ; but he had left some portions which were marked for omission in a state of doubt. From the manner in which the work was written, points of interest here and there were passed over indistinctly or omitted altogether, and some inaccu- racies were overlooked in the re-perusal. In a further revision by the writer's eldest son, several obscurities have been cleared away, inaccuracies have been cor- rected, and omissions have been supplied. The inter- polated passages, whether in the text or in notes, are distinguished bv being included in brackets. In the Preface to the earlier edition, the Author avowed that he felt a difficulty in having to retrace a life which was marked by comparatively little incident, and was necessarily, therefore, mainly a retrospect of his own writings. Another difficultv, of which he was evidently conscious only through its effect in cramp- ing his pen, lay in an excess of scruple when he approached personal matters. In the rcvisal of this second edition, however, the lapse of time had in some degree freed him from restraint; and while VI INTRODUCTION. the curtailments necessary to compress the bulk of the volume have been made principally in the more detailed portions of the literary retrospect, the addi- tions have tended to increase the personal interest of the text. The work is relieved of some other por- tions, because they may be found in his collected writings, or because the subject-matter to which they refer is out of date. The result of the alterations is, that the biographical part of the volume is brought more closely together, while it is presented with greater fulness and distinctness. The reader of this Autobiography will find it less a relation of the events which happened to the writer, than of their impression on himself, and the feelings which they excited, or the ideas which they prompted. This characteristic of the writing is in a great degree a characteristic of the man, and thus the book reflects his own life more than on a first judgment it might be sup- posed to do. His whole existence and his habit of mind, were essentially literar} r . If it were possible to form any computation of the hours which he expended seve- rally in literary labour and in recreation, after the manner of statistical comparisons, it would be found that the largest portion of his hours was devoted to hard work in the seclusion of the study, and that by far the larger portion of the allotted " recreation " was devoted to reading, either in the study or in the society of his family. Those who knew him best will picture him to themselves clothed in a dressing-gown, and bend- ing his head over a book or over the desk. At some periods of his life he rose early, in order that he might get to work early ; in other periods he rose late, because he sat over the desk very late. For the most part, how- ever, he habitually came down " too late " to breakfast, and was no sooner seated sideways at the table than he began to read. After breakfast he repaired to his study, INTRODUCTION. VU where he remained until he went out to take his walk. He sometimes read at dinner, though not always. At some periods of his life he would sleep after dinner ; but usually he retired from the table to read. He read at tea time, and all the evening read or wrote. In early life his profession led him, as a critic, to the theatres, and the same employment took him there at later dates. In the earlier half of his existence he mixed somewhat in society, and his own house was noted, amongst a truly selected circle of friends, for the tasteful ease of its con- versation and recreation, music usually forming a staple in both the talk and the diversion. It was at this period of his life that his appearance was most characteristic, and none of the portraits of him adequately conveyed the idea of it. One of the best, a half-length chalk drawing, by an artist named Wild man, perished. The miniature by Severn was only a sketch on a small scale, but it suggested the kindness and animation of his countenance. In other cases, the artists knew too little of their sitter to catch the most familiar traits of his aspect. He was rather tall, as straight as an arrow, and looked slenderer than he really was. His hair was black and shining, and slightly inclined to wave; his head was high, his forehead straight and white, his eyes black and sparkling, his general complexion dark. There was in his whole carriage and manner an extraordinary degree of life. Years and trouble had obscured that brilliancy when the drawing was made of which a copy is prefixed to the present volume; but it is a faithful portrait, in which the reader will see much of the reflec- tion, the earnestness, and the affectionate thought that were such leadirv elements in his character. As life advanced, as his family increased faster than his means, his range of visiting became more contracted, his devotion to labour more continuous, and his friends reduced to the small number of those who came only to Vill INTRODUCTION. steal for conversation the time that he otherwise would have given to his books. Such friends he welcomed heartily, and seldom allowed them to feel the tax which they made him pay for the time thus consumed. Even at seasons of the greatest depression in his for- tunes, he always attracted many visitors, but still not so much for any repute that attended him as for his personal qualities. Few men were more attractive " in society," whether in a large company or over the fireside. His manners were peculiarly animated; his conversation, varied, ranging over a great field of subjects, was moved and called forth by the response of his companion, be that companion philosopher or student, sage or boy, man or woman ; and he was equally ready for the most lively topics or for the gravest reflections — his expression easily adapting itself to the tone of his companion's mind. With much freedom of manners, he combined a spontaneous courtesy that never failed, and a considerateness derived from a ceaseless kindness of heart that invariably fasci- nated even strangers. In the course of his newspaper career, more than one enemy has come to his house with the determination to extort disavowals or to chastise, and has gone away with loud expressions of his personal esteem and liking. This tendency to seclusion in the study had a very large and serious influence upon Leigh Hunt's life. It arose, as we have seen, from no dislike to society ; on the contrary, from youth to his very latest days, he pre- ferred to have companions with him ; but it was necessary to be surrounded by his books. He used to ascribe this propensity to his two years' seclusion in prison ; and it is probable that that circumstance did contribute to fasten upon his character what must still have been-an inborn tendency ; for it continued through all changes of posi- tion. His natural faculties conduced to make him regard all things that came before him chiefly from the INTRODUCTION. IX intellectual or imaginative point of view. He had no aptitude for material science, and always retained a very precarious grasp of mere dry facts ; which, indeed, in proportion as they tended to the material or the hard, he almost disliked : the result was, that he viewed all things as in a mirror, and chiefly as they were reflected in books or illuminated by literary commentary. It is a necessary consequence of such a habit of mind that he often failed to see realities directly as they were ; and a further result was, that false ideas which were industriously circulated of him, in the first instance by political enemies, were confirmed, or even strengthened, by false conceptions which he formed of himself, and did Tiot conceal. At a very early date, he f< Li boi nd to vow bis liberal opinions on the subject of religion : in those days it was a common and an easy retort for an opponent to insinuate, that the man who was not sound in the most important opinions of all, must be wicked at heart, and therefore immoral in conduct; and, accordingly, Leigh Hunt has been accused of lax morality in his personal life. To him the shocking part of these accusals lay in their uncharitablencss, their disingenuousness, or their malignity. In reply, he pointed to the charity enjoined by the Divine Author of Christianity, and qualified even his antagonism to such charges by appeals to charitable constructions, and admissions of the foibles of human nature, which sug- gested that there might be some foundation of truth for the charge. He was accused of improvidence, and he admitted incapacities for computation in matters of money, or anything else, which sounded very like a reluctant confession. Stern critics discerned, in the plea- surable traits of his gayer poems, proofs of effeminacj and weakness ; and throughout Leigh Hunt's writings will be found admissions, or even spontaneous announce- ments, of personal timidity. If there were not numbers X INTRODUCTION. disposed to accept the best construction of the man, it would be difficult indeed to make them easily under- stand how utterly unfounded are these apparent confir- mations and admissions. Such foibles as Leigh Hunt had lay altogether in different directions. In early life he had no very pro- found respect for appearances, but his conduct was guided by a rigour of propriety that might shame many of his accusers ; and in later life he entertained a growing respect for appearances from the sense of the mischief which misconstrued example might do. His so-called improvidence resulted partly from actual dis- appointment in professional undertakings, partly from a real incapacity to understand any subjects when they were reduced to figures, and partly also from a readiness of self-sacrifice, which was the less to be guessed bv any who knew him, since he seldom alluded to it, and never, except in the vaguest and most unintelligible terms, hinted at its real nature or extent. His personal timidity was simply an intellectual hallucination, in some degree founded upon what he supposed ought to be the utterly unmoved feelings of " a brave man." I have seen him in many situations calculated to try the nerves, and never saw him moved by personal fear. He has been in a carriage of which the horses ran away, and seemed only to enjoy the rapidity of the motion ; in fact, I believe he could scarcely present to his mind the chances of personal mischief that were before us. I have seen him threatened, more than once, by brutal and brawny rustics, whom he instantly approached with an animated and convincing remonstrance. I have seen him in a carriage nearly carried away by a flooded river, his whole anxiety being centred in one of his children whom he thought to be more exposed than himselfl I have seen him for weeks together, each hour of the day, in imminent danger of shipwreck, and never INTRODUCTION. XI observed the slightest solicitude, except for those about him. On the occasion which he mentions, when the drunken steward endangered our being run down by two large ships that passed us like vast clouds astern, the lanterns were relit and handed up by Leigh Hunt with the coolness of a practised seaman. But there was a species of fear which beset him in every situation of life — it was, lest he might not do quite what was right; lest some terrible evil should be inflicted upon somebody else; and this thought, if he reflected, did sometimes paralyse his action and provoke evident emotion. Perhaps the mustering trait in his character was a conscientimi>ness which was carried even to extremes While lie possessed the uncertain grasp of material facts which I have mentioned, and viewed things most distinctly when they were presented to his mind in the mirror of some abstraction, he never was able to rest with a final confidence in his own judgment. The anxiety to recognise the right of others, the tendency to " refine," which was noticed by an early school compa- nion, and the propensity to elaborate every thought, made him, along with the direct argument by which he sustained his own conviction, recognise and almost admit all that might be said on the opposite side. If, indeed, tin' Pacts upon which he had to rely had become matter of literan record, he would collect them with an un- wearied industry of research ; but in the action of life these resources did not always avail him; and the ex- rive anxiety to take into account all that might be advanced on every side, with the no less excessive wish to do what was right, to avoid every chance of wrong, and, it' possible, to abstain from causing any pain, begot an uncertainty of purpose for which I can lind no known prototype except in the character of Hamlet. The ultra-conscientiousness has affected even his X" INTRODUCTION. biography. With an unbounded frankness in speaking of himself, he soon paused in speaking of others, from the habit of questioning whether he had " any right" to do so ; and thus an habitual frankness was accompanied by an habitual and unconquerable reserve. His Autobio- graphy is characteristically pronounced in its silence. He has nowhere related the most obvious family inci- dents. The silence is broken almost in an inverse pro- portion to the intimacy of his relations. He scarcely mentions his own marriage; excepting the faintest pos- sible allusions, the only one of his children to whom he alludes has been to a certain extent before the public ; and even where his personal friends gave him, in their own recognition by the public, the right to speak of them openly, he has faithfully used the right in the peculiar ratio which has been pointed out, — freely mentioning those with whom he held intercourse chiefly in literary matters or in society, sparingly those whose intercourse powerfully affected his own life. A conspicuous instance is afforded by the friend who ultimately became his suc- cessor in maintaining the general independence of the Examiner, who has placed in the library immortal con- tributions to the political history of the English Com- monwealth, who endeared himself to Leigh Hunt even less by most valuable and laborious services than by kindness of heart and generosity of mind, and who re- tained his strongly expressed affection to the last. It was not that he did not respond to the warmest affection which he could so well inspire ; but in proportion as it was strongly felt and personal he seemed to regard it as unfitted for public allusion. It would ill become a son gratuitously to reveal " the faults " of his father ; though he himself taught me to speak out the truth as I believe it. If I differ with him, it is in not being ready to see " faults " in any character, since I know of no abstract or ideal measure by which INTRODUCTION-. Xlll the shortcoming: could be established. But in his case it is most desirable that his qualities should be known as they were; for such deficiencies as he had are the honest explanation of his mistakes ; while, as the reader may see from his writing and his conduct, they are not, as the faults of which he was accused would be, incom- patible with the noblest faculties both of head and heart. To know Leigh Hunt as he was, was to hold him in reverence and love. The likeness to Hamlet was not lost even in a sort of aggressive conscientiousness. It affected his appreciation of character, which was, of course, modified also by the oblique sense of facts. Hence, some incidents in his life which had the most serious consequences to others, and therefore to himself. AVhen he first became ac- quainted with a new friend whom he liked, he notice* 1 with all his vivacity of ready and intense admiration the traits which he thought to be chiefly prominent in the aspect and bearing of the other ; constructed a cha- racter inferentially, and esteemed his friend accordingly. This constructive appreciation would survive the test of years. Then he would discover that in regard to some quality or other which he had ascribed to his friend " he was mistaken ;" the whole conception of the admired character at once fell to the ground; and his own dis- appointment recoiled with bitterness and grief on the perplexed and grieved friend. He never knew the pain he thus caused to some of the most loving hearts, which continued unchanged to him. If, indeed, he knew it, the simple knowledge was enough to cure the evil. No man ever lived who was more prepared to make thorough work with the practice of his own precepts — and his precepts were always noble in their spirit, charitable in their construction. No injury done to him, however inexcusable, however unreasing, or however painful in its consequences, could XIV INTRODUCTION. exhaust his power of forgiveness. His animation, his sympathy with what was gay and pleasurable, his avowed doctrine of cultivating cheerfulness, were mani- fest on the surface, and could be appreciated by those who knew him in society, most probably even exagge- rated as salient traits, on which he himself insisted with a sort of gay and ostentatious wilfulness. In the spirit which made him disposed to enjoy " anything that was going forward," he would even assume for the evening a convivial aspect, and urge a liberal mea- sure of the wine with the gusto of a bon vivant. Few that knew him so could be aware, not only of the simple and uncostly sources from which he habitually drew his enjoyments, but of his singularly plain life, extended even to a rule of self-denial. Excepting at intervals when wine was recommended to him, or came to him as a gift of friendship, his customary drink was water, which he would drink with the almost daily repetition of Dr. Armstrong's line, " Nought like the simple element dilutes." For, a trick of playing with a certain round of quotations was among the traits of his character most conspicuous even to casual visitors. In the routine of life, it may be said, he almost thought in a slang of the library. His dress was always plain and studiously economical. He would excuse the ex- treme plainness of his diet, by ascribing it to a deli- cacy of health, which he overrated. His food was often nothing but bread and meat at dinner, bread and tea for two meals of the day, bread alone for luncheon or for supper. His liberal constructions were shown to others, his strictness to himself. If he heard that a friend was in trouble, his house was offered as a " home ;" and it was literally so, many times in his life. Sometimes this generosity was repaid with outrageous ingratitude — with scandal-mongering, and even calum- nious inventions : he excused the wrong, as the conse- rNTRODTTCTION. XV quence of deficient sense, of early training, or of congenital fault ; " for," he would remark, " it is im- possible to say what share, now, X.'s father and mother may have had in his doing so, or what ancestor of X.'s may not have been really the author of my suffering — and his." When he was once reminded of his sacrifices for others, he answered, as if it dismissed the subject, " It was only for my own relations ;" but his memory deceived him extravagantly. It was not that his kind- ness was undiscriminating; for he a drew the line" with much clearness between what he "could" do for the mere sake of helping the unfortunate, and the willing- ness to share whatever he mio-ht have with those he really esteemed and loved — not a few. The tenderness of his affection was excessive : it disarmed some of the most reckless ; it made him throw a veil of impenetrable reserve over weaknesses of others, from which he suf- fered in ways most calculated to mortify and pain him, but which he suffered with never-failing kindness, and with silence absolutely unbroken. It must not be supposed, however, that with all his disposition to refine, his love of the pleasurable, and his tenderness, he was a mere easy sentimentalist. If be maybe compared to Hamlet, it was Hamlet budding himself to hard work, and performing with vigour and conscientious completeness. Seldom have writers so conscientiously verified all their statements of fact. His constant industry has been mentioned : he could work from early morning till far into midnight, every day, for months together; and he had been a hard-working man all his life. For the greater part, even his recreation was auxiliary to his work. He had thus acquired a know- ledge of authorities most unusual, and had heaps of information "at his fingers' ends;" yet he habitually verified even what he knew already, though it should be only for some parenthetical use. No tenderness could xvi INTRODUCTION. shake him from sternly rebuking or opposing where duty bade him do so ; and for a principle he was pre- pared to sacrifice everything, as he had sacrificed money and liberty. For all his excessive desire not to with- hold his sympathy, not to hurt others' feelings, or not to overlook any possible excuse for infirmity, moral as well as physical, he never paltered with his own sin- cerity. He never swerved from what he believed to be the truth. In the course of his long life as a public writer, political and polemical animosities died away, and were succeeded by a broader recognition of common purposes and common endeavours, to which he had not a little contributed. Although some strange misconceptions of Leigh Hunt's character still remained, — strange, though, as we have seen, not difficult to explain, — the acknow- ment of his genuine qualities had widely extended. There had been great changes, some liberals had become conservative, more conservatives had become liberal, all had become less dogmatic and uncharitable. His personal friendships embraced every party ; but through all, the spirit of his opinions, the qualities of his cha- racter, the unweariedness of his industry, continued the same. To promote the happiness of his kind, to minister to the more educated appreciation of order and beauty, to open more widely the door of the library, and more widely the window of the library looking out upon nature, — these were the purposes that guided his studies and animated his labour to the very last. AUTOBIOGBAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. CHAPTER I. THE AUTHOR'S PROGENITORS. The circumstances that led to this Autobiography Avill tran- spire in the course of it. Suffice it to say for the present, that a more involuntary production it would be difficult to conceive ; though I trust it will not be found destitute of the entertainment which any true account of experiences in the life of a human being must of necessity, perhaps, contain. I claim no importance for anything which I have done or undergone, but on grounds common to the interests of all, and to the willing sympathy of my brother-lovers of books. Should I be led at any time into egotisms of a nature that make me seem to think otherwise, I blush beforehand for the mischance, and beg it to be considered as alien from my habits of reflection. I have had vanities enough in my day; and, as the. reader will see, became aware of them. If I hare any remaining, I hope they are only such as nature kindly allows to most of us, in order to comfort us in our regrets and infirmities. And the more we could look even into these, the .'./round we should find in them for self-complacency, apart q considerations that respect the whole human race. There is a phrase, for instance, of "fetching a man's mind i his cradle." Bu1 does the mind begin at that point of ! Does it begin even with his parents ? I was looking , in company with Mr. Hazlitt, at an exhibition of pic- in the British Institution, when i i tin n.. i ires on the portrait of an offic c in the dress of the time of Charles the Second, i - sclaimed, "What a likeness to Basil Montagu I" (a friend of ours). It turned out to be his ancestor, Lord Sandwich. Mr. Hazlitt took me across the room, and showed 1 2 AtJTOEIOGKAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. me the portrait of a celebrated judge, who lived at the same period. "This," said he, "is Judge So-and-so; and his living representative (he is now dead) has the same face and the same passions." The Hazlitt then of the same age might have been the same Hazlitt that was standing with me before the picture ; and the same may have been the case with the writer of these pages. There is a famous historical bit of transmission called the " Austrian lip ;" and faces, which we consider peculiar to individuals, are said to be common in districts : such as the Boccaccio face in one part of Tuscany, and the Dante face in another. I myself have seen, in the Genoese territory, which is not far from Corsica, many a face like that of the Bonapartes; and where a race has strong- blood in it, or whatever may constitute the requisite vital tendency, it is probable that the family likeness might be found to prevail in the humblest as well as highest quarters. There are families, indeed, of yeomen, which are said to have nourished like oaks, in one and the same spot, since the times of the Anglo-Saxons. I am descended, both by father's and mother's side, from adventurous people, who left England for the New World, and whose descendants have retained the spirit of adventure to this clay. The chances are, that in some respects I am identical with some half-dozen, or perhaps twenty of these ; and that the mind of some cavalier of the days of the Stuarts, or some gentleman or yeoman, or " roving blade," of those of the Edwards and Henrys — per- haps the gallant merchant-man, " Henry Hunt " of the old ballad — mixed, alas ! with a sedentary difference — is now writing these lines, ignorant of his former earthly self and of his present ! I say earthly, for I speak it with no disparage- ment to the existence of an individual " soul " — a point in which I am a firm believer ; nor would it be difficult to reconcile one opinion with the other, in ears accustomed to such arguments ; but I must not enter upon them here.* * " Then Henrye Hunt, with vigour hott, Came bravely on the other side, Soon he drove downe his foremast tree, (Sir Andrew Barton's, to wit~) And killed fourscore men beside. 'No we, out alas! ' Sir Andrewe cryed, 'What may a man now think, or say? Yonder merchant theefe, that pierceth mee, He was my prisoner yesterday.' " Ballad of Sir Andrew Barton, in Percy's Reliques, vol. 2. [Barton THE AUTHOR'S PROGENITORS. 3 The name of Hunt is found among the gentry, but I suspect it is oftener a plebeian name. Indeed it must be so, like almost all others, from the superabundance of population on the plebeian side. But it has also a superabundance of its own ; for in the list of sixty of the commonest names in England, given by Mr. Lower in his Essay on Family Nomen- clature, it stands fifty-fourth. On the other hand, offsets from aristocratic trees wander into such remote branches, that the same name is found among those of the few families that have a right to quarter the royal arms. I should be very proud to be discovered to be a nine hundred and fiftieth cousin of Queen Victoria ; the more so, inasmuch as I could, patiently enough, have let the claim lie dormant in the case of some of her Majesty's predecessors. My immediate progenitors were clergymen; and Bryan Edwards's History of the West L contains a map of Barbados (their native place) with one of the residences designated by it — apparently a minor estate — yet the name of Hunt does not appear either in the old map in the History of Barbados by Ligon, or in the lists of influential or other persons in that by Sir Robert Schom- burgek. There is a " Richard Hunt, Esq." in the list of subscribers to Hughes's Natural History of Barbados, which contains also the name of Dr. Hunt, who was Hebrew and Arabic professor at Oxford, and whose genealogy the bio- grapher cannot discover. Perhaps the good old ori scholar belongs to our stock, and originated my love of the Arabian ts ! The tradition in the family is that we descend from Tory cavaliers (a wide designation), who fled to the West Indies from the ascendancy of Cromwell; and on a female side, amidst a curious mixture of q and soldiers, we derive ourselves not only from gentry, but from i — that is to say, Irish kings! — per (not to say it disrespectfully to the wit and misfortunes of the sister- island) who rank pretty much on a par with the negro chief, surrounded by half a dozen lords in ra i, who a Barton, a kind of "Scottish rover on the seas" (as the ballad calls . worried the English navigation in the time of Henry the Eighth, and was killed in the engagemi noticed, in which the two ships under his command were captured by two under the nand of Sir Thomas and Sir Edward Howard. Hunt was cap- tain of a merchantman, of Ni le, which traded to Bordeaux, which had bi of Barton's prizes, i hope the gallant • s claret was anc iy progenitors dr.i: 1—2 4 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. the traveller what his brother kin^s thought of him in Europe. A learned and friendly investigator into the matter thinks the Cromwell tradition a mistake, and brings us from a clergyman of the name of Isaac Hunt (my father's name), ■who left Exeter for Barbados in the time of James the First. He connects us also with a partner in the mercantile firm of Hunt and Lascelles in that island, one of which latter persons came into England during the first half of the last century, and gave rise to the noble family of Harewood. In the British Museum is a manuscript journal that was kept in this year by a Hunt of the same Christian name of Isaac. I take our paternal family stock to have been divided for many generations between the clerical and mercantile pro- fessions. The etymology, however, of the name is obvious ; and very unfit does it render it for its present owners. The pastime in which their Saxon ancestors may have excelled, so as to derive from it their very appellation, is contrary to the principles of their descendants ! But hunting was not merely a pastime in old Saxon days. It Avas a business and a necessity; there were children to feed, and wild beasts to be exterminated. Besides, one must share and share alike in the reputation of one's fellow-creatures. I dare say the Hunts were as ferocious in those days as their name may have implied. They have since hunted in other ways, not always without a spice of fierceness ; and smarting have been the wounds Avhich they have both given and taken. [The more probable etymology of the name traces it to the geographical use of the word, designating a district used for the chase. The tradition of Irish kings has probably been introduced by a very doubtful connection with the Hunts of Ireland, who have changed their name for that of De Vere, which they also claim by inheritance. One of the family, in a jocular way, claimed cousinship with Leigh Hunt ; but if any relationship existed, it must have been before either family left England for Barbados, or for Ireland. The Bickleys, mentioned subsequently, were not of Irish origin, though Sir William served in Ireland. The Hunts of Barbados were among the very earliest settlers, and the name may be seen in a list published in Barbados in 1612; but it is testimony from which the autobiographer probably shrunk with dislike, for it is an old list, perhaps the oldest existing list, of negro slave-ctt-ners. There is reason to believe that members of the TEE author's progenitors. 5 family revisited their native country in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.] I have begun my book with my progenitors and with child- hood, partly because " order gives all things view," partly because, whatever we may assume as we grow up respecting the " dignity of manhood," we all feel that childhood was a period of great importance to us. Most men recur to it with delight. They are in general very willing to dilate upon it, especially if they meet with an old schoolfellow; and there- fore, on a principle of reciprocity, and as I have long con- sidered myself a kind of playmate and fellow-disciple with persons of all times of life (for none of us, unless we are very silly or naughty boys indeed, ever leave off learning in some school or other), I shall suppose I have been listening to some other young gentleman of sixty or seventy years of age over his wane, and that I am now going to relate about ha much respecting my existence as he has told us of his ovrn. My grandfather, himself the son, I believe, of a clergyman, was Rector of St. Michael's, in Bridge Town, Barbados. He was a good-natured man, and recommended the famous Lauder to the mastership of the free school there; influenced, no doubt, partly by his pretended repentance, and partly by sympathy with his Toryism. Lauder is said to have been discharged for misconduct. I never heard that ; but I have heard that his appearance was decent, and that he had a wooden leg: which is an anti-climax befitting his history." My * Since writing this passage, I find a more serious conclusion to his history in a book entitled I 'reoliana; or, i id Domestic Scene; and Incidents in Bar initios in Days of Yore, by J. W. Orderson. He is there said to have failed in his school ; and to have set up a huckster's with the aid of an Afric nan whom he had purchased. After behaviour to a daughter by this woman which cannot be de- I, and her repulses of which he resented by ordering her to b ■ i, lie sold her to a naval captain, who rescued her from the infliction. Let us hope that Lauder would have denied the paternity imputed to him. Perhaps, indeed, lie would have denied more, or did deny it; for his answer of the charges yet remains to he heard. The poor girl afterwards became the fat and flourishing landlady of an hotel ; and nous in Barbadian and nautical annals for having successfully drawn up a bill of damages to the amount of seven hundred pounds inst his Royal Bighness Prince William Henry, afterwards Duke larence and King William the Fourth, who in a lit of ultra- joviality with the mess of the Forty-ninth Regiment, demolished all 6 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OP LEIGH HUNT. grandfather was admired and beloved by his parishioners for the manner in which he discharged his duties. He died at an early age, in consequence of a fever taken in the hot and damp air, while officiating incessantly at burials during a mortality. His wife, who was an O'Brien, or rather Bryan, very proud of her descent from the kings aforesaid (or of the Icings from her\ was as good-natured and beloved as her husband, and very assiduous in her« attentions to the negroes and to the poor, for whom she kept a set of medicines, like my Lady Bountiful. They had two children besides my father : Ann Courthope, who died unmarried ; and Eliza- beth, wife of Thomas Dayrell, Esq., of Barbados, one of the family of the Dayrells of Lillingstone, and father by a first marriage of the late barrister of that name. I men- tion both of these ladies, because they will come among my portraits. To these their children, the worthy Bector and his wife were a little too indulgent. When my father was to go to the American continent to school, the latter dressed up her boy in a fine suit of laced clothes, such as we see on the little gen- tlemen in Hogarth ; but so splendid and costly, that when the good pastor beheld him, he was moved to utter an expostula- tion. Objection, however, soon gave way before the pride of all parties ; and my father set off for school, ready spoilt, with plenty of money to spoil him more. He went to college at Philadelphia, and became the scape- grace who smuggled in the wine, and bore the brunt of the tutors. My father took the degree of Master of Arts, both at Philadelphia and New York. When he spoke the farewell oration on leaving college, two young ladies fell in love with him, one of whom he afterwards married. He was fair and handsome, with delicate features, a small aquiline nose, and blue eyes. To a graceful address he joined a remarkably fine voice, which he modulated with great effect. It was in read- ing, with this voice, the poets and other classics of England, that he completed the conquest of my mother's heart. He used to spend the evenings in this manner with her and her family, — a noble way of courtship ; and my grandmother became so hearty in his cause, that she succeeded in carrying the furniture in her house, to the very heds ; the cunning hostess (whom he upset as he went away) refusing to interfere with the vivacities of " Massa, the King's son," which she prudently concluded he would pay for like a gentleman. THE AUTHOR'S PROGENITORS. 7 it against her husband, who wished his daughter to many a wealthy neighbour. [The bride was Mary, the daughter of Stephen She well, a merchant of Philadelphia, a vehement man, both in public and in family matters. The other lady was Mary's aunt, although the girls were about the same age.] My father was intended, I believe, to carry on the race of clergymen, as he afterwards did ; but he went, in the first instance, into the law. The Americans united the practice of attorney and barrister. My father studied the law Til articles to one of the chief persons in the profession ; and afterwards practised with distinction himself. At this period (by which time all my brothers except one were born) the Revolution broke out; and he entered with so much zeal into the cause of the British Government, that, besides pleading for loyalists with great fervour at the bar, he wrote pamphlets equally full of party warmth, which drew on him the popular odium. His fortunes then came to a crisis in America. Early one morning, a great concourse of people appeared before his house. He came out, — or was brought. They put him into a cart prepared for the purpose (conceive the anxiety of his wife !), and, after parading him about the streets, were joined by a parly of the revolutionary soldiers with drum and fife. The multitude, some days before, for the same purpose, had seized Dr. Kearsley, a staunch Tory, who on learning their ition had shut up the windows of his house, and endea- voured to prevent their getting in. The doctor had his hand pierced by a bayonet, as i 1 entered between the shu behind which he had planted himself, lie was dragged out and put into the cart, dripping with blood; but he lost none of his intrepidity; for he ansAvered their reproaches and out- rage with vehement reprehensions; and, by way of retaliation on the "Rogue's March,"' struck up "God save the King." My father, who knew Kearsley, had endeavoured to persu him not to add to their irritation ; but to no purpose. The doctor co ' Infuriate, and more than once fainted from loss of 1 c! the violence of his fei com; with his gentler manners ; he is understood, like Kearsley, I rrow escape {, A tn ! > of tar, which had e of the streets for that pur] The well-bred lo; ili irer, did not escape entire 1 ; f: 8 ATJTOBIOGEAPHY OP LEIGH HUNT. personal injury. One of the stones thrown by the mob gave him such a severe blow on the head, as not only laid him swooning in the cart, but dimmed his sight for life. At length, after being carried through every street in Philadelphia, he was deposited, as Dr. Kearsley had been, in a prison in Market Street. The poor doctor went out of his mind, and ended his days not long afterwards in confinement.* My father, by means of a large sum of money given to the sen- tinel who had charge of him, was enabled to escape at midnight. He went immediately on board a ship in the Delaware, that belonged to my grandfather, and was bound for the West Indies. She dropped clown the river that same night ; and my father went first to Barbados, and afterwards to England, where he settled. My mother was to follow my father as soon as possible, which she was not able to do for many months. The last time she had seen him, he was a lawyer and a partisan, going out to meet an irritated populace. On her arrival in England, she beheld him in a pulpit, a clergyman, preaching tranquillity. When my father came over, he found it impossible to continue his profession as a lawyer. Some actors, who heard him read, advised him to go on the stage ; but he was too proud for that, and he went into the Church. He was ordained by the cele- brated Lowth, then Bishop of London ; and he soon became so popular that the Bishop sent for him and remonstrated against his preaching so many charity sermons. His lordship said that it was ostentatious in a clergyman, and that he saw his name in too many advertisements. My father thought it strange, but acquiesced. It is true he preached a great many of these sermons. I am told that for a whole year he did nothing else ; and perhaps there was something in his manner a little startling to the simplicity of the Church of England. I remember, when he came to that part of the Litany where * I learn this particular respecting Dr. Kearsley from an amusing and interesting book, entitled Memoirs of a Life chiefly passed in Pennsylvania, the anonymous author of which is understood to have been a Captain Graddon, or Graydon, an officer in the American service. The same work has occasioned me to represent the treat- ments of Kearsley and my father as occurring on two distinct days, instead of simultaneously, as in the family tradition, the Captain informing us that he was an eye-witness of both. There appears to have been something constitutionally wild in the temperament of Kearsley. The Captain describes him as having ridden once, during a midnight frolic, into the parlour of a lodging- house, mounted on horseback, and even up the stairs ! THE AUTHOR'S PROGENITORS. 9 the reader prays for his deliverance " in the hour of death and at the day of judgment," he used to make a pause at the word " death," and drop his voice on the rest of the sentence. The effect was striking ; but the repetition must have hurt it. I am afraid it was a little theatrical. His delivery, however, was so much admired by those who thought themselves the best judges, that Thomas Sheridan, father of the celebrated Sheridan, came up to him one day, after service, in the vestry, and complimented him on having profited so well from his Treatise on Reading the Liturgy. My father was obliged to tell him that he had never seen it. I do not know whether it was Lowth, but it was some bishop, to whom my father one day, in the midst of a warm discussion, being asked, " Do you know who I am ?" replied, with a bow, " Yes, my lord ; dust and ashes." Doubtless the clergyman was warm and imprudent. In truth, he made a great mistake when he entered the profession. By the nature of the tenure, it was irretrievable ; and his whole life after was a series of errors, arising from the unsuitability of his position. He was fond of divinity; but it was as a specu- lator, not as a d< b, or one who takes upon trust. He was ardent in the cause of Church and State ; but here he speculated too, and soon began to modify his opinions, which got him the ill-will of the Government. He delighted his audiences in the pulpit ; so much so, that he had crowds of carriages at the door. One of his congregations had an en- graving made of him ; and a lady of the name of Cooling, who was member of another, left him by will the sum of 500/., as a testimony of the pleasure and advantage she had derivi ! from his ■ removed 1<> Hampstead a second time : from Hampstead he crossed the water; and the first room I have any recollection of is one in a prison. It was in the King's Bench. Bere was the game of rackets, giving the place a strange lively air in the midst of its distresses; here I first heard, to my astonishment and horror, a verse of a song, sung out, as lie tottered along, by a drunken man, the words of which appeared to me unspeakably wicked : and here I re- member well, as he walked up and down, the appearance of a * Autobiography, Reminiscences, and Letter* of .John Trumbull, from \~'> , '< i<> i it. New York and London, 1841. The Thompson here contemptuously mentioned as "a Woburn lad," was afterwards the celebrated Count llumford. 14 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OP LEIGH HUNT. prisoner who was at that time making no little noise in the world, and who was veritably wicked enough. He was a tall thin man, in a cocked hat, had an aquiline nose, and altoge- ther appeared to my childish eyes a strangely inconsistent- looking person for a man of his character, and much of a gentleman. I have an impression on my memory that I was told he had run a needle through his wife's tongue. This was Andrew Eobinson Stoney Bowes, Esq., which last name he had assumed on his marriage with the Countess of Strath- more, for cruel treatment of whom in his attempt to extort her property he had been sentenced to an imprisonment of three years. His surgeon and biographer, Jesse Foot, in summing up his character, says of him, that he was " cow- ardly, insidious, hypocritical, tyrannic, mean, violent, selfish, deceitful, jealous, revengeful, inhuman, and savage, without a single countervailing quality." It is not improbable that Mr. Foot might have been one of the persons he deceived; but the known events of the man's life really go far to make him out this kind of monster ; and Foot suppresses most of the particulars of his cruelty as too shocking to detail. He was one of those madmen who are too conventionally sane to be locked up, but who appear to be born what they are by some accident of nature. Mr. West took the liberty of representing my father's cir- cumstances to the king. It is well known that this artist enjoyed the confidence of his Majesty in no ordinary degree. The king would converse Half a day at a time with him, while he was painting. His Majesty said he would speak to the bishops ; and again, on a second application, he said my father should be provided for. My father himself also presented a petition ; but all that was ever done for him, was the putting his name on the Loyalist Pension List for a hundred a year, — a sum which he not only thought extremely inadequate for the loss of seven or eight times as much in America, a cheaper country, but which he felt to be a poor acknowledgment even for the active zeal which he had evinced, and the things which he had said and written ; especially as the pension came late, and his circumstances were already involved. Small as it was, he was obliged to mortgage it ; and from this time till the arrival of some relations from the West Indies, several years afterwards, he underwent a series of mortifications and distresses, not always without reason for self-reproach. Un- fortunately for others, it might be said of him, what Lady THE author's progenitors. 15 Mary Wortley said of her kinsman, Henry Fielding, " that give him his leg of mutton and bottle of wine, and in the very thick of calamity he -would be happy for the time being." Too well able to seize a passing moment of enjoyment, he was always scheming, never performing ; always looking for- ward with some romantic plan which was sure to succeed, and never put in practice. I believe he wrote more titles of non- existing books than Rabelais. At length he found his mis- take. My poor father ! ' He grew deeply acquainted with arrests, and began to lose his graces and (from failures with creditors) his good name. He became irritable with the con- sequences, and almost took hope of better days out of the heart that loved him, and was too often glad to escape out of its society. Yet such an art had he of making his home com- fortable when he chose, and of settling himself to the most tranquil pleasures, that if she could have ceased to look for- ward about her children, I believe, with all his defects, those evenings would have brought unmingled satisfaction to her, when, after brightening the fire and bringing out the coffee, my mother knew that her husband was going to read Saurin or Barrow to her, with his fine voice and unequivocal enjoy- ment. We thus struggled on between quiet and disturbance, between placid readings and frightful knocks at the door, and sickness, and calamity, and hopes, which hardly ever forsook us. One of my brothers went to sea, — a great blow to my poor mother. The next was articled to an attorney. My brother Robert became pupil to an engraver, and my brother was apprenticed to Mr. Reynell, the printer, whose kindly manner, and deep iron voice, I well remember and •ect. I had also a regard for the speaking trumpet, which all the way up his tall house, and conveyed his rugged whispers to his men. And his goodly wife, proud of her randfather, the bishop; never shall I forget how much I loved her for her portly smiles and good dinners, and how often she used to make me measure heights with her fair daughter Caroline, and found me wanting; which I thought qo1 quite o I ioe j ntable. As my father's misfortunes, both in Ami ! and, were owing, in the first instance, 1 I worthy and disinterested, so they were xu yer unaccompanied with mani ime zeal for others in smaller, though not always equally jusl ways, which he had shown in 16 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. the greater. He hampered himself, for instance, by becoming security for other people. This, however, he could only have done out of his usual sanguine belief in the honesty of those ■whom he assisted ; for of collusion with anything deliberately unworthy, he was as incapable as he was trusting. His pen, though irregular, or unprofitable to himself, was always at the service of those who required it for memorials or other helps. As to his children, he was healthy and sanguine, and always looked forward to being able to do something for them ; and something for them he did, if it was only in grafting his animal spirits on the maternal stock, and setting them an example of independent thinking. But he did more. He really took care, considering his imbusinesslike habits, towards settling them in some line of life. It is our faults, not his, if we have not been all so successful as we might have been : at least it is no more his fault than that of the West Indian blood of which we all partake, and which has disposed all of its, more or less, to a certain aversion from business. And if it may be some vanity in us, at least it is no dis- honour to our turn of mind, to hope, that we may have been the means of circulating more knowledge and enter- tainment in society, than if lie had attained the bishopric he looked for, and left us ticketed and labelled among the acquiescent. Towards the latter part of his life, my father's affairs were greatly retrieved by the help of his sister, Mrs. Dayrell, Avho came over with a property from Barbados. My aunt was generous ; part of her property came among us also by a marriage [most probably of the author's eldest brother Stephen Shewell Hunt with Christiana Dayrell]. My father's West Indian sun was again warm upon him. On his sister's death, to be sure, his struggles recommenced, though not at all in comparison to what they had been. Eecommence, however, they did ; and yet so sanguine was he in his intentions to the last, and so accustomed had my mother been to try to believe in him, and to persuade herself she did, that not long before she died he made the most solemn promises of amendment, which by chance I could not help overhearing, and which she received with a tenderness and a tone of joy, the remembrance of which brings the tears into my eyes. My father had one taste well suited to his profession, and in him, I used to think, remarkable. He was very fond of sermons ; which he was rarely tired of reading, or my mother of hearing. I have THE AUTHOR'S PROGENITORS. 17 mentioned the effect which these used to have upon her. When she died, he could not bear to think she was dead; yet retaining, in the midst of his tears, his indestructible tendency to seize on a cheering reflection, he turned his very despair into consolation ; and in saying, " She is not dead, but sleeps," I verily believe the image became almost a literal thing with him. Besides his fondness for sermons, he was a great reader of the Bible. His copy of it is scored with manuscript; and I Relieve he read a portion of it every morning to the last, let him have been as satisfied or dissatisfied with himself as he might for the rest of day. This was not hypocrisy; it was habit, and real fondness: though, while he was no hypo- crite, l;e was not, I must confess, remarkable for being explicit about himself; nor did he cease to dogmatize in a sort of official manner upon faith and virtue, lenient as he thought himself bound to be to particular instances of frailty. To wung people, who had no secrets from him, he was especially indulgent, as I have good reason to know. Pie delighted to show his sense of a candour in others, which I believe he ■would always have practised himself, had he been taught it early. For many years before his death, he had greatly relaxed in the orthodoxy of his religious opinions. Both he and my mother had become Unitarians. They were also rnivcrsalists, and great admirers of Mr. Winchester, parti- cularly my mother.* My father was willing, however, to hear all sides of the question, and used 1m \. it the chapels of the most popular preachers of all denominations. His favourite among them, I think, was Mr. Worthington, who In d at a chapel in Long Acre, and had a strong natural eloquence. Politics and divinity occupied almost all the conversation that I heard at our fire-side. It is a pity my father had been so spoilt a child, and had strayed so much out bf his sphere; for he could be contented with little, lie was "tie of the last of the gentry who retained the old fashion of smoking, lie indulged in it every night before he went, to bed, which he did at an early hour; and it was pleasant to see him sit, in his tranquil and gentlemanly manner, an I * " The Universalists cannot, properly speaking, be called a distinct uently found scattered amongst various denomi- nations. They are so named from holding the benevolenl opinion, that all mankind, nay, even the demons them will be finally restored to happiness, through the mercy of Almighty God." — History of all 'ions mill Religious Ceremonies, p. 263. What an impiety towards nighty Uod," that anybody could ever have thought the reverse ! 2 18 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OP LEIGH HUNT. relate anecdotes of " my Lord North " and the Rockingham administration, interspersed with those mild puffs and urbane resumptions of the pipe. How often have I thought of him under this aspect, and longed for the state of society that inijrht have encouraged him to be more successful ! Had he lived twenty years longer he would have thought it was coming. He died in the year 1809, aged fifty-seven, and was buried in the churchyard in Bishopsgate Street. I re- member they quarrelled over his coffin for the perquisites of the candles ; which put me upon a great many reflections, both on him and on the world. I bless and am grateful to his memory. One of the last sayings of the last surviving of his children but myself, was a tribute to it equally simple and sincere. " What a kind man," said my brother Robert, " he was !" My grandfather, by my mother's side, was Stephen Shewed, merchant of Philadelphia, Avho sent out his " argosies." His mother was a quaker, and he, himself, I believe, descended from a quaker stock. He had ships trading to England, Holland, and the West Indies, and used to put his sons and nephews in them as captains. For sausages and " botargoes" (first authors, perhaps, of the jaundice in our blood), Friar John would have recommended him. As Chaucer says, " It snewed, in his house, of meat and drink." On that side of the family we seem all sailors and rough subjects, with a mitigation (on the female part) of quakerism; as, on the father's side, we are Creoles and claret- drinkers, very polite and clerical. My grandmother's maiden name was Bickley. I believe her family came from Buckinghamshire. The coat of arms are three half-moons ; wdiich I happen to recollect, because of a tradition Ave had, that an honourable augmentation was made to them of three wheat-sheaves, in reward of some gallant achievement performed in cutting off a convoy of pro- visions [by Sir William Bickley, a partisan of the House of Orange, who was made a Banneret. He was reputed in the family to have been the last Englishman who received the title of a Knight Banneret, by receiving Knighthood from the royal hand, on the field]. My grandmother was an open- hearted, cheerful woman, of a good healthy blood. The family consisted of five daughters and two sons. One of the daughters died unmarried: of the four others, three are dead THE AUTHOR'S PROGENITORS. 19 also; the fourth still lives, as upright in her carriage as when she was young, and the intelligent mother of two intelligent daughters, one of whom, the wife of Dr. Swift, a physician, is distinguished for her talent in writing verses. One of my uncles died in England, a mild, excellent creature, more fit for solitude than the sea. The other, my uncle Stephen, a fine handsome fellow of great good nature and gallantry, was never heard of, after leaving the port of Philadelphia for the West Indies. He had a practice of crowding too much sail, which is supposed to have been his destruction. They said he did it " to get back to his ladies." My uncle was the means of saving his namesake, my brother Stephen, from a singular destiny. Some Indians, who came into the city to traffic, had been observed to notice my brother a good deal. It is supposed they saw in his tall little person, dark face, and long black hair, a resemblance to themselves. One day they enticed him from my grand- father's house in Front Street, and taking him to the Dela- ware, which was close by, were carrying him off across the. river, when his uncle descried them and gave the alarm. His threats induced them to come back; otherwise, it is thought, they intended to carry him into their own quarters, and bring him up as an Indian; so that, instead of a rare character of another sort, — an attorney who would rather compound a quarrel for his clients than get rich by it, — we might have had for a brother the Great Buffalo, Bloody Bear, or some such grim personage. I will indulge myself with the liberty of observing in this place, that with great diversity of character among us, with strong points of dispute even among ourselves, and with the usual amount, though not perhaps exactly the like nature, of infirmities common to other tie, — some of us, may be, with greater, — we have all been persons who inherited the power of making sacriiices for the sake of a prineipl - My grandfather, though intimate with Dr. Franklin, was secretly on the British side of the question when the Ameri- can war broke out. He professed to be neutral, and to attend only to business; but his neutrality did not, avail him. One of his most valuably laden ships was burnt in the, iware by the Revolutionists, to prevent its vetting into the i of the British; and I taking free with his ; rgoes, they despatched every -now and then a file of Holdiers to rifle bis house of everything else that could be 2—2 20 AUTOBIOGKAPIIY OF LEIGH HUNT. serviceable : linen, blankets, &c. And this, unfortunately, was only a taste of what he was to suffer; for, emptying his mercantile stores from time to time, they paid him with their continental currency, paper-money ; the depreciation of which was so great as to leave him, at the close of the war, bankrupt of everything but some houses, which his wife brought him. They amounted to a sufficiency for the family support ; and thus, after all his neutralities, he owed all that he retained to a generous and unspeculating woman. His saving grace, however, was not on all occasions confined to his money. He gave a strong instance of his partiality to the British cause, by secreting in his house a gentleman of the name of Slater, who commanded a small armed vessel on the Delaware, and who was not long since residing in London. Mr. Slater had been taken prisoner, and confined at some miles' distance from Philadelphia. He contrived to make his escape, and astonished my grandfather's family by appearing before them at night, drenched in the rain, which descends in torrents in that climate. They secreted him for several months in a room at the top of the house. My mother at that time was a brunette with fine eyes, a tall lady-like person, and hair blacker than is seen of English growth. It was supposed that Anglo-Americans already began to exhibit the influence of climate in their appearance. The late Mr. West told me, that if he had met myself or any of my brothers in the streets, he should have pronounced, without knowing us, that we were Americans. My mother had no accomplishments but the two best of all, a love of nature and of books. Dr. Franklin offered to teach her the guitar; but she was too bashful to become his pupil. She regretted this afterwards, partly, no doubt, for having lost so illustrious a master. Her first child, who died, was named after him. I know not whether the anecdote is new; but I have heard, that when Dr. Franklin invented the Harmonica, he concealed it from his wife till the instrument was fit to play ; and then woke her with it one night, Avhen she took it for the music of angels. Among the visitors at my grandfather's house, besides Franklin, was Thomas Paine ; whom I have heard my mother speak of, as having a countenance that inspired her with terror. I believe his aspect was not capti- vating ; but most likely his political and religious opinions did it no good in the eyes of the fair loyalist. My mother was diffident of her personal merit, but she THE AUTHOR'S PROGENITORS. 21 had great energy of principle. "When the troubles broke out, and my father took that violent part in favour of the king, a letter was received by her from a person high in authority, stating, that if her husband would desist from opposition to the general wishes of the colonists, he should remain in security; but that if he thought fit to do otherwise, he must suffer the consequences which awaited him. The letter con- cluded with advising her, as she valued her husband's and family's happiness, to use her influence with him to act accordingly. To this, " in the spirit of old Eome and ce," as one of her sons has proudly and justly observed (I will add, of Old England, and, though contrary to our loyalist opinions, of New America, too,) my mother replied, that .die knew her husband's mind too well to suppose for a moment that he would so degrade himself; and that the writer of the letter entirely mistook her, if he thought her capable of endeavouring to persuade him to an action con- trary to the convictions of his heart, whatever the conse- quences threatened might be. Yet the heart of this excellent woman, strong as it was, was already beating with anxiety for what might occur; and on the day when my father was seized, she fell into a fit of the jaundice, so violent, as to affect her ever afterwards, and subject a previously fine con- stitution to every ill that came across it. It was nearly two years before my mother could set off with her children for England. She embarked in thenar/ of gham frigate, Captain Dempster, who, from the moment she was drawn up the sides of the vessel with her little boys, eived a pity and respect, for her, and paid her the most cordial attention. In truth, he felt more pity for her than he chose to express; for the vessel was old and battered, and he thought the voyage not without danger. Nor was it. 'I'luy did very well till they came off the Scilly Islands, when arose winch tin I to sink them. The ship was with difficulty kept above water. Here my mother a showed how coi as her heart could lie, by the very . of its tenderness. There was a lady in the vessel who had betrayed weaknesses of various soil-; during the voyage; and who even went so far as to resent the superior which ili'- gallant captain could not help i til irtain of her fellow-pal '. My mother, instead of giving way ! lamentations, did all she could to keep up the spirits of her children. The lady in question did the reverse; 22 AUTOBIOGKAPHY OP LEIGH HUNT. and my mother feeling the necessity of the case, and touched with pity for children in the same danger as her own, was at length moved to break through the delicacy she had observed, and expostulate strongly Avith her, to the increased admiration of the captain, who congratulated himself on having a female passenger so truly worthy of the name of woman. Many years afterwards, near the same spot, and during a similar danger, her son, the writer of this book, with a wife and seven children around him, had occasion to call her to mind ; and the example was of service even to him, a man. It was thought a miracle that the Earl of Effingham was saved. It was driven into Swansea Bay, and borne along by the heaving might of the waves into a shallow, where no vessel of so large a size ever appeared before ; nor could it ever have got there, but by so unwonted an over- liftings Having been born nine years later than the youngest of my brothers, I have no recollection of my mother's earlier aspect. Her eyes were always fine, and her person lady-like ; her hair also retained its colour for a long period; but her brown complexion had been exchanged for a jaundiced one, which she retained through life; and her cheeks were sunken, and her mouth drawn down with sorrow at the corners. She retained the energy of her character on great occasions ; but her spirit in ordinary was weakened, and she looked at the bustle and discord of the present state of society with a frightened aversion. My father's danger, and the war- whoops of the Indians which she heard in Philadelphia, had shaken her soul as well as frame. The sight of two men fighting in the streets would drive her in tears down another road ; and I remember, when we lived near the park, she would take me a long circuit out of the way rather than hazard the spectacle of the soldiers. Little did she think of the timidity with which she was thus inoculating me, and what difficulty I should have, when I went to school, to sustain all those fine theories, and that unbending resistance to oppression, which she inculcated. However, perhaps it ultimately turned out for the best. One must feel more than usual for the sore places of humanity, even to fight properly in their behalf. Never shall I forget her face, as it used to appear to me coming up the cloisters, with that weary hang of the head on one side, and that melancholy smile ! One holiday, in a severe winter, as she was taking me THE AUTHOR'S progenitors. 23 home, she was petitioned for charity by a woman sick and ill-clothed. It was in Blackfriars' Road, I think about mid- way. My mother, with the tears in her eyes, turned up a gateway, or some such place, and beckoning the woman to follow, took off her flannel petticoat, and gave it her. It is supposed that a cold which ensued, fixed the rheumatism upon her for life. Actions like these have doubtless been often performed, and do not of necessity imply any great virtue in the performer; but they do if they are of a piece with the rest of the character. Saints have been made for charities no greater. The reader will allow me to quote a passage out of a poem of mine, because it was suggested by a recollection I had upon me of this excellent woman. It is almost the only passage in that poem worth repeating, which I mention, in order that he may lay the quotation to its right account, and not suppose I am anxious to repeat my verses because I fancy they must be good. In every tiling but the word " happy," the picture is from life. The bird spoken of is the nightingale — the " Bird of wakeful glow, Whose louder song is like the voice of life, Triumphant o'er death's image; but whose deep, Low, lovelier note is like a gentle wife, A poor, a pensive, yet a happy one, Stealing, when daylight's common tasks are done, An hour for mother's work; and singing low, "While her tired husband and her children sleep." I have spoken of my mother during my father's troubles in England. She stood by him through them all; and in every- thing did more honour to marriage, than marriage did good to either of them ; for it brought little happiness to her, and too many children to both. Of his changes of opinion, as well as of fortune, she partook also. She became a Unitarian, a Universalist, perhaps a Republican; and in her new opi- i in her old, was apt, I suspect, to be a little too mptory, and to wonder at those who could be of the other was her only fault. She would have mended it had lived till now. Though not a republican myself, I have, ■ thought, in my time, to speak too severely of kings and princes. 1 think 1 did, and that society is no longer to be red in that manner, but in a much calmer and nobler way. I5ut I was a witness, in my childhood, to a greal deal of suffering; 1 heard of more all over the world ; and kings 24 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. and princes bore a great share in the causes to which they were traced. Some of those causes were not to be denied. It is now understood, on all hands, that the continuation of the Ame- rican war was owing to the personal stubbornness of the king. My mother, in her indignation at him for being the cause of so much unnecessary bloodshed, thought that the unfortunate malady into which he fell was a judgment of Providence. My mother's intolerance, after all, was only in theory. "When anything was to be done, charity in her always ran before faith. If she could have served and benefited the king himself personally, indignation would soon have given way to humanity. She had a high opinion of everything that was decorous and feminine on the part of a wife ; yet when a poor violent woman, the wife of an amiable and eloquent preacher, went so far on one occasion as to bite his hand in a fit of jealous rage as he was going to ascend his pulpit (and he preached in great pain), my mother was the only female of her acquaintance that continued to visit her ; alleging that she needed society and comfort so much the more. She had the highest notions of chastity ; yet when a servant came to her, who could get no place because she had had an illegitimate child, my mother took her into her family upon the strength of her candour and her destitute condition, and was served during the remainder of the mistress's life with affectionate gratitude. My mother's favourite books were Dr. Young's Night Thoughts (which was a pity), and Mrs. Howe's Devout Exer- cises of the Heart. I remember also her expressing great admiration of the novels of Mrs. Inchbald, especially the Simple Story. She was very fond of poetry, and used to hoard my verses in her pocket-book, and encourage me to write, by showing them to the Wests and the Thorntons. Her friends loved and honoured her to the last ; and, I believe, they retained their regard for the family. My mother's last illness was long, and was tormented with rheumatism. I envied my brother Robert the recollection of the filial attentions he paid her ; but they shall be as much known as I can make them, not because he was my brother (which is nothing), but because he was a good son, which is much ; and every good son and mother will be my warrant. My other brothers, who were married, were away with their families ; and I, who ought to have attended more, was as CHILDHOOD. 25 giddy as I was young, or rather a great deal more so. I attended, but not enough. How often have we occasion to wish that we could be older or younger than we are, according as we desire to have the benefit of gaiety or experience ! Her greatest pleasure during her decay was to lie on a sofa, look- ing at the setting sun. She used to liken it to the door of heaven, and fancy her lost children there, waiting for her. She died in the fifty-third year of her age, in a little miniature house which stands in a row behind the church that has been since built in Soinerstown ; and she was buried, as she had always wished to be, in the churchyard of Hampstead. CHAPTER II. CHILDHOOD. I have spoken of the Duke of Chandos, to whose nephew, Mr. Leigh, my father became tutor. Mr. Leigh, who gave me his name, was son of the duke's sister, Lady Caroline, and died member of parliament. He was one of the kindest and gentlest of men, addicted to those tastes for poetry and s< questered pleasure, which were conspicuous in his son, Lord Leigh; for all which reasons it would seem, and contrary to the usurping qualities in such cases made and provided, he and his family were subjected to one of the most extraordinary charges that a defeated claim ever brought drunken witnesses t up, — no less than the murder and burial of a set oi masons, who were employed in building a bridge, and whose ruction in the act of so doing was to bury both them and a monument which they knew of for ever ! To complete the romance of the tragedy, a lady, the wife of the usurper, pre- over the a be. She cries, "Let go!" while the poor wretches are i ■'• at night-time, amidst a scene of torches and seclusion; and down goes the stone, aided by this tremendous father and son, and crushes the victims of her ambition ! She meant, as Cowley says Goliah did of David, " At once their murder and their monument." most awful crimes could be dug up the memo ■ h men as Tl ison and Shenstone, Cowley, or Cowper, or the " Man of Ross," it could not have created more laughing astonishment in the minds of 26 AUTOBIOGBAPHY OP LEIGH HUNT. those who knew them, than such a charge against the family of the Leighs. Its late representative, in the notes to his volume of poems, printed some years ago, quoted the " fol- lowing beautiful passage" out of Fielding: — " It was the middle of May, and the morning was remark- ably serene, when Mr. Allworthy walked forth on the terrace, where the dawn opened every minute that lovely prospect we have before described, to his eye. And now having sent forth streams of light which ascended to the firmament before him, as harbingers preceding his pomp, in the full blaze of his majesty up rose the sun; than which one object alone in this lower creation could be more glorious, and that Mr. Allworthy himself presented — a human being replete with benevolence, meditating in what manner he might render himself most acceptable to his Creator by doing most good to his creatures." " This," adds the quoter, " is the portrait of a fictitious personage ; but I see in it a close resemblance to one whose memory I shall never cease to venerate." The allusion is to his father, Mr. Leigh. But I must not anticipate the verdict of a court of justice.* Indeed, I should have begged pardon of my noble friend for speaking of this preposterous accusation, did not the very ex- cess of it force the words from my pen, and were I not sure that my own father would have expected them from me, had he been alive to hear it. His lordship must accept them as an effusion of grateful sympathy from one father and son to another. Lord Leigh has written many a tender and thoughtful verse, in which, next to the domestic affections and the pro- gress of human kind, he shows that he loves above all things the beauties of external nature, and the tranquil pleasures they suggest. So much do I agree with him, that it is a pleasure to me to know that I was even born in so sweet a village as Southgate. I first saw the light there on the 19th of October, 1784. It found me cradled, not only in the lap of the nature which I love, but in the midst of the truly English scenery which I love beyond all other. Middlesex in general, like my noble friend's county of Warwickshire, is a scene of trees and meadows, of " greenery " and nestling cottages ; and Southgate is a prime specimen of Middlesex. It is a place lying out of the way of * The verdict was subsequently given. It almost seemed ridicu- lous, it was po unnecessary; except, indeed, as a caution to the like of those whom it punished. CHILDHOOD. 27 innovation, therefore it has the pure, sweet air of antiquity about it ; and as I am fond of local researches in any quarter, it may be pardoned me if in this instance I would fain know even the meaning of its name. There is no North gate, East- gate, or Westgate in Middlesex : what, then, is Southgate? No topographer tells us ; but an old map of the country twenty-five miles round London, drawn up some years pre- vious to my childhood, is now before me ; and on looking at the boundaries of Enfield Chase, I see that the "Chase-gate," the name most likely of the principal entrance, is on the north side of it, by North-Hall and Potter's Bar ; while Southgate. which has also the name of " South Street," is on the Chase's opposite border ; so that it seems evident that Southgate meant the southern entrance into the chase, and that the name became that of a village from the growth of a •< let. The street, in all probability, was the consequence of a fair held in a wood which ran on the western side of it, and which, in the map, is designated " Bush Fair." Bush, in old English, meant not only a hedge, but a wood ; as Bois or Bosco does in French and Italian. Moses and the " burning bush" is Moses and the "burning wood;" which, by the way, presents a much grander idea than the modicum of hedge commonly assigned to the celestial apparition. There is a good deal more wood in the map than is now to be found. I wander in imagination through the spots marked in the neighbourhood, with their pleasant names — Woodside, Wood Green, Palmer Green, Nightingale Hall, &c, and fancy my father and mother listening to thu nightingales, and loving the new little baby, who has now lived to see more years than they did. Southgate lies in a cross-country road, running from Ed- monton through Enfield Chase into Hertfordshire. It is in the parish of Edmonton ; so thai we may fancy the Merry Devil of thai place still playing his pranks hereabouts, and helping innocent lovers to a weddh in i!i ( ' wed little play attributed to Dryden. Yov as to any such devils going to a place less han to be thoughl possible by good Christians. Fiu what classical ground is round about Si and iated with the us, both old and new, Edmonton is tin! birthplace of e, of our drama, and of my friend Borne, his congenial celebrator. In Edmonton cjru d lies ' • i ; in ! ■ churchyard, 28 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. Coleridge ; and in Hampstead have resided Shelley and Keats, to say nothing of Akenside before them, and of Steele, Arbuthnot, and others, before Akenside. But the neighbourhood is dear to me on every account ; for near Southgate is Colney Hatch, where my mother became acquainted with some of her dearest friends, whom I shall mention by-and-by. Near Colney Hatch is Finchley, where our family resided on quitting Southgate ; and at no great distance from Finchley is Mill Hill, where lived excellent Dr. W. M. Trinder, Vicar of Hendon, who presented in his person the rare combination of clergyman and physician. He boasted that he had cured a little child (to wit, myself) of a dropsy in the head. The fact was contested, I believe, by the lay part of the profession; but it was believed in the family, and their love for the good doctor was boundless. I may call myself, in every sense of the word, etymological not excepted, a son of mirth and melancholy ; for my father's Christian name (as old students of onomancy would have heard with serious faces) was Isaac, which is Hebrew for " laughter," and my mother's was Mary, which comes from a word in the same language signifying " bitterness." And, indeed, as I do not remember to have ever seen my mother smile, except in sorrowful tenderness, so my father's shouts of laughter are now ringing in my ears. Not at any expense to her gravity, for he loved her, and thought her an angel on earth ; but because his animal spirits were invincible. I inherit from my mother a tendency to jaundice, which at times has made me melancholy enough. I doubt, indeed, whether I have passed a day during half my life, without reflections; the first germs of which are traceable to sufferings which this tendency once cost me. My prevailing tempera- ment, nevertheless, is my father's ; and it has not only enabled me to turn those reflections into sources of tranquillity and exaltation, but helped my love of my mother's memory to take a sort of pride in the infirmity which she bequeathed me. I forget whether it was Dr. Trinder — for some purpose of care and caution — but somebody told my mother (and she believed it), that if I survived to the age of fifteen I might turn out to possess a more than average amount of intellect; but that otherwise I stood a chance of dying an idiot. The reader may imagine the anxiety which this information would give to a tender mother. Not a syllable, of course, did she breathe to me on the subject till the danger was long past, CHILDHOOD. 29 and doubly did I then become sensible of all the marks of affection which I called to mind ; of the unusual things which she had done for me; of the neglect, alas! which they had too often experienced from me, though not to her knowledge ; and of the mixture of tenderness and anxiety which I had always noted in her face. I was the youngest and least robust of her sons, and during early childhood I used hardly to recover from one illness before I was seized with another. The doctor said I must have gone through an extraordinary amount of suffering. I have sometimes been led to consider this as the first layer of that accumulated patience with which, in after life, I had occasion to fortify myself ; and the suppo- sition lias given rise to many consolatory reflections on the bject of endurance in general. To assist my recovery from one of these illnesses, I was taken to the coast of France, where, as usual, I fell into Another ; and one of my earliest recollections is of a good- natured French woman, the mistress of the lodging-house at Calais, who cried over the " poore littel boy," because J was a heretic. She thought I should go to the devil. Poor soul ! What torments must the good-hearted woman have under- gone; and what pleasant pastime it is for certain of her loud and learned inferiors to preach such doctrines, careless of the injuries they inflict, or even hoping to inflict them for the sake of some fine deity-degrading lesson, of which their sordid imaginations and splenetic itch fit' dictation assume the nece it was lucky for me that onr hostess was a gentle, not a violent bigot, and susceptible at her heart of those better notions of God which arc instinctive in the best natures. She mighl otherwise have treated me, as ;i late traveller says, infants have been treated by Catholic nurses, and murdered in order to save me.* In returning from the coast of France, we stopped at Deal, and 1 found m\ si If, one evening, standing with an elder brother on the beach, looking at a shoal of porpoises, creatures of which he had given me some tremendous, mysterious notion. I remember, as if it were yesterday, feeling the similes of evening, and the solemnity of the spectacle, with an awful intensity. There, they were, tumbling along in the; foam, wl: fcly 1 knew not, but fearful creatures of some sort. .My In-other spoke to me of them in an under I J of voice, * Letters from the Bye-ways of Italy. By Mrs. Henry Stisted. 30 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. and I held my breath as I looked. The very word " porpoise" had an awful, mouthfilling sound. This brother of mine, who is now no more, and who might have been a Marinell himself, for his notions of wealth and grandeur (to say nothing of his marrying, in succession, two ladies with dowries, from islands, whom ancient imagination could easily have exalted into sea-nymphs), was then a fine tall lad, of intrepid spirit, a little too much given to playing tricks on those who had less. He was a dozen years older than I was, and he had a good deal of the despot in a nature otherwise generous. To give an instance of the lengths to which my brother Stephen carried his claims of ascendancy, he used to astonish the boys, at a day-school to which he went at Finchley, by appearing among them with clean shoes, when the bad state of the lanes rendered the phenomenon unaccountable. Ee- serve, on the one side, and shame on another, kept the mystery a secret for some time. At length it turned out that he was in the habit, on muddy days, of making one of his brothers carrv him to school on his shoulders. This brother (Robert), who used to laugh at the recollec- tion, and who, as I have intimated, was quite as brave as the other, was at a disadvantage on such occasions, from his very bravery ; since he knew what a horror my mother would have felt had there been any collision between them ; so he used to content himself with an oratorical protest, and acquiesce. Being a brave, or at all events irritable little fellow enough myself, till illness, imagination, and an ultra tender and anxious rearing, conspired to render me fearful and patient, I had no such consequences to think of. "When Stephen took me bodily in hand, I was only exasperated. I remember the furious struggles I used to make, and my endeavours to get at his shins, when he would hold me at arm's length, " aggra- vating" me (as the phrase is) by taunting speeches, and laughing like a goblin. But on the " niaht-side of human nature," as Mrs. Crowe calls it, he " had me." I might confront him and endeavour to kick his shins by daylight, but with respect to ghosts, as the sailor said, I did not "understand their tackle." I had unfortunately let him see that I did not like to be in the dark, and that I had a horror of dreadful faces, even in books. I had found something particularly ghastly in the figure of an old man crawling on the ground, in some frontispiece — I think CHILDHOOD. . SI to a book called the Lodking-Glass ; and there was a fabulous wild-beast, a portrait of which, in some picture-book, un- speakably shocked me. It was called the Mantichora. It had the head of a man, grinning with rows of teeth, and the body of a wild-beast, brandishing a tail armed with stings. It was sometimes called by the ancients J/wtichora. But I did not know that. I took the word to be a horrible com- pound of man and tiger. The beast figures in Pliny and the old travellers. Apollonius had heard of him. He ta; fearful joy in describing him, even from report : — • Lpollonius asked ' if the}' had among them the Marti- chora.' 'What!' said Iarchas, 'have you heard of that animal : for if you have, you have probably heard somet' extraordinary of its figure.' ' Great and wonderful things I heard of it,' replied Apollonius. ' It is of the number of quadrupeds, has a head like a man's, is as large as a lion, witli a tail from which bristles grow, of the length of a cubit, all as sharp as prickles, which it shoots forth like so n. arrows against its pursuers.'"* That sentence, beginning " Great and wonderful tin:, proves to me, that Apollonius must once have been a little boy, looking at the picture-books. The possibility of - "creatures" being " pursued" never occurred tome. Alex- ander, I thought, might have been encounto red while crossing the Granicus, and elephants might be. driven into the - but how could any one face a beast with a man's head ? One of its horrid countenance (which it always carried fi ing you, as it went by — I never imagined it seen in profile) would have ugh, I concluded, to scare an arm v. . full-grown die . makers have been frightened out of their propriety at the thought of him. " Mantichora," says old Morell — " best: " — (a brute fit to give the horrors). In vain my brother played me repeated tricks with this frightful anomaly. I was always ready to be frightened a. At one time lie would grin like the Mantichora; then he i roar like hi; a call about him in the di rl - I r his asking me to come up to him one night at the nd the door ^ : \ in-, in its I ." Down 1 rushed to the ] jig, * Berwick's Tra 32 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. I dwell the more on this seemingly petty circumstance, because such things are no petty ones to a sensitive child. My brother had no idea of the mischief they did me. Per- haps the mention of them will save mischief to others. They helped to morbidize all that was weak in my temperament, and cost me many a bitter night.* Another time I was reading to him, while he was recovering in bed from an accident. He was reckless in his play; had once broken his leg on Hampstead Heath ; and was now getting well from a broken collar-bone. He gave me a volume to read to him, either of Elegant Extracts or AikirCs Miscel- lanies (I think the former), and selected the story of " Sir Bertrand." He did not betray by his face what was coming. I was enchanted with the commencement about the " dreary moors" and the " curfew ; " and I was reading on with breath- less interest, when, at one of the most striking passages, — probably some analogous one about a noise, — he contrived, with some instrument or other, to give a tremendous knock * Since this passage was written, I have met with one in Tod's Travels in Western India, p. 82, &c, in which the veritable origin of the idea of the Mantichora is, I have no doubt, set forth. India has ever been a land of extremes, both spiritual and bodily. At the moment when I write (September, 1857) it is a land of horrors. Here is one, existing five-and-thirty years ago, and in all probability existing still, which shows the outrageous tendency to excess on the side ot mad superstition, and of brute contradiction to humanity, characteristic of the lower forms of Indian degradation. It is the sect of the Aghori, who, among other unspeakable viands, fed on dead bodies, and were first re-mentioned, after the ancient writers, by the celebrated tra- veller Thevenot, who says they were called Merdi-coura, or eaters of men. Colonel Tod observes, " It is a curious fact, as D'Anville adds, that 'this espece de bete,' this Merdi-cour, or, properly, Merdi-khor, should have been noticed by Pliny, Aristotle, and Ctesias, under nearly the same name— Marti-chora, giving its synonym in their own language, 'AvOpoirotpayog. ; for Merdi-khor is a Persian compound, from meid, ' man,' and kliourdun ' to eat.' " " I passed," says the Colonel, " the gopha, or cave, of the most celebrated of the monsters of the present age, who was long the object of terror and loathing to Aboo and its neighbourhood. His name was Futteh Poori ; who, after having embowelled whatever came in his way, took the extraordinary resolution of immuring himself in his cell. The commands of maniacs generally meet witli ready obedience; and as he was regarded by many in this light, his desire was implicitly fulfilled. The mouth of the cave was built up ; and will remain so, till some mummy-hunting Prank shall re-open it, or till phrenology form a part of the modern education of a Hindu; when, doubtless, the organ of destruction on the cranium of Futteh Poori will exhibit a high state of development." CHILDHOOD. S3 on the wall. Up I jumped, aghast ; and the invalid lay rolling with laughter. So healthily had I the good fortune to be brought up in point of religion, that (to anticipate a remark which might have come in at a less effective place) I remember kneeling one day at the school-church during the Litany, when the thought fell upon me — " Suppose eternal punishment should be true." An unusual sense of darkness and anxiety crossed me — but only for a moment. The next instant the extreme absurdity and impiety of the notion restored me to my ordinary feelings ; and from that moment to this, — respect the mystery of the past as I do, and attribute to it what final good out of fugi- tive evil I may, — I have never for one instant doubted the transitoriness of the doctrine and the unexclusive goodness of futurity. All those question-begging argumentations of the churches and schools, which are employed to reconcile the inflictions of the nursery to the gift of reason, and which would do quite as well for the absurdities of any one creed as another (indeed, they would be found to have done so, were we as deeply read in the religions of the East as of the W< come to nothing before the very modesty to which they appeal, provided it is a modesty healthy and loving. The more even of fugitive evil which it sees (and no ascertained evil suffered by any individual creature is otherwise), nay, the more which is disclosed to it in the very depths and concealments of nature, only the more convinces it that the great mystery of all things will allow of no lasting evil, visible or invisible ; and therefore it concludes that the evil which does exist is for some good purpose, and for the final blessing of all sentient beings, of whom it takes a care so remarkable. I know not whether it was fortunate or unfortunate for me, humanly speaking, that my mother did not see as far into healthiness of training in other respects as in this. Some of the bad consequences to myself were indeed obvious, as the reader has seen; but it may have enabled me to save worse to others. It' 1 could find any fault with her memory (: alter an ordinary fashion), it would be that I was too deli- cately bred, except as to what is called good living. My n1 were too or luxury. Bui she el me an example of such excessive and anxiety for those about us, that I mber 1 could uol Bee her bite off the ends d her thread while at work without being in pain till 1 was sure she would not swallow them. She used to be so agitated at the sight of 34 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. discord and quarrelling, particularly when it came to blows, and between the rudest or gayest combatants in the street, that, although it did not deprive her of courage and activity enough to interfere (which she woidd do if there was the slightest chance of effect, and which produced hi myself a corresponding discrimination between sensibility and endea- vour), it gave me an ultra-sympathy with the least show of pain and suffering ; and she had produced in me such a horror, or rather such an intense idea of even violent words, and of the commonest trivial oath, that being led one day, perhaps by the very excess of it, to snatch a "fearful joy" in its utterance, it gave me so much remorse that for some time afterwards I could not receive a bit of praise, or a pat of encouragement on the head, without thinking to myself, " Air ! they little suspect that I am the boy who said, ' d — n it.' " Dear mother ! No one could surpass her in generosity ; none be more willing to share, or to take the greatest portion of blame to themselves, of any evil consequences of mistake to a son ; but if I have not swallowed very many camels in the course of my life, it has not been owing, perhaps, to this too great a straining at gnats. How happy shall I be (if I may) to laugh and compare notes with her on the subject in any humble corner of heaven ; to recall to her the filial tenderness with which she was accustomed to speak of the mistakes of one of her own parents, and to think that her grandchildren will be as kind to the memory of their father. I may here mention, as a ludicrous counterpart to this story, and a sample of the fantastical nature of scandal, that somebody having volunteered a defence of my character on some occasion to Mr. Wordsworth, as though the character had been questioned by him — the latter said he had never heard anything against it, except that I was " given to swearing." I certainly think little of the habit of swearing, however idle, if it be carried no further than is done by many gallant and very good men, wise and great ones not excepted. I wish I had no worse faults to answer for. But the fact is, that however I may laugh at the puerile conscience of the anecdote just mentioned, an oath has not escaped my lips from that day to this. I hope no " good fellow " will think ill of me for it. If he did, I should certainly be tempted to begin swearing imme- diately, purely to vindicate my character. But there was no CHILDHOOD. 35 swearing in our family ; there was none in our school (Christ Hospital); and I seldom ever fell in the way of it anywhere except in books; so that the practice was not put into my head. I look upon Tom Jones, who swore, as an angel of light compared with Blifil, who, I am afraid, swore no more than myself. Steele, I suspect, occasionally rapped out an oath; which is not to be supposed of Addison. And this, again, might tempt me into a grudge against my nonjuring turn of colloquy; for I must own that I prefer open-hearted Steele with all his faults, to Addison with all his essays. But habit is habit, negative as well as positive. Let him that is without one, cast the first sarcasm. After all, swearing was once seriously objected to me, and I had given cause for it. I must own, that I even begged hard to be allowed a few oaths. It was for an article in a magazine (the New Monthly), where I had to describe a fictitious person, whose character I thought required it ; and I pleaded truth to nature, and the practice of the good old novelists; but in vain. The editor was not to be entreated. He was Mr. Theodore Hook. Perhaps this was what gave rise to the poet's impression. But to return to my reminiscences. It may appear sur- prising to some, that a child brought up in such scruples of conscience, and particularly in such objections to pugnacity, should have ever found himself in possession of such toys a drum and a sword. A distinguished economist, who was pleased the other day to call me the "spoiled child of the public" (a title which I should be proud to possess), ex- pressed his astonishment that a person so "gentle" should have been a fighter in the thick of politics. But the " gentle- was the reason. 1 mean, that under certain circum- stances of training, the very love of peace and comfort, in feting a desire to see those benefits partaken by others, i corresponding indignation at seeing them withheld. I am aware of the perils of reaction to which this feeling : of the indulgence in bad passions which it may dis- ■; of the desirableness of quietly advocating whatever is quietly to be secured; of the perplexity occasioned to all considerations by the example which appears to be by nature herself in her employment of storm and tempest; and of the answer to lie given to that perplexity by the modesty of human ignorance and its want of certainty i, till this question ' led i and the 3—2 3G AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. sooner the justice of the world can settle it the better), it renders the best natures liable to inconsistencies between theory and practice, and forces them into self-reconcilements of conscience, neither quite so easy in the result, nor so deducible from perfect reason as they would suppose. My mother, whose fortunes had been blighted, and feelings ago- nized, by the revolution in America, and who had conceived such a horror of war, that when we resided once near the Park, she would take a long circuit (as I have before men- tioned), rather than go through it, in order to avoid seeing the soldiers, permitted me, nevertheless, to have the drum and the sword. Why? Because, if the sad necessity were to come, it would be her son's duty to war against war itself — to fight against those who oppressed the anti-fighters. My father, entertaining these latter opinions without any misgiving (enforced, too, as they were by his classical educa- tion), and both my parents being great lovers of sermons, which he was in the habit of reading to us of an evening, I found myself at one time cultivating a perplexed idtra-con- scidntiousness with my mother ; at another, laughing and being jovial with my father; and at a third, hearing from both of them stories of the Greek and Roman heroes, some of whom she admired as much as he did. The consequence was, that I one day presented to the astonished eyes of the maid- servant a combination that would have startled Dr. Trinder, and delighted the eyes of an old Puritan. To clap a sword by my side, and get the servant to pin up my hat into the likeness of the hat military, were symptoms of an ambition which she imderstood and applauded ; but when I proceeded to append to this martial attire one of my father's bands, and, combining the military with the ecclesiastical authority, got upon a chair to preach to an imaginary audience over the back of it, she seemed to think the image realized of " heaven and earth coming together." However, she ended with enjoy- ing, and even abetting, this new avatar of the church militant. Had I been a Mohammed, she would have been my first proselyte, and I should have called her the Maid-servant of the Faithful. She was a good, .simple-hearted creature, who from not having been fortunate with the first orator in whom she believed, had stood a chance of ruin for life, till received into the only family that would admit her ; and she lived and died in its service. The desire thus childishly exhibited, of impressing some CHILDHOOD. 37 religious doctrine, never afterwards quitted me; though, in consequence of the temperament which I inherited from one parent, and the opinions which I derived from both, it took a direction singularly cheerful. For a man is but his parents, or some other of his ancestors, drawn out. My father, though a clergyman of the Established Church, had settled, as well as my mother, into a Christian of the Universalist persuasion, which believes in the final restoration of all tilings. It was hence that I learned the impiety (as I have expressed it) of the doctrine of eternal punishment. In the present day, a sense of that impiety, in some way or other, whether of doubt or sophistication, is the secret feeling of nine-tenths of all churches; and every church will discover, before long, that it must rid itself of the doctrine, if it would not cease to exist. Love is the only creed destined to siuvive all others. They who think that no church can exist without a strong spice of terror, should watch the growth of education, and see which system of it is the most beloved. They should see also which system in the very nursery is growing the most ridiculous. The threat of the "black man and the coal-hole" has vanished from all decent infant training. What answer is the father, who would uphold the worst form of it, to give to the child whom he has spared the best ? How pleasant it is, in reviewing one's life, to look back on the circumstances that originated or encouraged any kindly tendency ! I behold, at this moment, with lively distinct- ness, the handsome face of Miss C, who was the first person I remember seeing at a pianoforte ; and I have something of a like impression of that of Miss M., mother, if I mistake not, or, at all events, near relation, of my distinguished friend Sheridan Knowle-. .My parents and his were acquainted. My mother, though fond of rmisic, and a gentle singer in her way, had missed the advantage of a musical education, partly from her coming of a half-quaker stock, partly (as I have said before) from her having been too diffident to avail her- self of the kindness of Dr. Franklin, who offered to teach her guitar. The reigning Erigli h composer at that, time was "Mr. Book," as he was styled at the head of his songs. He was the father of my punctilious editor of the magazine, and had .•]. real, though small vein of genius, which wag none the c for its 1 icing called upon to How profusely for Ranelagh and Vauxhall. He was composer of the " Lass of Kichmond 38 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. Hill" (an allusion to a penchant of George IV.), and of another popular song more lately remembered, " 'Twas within a mile of Edinborough town." The songs of that day abounded in Strephons and Delias, and the music partook of the gentle inspiration. The association of early ideas with that kind of commonplace, has given me more than a toleration for it. I find something even touching in the endeavours of an inno- cent set of ladies and gentlemen, my fathers and mothers, to identify themselves with shepherds and shepherdesses, even in the most impossible hats and crooks. I think of the many heartfelt smiles that must have welcomed love letters and verses containing that sophisticate imagery, and of the no less genuine tears that were shed over the documents when faded ; and criticism is swallowed up in those human drops. This is one of the reasons why I can read even the most faded part of the works of Shenstone, and why I can dip again and again into such correspondence as that of the Countesses of Hertford and Pomfret, and of my Lady Luxborough, who raises monuments in her garden to the united merits of Mr. Somerville and the god Pan. The feeling was true, though the expression was sophisticate and a fashion ; and they who cannot see the feeling for the mode, do the very thing which they think they scorn; that is, sacrifice the greater consideration for the less. But Hook was not the only, far less the most fashionable composer. There were (if not all personally, yet popularly contemporaneous) Mr. Lampe, Mr. Oswald, Dr. Boyce, Lin- ley, Jackson, Shield, and Storace, with Paesiello, Sacchini, and others at the King's Theatre, whose delightful airs wan- dered into the streets out of the English operas that bor- rowed them, and became confounded with English property. I have # often, in the course of my life, heard "Whither, my love ? " and " For tenderness formed,'-' boasted of, as specimens of English melody. For many years I took them for such myself, in common with the rest of our family, with whom they were great favourites. The first, which Stephen Storace adapted to some words in the Haunted Tower, is the air of " La Kachelina" in Paesiello's opera La Molinara. The second, which was put by General Burgoyne to a song in his comedy of the Heiress, is " Io sono Lindoro," in the same enchanting composer's Barbiere di Siviglia. The once popu- lar English songs and duets, &c, " How imperfect is expres- sion ; " " For me, my fair a wreath has wove ; " " Henry CHILDHOOD. 39 cull'd the flow'ret's bloom;" "Oh, thou wert born to please me;" "Here's a health to all good lasses;" "Youth's the season made for joys;" " Gently touch the warbling lyre;" " No, 'twas neither shape nor feature;" " Pray, Goody, please to moderate ; " " Hope told a nattering tale ; " and a hundred others, "were all foreign compositions, chiefly Italian. Every burlesque or buffo song, of any pretension, was pretty sure to be Italian. When Edwin, Fawcett, and others, were rattling away in the happy comic songs of O'Keeffe, with his triple rhymes and illustrative jargon, the audience little suspected that they were listening to some of the finest animal spirits of the south — to Piccini, Paesiello, and Cimarosa. Even the wild Irish- man thought himself bound to go to Naples, before he could get a proper dance for his gaiety. The only genuine English compositions worth anything at that time, were almost confined to Shield, Dibdin, and Storace, the last of whom, the author of " Lullaby," who was an Italian born in England, formed the golden link between the music of the two countries, the only one, perhaps, in which English accentuation and Italian flow were ever truly amalgamated ; though I must own that I am heretic enough (if present fashion is orthodoxy) to believe, that Arne was a real musical genius, of a very pure, albeit not of the very first water. He has set, indued, two songs of Shakspeare's (the " Cuckoo song," and "Where the bee sucks,") in a spirit of perfect analogy to the words, as well as of the liveliest musical inveD : and his air of " Water parted," in Artaxerxes, winds about the feelings with an earne I and graceful tenderness of regret, worthy in the highest degree of the affecting beauty of the sentiment.* All the favourite poetry of the day, however, was of one I have now before me a, Select Collection of English Songs, by Pitson, published in the year 1783, in three octavo, the last of which contains the musical air ;. The style is of the following description: — Almeria'a face, her shape, her air, With charms resistless wound the heart, &c. p. 2. * " ])r. Haydn was delighted with Artaxerxes ; and lie told my dear mother (for lie was frequently with us at Vauxhall) that he had not an idea we had such an opera in the English language." — Letter of Mrs. Henslow in (Jradock's Literal// and Miscellaneous Memoirs. Vol. It. p. 133. 40 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OP LEIGH HUNT. (I should not wonder if dear Almeria Thornton, whose tender affection for my mother will appear in another chapter, was christened out of this song.) Say, Myra, why is gentle love, &c. Which racks the amorous breast, by Lord Lyttelton, the most admired poet, perhaps, of the age. When Delia on the plain appears ; also by his lordship. In vain, Philander, at my feet. Ah, Damon, dear shepherd, adieu. Come, thou rosy dimpled boy, Source of every heartfelt joy, Leave the blissful bowers a while, Paphos a7id the Cyprian isle. This was a favourite song in our house. So was " Come, now, all ye social powers," and Come, let us dance and sing, While all Barbados bells shall ring ; probably on account of its mention of my father's native place. The latter song is not in Ritson. It was the finale in Colman's Inkle and Yarico, a play founded on a Barbadian story, which our family must have gone with delight to see. Another favourite, which used to make my mother shed tears, on account of my sister Eliza, who died early, was Jackson of Exeter's song — Encompass'd in an angel's frame. It is, indeed, a touching specimen of that mastei*. The "Hardy Tar," also, and "The topsails shiver in the wind," used to charm yet sadden her, on account of my eldest bro- ther then living, who was at sea. The latter, written by the good-natured and gallant Captain Thompson, was set to music, I think, by Arne's son, Michael, who had a fine musical sea-vein, simple and strong. He was the composer of " Fresh and strong the breeze is blowing." The other day I found two songs of that period on Robin- son's music-stall in Wardour Street, one by Mr. Hook, entitled " Alone, by the light of the moon ; " the other, a song with a French burden, called "Dans votre lit;" an innocent pro- duction, notwithstanding its title. They were the only songs I recollect singing when a child, and I looked on them with the accumulated tenderness of sixty-three years of age. I do not remember to have set eyes on them in the interval. What CHILDHOOD. 41 a difference between the little smooth-faced boy at his mother's knee, encouraged to lift up his voice to the piano- forte, and the battered grey-headed senior, looking again, for the first time, on what he had sung at the distance of more than half a century ! Life often seems a dream ; but there are occasions when the sudden re-appearance of early objects, by the intensity of their presence, not only renders the in- terval less present to the consciousness than a very dream, but makes the portion of life which preceded it seem to have been the most real of all things, and our only undreaming time. " Alone, by the light of the moon," and " Dans votre lit !" how had they not been thumbed and thrown aside by all the pianoforte young ladies — our mothers and grandmothers — fifty years ago, never to be brought forth again, except by an explorer of old stalls, and to meet, perhaps, with no sym- pathy but in his single imagination ! Yet there I stood; and Wardour Street, every street, all London, as it now exists, became to me as if it had never been. The universe itself was nothing but a poor sitting-room in the year '89 or '90, with my mother in it bidding me sing, Miss C. at the piano- forte — harpsichord more likely, and my little sister, Mary, with her round cheeks and blue eyes, wishing me to begin. What a great singer is that little boy to those loving relations, and how Miss C, with all her good nature, must be smiling at the importance of little boys to their mothers ! " Alone, by the light of the moon," was the " show song," but " Dans votre lit " was the favourite with my sister, because, in her ignorance of the French language, she had associated the name of her brother with the sound of the last word. The song was a somewhat gallant, but very decorous song, apostrophizing a lady as a lily in the flower-bed. It was "silly, sooth," and "dallied with the innocence of love" in those days, after a fashion which might have excited livelier ideas in the more restricted imaginations of the present. The r has seen that my mother, notwithstanding her chari- tableness to the poor maid-servant, was a woman of strict moral- ; the tone of the family conversation was scrupulously correct, though, perhaps, a little flowery and Thomson-like (Thomson was the favourite poet of most of us) ; yet the songs that were sung at that time by the most fastidious might be _;ht a shade freer than would suit the like kind of society at present. Whether we are more innocent in having become 42 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. more ashamed, I shall not judge. Assuredly, the singer of those songs was as innocent as the mother that bade him sing them. My little sister Mary died not long after. She was so young, that my only recollection of her, besides her blue eyes, is her love of her brother, and her custom of leading me by the hand to some stool or seat on the staircase, and making me sing the song with her favourite burden. We were the two youngest children, and about of an age. I please myself with picturing to my imagination what was going forward during my childhood in the world of politics, literature, and public amusements ; how far they interested my parents ; and what amount of impression they may have left on my own mind. The American Eevolution, which had driven my father from Philadelphia, was not long over, and the French Revolution was approaching. My father, for reasons which have already been mentioned, listened more and more to the new opinions, and my mother listened, not only from love to her husband, but because she was still more deeply impressed by speculations regarding the welfare of human kind. The public mind, after a long and comparatively insipid tranquillity, had begun to be stirred by the eloquence of Burke ; by the rivalries of Pitt and Fox ; by the thanks which the king gave to heaven for his recovery from his first illness; by the warlike and licentious energies of the Eussian Empress, Catherine II., who partly shocked and partly amused them ; and by the gentler gallantries and showy luxury of the handsome young Prince of Wales, after- wards George IV. In the world of literature and art, Goldsmith and Johnson had gone ; Cowper was not yet much known ; the most pro- minent poets were Hayley and Darwin ; the most distinguished prose-writer, Gibbon. Sir Joshua Eeynolds was in his decline, so was Horace Walpole. The Kembles had come up in the place of Garrick. There were excellent comic actors in the persons of Edwin, Lewis, young Bannister, &c. They had O'Keeffe, an original humourist, to write for them. I have already noticed the vocal portion of the theatres. Miss Bumey, afterwards Madame d'Arblay, surprised the reading world with her entertaining, but somewhat vulgar novels ; and Mrs. Inchbald, Mrs. Charlotte Smith, and a then anonymous author, Eobert Bage (who wrote Hermsprong, and Man as He Is), delighted liberal politicians with theirs. Mrs. Inchbald was CHILDHOOD. 43 also a successful dramatist ; but her novels, which were writteu in a style to endure, were her chief merits. My mother was one of their greatest admirers. I have heard her expatiate with delight on the characters in Nature and Art, which, though not so masterly a novel as the Simple Story, and a little wilful iu the treatment, was full of matter for reflection, especially on conventional, and what are now called " class" points. Dr. Philpotts would have accused my mother of disaffection to the Church ; and she woidd not have mended the matter by retreating on her admiration of Bishops Hoadley and Shipley. Her regard for the reverend author of Meditations in a Flower Garden would have made the doctor smile, though she would have recovered, perhaps, something of his good opinion by her admiration of Dr. Young and his Night Thoughts. But Young deluded her with his groans ast the world, and his lamentations for his daughter. She did not know that ho was a preferment-hunter, who was pros- perous enough to indulge in the " luxury of woe," and to groan because his toast was not thrice buttered. Kanelagh and Vauxhall, as painted in Miss Burney's novels, were among the fashionable amusements of those days. My mother was neither rich nor gay enough to see much of them ; but she was no ascetic, and she went where others did, as occa- sion served. My father, whose manners were at once high- bred and lively, had some great acquaintances; but I recollect none of them personally, except an old lady of quality, who (if memory does not strangely deceive me, and give me a per- sonal share in what I only heard talked of ; for old auto- biographers of childhood must own themselves liable to such confusions) astounded me one day, by letting her false teeth slip out, and clapping them in again. I had no idea of the existence of such phenomena, and coidd almost as soon have expected her to take off her head and re- adjust it. She lived in lied Lion Square, a quarter in different nation from what it is now. It was at her house, I be- lieve, that my father one evening mot Wilkes, lie did not know him by sight, and happening to fall into conversation witli him, while the latter sat looking down, he said something in Wilkes's disparagement ; en which the jovial demagogue looked up in his face, and burst out a laughing. I d i ' exactly know how people dressed at that time; but I believe thai sacks, and negligees, and toupees were go- OUt, and the pigtail and the ampler modern style of dress 44 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. coming in. I recollect hearing my mother describe the misery of having her hair dressed two or three stories high, and of lying in it all night ready for some visit or spectacle next day. I think I also recollect seeing Wilkes himself in an old- fashioned flap-waistcoated suit of scarlet and gold ; and I am sure I have seen Murphy, the dramatist, a good deal later, in a suit of a like fashion, though soberer, and a large cocked- hat. The cocked-hat in general survived till nearly the pre- sent century. It was superseded by the round one during the French Revolution. I remember our steward at school, a very solemn personage, making his appearance in one, to our astonishment, and not a little to the diminution of his dignity. Some years later, I saw Mr. Pitt in a blue coat, buckskin breeches and boots, and a round hat, with powder and pigtail. He was thin and gaunt, with his hat off his forehead, and his nose in the air, — that nose on which Hazlitt said he " sus- pended the House of Commons." Much about the same time I saw his friend, the first Lord Liverpool, a respectable look- ing old gentleman, in a brown wig. Later still, I saw Mr. Fox, fat and jovial, though he was then declining. He, who had been a " beau" in his youth, then looked something quaker- like as to dress, with plain coloured clothes, a broad round hat, white waistcoat, and, if I am not mistaken, white stock- ings. He was standing in Parliament-street, just where the street commences as you leave Whitehall ; and was making two young gentlemen laugh heartily at something which he seemed to be relating. My father once took me — but I cannot say at what period of my juvenility — into both houses of Parliament. In the Commons, I saw Mr. Pitt sawing the air, and occasionally turning to appeal to those about him, while he spoke in a loud, important, and hollow voice. When the persons he appealed to, said " Hear ! hear !" I thought they said " Dear ! dear !" in objection ; and I wondered that he did not seem in the least degree disconcerted. The House of Lords, I must say (without meaning disrespect to an assembly which must always have contained some of the most accomplished men in the country), surprised me with the personally insignificant look of its members. I had, to be sure, conceived exagger- ated notions of the magnates of all countries ; and perhaps might have expected to behold a set of conscript fathers; but in no respect, real or ideal, did they appear to me in their cor- porate aspect, like anything which is understood by the word SCHOOL-DATS. 45 " noble." The Commons seemed to me to have the advan- tage ; though they surprised me with lounging on the benches and retaining their hats. I was not then informed enough to know the difference between apparent and substantial import- ance ; much less aware of the positive exaltation, which that very simplicity, and that absence of pretension, gave to the most potent assembly in Em-ope. CHAPTER III. SCHOOL-DAYS. Books for children during the latter part of the eighteenth century had been in a bad way, with sordid and merely plodding morals — ethics that were necessary perhaps for a certain stage in the progress of commerce and for its greatest idtimate purposes (undreamt of by itself), but which thwarted healthy and large views of society for the time being. They were the consequences of an altogether unintellectual state of trade, aided and abetted by such helps to morality as Hogarth's pictures of the Good and Bad Apprentice, which identified virtue with prosperity. Hogarth, in most of his pictures, was as healthy a moralist as he supposed himself, but not for the reasons which he supposed. The gods he worshipped were Truth and Pru- dence; but he saw more of the carnal than spiritual beauties of either. He was somewhat of a vulgarian in intention as well as mode. But wherever there is genius, there is a genial something greater than the accident of breeding, than the prevailing disposition, or even than tin' conscious design; and this portion of divinity within the painter, saw fair-play between his conventional and immortal part. It put the. ity of colour into his mirth, the counteraction of mirth into his melancholy, and a Lesson beyond his intention into all: that is to say, it suggested redemptions and first causes for the objects of his satire ; and thus vindicated the ju of na - tie' moment when he was thinking of little but the pragmaticalness of The children's boi those days were : ' b's pictures taken in their most literal acceptation. Every good hoy was to ride in his coach, and be ■■> lord i ery bad hoy was to be hung, or eaten by lions. The gingi i l 46 AUTOBIOGBAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. gilt, and the books were gilt like the gingerbread, — a " take in " the more gross, inasmuch as nothing could be plainer or less dazzling than the books of the same boys when they grew a little older. There was a lingering old ballad or so in favour of the gallanter apprentices who tore out lions' hearts and asto- nished gazing sultans ; and in antiquarian corners, Percy's " Reliques" were preparing a nobler age, both in poetry and prose. But the first counteraction came, as it ought, in the shape of a new book for children. The pool of mercenary and time-serving ethics was first blown over by the fresh country breeze of Mr. Day's Sandford and Merton — a pro- duction that I well remember, and shall ever be grateful to. It came in aid of my mother's perplexities between delicacy and hardihood, between courage and conscientiousness. It assisted the cheerfulness I inherited from my father ; showed me that circumstances were not to crush a healthy gaiety, or the most masculine self-respect; and helped to supply me with the resolution of standing by a principle, not merely as a point of lowly or lofty sacrifice, but as a matter of common sense and duty, and a simple co-operation with the elements of natural welfare. I went, nevertheless, to school at Christ Hospital, an ultra- sympathizing and timid boy.* The sight of boys fighting, from which I had been so anxiously withheld, frightened me as something devilish ; and the least threat of corporal chastisement to a schoolfellow (for the lesson I had learned would have enabled me to bear it myself) affected me to tears. I remember to this day, merely on that account, the name of a boy who was to receive punishment for some offence about a task. It was Lemoine. (I hereby present him with my respects, if he is an existing old gentleman, and hope he has not lost a pleasing countenance.) He had a cold and hoarseness ; and his voice, while pleading in mitigation, sounded to me so pathetic, that I wondered how the master could have the heart to strike him. Eeaders who have been at a public school may guess the consequence. I was not of a disposition to give offence, but neither was I quick to take it; and this, to the rude, energy- cultivating spirit of boys in general (not the worst thing in the world, till the pain in preparation for them can be diminished), was in itself an offence. I therefore "went to the wall," till address, and the rousing of my own spirit, tended to right me; * In 1792. SCHOOL-DATS. 47 but I went through a great deal of fear in the process. I became convinced, that if I did not put moral courage in the place of personal, or, in other words, undergo any stubborn amount of pain and wretchedness, rather than submit to what I thought wrong, there was an end for ever, as far as I was concerned, of all those fine things that had been taught me, in vindication of right and justice. Whether it was, however, that by the help of animal spirits I possessed some portion of the courage for which the rest of the family was remarkable — or whether I was a veritable coward, born or bred, destined to show, in my person, how far a spirit of love and freedom could supersede the necessity of gall, and procure me the respect of those about me — certain it is, that although, except in one instance, I did my best to avoid, and succeeded honourably in avoid- ing, those personal encounters with my school-fellows, which, in confronting me on my own account with the face of a fellow-creature, threw me upon a sense of something devilish, and overwhelmed me with a sort of terror for both parties, yet I gained at an early period of boyhood the reputation of a romantic enthusiast, whose daring in behalf of a friend or a good cause nothing could put down. I was obliged to call in the aid of a feeling apart from my own sense of personal antagonism, and so merge the diabolical, as it were, into the human. In other words, I had not self-respect or gall enough to be angry on my own account, unless there was something at stake which, by concerning others, gave me a sense of support, and BO pieced out my want with their abundance. The moment, however, that I felt thus supported, not only did all misgiving vanish from my mind, but contempt of pain took possession of my body ; and my poor mother might e gloried through her tears in the loving courage of her son. I state the case thus proudly, both in justice to the manner in which she trained me, and because J conceive it may do good. I never foughl with a boy but once, and then it was on my own account ; but though I beat him I was frightened, and eagerly sought his good will. I dared everything, how- ever, from the biggesl and Btronge "ii other accounts, and was sometimes afforded an opportunity of showing my spirit of martyrdom. The truth is, I could Buffer better than ad ; i'nr the utmost activity of martyrdom is supported by a certain sense of passivi We are not bold from our- 48 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. selves, but from something which compels us to be so, and which supports us by a sense of the necessity. I had not been long in the school, when this spirit within me broke out in a manner that procured me great esteem. There was a monitor or " big boy " in office, who had a trick of entertaining himself by pelting lesser boys' heads with a hard ball. He used to throw it at this boy and that ; make the throwee bring it back to him ; and then send a rap with it on his cerebellum, as he was going off. I had borne this spectacle one day for some time, when the family precepts rising within me, I said to myself, "I must go up to the monitor and speak to him about this." I issued forth accordingly, and to the astonishment of all present, who had never witnessed such an act of insubordination, I said, "You have no right to do this." The monitor, more astounded than any one, exclaimed, " What ? " I repeated my remonstrance. He treated me with the greatest con- tempt, as if disdaining even to strike me ; and finished by ordering me to "stand out." " Standing out" meant going to a particular spot in the hall where we dined. I did so; but just as the steward (the master in that place) was enter- ing it, the monitor called to me to come away ; and I neither heard any more of standing out, nor saw any more of the ball. I do not recollect that he even " spited " me afterwards, which must have been thought very remarkable. I seemed fairly to have taken away the breath of his calculations. The proba- bility is, that he was a good lad who had got a bad habit. Boys often become tyrants from a notion of its being grand and manly. Another monitor, a year or two afterwards, took it into his head to force me to be his fag. Fag was not the term at our school, though it was in our vocabulary. Fag, with us, meant eatables. The learned derived the word from the Greek ipliacjo^ to eat. I had so little objection to serve out of love, that there is no office I could not have performed for good will ; but it had been given out that I had determined not to be a menial on any other terms, and the monitor in question undertook to bring me to reason. He was a mild, good-looking boy about fourteen, remarkable for the neat- ness, and even elegance, of his appearance. Eeceiving the refusal, for which he had been prepared, he showed me a knot in a long handkerchief, and told me I should receive a lesson from that handkerchief every day, SCHOOL-DAYS. 49 with the addition of a fresh knot every time, unless I chose to alter iny mind. I did not choose. I received the daily or rather nightly lesson, for it was then most convenient to strip me, and I came out of the ordeal in triumph. I never was fag to anybody; never made anybody's bed, or cleaned his shoes, or was the boy to get his tea, much less expected to stand as a screen for him before the fire, which I have seen done; though, upon the whole, the boys were very mild governors. Lamb has noticed the character of the school for good manners, which he truly describes as being ecpially removed from the pride of aristocratic foundations and the servility of the charity schools. I believe it retains this character still ; though the changes which its system underwent not long ago, fusing all the schools into one another, and introducing a more generous diet, is thought by some not to have been follpwed by an advance in other respects. I have heard the school charged, more lately, with having been suffered, in the intervals between the school hours, to fall out of the liberal and gentlemanly supervision of its best teachers, into the hands of an officious and ignorant sectarianism. But this may only have been a passing abuse. I love and honour the school on private accounts; and I feel a public interest in its welfare, inasmuch as it is one of e judicious links with all classes, the importance of which, especially at a time like the present, cannot be too highly estimated; otherwise, I should have said nothing to its pos- sible, and I hope transient disadvantage. Queen Victoria recognized its importance, by visits and other personal con- descensions, long before the late changes in Europe could have diminished the grace of their bestowal ; and I will venture to say that every one of those attentions will have sown for her generous nature a crop of loyalty worth having. But for the benefit of such as are unacquainted with the city, or with a certain track of reading, I must give a more particular account of a school which in truth is a curiosity. Thousands of inhabitants of tin: metropolis have gone from west-end to east-end, and till the new hall was laid open to view by the alteration hi Newgate Street, never suspected that in the heart of it lies an old cloistered foundation, where a boy may grow up as i did, among six hundred others, and v as little of the very neighbourhood as the world does of him. 4 50 AUTOBIOGKAPHY OP LEIGH HUNT. Perhaps there is not a foundation in the country so truly English, taking that word to mean what Englishmen wish it to mean — something solid, unpretending, of good character, and free to all. More boys are to be found in it, who issue from a greater variety of ranks, than in any school in the kingdom; and as it is the most various, so it is the largest, of all the free schools. Nobility do not go there, except as boarders. Now and then a boy of a noble family may ba met with, and he is reckoned an interloper, and against the charter ; but the sons of poor gentry and London citizens abound; and with them an equal share is given to the sons of tradesmen of the very humblest description, not omitting servants. I would not take my oath — but I have a strong recollection, that in my time there were two boys, one of whom went up into the drawing-room to his lather, the master of the house; and the other, down into the kitchen to his father, the coachman. One thing, however, I know to be certain, and it is the noblest of all, namely, that the boys themselves (at least it was so in my time) had no sort of feeling of the difference of one another's ranks out of doors. The cleverest boy was the noblest, let his father be who he might. Christ Hospital is a nursery of tradesmen, of mer- chants, of naval officers, of scholars ; it has produced some of the greatest ornaments of their time; and the feeling among the boys themselves is, that it is a medium between the patrician pretension of such schools as Eton and West- minster, and the plebeian submission of the charity schools. In point of university honours it claims to be equal with the best ; and though other schools can show a greater abundance of eminent names, I know not where many will be found who are a greater host in themselves. One original author is worth a hundred transmitters of elegance: and such a one is to be found in Richardson, who here received what education he possessed. Here Camden also received the rudiments of his. Bishop Stillingfleet, according to the Memoirs of Pepys, was brought up in the school. We have had many eminent scholars, two of them Greek professors, to wit, Barnes and Scholefield, the latter of whom attained an extraordinary suc- cession of university honours. The rest are Markland ; Mid- dleton, late Bishop of Calcutta; and Mitchell, the translator of Aristophanes. Christ Hospital, I believe, towards the close of the last century, and the beginning of the present, sent out more living writers, in its proportion, than any other school. SCHOOL-DAYS. 51 There was Dr. Richards, author of the Aboriginal Britons ; Dyer, whose life was one unbroken dream of learning and goodness, and who used to make us wonder with passing through the school-room (where no other person in "town clothes" ever appeared) to consult books in the library; Le Grice, the translator of Longus ; Home, author of some well-known productions in controversial divinity ; Surr, the novelist (not in the Grammar School) ; James White, the friend of Charles Lamb, and not unworthy of him, author of Falstafs Letters (this was he who used to give an anni- versary dinner to the chimney-sweepers, merrier than, though not so magnificent as Mrs. Montague's) ; Pitman, a celebrated preacher, editor of some school-books and religious classics (also a veritable man of wit); Mitchell, before mentioned; myself, who stood next him ; Barnes, who came next, the Editor of the Times, than whom no man (if he had cared for it) could have been more certain of attaining celebrity for wit and literature; Townsend, a prebendary of Durham, author of Armageddon, and several theological works (it was he who went to see the Pope, in the hope of pei-suading him to concede points towards the amalgamation of the Papal and Protestant Churches); Gilly, another of the Durham preben- daries, an amiable man, who wrote the Narrative of the Wal- denses ; Scargill, a Unitarian minister, author of some tracts on Peace and War, &c. ; and lastly, whom I have kept by way of climax, Coleridge and Charles Lamb, two of the most original geniuses, not only of the day, but of the country. In the time of Henry the Eighth Christ Hospital was a monastery of Franciscan friars. Being dissolved among the others, Edward the Sixth, moved by a sermon of Bishop Ridley's, assigned the revenues of it to the maintenance ami education of a certain number of poor orphan children, born of citizens of London. I believe there has been no law passed to alter the letter of this intention; which is a pity, since the alteration has taken place. An extension of it was probably very good, and even demanded by circumstances. I have •n, for one, to be grateful for it. But tampering with matters-of-fact among children is dangerous. They soon learn to distinguish between allowed poetical fiction and that which they are told, under severe penalties, never to be guilty of; and this early sample of contradiction between the thing bed and the obvious feet, can do no good e in an establishment so plain-dealing in other respects as Christ 4—2 52 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. Hospital. The place is not only designated as an Orphan- house in its Latin title, but the boys, in the prayers which they repeat every day, implore the pity of heaven upon " us poor orphans." I remember the perplexity this caused me at a very early period. It is true, the word orphan may be used in a sense implying destitution of any sort; but this was not its Christ Hospital intention ; nor do the younger boys give it the benefit of that scholarly interpretation. There was another thing (now, I believe, done away) which existed in my time, and perplexed me still more. It seemed a glaring instance of the practice likely to result from the other assumption, and made me prepare for a hundred falsehoods and deceptions, which, mixed up with contradiction, as most things in society are, I sometimes did find, and oftener dreaded. I allude to a foolish custom they had in the ward which I first entered, and which was the only one that the company at the public suppers were in the habit of going into, of hanging up, by the side of each bed, a clean white napkin, which was sup- posed to be the one used by the occupiers. Now these nap- kins were only for show, the real towels being of the largest and coarsest kind. If the masters had been asked about them, they would doubtless have told the truth ; perhaps the nurses would have done so. But the boys were not aware of this. There they saw these " white lies " hanging before them, a conscious imposition; and I well remember how alarmed I used to feel, lest any of the company should direct their inquiries to me. Christ Hospital (for this is its proper name, and not Christ's Hospital) occupies a considerable portion of ground between Newgate Street, Giltspur Street, St. Bartholomew's, and Little Britain. There is a quadrangle with cloisters; and the square inside the cloisters is called the Garden, and most likely was the monastery garden. Its only delicious crop, for many years, has been pavement. Another large area, pre- senting the Grammar and Navigation Schools, is also mis- nomered the Ditch; the town-ditch having formerly run that way. In Newgate Street is seen the Hall, or eating-room, one of the noblest in England, adorned with enormously long paintings by Verrio and others, and with an organ. A por- tion of the old quadrangle once contained the library of the monks, and was built or repaired by the famous Whittington, wdiose arms were to be seen outside ; but alterations of late years have done it away. SCHOOL-DAYS. 53 In the cloisters a number of persons lie buried, besides the officers of the house. Among them is Isabella, wife of Edward the Second, the " She-wolf of France." I was not aware of this circumstance then; but many a time, with a recollection of some lines in " Blair's Grave " upon me, have I run as hard as I could at night-time from my ward to an- other, in order to borrow the next volume of some ghostly romance. In one of the cloisters was an impression resem- bling a gigantic foot, which was attributed by some to the angry stamping of the ghost of a beadle's wife ! A beadle was a higher sound to us than to most, as it involved ideas of detected apples in churchtime, " skulking " (as it was called) out of bounds, and a power of reporting us to the masters. But fear does not stand upon rank and ceremony. The wards, or sleeping-rooins, are twelve, and contained, in my time, rows of beds on each side, partitioned off, but connected with one another, and each having two boys to sleep in it. Down the middle ran the binns for holding bread and other things, and serving for a table when the meal was not taken in the hall ; and over the binns hung a great homely chandelier. To each of these wards a nurse was assigned, who was the widow of some decent liveryman of London, and who had the charge of looking after us at night-time, seeing to our wash- ing, &c, and carving for us at dinner: all of which gave her a good deal of power, more than her name warranted. The nurses, however, w r ere almost invariably very decent people, and performed their duty; which was not always the case with the young ladies, their daughters. There were five schools ; a grammar-school, a mathematical or navigation- school (added by Charles the Second, through the zeal of Mr. Pepys), a writing, a drawing, and a reading school. Those who could not read when they came on the foundation, went into the last. There were lew in the last-but-one, and I scarcely know what they did, or for what object. The writing-school was for those who were intended for trade and commerce; the mathematical, for boys who went as mid- shipmen into the naval and East India service; an. I the in ir-school for such as were designed for tin- Church, and to go to the University. The writing-school was by far the largest; and, what is very curious (it has been altered since), all tl ols were kepi quite distinct; so that a boy might arrive at tin; age <>i fifteen in the grammar school, and 54: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. not know his multiplication-table ; which was the case with myself. Nor do I know it to this day ! Shades of Horace, Walpole, and Lord Lyttelton ! come to my assistance, and enable me to bear the confession : but so it is. The fault was not my fault at the time ; but I ought to have repaired it when I went out in the world ; and great is the mischief which it has done me. Most of these schools had several masters; besides whom there was a steward, who took care of our subsistence, and who had a general superintendence over all hours and cir- cumstances not connected with teaching. The masters had almost all been in the school, and might expect pensions or livings in their old age. Among those in my time, the mathematical master was Mr. Wales, a man well known for his science, who had been round the world with Captain Cook ; for which we highly venerated him. He was a good man, of plain, simple manners, with a heavy large person and a benign countenance. When he was at Otaheite, the natives played him a trick while bathing, and stole his small-clothes; which we used to think a liberty scarcely credible. The name of the steward, a thin stiff man of invincible formality of demeanour, admirably fitted to render encroachment im- possible, was Hathaway. We of the grammar-school used to call him " the Yeoman," on account of Shakspeare having married the daughter of a man of that name, designated as " a substantial yeoman." Our dress was of the coarsest and quaintest kind, but was respected out of doors, and is so. It consisted of a blue drugget gown, or body, with ample skirts to it ; a yellow vest underneath in winter-time ; small-clothes of Eussia duck ; worsted yellow stockings ; a leathern girdle ; and a little black worsted cap, usually carried in the hand. I believe it was the ordinary dress of children in humble life during the reign of the Tudors. We used to flatter ourselves that it was, taken from the monks ; and there went a monstrous tradition, that at one period it consisted of blue velvet with silver buttons. It was said, also, that during the blissful era of the blue velvet, we had roast mutton for supper; but that the small-clothes not being then in existence, and the mutton suppers too luxurious, the eatables were given up for the ineffables. A malediction, at heart, always followed the memory of him who had taken upon himself to decide so preposterously. SCHOOL-DATS. 55 To say the truth, we were not too well fed at that time, either in quantity or quality; and we could not enter with our hungry imaginations into these remote philosophies. Our breakfast was bread and water, for the beer was too bad to drink. The bread consisted of the half of a three-halfpenny loaf, according to the prices then current. This was not much for growing boys, who had had nothing to eat from six or seven o'clock the preceding evening. For dinner we had the same quantity of bread, with meat only every other day, and that consisting of a small slice, such as would be given to an infant three or four years old. Yet even that, with all our hunger, we very often left half-eaten — the meat was so tough. On the other days Ave had a milk-porridge, ludicrously thin ; or rice-milk, which was better. There were no vegetables or puddings. Once a month we had roast beef; and twice a year (1 blush to think of the eagerness with which it was looked for!) a dinner of pork. One was roast, and the other boiled ; and on the latter occasion we had our only pudding, which was of peas. I blush to remember this, not on account of our poverty, but on account of the sordidness of the custom. There had much better have been none. For supper we had a like piece of bread, Avith butter or cheese ; and then to bed, " with what appetite we might." Our routine of life was this. We rose to the call of a bell, at six in summer, and seven in winter; and after combing ourselves, and Avashing our hands and faces, Avent, at the call of another bell, to breakfast. All this took up about an hour. From breakfasi we ded to school, where we remained till eleven, winter and Bummer, and then had an hour's play. Dinner took place at tAvelve. Afterwards avus a little play till one, when we again went to school, and remained till five in summer and four in winter. At six avhs the supper. We I to play after it in summer till eight. In winter, we proceeded from supper to bed. On Sundays, the school-time of the other days was occupied in church, both morning and evening ; and as the Bible Avas read to us every day re every meal, and on going to bed, besides prayers and graci rivalled the monks in the religioi part of our duties. The effect Avas certainly not what Avas intended. The Bible, perhaps, was read thus frequently, in the first instance, OUt of Contradiction to the papal spirit that had so long kept it locked up; but, in tie eij bteenth century, the repetition 56 AUTOBIOGBAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. was not so desirable among a parcel of hungry boys, anxious to get their modicum to eat. On Sunday, what with the long service in the morning, the service again after dinner, and the inaudible and indifferent tones of some of the preachers, it was unequivocally tiresome. I, for one, who had been piously brought up, and continued to have religion inculcated on me by father and mother, began secretly to become as indifferent as I thought the preachers; and, though the morals of the school were in the main excellent and exemplary, we all felt, without knowing it, that it was the orderliness and example of the general system that kept us so, and not the religious part of it, which seldom entered our heads at all, and only tired us when it did. I am not begging any question here, or speaking for or against. I am only stating a fact. Others may argue that, however superfluous the readings and prayers might have been, a good general spirit of religion must have been incul- cated, because a great deal of virtue and religious charity is known to have issued out of that school, and no fanaticism. I shall not dispute the point. The case is true ; but not the less true is what I speak of. Latterly there came, as our parish clergyman, Mr. Crowther, a nephew of our famous Richardson, and worthy of the talents and virtues of his kinsman, though inclining to a mode of faith which is sup- posed to produce more faith than charity. But, till then, the persons who were in the habit of getting up in our church pulpit and reading-desk, might as well have hummed a tune to their diaphragms. They inspired us with nothing but mimicry. The name of the morning reader was Salt. He was a worthy man, I believe, and might, for aught we knew, have been a clever one ; but he had it all to himself. He spoke in his throat, with a sound as if he were weak and cor- pulent; and was famous among us for saying " murracles" instead of "miracles." When we imitated him, this was the only word we drew upon : the rest was unintelligible suffoca- tion. Our usual evening preacher was Mr. Sandiford, who had the reputation of learning and piety. It was of no use to us, except to make us associate the ideas of learning and piety in the pulpit with inaudible humdrum. Mr. Sandiford's voice was hollow and low ; and he had a habit of dipping up and down over his book, like a chicken drinking. Mr. Salt was eminent for a single word. Mr. Sandiford surpassed him, for he had two audible phrases. There was, it is true, no SCHOOL-DAYS. 57 great variety in them. One was " the dispensation of I\ roses ;" the other (with a due interval of hum), " the Mosaic dispen- sation." These he used to repeat so often, that in our cari- catures of him they sufficed for an entire portrait. The reader may conceive a large church (it was Christ Church, Newgate Street), with six hundred boys, seated like charity-children up in the air, on each side of the organ, Mr. Sandiford hum- ming in the valley, and a few maid-servants who formed his afternoon congregation. We did not dare to go to sleep. We were not allowed to read. The great boys used to get those that sat behind them to play with their hair. Some whispered to their neighbours, and the others thought of their lessons and tops. I can safely say, that many of us would have been good listeners, and most of us attentive ones, if the clergyman could have been heard. As it was, I talked as well as the rest, or thought of my exercise. Sometimes we could not help joking and laughing over our weariness : and then fear was, lest the steward had seen us. It was part of the business of the steward to preside over the boys in church- time. He sat aloof, in a place where he could view the whole of his flock. There was a ludicrous kind of revenge we had of him, whenever a particular part of the Bible was read. This was the parable of the Unjust Steward. The boys waited anxiously till the passage commenced; and then, as if by a eral conspiracy, at the words "thou unjust steward," the whole school turned their eyes upon this unfortunate officer, who sat " Like Teneriff or Atlas unremoved." We persuaded ourselves, that the more unconscious he looked, the more he was acting. By a singular chance, there were two clergymen, occasional preachers in our pulpit, who were as loud and startling as the others were somniferous. One of them, with a sort of flat, high voice, had a remarkable way of making a ladder of it, climbing higher and higher to the end of the sentence. It lit to be described by the gamut, or written up-hill. Per- haps il was an association of ideas, that has made me recollect one particular pa sage. It is where Ahab consults the pro- phets, asking them whether he shall go up to Ramoth Gilead to battle. "Shall I go against Ramoth Gilead to battle, or shall I fori tear ? and they said, Go up ; for the Lord shall deliver it into the hand of the king." lie used to give this out in such a manner, that you might have fancied him climb- 58 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OP LEIGH HUNT. ing out of the pulpit, sword in hand. The other was a tall thin man, with a noble voice. He would commence a prayer in a most stately and imposing manner, full both of dignity and feeling ; and then, as if tired of it, would hurry over ail the rest. Indeed, he began every prayer in this way, and was as sure to hurry it ; for which reason, the boys hailed the sight of him, as they knew they should get sooner out of church. When he commenced, in his noble style, the band seemed to tremble against his throat, as though it had been a sounding-board. Being able to read, and knowing a little Latin, I was put at once into the Under Grammar School. How much time I wasted there in learning the accidence and syntax, I cannot say ; but it seems to me a long while. My grammar seemed always to open at the same place. Things are managed dif- ferently now, I believe, in this as well as in many other re- spects. Great improvements have been made in the whole establishment. The boys feed better, learn better, and have longer holidays in the country. In my time, they never slept out of the school, but on one occasion, during the whole of their stay ; this was for three weeks in summer-time, which they were bound to pass at a certain distance from London. They now have these holidays with a reasonable frequency ; and they all go to the different schools, instead of being con- fined, as they were then, some to nothing but writing and cyphering, and some to the languages. It has been doubted by some of us elders, whether this system will beget such temperate, proper students, with pale faces, as the other did. I dare say, our successors are not afraid of us. I had the pleasure, some years since, of dining in company with a Deputy Grecian, who, with a stout rosy-faced person, had not failed to acquire the scholarly turn for joking which is common to a classical education ; as well as those simple, becoming man- ners, made up of modesty and proper confidence, which have been often remarked as distinguishing the boys on this foun- dation. " But what is a Deputy Grecian ? " Ah, reader ! to ask that question, and at the same time to know anything at all worth knowing, would at one time, according to our notion of things, have been impossible. When I entered the school, I was shown three gigantic boys, young men rather (for the eldest was between seventeen and eighteen), who, I was told, were going to the University. These were the Grecians. SCHOOL-DAYS. 59 They were the three head boys of the Grammar School, and were understood to have their destiny fixed for the Church. The next class to these, like a College of Cardinals to those three Popes (for every Grecian was in our eyes infallible), were the Deputy Grecians. The former were supposed to have completed their Greek studies, and were deep in Sophocles and Euripides. The latter were thought equally competent to tell you anything respecting Homer and Demosthenes. These two c'asses, and the head boys of the Navigation School, held a certain rank over the whole place, both in school and out. Indeed, the whole of the Navigation School, upon the strength of cultivating their valour for the navy, ' and being called Ring's Boys, had succeeded in establishing an extra- ordinary pretension to respect. This they sustained in a manner as laughable to call to mind as it was grave in its reception. It was an etiquette among them never to move out of a right line as they walked, whoever stood in their way. I believe there was a secret understanding with Grecians and Deputy Grecians, the former of whom were unquestionably lords paramount in point of fact, and stood and walked aloof when all the rest of the school were marshalled in bodies. I do not remember any clashing between these civil and naval powers; but I remember well my astonishment when I first beheld some of my little comrades overthrown by the pro- gress of one of these very straightforward marine person' who walked on with as tranquil and unconscious a face as it' nothing had happened. It was not a fierce-looking push ; there seemed to be no intention in it. The insolence lay in the boy not appearing to know that such inferior creatures existed. It was always thus, wherever he came. If aware, the boys got out of his Avay ; if not, down they went, one or more; away rolled the top or the marbles, and on walked the future captain — " In maiden navigation, frank and free." These boys wore a badge on the shoulder, of which they were very proud; though in the streets it must have helped to con- found them with charity boys. For charity boys, I must own, we all had a great contempt, or thought so. We did not dare to know that there mighl have been a little jealousy of our own position in it, placed as we were midway between the homeliness of the common charity-school and the dignity of the foundations. We called them " chizzy-wags" and had a icular seem and hatred of their nasal tone in singing. 60 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. The under grammar-master, in my time, was the Rev. Mr. Field. He was a good-looking man, very gentlemanly, and always dressed at the neatest. I believe he once wrote a play. He had the reputation of being admired by the ladies. A man of a more handsome incompetence for his situation perhaps did not exist. He came late of a morning ; went away soon in the afternoon; and used to walk up and down, languidly bearing his cane, as if it were a lily, and hearing our eternal Dominuses and As in prcesentis with an air of ineffable endurance. Often he did not hear at all. It was a joke with us, when any of our friends came to the door, and we asked his permission to go to them, to address him with some preposterous question wide of the mark ; to which he used to assent. We would say, for instance, " Are you not a great fool, sir?" or, " Isn't your daughter a pretty girl?" to which he would reply, " Yes, child." When he condescended to hit us with the cane, he made a face as if he were taking physic. Miss Field, an agreeable-looking girl, was one of the goddesses of the school ; as far above us as if she had lived on Olympus. Another was Miss Patrick, daughter of the lamp- manufacturer in Newgate Street. I do not remember her face so well, not seeing it so often; but she abounded in admirers. I write the names of these ladies at full length, because there is nothing that should hinder their being pleased at having caused us so many agreeable visions. We used to identify them with the picture of Venus in Tooke's Pantheon. The other master, the upper one, Boyer — famous for the mention of him by Coleridge and Lamb — was a short stout man, inclining to punchiness, with large face and hands, an aquiline nose, long upper lip, and a sharp mouth. His eye was close and cruel. The spectacles which he wore threw a balm over it. Being a clergyman, he dressed in black, with a powdered wig. His clothes were cut short; his hands hung out of the sleeves, with tight wristbands, as if ready for execution ; and as he generally wore gray worsted stockings, very tight, with a little balustrade leg, his whole appearance presented something formidably succinct, hard, and mechani- cal. In fact, his weak side, and undoubtedly his natural destination, lay in carpentry; and he accordingly carried, in a side-pocket made on purpose, a carpenter's rule. The merits of Boyer consisted in his being a good verbal scholar, and conscientiously acting up to the letter of time and attention. I have seen him nod at the close of the long SCHOOL-DAYS. 61 summer school-hours, wearied out ; and I should have pitied him if he had taught us to do anything but fear. Though a clergyman, very orthodox, and of rigid morals, he indulged himself in an oath, which was " God's-my-life ! " When you were out in your lesson, he turned upon you a roimd staring eye like a fish ; and he had a trick of pinching you under the chin, and by the lobes of the ears, till he would make the blood come. He has many times lifted a boy off the ground in this way. He was, indeed, a proper tyrant, passionate and capricious ; would take violent likes and dis- likes to the same boys ; fondle some without any apparent reason, though he had a leaning to the servile, and, perhaps, to the sons of rich people; and he would persecute others in a manner truly frightful. I have seen him beat a sickly- looking, melancholy boy (C n) about the head and ears, till the poor fellow, hot, dry-eyed, and confused, seemed lost in beAvilderment. C n, not long alter he took orders, died, out of his senses. I do not attribute that catastrophe to the master ; and of course he could not wish to do him any last- ing mischief. He had no imagination of any sort. But there is no saying how far his treatment of the boy might have contributed to prevent a cure. Tyrannical school- masters nowadays are to be found, perhaps, exclusively in such inferior schools as those described with such masterly and indignant edification by my friend Charles Dickens ; but they formerly seemed to have abounded in all ; and masters, as well as boys, have escaped the chance of many bitter reflections, since a wiser and more generous intercourse has come up between thi I have some stories of Boyer that will completely show Lis character, and at the same time relieve the reader's indigna- tion by something ludicrous in their excess. We had a few boarders at the school : boys whose parents were too rich t<> them go on the foundation. Among them, in my time, was Carlton, a son of Lord Dorchester; Macdonald, one of the Lord Chief Baron's sons ; and R , the son of a rich merchant. Carlton, who was a fine fellow, manly and full of I sense, took his new ma iter and his caresses very coolly, and did not want them. Little Macdonald also could dis- • with them, and would put on his delicate gloves after lesson, with an air as if he resumed his patrician plumage. li W her, and willing to be encouraged; and there would the master sit, with his arm round his tall waist, 62 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. helping him to his Greek verbs, as a nurse does bread and milk to an infant ; and repeating them, when he missed, with a fond patience, that astonished us criminals in drugget. Very different was the treatment of a boy on the founda- tion, whose friends, by some means or other, had prevailed on the master to pay him an extra attention, and try to get him on. He had come into the school at an age later than usual, and could hardly read. There was a book used by the learners in reading, called Dialogues between a Missionary and an Indian. It was a poor performance, full of incon- clusive arguments and other commonplaces. The boy in question used to appear with this book in his hand in the middle of the school, the master standing behind him. The lesson was to begin. Poor , whose great fault lay in a deep-toned drawl of his syllables and the omission of his stops, stood half looking at the book, and half casting his eye towards the right of him, whence the blows were to proceed. The master looked over him, and his hand was ready. I am not exact in my quotation at this distance of time ; but the spirit of one of the passages that I recollect was to the following purport, and thus did the teacher and his pupil proceed: — Master. — " Now, young man, have a care ; or I'll set you a swingeing task." (A common phrase of his.) Pupil. — (Making a sort of heavy bolt at his calamity, and never remembering his stop at the Avord Missionary.) " Mis- sionary Can you see the wind ? " (Master gives him a slap on the cheek.) Pupil. — (Raising his voice to a cry, and still forgetting his stop.) " Indian No ! " Master.' — " God's-my-life, young man ! have a care how you provoke me ! " Pupil. — (Always forgetting the stop.) " Missionary How then do you know that there is such a thing ? " (Here a terrible thump.) Pupil. — (With a shout of agony.) " Indian Because I feel it." One anecdote of his injustice will suffice for all. It is of ludicrous enormity; nor do I believe anything more fla- grantly wilful was ever done by himself. I heard Mr. C , the sufferer, now a most respectable person in a Government office, relate it with a due relish, long after quitting the school. The master was in the habit of " spiting " C ; SCHOOL-DAYS. 63 that is to say, of taking every opportunity to be severe with him; nobody knew why. One day he comes into the school, and finds him placed in the middle of it with three other boys. He was not in one of his worst humours, and did not seem inclined to punish them, till he saw his antagonist. "Oh, oh ! sir," said he: "what ! you are among them, are you ? " and gave him an exclusive thump on the face. He then turned to one of the Grecians, and said, " I have not time to flog all these boys; make them draw lots, and I'll punish one." The lots were drawn, and C 'a was favour- able. "Oh, oh!" returned the master, when he saw them, " you have escaped, have you, sir ? " and pulling out his watch, and turning again to the Grecian, observed, that he found he had time to punish the whole three; "and, sir," added he to C , with another slap, " I'll begin with you. He then took the boy into the library and flogged him; and, on issuing forth again, had the face to say, with an air of indifference, " I have not time, after all, to punish these two other boys ; let them take care how they provoke me another time." Often did I wish that I were a fairy, in order to play him tricks like a Caliban. We used to sit and fancy what we should do with his wig; how Ave would hamper and vex him; " put knives in his pillow, and halters in his pew." To venture on a joke in our own mortal persons, was like playing with Polyphemus. One afternoon, when he was nodding with sleep over a lesson, a boy of the name of Meader, who stood behind him, ventured to take a pin, and begin ad- vancing with it up his wig. The hollow, exhibited between the wig and the nape of the neck, invited him. The boys encouraged this daring act of gallantry. Nods and becks, and then whispers of "Go il, M. !" gave more and more valour to his hand. On a sudden, the master's head falls back; he starts with eyes like a shark ; and seizing the unfortunate culprit, who stood helpless in the act of holding the pin, caught hold of him, fiery with passion. A "swinge- in- task" ensued, which kept him at home all the holidays. One nf these tasks would consist of an impossible quantity of il, which the learner, unable to retain it at once, wasted In hearl and soul out " to get up," till it was too late. Sometimes, however, our >!■ - into a dilemma, and then hi' did not know how to get out of it. A boy, now and th' ii, would be roused into open and fierce remonstrance. I 64 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. recollect S., afterwards one of the mildest of preachers, start- ing up in his place, and pouring forth on his astonished hearer a torrent of invectives and threats, which the other could only answer by looking pale, and uttering a few threats in return. Nothing came of it. He did not like such matters to go before the governors. Another time, Favell, a Grecian, a youth of high spirit, whom he had struck, went to the school- door, opened it, and, turning round with the handle in his grasp, told him he would never set foot again in the place, unless he promised to treat him with more delicacy. " Come back, child; come back !" said the other, pale, and in a faint voice. There was a dead silence. Favell came back, and nothing more was done. A sentiment, unaccompanied with something practical, would have been lost upon him. D , who went after- wards to the Military College at Woolwich, played him a trick, apparently between jest and earnest, which amused us exceedingly. He was to be flogged; and the dreadful door of the library was approached. (They did not invest the books with flowers, as Montaigne recommends.) Down falls the criminal, and twisting himself about the master's legs, which he does the more when the other attempts to move, repeats without ceasing, " Oh, good God ! consider my father, sir ; my father, sir; you know my father !" The point was felt to be getting ludicrous, and was given up. P , now a popular preacher, was in the habit of entertaining the boys that way. He was a regular wag; and would snatch his jokes out of the very flame and fury of the master, like snap- dragon. Whenever the other struck him, P. would get up ; and, half to avoid the blows, and half render them ridiculous, begin moving about the school-room, making all sorts of antics. When he was struck in the face, he would clap his hand with affected vehemence to the place, and cry as rapidly, " Oh, Lord ! " If the blow came on the arm, he would grasp his arm, with a similar exclamation. The master would then go, driving and kicking him ; while the patient accompanied every blow with the same comments and illustrations, making faces to us by way of index. What a bit of a golden age was it, when the Rev. Mr. Steevens, one of the under grammar-masters, took his place, on some occasion, for a short time ! Steevens was short and fat, with a handsome, cordial face. You loved him as you looked at him; and seemed as if you should love him the SCHOOL-DATS. 65 more the fatter he became. I stammered when I was at that time of life : which was an infirmity that used to get me into terrible trouble with the master. Steevens used to say, on the other hand, "Here conies our little black-haired friend, who stammers so. Now, let us see what we can do for him." The consequence was, I did not hesitate half so much as with the other. When I did, it was out of impatience to please him. Such of us were not liked the better by the master as were in favour with his wife. She was a sprightly, good- looking woman, with black eyes; and was beheld with trans- port by the boys, whenever she appeared at the school-door. Her husband's name, uttered in a mingled tone of good-nature and imperativeness, brought him down from his seat with smiling haste. Sometimes he did not return. On entering the school one day, he found a boy eating cherries. " Where did you get those cherries ? " exclaimed he, thinking the boy h;ul nothing to say for himself. " Mrs. Boyer gave them me, sir." lie turned away, scowling with disappointment. Speaking of fruit, reminds me of a pleasant trait on the part of a Grecian of the name of Le Grice. Pie was the mad- di : of all the great beys in my time; clever, full of address, and not hampered with modesty. Remote humours, not lightly to be heard, fell on our ears, respecting pranks of his amongst the nurses' daughters. He had a fair handsome face, with delicate aquiline nose, and twinkling eyes. I remember his astonishing me when I was "a new boy," with sending me for a bottle of water, which he proceeded to pour down the back of G., a grave Deputy Grecian. On the master asking him one day why he, of all the boys, had given up no exer- cise (it was a particular exercise that they were bound to do in the course of a long set of holidays), he said he had had " a lethargy." The extreme impudence of this puzzled the master ; and, I believe, nothing came of it. Hut what I alluded to about the fruit was this. Le Grice was in the habit of eating apples in school-time, for which he had been i rebuked. One day, having particularly pleased the r, the latte,-, who was eating apples himself, and who would new and then with great ostentation present a boy with some halfpenny token of his mansuetude, called out to his favourite of the moment, "Le Grice, here is an apple Le Grice, who felt his dignity hurt as a Grecian, but was more plea ed at having this opportunity of mortify- 5 GG AtJTOBIOGEAPHY OP LEIGH HUNT. ing his reprover, replied, with an exquisite tranquillity of assurance, " Sir, I never eat apples." For this, among other things, the boys adored him. Poor fellow ! He and Favell (who, though very generous, was said to be a little too sensible of an humble origin) wrote to the Duke of York, when they were at College, for commissions in the army. The Duke good-naturedly sent them. Le Grice died in the West Indies. Favell was killed in one of the battles in Spain, but not before he had distinguished himself as an officer and a gentleman. The Upper Grammar School was divided into four classes or forms. The two under ones were called Little and Great Erasmus; the two upper were occupied by the Grecians and Deputy Grecians. We used to think the title of Erasmus taken from the great scholar of that name ; but the sudden appearance of a portrait among us, bearing to be the likeness of a certain Erasmus Smith, Esq., shook us terribly in this opinion, and was a hard trial of our gratitude. We scarcely relished this perpetual company of our benefactor, watch- ing us, as he seemed to do, with his omnipresent eyes. I believe he was a rich merchant, and that the forms of Little and Great Erasmus were really named after him. It was but a poor consolation to think that he himself, or his great-uncle, might have been named after Erasmus. Little Erasmus learned Ovid; Great Erasmus, Virgil, Terence, and the Greek Testament. The Deputy Grecians were in Homer, Cicero, and Demosthenes; the Grecians, in the Greek plays and the mathematics. When a boy entered the Upper School, he was understood to be in the road to the University, provided he had inclina- tion and talents for it ; but, as only one Grecian a year went to College, the drafts out of Great and Little Erasmus into the writing-school were, numerous. A few also became Deputy Grecians without going farther, and entered the world from that form. Those who became Grecians always went to the University, though not always into the Church ; which was reckoned a departure from the contract. When I first came to school, at seven years old, the names of the Grecians were Allen, Favell, Thomson, and Le Grice, brother of the Le Grice above mentioned, and now a clergyman in Cornwall. Charles Lamb had lately been Deputy Grecian ; and Coleridge had left for the University. The master, inspired by his subject with an eloquence be- SCHOOL-DAYS. 67 yond himself, once called him, "that sensible fool, Colleridge," pronouncing the word like a dactyl. Coleridge must have alternately delighted and bewildered him. The compliment, as to the bewildering was returned, if not the delight. The pupil, I am told, said he dreamt of the master all his life, and that his dreams were horrible. A bon-mot of his is recorded, very characteristic both of pupil and master. Coleridge, when he heard of his death, said, " It was lucky that the cherubim who took him to heaven were nothing but faces and wings, or he would infallibly have flogged them by the way." This was his esoterical opinion of him. His outward and subtler opinion, or opinion exoterical, he favoured the public with in his Literary Life. He praised him, among other things, for his good taste in poetry, and his not suffering the boys to get into the commonplaces of Castalian Streams, Invocations to the Muses, &c. Certainly, there were no such things in our days — at least, to the best of my remembrance. But I do not think the master saw through them, out of a perception of anything further. His objection to a commonplace must have been itself commonplace. I do not remember seeing Coleridge when I was a child. Lamb's visits to the school, after he left it, I remember well, with his fine intelligent face. Little did I think I should have the pleasure of sitting with it in after-times as an old friend, and seeing it careworn and still finer. Allen, the Grecian, was so handsome, though in another and more obvious way, that running one day against a barrow-woman in the street, and turning round to appease her in the midst of her abuse, she said, " Where are you driving to, you great hulking, good-for-nothing — beautiful fellow, God bless you!" Le Grice the elder was a wag, like his brother, but more staid. He went into the Church, as he ought to do, and married a rich widow. He published a translation, abridged, of the celebrated pastoral of Longus; and report at school made him ti hor of a little anonymou tra I on the Art of Poking the Fire. Few of us cared for any of the books that wen 1 , taughl : and no pains were taken to make us do BO. The boys had no helps to information, had or good, except what the master afforded them respecting manufactures — a branch of know- e to which, as 1 before observed, he had a great tendency} and which was the onlj poinl on which he was enthusiastic aitous. l do mil blame him for what he taught u of 5—2 68 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. this kind: there was a use in it, beyond what he was aware of ; but it was the only one on which he volunteered any assistance. In this he took evident delight. I remember, in explaining pigs of iron or lead to us, he made a point of crossing one of his legs with the other, and, cherishing it up and down Avith great satisfaction, saying, " A pig, children, is about the thickness of my leg." Upon which, with a slavish pretence of novelty, Ave all looked at it, as if he had not told us so a hundred times. In everything else we had to hunt out our own knowledge. He would not help us with a word till he had ascertained that Ave had done all Ave could to learn the meaning of it ourselves. This discipline was useful ; and in this and every other respect, Ave had all the advantages which a mechanical sense of right, and a rigid exaction of duty, could afford us ; but no further. The only superfluous grace that he was guilty of, was the keeping a manuscript book, in which, by a rare luck, the best exercise in English verse was occasionally copied out for immortality ! To have verses in " the Book" was the rarest and highest honour conceivable to our imaginations. I never, alas ! attained it. PIoav little did I care for any verses at that time, except English ones ; I had no regard even for Ovid. I read and knew nothing of Horace ; though I had got somehoAV a liking for his character. Cicero I disliked, as I cannot help doing still. Demosthenes I was inclined to admire, but did not know Avhy, and would very Avillingly have given up him and his difficulties together. Homer I regarded with horror, as a series of lessons which I had to learn by heart before I under- stood him. When I had to conquer, in this Avay, lines Avhich I had not construed, I had recourse to a sort of artificial memory, by which I associated the Greek words Avith sounds that had a meaning in English. Thus, a passage about Thetis I made to bear on some circumstance that had taken place in the school. An account of a battle Avas converted into a series of jokes ; and the master, Avhile I was saying my lesson to him in trepidation, little suspected what a figure he Avas often cutting in the text. The only classic I remember hav- ing any love for Avas Virgil; and that was for the episode of Nisus and Euryalus. But there Avere three books Avhich I read in Avhenever I could, and Avhich often got me into trouble. These were Tooke's Pantheon, Lempriere's Classical Dictionary, and Spence's Polymetis, the great folio edition with plates, Tooke SCHOOL-DAYS. GO was a prodigious favourite with us. I see before me, as vividly now as ever, his Mars and Apollo, his Venus and Aurora, which I was continually trying to copy ; the Mars, coming on furiously in his car ; Apollo, with his radiant head, in the midst of shades and fountains; Aurora with hers, a golden dawn ; and Venus, very handsome, we thought, and not looking too modest in " a slight cymar." It is curious how completely the graces of the Pagan theology overcame with us the wise cautions and reproofs that were set against it in the pages of Mr. Tooke. Some years after my de- parture from school, happening to look at the work in ques- tion, I was surprised to find so much of that matter in him. When I came to reflect, I had a sort of recollection that we used occasionally to notice it, as something inconsistent with the rest of the text — strange, and odd, and like the inter- ference of some pedantic old gentleman. This, indeed, is pretty nearly the case. The author has also made a strange mistake about Bacchus, whom he represents, both in his text and his print, as a mere belly-god; a corpulent child, like the Bacchus bestriding a tun. This is anything but classical. The truth is, it was a sort of pious fraud, like many other things palmed upon antiquity. Tooke's Pantheon was written originally in Latin by the Jesuits. Our Lempriere was a fund of entertainment. Spence's Polymetis was not so easily got at. There was also some- thing in the text that did not invite us; but we admired the fine large prints. However, Tooke was the iavourite. I can- not divest myself of a notion, to this day, that there is some- thing really clever in the picture of Apollo. The Minerva we " coidd not abide; " Juno was no favourite, for all her throne and her peacock; and we thought Diand too pVetty. The instinct against these three goddesses begins early. I used to wonder how Juno and Minerva could have the insolence to ute the apple with Venus. In those time.-, Cooke's edition of the British poets came up. I had got an odd volume of Spenser; and I fell passionately in love with Collins and Gray. How I loved tho e little six- penny numbers containing whole poets! I doted on their flize; 1 doted on their typo, on their ornaments, on their wrappers containing lists of other poets, and on the engravings from Bark. I boughl them over and ovei again, and used to get up select sets, which disappeared like buttered crumpets ; fur I could resist neither giving them away, nor possessing 70 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OP LEIGH HUNT. them. When the master tormented me — when I used to hate and loathe the sight of Homer, and Demosthenes, and Cicero — ■ I would comfort myself with thinking of the sixpence in my pocket, with which I shoidd go out to Paternoster Row, when school was over, and buy another number of an English poet. I was already fond of writing verses. The first I remem- ber were in honour of the Duke of York's " Victory at Dun- kirk ; " which victory, to my great mortification, turned out to be a defeat. I compared him with Achilles and Alexander; or should rather say, trampled upon those heroes in the com- parison. I fancied him riding through the field, and shooting right and left of him ! Afterwards, when in Great Erasmus, I wrote a poem called Winter, in consequence of reading Thomson ; and when Deputy Grecian, I completed some hun- dred stanzas of another, called the Fairy King, which was to be in emulation of Spenser ! I also wrote a long poem in irregidar Latin verses (such as they were) entitled Thor ; the consequence of reading Gray's Odes and Mallett's Northern Antiquities. English verses were the only exercise I per- formed with satisfaction. Themes, or prose essays, I wrote so badly, that the master was in the habit of contemptuously crumpling them up in his hand, and calling out, " Here, children, there is something to amuse you ! " Upon which the servile part of the boys would jump up, seize the paper, and be amused accordingly. The essays must have been very absurd, no doubt ; but those who would have tasted the ridicule best were the last to move. There was an absurdity in giving us such essays to write. They were upon a given subject, generally a moral one, such as^Ambition or the Love of Money : and the regular process in the manufacture was this : — You wrote out the sub- ject very fairly at top, Quid non mortalia, &c, or, Crescit amor minimi. Then the ingenious thing was to repeat this apophthegm in as many words and roundabout phrases as possible, which took up a good bit of the paper. Then you attempted to give a reason or two, why amor nummi was bad ; or on Avhat accounts heroes ought to eschew ambition; after which naturally came a few examples, got out of Plutarch or the Selectee c Profanis ; and the happy moralist concluded with signing his name. Somebody speaks of schoolboys going about to one another on these occasions, and asking for " a little sense." That was not the phrase with us ; it was " a thought," ( ' P , can you give me a thought ? " "C , SCHOOL-DAYS. 71 for God's sake, help me to a thought, for it only wants ten minutes to eleven." It was a joke with P , who knew my hatred of themes, and how I used to hurry over them, to come to me at a quarter to eleven, and say, " Hunt, have you begun your theme ? " — " Yes, P ." He then, when the quarter of an hour had expired, and the bell tolled, came again, and, with a sort of rhyming formula to the other question, said, " Hunt, have you done your theme ? " — « Yes, P ." How I dared to trespass in this way upon the patience of the master, I cannot conceive. I suspect that the themes appeared to him more absurd than careless. Perhaps another thing perplexed him. The master was rigidly orthodox ; the school establishment also was orthodox and high Tory ; and there was just then a little perplexity, arising from the free doctrines inculcated by the books we learned, and the new and alarming echo of them struck on the ears of power by the French Revolution. My father was in the habit of express- ing his opinions. He did not conceal the new tendency which he felt to modify those which he entertained respecting both Church and State. His unconscious son at school, nothing doubting or suspecting, repeated his eulogies of Timoleon and the Gracchi, with all a schoolboy's enthusiasm ; and the master's mind was not of a pitch to be superior to this un- witting annoyance. It was on these occasions, I suspect, that he crumpled up my themes with a double contempt, and with an equal degree of perplexity. There was a better school exercise, consisting of an abridg- ment of some paper in the Spectator. We made, however, little of it, and thought it very diflicult and perplexing. In fact, it was a hard task for boys, utterly unacquainted with the world, to seize the best points out of the writings of masters in experience. It only gave the Spectator an unnatural gravity in our eyes. A common paper for selection, because reckoned one of the easiest, was the one beginning, " I have always preferred cheerfulness to mirth." I had heard this paper so often, and was so tired with it, that it gave me a great inclination to prefer mirth to cheerfulne My books were a never-ceasing consolation to me, and such they have ever continued. My favourites, out of school hours, were Spenser, Collins, Gray, and the Arabian Nights. Pope I admired more than loved; Milton wa above me; and the only play of .Shakspeare's with which I was conversant 72 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. was Hamlet, of which I had a delighted awe. Neither then, however, nor at any time, have I been as fond of dramatic reading as of any other, though I have written many dramas myself, and have even a special propensity for so doing ; a contradiction for which I have never been able to account. Chaucer, who has since been one of my best friends, I was not acquainted with at school, nor till long afterwards. Hudibras I remember reading through at one desperate plunge, while I lay incapable of moving, with two scalded legs. I did it as a sort of achievement, driving on through the verses without understanding a twentieth part of them, but now and then laughing immoderately at the rhymes and similes, and catching a bit of knowledge unawares. I had a schoolfellow of the name of Brooke, afterwards an officer in the East India Service — a grave, quiet boy, with a fund of manliness and good-humour. He would pick out the ludi- crous couplets, like plums ; such as those on the astrologer, — " Who deals in destiny's dark counsels, And sage opinions of the moon sells;" And on the apothecary's shop — ■ " With stores of deleterious med'eines, Which whosoever took is dead since." He had the little thick duodecimo edition, with Hogarth's plates — dirty, and well read, looking like Hudibras himself. I read through, at the same time, and with little less sense of it as a task, Milton's Paradise Lost. The divinity of it was so much " Heathen Greek " to us. Unluckily, I could not taste the beautiful "Heathen Greek" of the style. Mil- ton's heaven made no impression ; nor could I enter even into the earthly catastrophe of his man and woman. The only two things I thought of were their happiness in Paradise, where (to me) they eternally remained ; and the strange malignity of the devil, who, instead of getting them out of it, as the poet represents, only served to bind them closer. He seemed an odd shade to the picture. The figure he cut in the engravings was more in my thoughts than anything said of him in the poem. He was a sort of human wild beast, lurk- ing about the garden in which they lived; though, in conse- quence of the dress given him in some of the plates, this man with a tail occasionally confused himself in my imagination with a Roman general. I could make little of it. I believe, the plates impressed me altogether much more than the poem. Perhaps they were the reason why I thought of Adam SCHOOL-DAYS. 73 and Eve as I did ; the pictures of them in their paradisaical state being more numerous than those in which they appear exiled. Besides, in their exile they were together ; and this constituting the best thing in their paradise, I suppose I could not so easily get miserable with them when out of it. I had the same impression from Dr. Johnson's Rasselas. I never thought of anything in it but the Happy Valley. I might have called to mind, with an effort, a shadowy some- thing about disappointment, and a long remainder of talk which I would not read again, perhaps never thoroughly did read. The Happy Valley was new to me, and delightful, and everlasting; and there the princely inmates were everlasting ;ly to be found. The scald that I speak of as confining me to bed was a bad one. I will give an account of it, because it furthers the elucidation of our school manners. I had then become ;i monitor, or one of the chiefs of a ward; and I was sitting before the fire one evening, after the boys had gone to bed, wrapped up in the perusal of the Wonderful Magazine, and having in my ear at the same time the bubbling of a great pot, or rather cauldron of water, containing what was by courtesy called a bread pudding; being neither more nor less than a loaf or two of our bread, which, with a little Bugar mashed up with it, was to serve for m er. And there were eyes, not yet asleep, which would look at it out of their beds, and regard it as a lordly dish. From this dream of bliss I was roused upon the sudden by a great cry, and a horrible agony in my legs. A "boy," as a fag was called, wishing to get something from the other side of the firepl and not choosing either to go round behind the table, or to disturb the illustrious legs of the monitor, had endeavoured to get under them or between them, and so pulled the ureal, handle of the pot after him. It was a frightful Bensation. The whole of my being seemed collected in one fiery torment into my legs. Wood, the Grecian (afterwards Fellow ofPem- .", at Cambridge), who was in our ward, and who Avas always very kind to me (led, I helieve, by my inclination for i which he had a greal name), came oul of his study, and after helping mo off with my Btockings, which was a horrid operation, the stockinj i b ing vi ry coarse, took me in his arms to the Bick ward. I shall never forgel the enchant- occasioned by r I air, as it Mew across the square of the sick ward. I lay there for several weeks, not 74 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OP LEIGH HUNT. allowed to move for some time ; and caustics became neces- sary before I got Avell. The getting well was delicious. I bad no tasks — no master ; plenty of books to read ; and the nurse's daughter (absit calumnia) brought me tea and buttered toast, and encouraged me to play the flute. My playing con- sisted of a few tunes by rote ; my fellow-invalids (none of them in very desperate case) would have it rather than no playing at all ; so we used to play and tell stories, and go to sleep, thinking of the blessed sick holiday we should have to-morrow, and of the bowl of milk and bread for breakfast, which was alone worth being sick for. The sight of Mr. Long's probe was not so pleasant. We preferred seeing it in the hands of Mr. Vincent, whose manners, quiet and mild, had double effect on a set of boys more or less jealous of the mixed humbleness and importance of their school. This was most likely the same gentleman of the name of Vincent, who afterwards became distinguished in his profession. He was dark, like a West Indian, and I used to think him handsome. Perhaps the nurse's daughter taught me to think so, for she was a considerable observer. CHAPTER IV. SCHOOL-DAYS {continued). I am grateful to Christ Hospital for having bred me up in old cloisters, for its making me acquainted with the languages of Homer and Ovid, and for its having secured to me, on the whole, a well-trained and cheerful boyhood. It pressed no superstition upon me. It did not hinder my growing mind from making what excursions it pleased into the wide and healthy regions of general literature. I might buy as much Collins and Gray as I pleased, and get novels to my heart's content from the circulating libraries. There was nothing prohibited but what would have been prohibited by all good fathers ; and everything was encouraged which would have been encouraged by the Steeles, and Addisons, and Popes ; by the Warburtons, and Atterburys, and Hoadleys. Boyer was a severe, nay, a cruel master ; but age and reflection have made me sensible that I ought always to add my testimony to his being a laborious and a conscientious one. When his severity went beyond the mark, I believe he was always sorry SCHOOL-DAYS. 75 for it : sometimes I am sure he was. He once (though the anecdote at first sight may look like a burlesque on the re- mark) knocked out one of my teeth with the back of a Homer, in a fit of impatience at my stammering. The tooth was a loose one, and I told him as much ; but the blood rushed out as I spoke : he turned pale, and, on my proposing to go out and wash the mouth, he said, " Go, child," in a tone of voice amounting to the paternal. Now " Go, child," from Boyer, was worth a dozen tender speeches from any one else; and it was felt that I had got an advantage over him, acknow- ledged by himself. If I had reaped no other benefit from Christ Hospital, the school would be ever dear to me from the recollection of the friendships I formed in it, and of the first heavenly taste it gave me of that most spiritual of the affections. I use the word " heavenly" advisedly ; and I call friendship the most spiritual of the affections, because even one's kindred, in par- taking of our flesh and blood, become, in a manner, mixed up with our entire being. Not that I would disparage any other form of affection, worshipping, as I do, all forms of it, love in particular, which, in its highest state, is friendship and something more. But if ever I tasted a disembodied trans- port on earth, it was in those friendships which I entertained at school, before I dreamt of any maturer feeling. I shall never forget the impression it first made on me. I loved my friend for his gentleness, his candour, his truth, his good repute, his freedom even from my own livelier manner, his calm and reasonable kindness. It was not any particular talent that attracted me to him, or anything striking whatso- ever. I should say, in one word, it was his goodness. I doubt whether he ever had a conception of a tithe of the regard and respect I entertained for him ; and I smile to think of the perplexity (though he never showed it) which he pro- bably felt sometimes at my enthusiastic expressions ; for I thought him a kind of angel. It is no exaggeration to say, that, take away the unspiritual part of it — the genius and the knowledge — and there is no height of conceit indulged in by the most romantic character in Shakspearc, which surpassed what I felt towards the merits I ascribed to him, and the delight which I took in his society. With the other boys I played antics, and rioted in fantastic jests ; but in his society, or whenever I thought of him, 1 fell into a kind of Sabbath state of bliss ; and 1 am sure I could have died for him. 76 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. I experienced this delightful affection towards three succes- sive schoolfellows, till two of thern had for some time gone out into the world and forgotten me ; but it grew less with each, and in more than one instance became rivalled by a new set of emotions, especially in regard to the last, for I fell in love with his sister — at least, I thought so. But on the occurrence of her death, not long after, I was startled at finding myself assume an air of greater sorrow than I felt, and at being Avilling to be relieved by the sight of the first pretty face that turned towards me. I was in the situation of the page in Figaro : — " Ogni donna cangiar di colore; Ogni donna mi fa palpitar." My friend, who died himself not long after his quitting the University, was of a German family in the service of the court, very refined and musical. I likened them to the people in the novels of Augustus La Fontaine ; and with the younger of the two sisters I had a great desire to play the part of the hero in the Family of Halden. The elder, who was my senior, and of manners too advanced for me to aspire to, became distinguished in private circles as an accomplished musician. How I used to rejoice when they struck their " harps in praise of Bragela ! " and how ill-bred I must have appeared when I stopped beyond all reasonable time of visiting, unable to tear myself away ! They lived in Spring Gardens, in a house which I have often gone out of my way to look at ; and as I first heard of Mozart in their company, and first heard his marches in the Park, I used to associate with their idea whatsoever was charming and graceful. Maternal notions of war came to nothing before love and music, and the steps of the officers on parade. The young ensign with his flag, and the ladies with their admiration of him, carried everything before them. I had already borne to school the air of " Non piic andrai ;" and, with the help of instruments made of paper, into which we breathed what imitations Ave could of hautboys and cla- rionets, had inducted the boys into the " pride, pomp, and circumstance" of that glorious bit of war. Thus is war clothed and recommended to all of us, and not without reason, as long as it is a necessity, or as long as it is something, at least, which we have not acquired knowledge or means enough to do away with. A bullet is of all pills the one that most requires gilding. SCHOOL-DAYS. 77 But I will not bring these night-thoughts into the morning of life. Besides, I am anticipating ; for this was not my first love. I shall mention that presently. I have not done with my school reminiscences ; but in order to keep a straightforward course, and notice simultaneous events in their proper places, I shall here speak of the persons and things in which I took the greatest interest when I was not within school-bounds. The two principal houses at which I visited, till the arrival of our relations from the "West Indies, were Mr. "West's (late President of the Eoyal Academy), in Newman-street, and Mr. Godfrey Thornton's (of the distinguished City family), in Austin Friars. How I loved the Graces in one, and every- thing in the other ! Mr. West (who, as I have already men- tioned, had married one of my relations) had bought his house, I believe, not long after he came to England ; and he had added a gallery at the back of it, terminating in a couple of lofty rooms. The gallery was a continuation of the house- passage, and, together with one of those rooms and the parlour, formed three sides of a garden, very small but elegant, with a grass-plot in the middle, and busts upon stands under an arcade. The gallery, as you went up it, formed an angle at a little distance to the left, then another to the right, and then took a longer stretch into the two rooms ; and it was hung with the artist's sketches all the way. In a corner between the two angles was a study-door, with casts of Venus and Apollo on each side of it. The two rooms contained the largest of his pictures; and in the farther one, after stepping softly down the gallery, as if reverencing the dumb life on the walls, you generally found the mild and quiet artist at his work ; happy, for he thought himself immortal. I need not enter into the merits of an artist who is so well known, and has been so often criticized. He was ;i man with regular, mild features; and, though of Quaker origin, had the look of what he was, a painter to a court. His appear- ance was so gentlemanly, that, the moment he changed his n for a coat, he seemed to be full -dressed. The simplicity and self-possession of the young Quaker, not having time enough to grow stiff (\\>v he went early to study at Rome), i, I suppose, with more ease than most would have done, the urbanities of his new position. And what simpli- city helped him to, favour would retain. Yet this man, so well bred, and BO indisputably clever in his art (whatever 78 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. might be the amount of his genius), had received so careless, or so homely an education when a boy, that he could hardly read. He pronounced also some of his words, in reading, with a puritanical barbarism, such as halve for have, as some people pronounce when they sing psalms. But this was, per- haps, an American custom. My mother, who both read and spoke remarkably well, would say haive and shaul (for shall), when she sang her hymns. But it was not so well in reading lectures to the Academy. Mr. West would talk of his art all day long, painting all the while. On other subjects he was not so fluent ; and on political and religious matters he tried hard to maintain the reserve common with those about a court. He succeeded ill in both. There were always strong suspi- cions of his leaning to his native side in politics ; and during Bonaparte's triumph, he could not contain his enthusiasm for the Eepublican chief, going even to Paris to pay him his homage, when First Consul. The admiration of high colours and powerful effects, natural to a painter, w r as too strong for him. How he managed this matter with the higher powers in England I cannot say. Probably he was the less heedful, inasmuch as he was not very carefully paid. I believe he did a great deal for George the Third with little profit. Mr. West certainly kept his love for Bonaparte no secret; and it was no wonder, for the latter expressed admiration of his pictures. The artist thought the conqueror's smile enchanting, and that he had the handsomest leg he had ever seen. He was present when the " Venus de' Medici " was talked of, the French having just taken possession of her. Bonaparte, Mr. West said, turned round to those about him, and said, with his eyes lit up, " She's coming !" as if he had been talking of a living person. I believe he retained for the Emperor the love that he had had for the First Consul, a wedded love, "for better, for worse." However, I believe also that he retained it after the Emperor's downfall — which is not what every painter did. But I am getting out of my chronology. The quiet of Mr. West's gallery, the tranquil, intent beauty of the statues, and the subjects of some of the pictures, particularly Death on the Pale Horse, the Deluge, the Scotch King hunting the Stag, Moses on Mount Sinai, Christ Healing the Sick (a sketch), Sir Philip Sidney giving up the Water to the Dying Soldier, the Installation of the Knights of the Garter, and Ophelia before the King and Queen (one of the best things he ever did), made a great impression upon me. My mother SCHOOL-DATS. 79 and I used to go down the gallery, as if we were treading on wool. She was in the habit of stopping to look at some of the pictures, particularly the Deluge and the Ophelia, with a countenance quite awe-stricken. She used also to point out to nie the subjects relating to liberty and patriotism, and the domestic affections. Agrippina bringing home the ashes of Germanicus was a great favourite with her. I remember, too, the awful delight afforded us by the Angel slaying the Army of Sennacherib; a bright figure lording it in the air, with a chaos of human beings below. As Mr. "West was almost sure to be found at work, in the farthest room, habited in his white woollen gown, so you might have predicated, with equal certainty, that Mrs. West was sitting in the parlour, reading. I used to think, that if I had such a parlour to sit in, I should do just as she did. It was a good-sized room, with two windows looking out on the little garden I spoke of, and opening to it from one of them by a flight of steps. The garden, with its busts in it, and the pictures which you knew were on the other side of its wall, had an Italian look. The room was hung with engravings and coloured prints. Among them was the Lion Hunt, from Rubens ; the Hierarchy with the Godhead, from Raphael, which I hardly thought it right to look at ; and two screens by the fireside, containing prints (from Angelica Kaufrman, I think, but I am not sure that Mr. West himself Avas not the designer) of the Loves of Angelica and Medoro, which I could have looked at from morning to night. An- gelica's intent eyes, I thought, had the best of it ; but I thought so without knowing why. This gave me a love for Ariosto before I knew him. I got Hoole's translation, but could make nothing of it. Angelica Kauffman seemed to me to have done much more for her namesake. She could see farther into a pair of eyes than Mr. Hoole with his spectacles. This reminds me that I could make as little of Pope's Homer, which a schoolfellow of mine was always reading, and which 1 was ashamed of not being able to like. It was not that I did ii'if admire Pope ; but the words in his translation always took precedence in my mind of the things, and the unvarying sweetness of his versification tired me before I knew the reason. This did not hinder me afterwards from trying to imitate it,; nor from succeeding; that is to say, as far as everybody else succeeds, and writing smooth verses. It is Pope's wit and closene that are the difficult things, and 80 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OP LEIGH HUNT. that make him what he is : a truism which the mistakes of critics on divers sides have rendered it but too warrantable to repeat. Mrs. West and my mother used to talk of old times, and Philadelphia, and my father's prospects at court. I sat apart with a book, from which I stole glances at Angelica. I had a habit at that time of holding my breath, which forced me every now and then to take long sighs. My aunt would offer me a bribe not to sigh. I would earn it once or twice ; but the sighs were sure to return. These wagers I did not care for ; but I remember being greatly mortified when Mr. West offered me half-a-crown if I would solve the old question of " Who was the father of Zebedee's children?" and I could not tell him. He never made his appearance till dinner, and returned to his painting-room directly after it. And so at tea-time. The talk was very quiet; the neighbourhood quiet; the servants quiet; I thought the very squirrel in the cage would have made a greater noise anywhere else. James, the porter, a fine tall fellow, who figured in his master's pictures as an apostle, was as quiet as he was strong. Standing for his picture had become a sort of religion with him. Even the butler, with his little twinkling eyes, full of pleasant conceit, vented his notions of himself in half-tones and whispers. This was a strange fantastic person. He got my brother Eobert to take a likeness of him, small enough to be contained in a shirt-pin. It was thought that his twinkling eyes, albeit not young, had some fair cynosure in the neighbourhood. What was my brother's amazement, Avhen, the next time he saw him, the butler said, with a face of enchanted satisfaction, " Well, sir, you see!" making a movement at the same time with the frill at his waistcoat. The miniature that was to be given to the object of his affections, had been given accordingly. It was in his own bosom ! But, notwithstanding my delight with the house at the West End of the town, it was not to compare with my beloved one in the City. There was quiet in the one ; there were beau- tiful statues and pictures ; and there was my Angelica for me, with her intent eyes, at the fireside. But, besides quiet in the other, there was cordiality, and there was music, and a family brimful of hospitality and good-nature, and dear Almeria (now Mrs. P e), who in vain pretends that she has become aged, which is what she never did, shall, would, might, should, or could do. Those were indeed holidays, on SCHOOL-DAYS. 81 which I used to go to Austin Friars. The house (such, at least, are my boyish recollections) was of the description I have been ever fondest of, — large, rambling, old-fashioned, solidly built, resembling the mansions about Highgate and other old villages. It was furnished as became the house of a rich merchant and a sensible man, the comfort predominating over the cost- liness. At the back was a garden with a lawn ; and a private door opened into another garden, belonging to the Company of Drapers ; so that, what with the secluded nature of the street itself, and these verdant places behind it, it Avas truly rus in urbe, and a retreat. When I turned down the arch- way, I held my mother's hand tighter with pleasure, and was full of expectation, and joy, and respect. My first delight was in mounting the staircase to the rooms of the young ladies, setting my eyes on the comely and bright countenance of my fair friend, with her romantic name, and turning over for the hundredth time the books in her library. What she did with the volumes of the Turkish Spy, what they meant, or what amusement she could extract from them, was an eternal mystification to me. Not long ago, meeting with a copy of the book accidentally, I pounced upon my old acquaintance, and found him to contain better and more amusing stuff than people would suspect from his dry look and his obsolete politics.* The face of tenderness and respect with which Almcria used to welcome my mother, springing forward with her fine buxom figure to supply the strength which the other wanted, and showing what an equality of love there may be between youth and middle age, and rich and poor, I should never cease to love her for, had she not been, as she was, one of the best- naturcd persons in the world in everything. I have not seen her now for a great many years; but, with that same face, whatever change she may pretend to find in it, she will go to heaven ; for it is the face of her spirit. A good heart never grows old. Of George T , her brother, who will pardon this i of his worldly titles, whatever they may be, I have * The Turkish Spy is a sort of philosophical newspaper, in volumes; and, under a mask of bigotry, speculates very freely on all subjects. It is said to have be a written by an Italian Jesuit of the name of Marana. The first volume has been attributed, however, to Sir Roger Manley, father of the author of the Atalantis; and the rest to Dr. Midgeley, a friend of his. 6 82 AUTOBIOGKAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. a similar kind of recollection, in its proportion; for, though we knew him thoroughly, we saw him less. The sight of his face was an additional sunshine to my holiday. He was very generous and handsome-minded; a genuine human being. Mrs. T , the mother, a very lady-like woman, in a delicate state of health, we usually found reclining on a sofa, always ailing, but always with a smile for us. The father, a man of a large habit of body, panting with asthma, whom we seldom saw but at dinner, treated us with all the family delicacy, and would have me come and sit next him, which I did with a mixture of joy and dread; for it was painful to hear him breathe. I dwell the more upon these attentions, because the school that I was in held a sort of equivocal rank in point of what is called respectability; and it was no less an honour to another, than to ourselves, to know when to place us upon a liberal footing. Young as I was, I felt this point strongly ; and was touched with as grateful a tenderness toAvards those who treated me handsomely, as I retreated inwardly upon a proud consciousness of my Greek and Latin, when the supercilious would have humbled me. Blessed house ! May a blessing be upon your rooms, and your lawn, and your neighbouring garden, and the quiet old monastic name of your street ! and may it never be a thoroughfare ! and may all your inmates be happy ! Would to God one could renew, at a moment's notice, the happy hours we have enjoyed in past times, with the same circles, and in the same houses ! A planet with such a privilege would be a great lift nearer heaven. What prodigious evenings, reader, we would have of it ! What fine pieces of childhood, of youth, of manhood — ay, and of age, as long as our friends lasted ! The old gentleman in Gil Bias, who complained that the peaches were not so fine as they used to be when he was young, had more reason than appears on the face of it. He missed not only his former palate, but the places he ate them in, and those who ate them with him. I have been told, that the cranberries I have met with since must have been as fine as those I got with the T 's ; as large and as juicy ; and that they came from the same place. For all that, I never ate a cranberry-tart since I dined in Austin Friars. I should have fallen in love with A. T , had I been old enough. As it was, my first flame, or my first notion of a flame, which is the same thing in those days, was for my giddy cousin Fanny Dayrell, a charming West Indian. Her SCHOOL-DAYS. 83 mother, the aunt I spoke of, had just come from Barbados ■with her two daughters and a sister. She was a woman of a princely spirit ; and having a good property, and every wish to make her relations more comfortable, she did so. It became holiday with us all. My mother raised her head ; my father grew young again ; my cousin Kate (Christiana rather, for her name was not Catherine; Christiana Arabella was her name) conceived a regard for one of my brothers, and married him ; and for my part, besides my pictures and Italian garden at Mr. AVest's, and my beloved old English house in Austin Friars, I had now another paradise in Great Ormond Street. My aunt had something of the West Indian pride, but all in a good spirit, and was a mighty cultivator of the gentilities, inward as well as outward. I did not dare to appear before her with dirty hands, she would have rebuked me so hand- somely. For some reason or other, the marriage of my brother and his cousin was kept secret a little while. I be- came acquainted with it by chance, coming in upon a holiday, the day the ceremony took place. Instead of keeping me out of the secret by a trick, they very wisely resolved upon trusting me with it, and relying upon my honour. My honour happened to be put to the test, and I came off with flying colours. It is to this circumstance I trace the religious idea I have ever since entertained of keeping a secret. I went with the bride and bridegroom to church, and remember kneeling apart and weeping bitterly. My tears were unaccountable to me then. Doubtless they were owing to an instinctive sense of the great change that was taking place in the lives of two human beings, and of the unalterableness of the engagement. Death and Life seem to come together on these occasions, like awful guests at a feast, and look one another in the face. It was not with such good effect that my aunt raised my notions of a schoolboy's pocket-money to half-crowns, and crowns, and half-guineas. My father and mother were both as generous as daylight; but they could not give what they had not. I had been unused to spending, and accordingly I spent with a vengeance. I remember a ludicrous instance. The first half-guinea that I received brought about me a con- sultation of companions to know how to get rid of it. One shilling was devoted to pears, another to apples, another to cakes, and so on, all to be boughl immediately, as they were; till coming to the sixpence, and being struck with a recollec- G— 2 84 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. tion that I ouoht to do something useful with that, I bought sixpenn'rth of shoe-strings: these, no doubt, vanished like the rest. The next half-guinea came to the knowledge of the master : he interfered, which was one of his proper actions ; and my aunt practised more self-denial in future. Our new family from abroad were true West Indians, or, as they would have phrased it, " true Barbadians born." They were generous, warm-tempered, had great good-nature ; were proud, but not unpleasantly so; lively, yet indolent; temperately epicurean in their diet ; fond of company, and dancing, and music; and lovers of show, but far from with- holding the substance. I speak chiefly of the mother and daughters. My other aunt, an elderly maiden, who piqued herself on the delicacy of her hands and ankles, and made you understand how many suitors she had refused (for which she expressed anything but repentance, being extremely vexed), was not deficient in complexional good-nature ; but she was narrow-minded, and seemed to care for nothing in the world but two things : first, for her elder niece Kate, whom she had helped to nurse ; and second, for a becoming set-out of coffee and buttered toast, particularly of a morning, when it was taken up to her in bed, with a suitable equipage of silver and other necessaries of life. Yes ; there was one more in- dispensable thing — slavery. It was frightful to hear her small mouth and little mincing tones assert the necessity not only of slaves, but of robust corporal punishment to keep them to their duty. But she did this, because her want of ideas could do no otherwise. Having had slaves, she won- dered how anybody could object to so natural and lady- like an establishment. Late in life, she took to fancying that every polite old gentleman was in love with her ; and thus she lived on, till her dying moment, in a nutter of expectation. The black servant must have puzzled this aunt of mine sometimes. All the wonder of which she was capable, he certainly must have roused, not without a " quaver of con- sternation." This man had come over with them from the West Indies. He was a slave on my aunt's estate, and as such he demeaned himself, till he learned that there was no such thing as a slave in England ; that the moment a man set his foot on English ground he was free. I cannot help smiling to think of the bewildered astonishment into which his first overt act, in oonsequence of this knowledge, must SCHOOL-DAYS. 85 have put my poor aunt Courthope (for that was her Christian name). Most likely it broke out in the shape of some remon- strance about his fellow-servants. He partook of the pride common to all the Barbadians, black as well as white; and the maid-servants tormented him. I remember his coming up in the parlour one day, and making a ludicrous represen- tation of the affronts put upon his office and person, inter- spersing his chattering and gesticulations with explanatory dumb show. One of the maids was a pretty girl, who had manoeuvred till she got him stuck in a corner ; and he insisted upon telling us all that she said and did. His respect for himself had naturally increased since he became free ; but he did not know what to do with it. Poor Samuel was not un- generous, after his fashion. He also wished, with his freedom, to acquire a freeman's knowledge, but stuck fast at pothooks and hangers. To frame a written B he pronounced a thing impossible. Of his powers on the violin he made us more sensible, not without frequent remonstrances, which it must have taken all my aunt's good- nature to make her repeat. lie Lad left two wives in Barbados, one of whom was brought to bed of a son a little after he came away. For this son he wanted a name, that was new, sounding, and long. They referred him to the reader of Homer and Virgil. "With classical names he was well acquainted, Mars and Venus being among his most intimate friends, besides Jupiters and Adonises, and Dianas with large families. At length Ave succeeded with Ncoptolemus. lie said he had never heard it before ; and he made me write it for him in a great text-hand, that there might be no mistake. My aunt took a country-house at Merton, in Surrey, where I passed three of the happiest Avceks of my life. It was the custom at our school, in those days, to allow us only one set of unbroken holidays during the whole time we were there — I mean, holidays in which Ave remained away from school by night as well as by day. The period was always in August, due a schoolboy passionately fond of the green fields, Avho had never slept out of the heart of the City for years. It was a compensation even for the pang of leaving my friend; and then what letters I would Avrite to him ! And what letters I did Avrite ! What full measure of affection pressed doAvn, and running over! I read, walked, had a garden and orchard to run in ; and fields that I could have rolled in, to have my will of them. 86 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. My fiith er accompanied me to Wimbledon to see Home Tooke, who patted me on the head. I felt very differently under his hand, and under that of the bishop of London, when he confirmed a crowd of us in St. Paul's. Not that I thought of politics, though I had a sense of his being a patriot ; but patriotism, as well as everything else, was con- nected in my mind with something classical, and Home Tooke held his political reputation with me by the same tenure that he held his fame for learning and grammatical knowledge. " The learned Home Tooke" was the designation by which I styled him in some verses I wrote; in which verses, by the way, with a poetical licence which would have been thought more classical by Queen Elizabeth than my master, I called my aunt a " nymph." In the ceremony of confirmation by the bishop, there was something too official and like a de- spatch of business, to excite my veneration. My head only anticipated the coming of his hand with a thrill in the scalp : and when it came, it tickled me. My cousins had the celebrated Dr. Callcott for a music- master. The doctor, who was a scholar and a great reader, was so pleased with me one day for being able to translate the beginning of Xenophon's Anabasis (one of our schoolbooks), that he took me out with him to Nunn's the bookseller's in Great Queen Street, and made me a present of Schrevelius's Lexicon. When he came down to Merton, he let me ride his horse. What days were those ! Instead of being roused against my will by a bell, I jumped up with the lark, and strolled " out of bounds." Instead of bread and water for breakfast, I had coffee, and tea, and buttered toast : for dinner, not a hunk of bread and a modicum of hard meat, or a bowl of pretended broth ; but fish, and fowl, and noble hot joints, and puddings, and sweets, and Guava jellies, and other West Indian mysteries of peppers and preserves, and wine ; and then I had tea; and I sat up to supper like a man, and lived so well, that I might have been very ill, had I not run about all the rest of the day. My strolls about the fields with a book were full of happi- ness : only my dress used to get me stared at by the villagers. Walking one day by the little river Wandle, I came upon one of the loveliest girls I ever beheld, standing in the water with bare legs, washing some linen. She turned as she was stoop- ing, and showed a blooming oval face with blue eyes, on either side of which flowed a profusion of flaxen locks. With the SCHOOL-DAYS. 87 exception of the colour of the hair, it was like Raphael's own head turned into a peasant girl's. The eyes were full of gen- tle astonishment at the sight of me ; and mine must have wondered no less. However, I was prepared for such won- ders. It was only one of my poetical visions realized, and I expected to find the world full of them. What she thought of my blue skirts and yellow stockings is not so clear. She did not, however, taunt me with my " petticoats," as the girls in the streets of London would do, making me blush, as I thought they ought to have done instead. My beauty in the brook was too gentle and diffident ; at least I thought so, and my own heart did not contradict me. I then took every beauty for an Arcadian, and every brook for a fairy stream ; and the reader would be surprised if he knew to what an extent I have a similar tendency still. I find the same possi- bilities by another path. I do not remember whether an Abbe Paris, who taught my cousins French, used to see them in the country ; br.t I never shall forget him in Ormond Street lie was an emigrant, very gentlemanly, with a face of remarkable benignity, and a voice that became it. He spoke English in a slow manner, that was veiy graceful. I shall never forget his saying one day, in answer to somebody who pressed him on the subject, and in the mildest of tones, that without doubt it was impossible to be saved out of the pale of the Catholic Church. One contrast of this sort reminds me of another. My aunt Courthope had something growing out on one of her knuckles, which she was afraid to let a surgeon look at. There was a Dr. Chapman, a West Indian physician, who came to see us, a person of great suavity of manners, with all that air of languor and want of energy which the West Indians often exhibit. He was in the habit of inquiring, with the softest voice in the world, how my aunt's hand was; and coming one day upon us in the midst of dinner, and sighing forth his usual question, she gave it him over her shoulder to look at. In a moment she shrieked, and the swelling was gone. The meekest of doctors had done it away with his lancet. I had no drawback on my felicity at Morton, with the ex- ception of an occasional pang at my friend's absence, and a new vexation that surprised and mortified me. 1 bad been n< 1 at school to sleep with sixty boys in the room, and some old night-fears that used to haunt me were for- gotten. No Mantichoras there ! — no old men crawling on the 88 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. floor ! What was my chagrin, when on sleeping alone, after so long a period, I found my terrors come back again ! — not, indeed, in all the same shapes. Beasts coidd frighten me no longer; but I was at the mercy of any other ghastly fiction that presented itself to my mind, crawling or ramping. I struggled hard to say nothing about it; but my days began to be discoloured with fears of my nights ; and with unutter- able humiliation I begged that the footman might be allowed to sleep in the same room. Luckily, my request was attended to in the kindest and most reconciling manner. I was pitied for my fears, but praised for my candour — a balance of qua- lities which, I have reason to believe, did me a service far beyond that of the moment. Samuel, who, fortunately for my shame, had a great respect for fear of this kind, had his bed removed accordingly into my room. He used to enter- tain me at night with stories of Barbados and the negroes ; and in a few days I was reassured and happy. It was then (oh, shame that I must speak of fair lady after confessing a heart so faint !) — it was then that I fell in love with my cousin Fan. However, I would have fought all her young acquaintances round for her, timid as I was, and little inclined to pugnacity. Fanny was a lass of fifteen, with little laughing eyes, and a mouth like a plum. I was then (I feel as if I ought to be ashamed to say it) not more than thirteen, if so old; but I had read Tooke's Pantheon, and came of a precocious race. My cousin came of one too, and was about to be married to a handsome young fellow of three-and-twenty. I thought nothing of this, for nothing could be more innocent than my intentions. I was not old enough, or grudging enough, or whatever it was, even to be jealous. I thought everybody must love Fanny Dayrell ; and if she did not leave me out in permitting it, I was satisfied. It was enough for me to be with her as long as I could; to gaze on her with delight as she floated hither and thither ; and to sit on the stiles in the neighbouring fields, thinking of Tooke's Pantheon. My friend- ship was greater than my love. Had my favoiu-ite school- fellow been ill, or otherwise demanded my return, I should certainly have chosen his society in preference. Three-fourths of my heart were devoted to friendship ; the rest was in a vague dream of Vauty, and female cousins, and nymphs, and green fields, and a feeling which, though of a warm nature, was full of fear and respect. CHILDHOOD. 89 Had the jade put me on the least equality of footing as to age, I know not what change might have been wrought in me ; but though too young herself for the serious duties she was about to bring on her, and full of sufficient levity and gaiety not to be uninterested with the little black-eyed schoolboy that lingered about her, my vanity was well paid off by hers, for she kept me at a distance by calling me petit garqon. This was no better than the assumption of an elder sister in her teens over a younger one ; but the latter feels it, nevertheless ; and I persuaded myself that it was particularly cruel. I wished the Abbe Paris at Jamaica with his French. There would she come in her frock and tucker (for she had not yet left off either), her curls dancing, and her hands clasped together in the enthusiasm of something to tell me, and when I flew to meet her, forgetting the difference of ages, and alive only to my charming cousin, she would repress me with a little fillip on the cheek, and say, " Well, petit garqon, what do you think of that?" The worst of it was, that this odious French phrase sat insufferably well upon her plump little mouth. She and I used to gather peaches before the house were up. I held the ladder for her ; she mounted like a fairy; and when I stood doting on her as she looked down and threw the fruit in my Jap, she Avould cry, " Petit garqon, you will let 'em all drop! " On my return to school, she gave me a locket for a keepsake, in the shape of a heart ; which was the worst thing she ever did to the petit garqon, for it touched me on my weak side, and looked like a sentiment. I believe I should have had serious thoughts of becoming melancholy, had I not, in returning to school, returned to my friend, and so found means to occupy my craving for sympathy. However, I wore the heart a long while. 1 have sometimes thought there was more in her French than I imagined; but 1 believe not. She naturally took herself for double my age, with a lover of three-and-twenty. Soon after her marriage, fortune separated as for many years. My pa ion had almost as soon died away; but I have loved the name of Fanny ever since; and when i met her again, which Was under circumstances of trouble on her part, I could not see her without such an emotion as i was fain to confess to a person "near and dear," who forgave me for it; which made me love the forgiver the more. Yes! the "black ox" trod on the fairy foot of my light-hearted cousin Fan; of her, whom I could no more have thought of in conjunction 90 AUTOBIOGKAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. with sorrow, than of a ball-room with a tragedy. To know that she was rich and admired, and abounding in mirth and music, was to me the same thing as to know that she existed. How often did I afterwards wish myself rich in turn, that I might have restored to her all the graces of life ! She was generous, and would not have denied me the satis- faction. This was my first love. That for a friend's sister was my second, and not so strong ; for it was divided with the admi- ration of which I have spoken for the Park music and " the soldiers." Nor had the old tendency to mix up the clerical with the military service been forgotten. Indeed, I have never been without a clerical tendency; nor, after what I have written for the genial edification of my fellow-creatures, and the extension of charitable and happy thoughts in matters of religion, would I be thought to speak of it without even a certain gravity, not compromised or turned into levity, in my opinion, by any cheerfulness of tone with which it may happen to be associated ; for Heaven has made smiles as well as tears : has made laughter itself, and mirth ; and to appreciate its gifts thoroughly is to treat none of them with disrespect, or to affect to be above them. The wholly gay and the wholly grave spirit is equally but half the spirit of a right human creature. I mooted points of faith with myself very early, in conse- quence of what I heard at home. The very inconsistencies which I observed round about me in matters of belief and practice, did but the more make me wish to discover in what the right spirit of religion consisted : while, at the same time, nobody felt more instinctively than myself, that forms were necessary to preserve essence. I had the greatest respect for them, wherever I thought them sincere. I got up imitations of religious processions in the school-room, and persuaded my coadjutors to learn even a psalm in the original Hebrew, in order to sing it as part of the ceremony. To make the lesson as easy as possible, it was the shortest of all the psalms, the hundred and seventeenth, which consists but of two verses. A Jew, I am afraid, would have been puzzled to recognize it; though, perhaps, I got the tone from his own synagogue ; for I was well acquainted with that place of worship. I was led to dislike Catholic chapels, in spite of their music and their paintings, by what I had read of Inquisitions, and by the impiety which I found in the doctrine of eternal punishment, — a monstrosity which I never associated with SCHOOL-DAYS. 91 the Church of England, at least not habitually. But identi- fying no such dogmas with the Jews, who are indeed free from them (though I was not aware of that circumstance at the time), and reverencing them for their ancient connec- tion with the Bible, I used to go with some of my companions to the synagogue in Duke's Place ; where I took pleasure in witnessing the semi-Catholic pomp of their service, and in hearing their fine singing ; not without something of a constant astonishment at their wearing their hats. This cus- tom, however, kindly mixed itself up with the recollection of my cocked hat and band. I was not aware that it origi- nated in the immovable Eastern turban. These visits to the synagogue did me, I conceive, a great deal of good. They served to universalize my notions of religion, and to keep them unbigoted. It never became neces- sary to remind me that Jesus was himself a Jew. I have also retained through life a respectful notion of the Jews as a body. There were some school rhymes about " pork upon a fork," and the Jews going to prison. At Easter, a strip of bordered paper was stuck on the breast of every boy, containing the words " He is risen." It did not give us the slightest thought of what it recorded. It only reminded us of an old rhyme, which some of the boys used to go about the school re- peating : — " He is risen, he is risen, All the Jews must go to prison." A beautiful Christian deduction ! Thus has charity itself been converted into a spirit of antagonism ; and thus it is that the antagonism, in the progress of knowledge, becomes first a pastime and then a jest. I never forgot the Jews' synagogue, their music, their tabernacle, and the courtesy with which strangers were allowed to see it. I had the pleasure, before I left school, of becoming acquainted with some members of their com- munity, who were extremely liberal towards other opinions, and who, nevertheless, entertained a sense of the Supreme Being far more reverential than I had observed in any Christian, my mother excepted. My feelings towards them received additional encouragement from the respect shown to their history in the paintings of Mr. West, who was anything but a bigol himself, and who often had Jews to sit to him. I contemplated Moses and Aaron, and the young Levites, by tie- sweet light of his picture-rooms, where everybody trod 92 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. about in stillness, as though it were a, kind of holy ground; and if I met a Kabbi in the street, he seemed to me a man coining, not from Bishopsgate or Saffron Hill, but out of the remoteness of time. I have spoken of the distinguished individuals bred at Christ Hospital, including Coleridge and Lamb, who left the school not long before I entered it. Coleridge I never saw till he was old. Lamb I recollect coming to see the boys, with a pensive, brown, handsome, and kindly face, and a gait advancing with a motion from side to side, between involun- tary consciousness and attempted ease. His brown com- plexion may have been owing to a visit in the country ; his air of uneasiness to a great burden of sorrow. He dressed with a quaker-like plainness. I did not know him as Lamb: I took him for a Mr. " Guy," having heard somebody address him by that appellative, I suppose in jest. The boy whom I have designated in these notices as C n, and whose intellect in riper years became clouded, had ft more than usual look of being the son of old parents. He had a reputation among us, which, in more superstitious times, might have rendered him an object of dread. We thought he knew a good deal out of the pale of ordinary inquiries. He studied the weather and the stars, things which boys rarely troixble their heads with ; and as I had an awe of thunder, which ahvays brought a reverential shade on my mother's face, as if God had been speaking, I used to send to him on close summer days, to know if thunder was to be expected. In connection with this mysterious schoolfellow, though he was the last person, in some respects, to be associated with him, I must mention a strange epidemic fear which occa- sionally prevailed among the boys respecting a pe sonage whom they called the Fazzer. The Fazzer was known to be nothing more than one of the boys themselves. In fact, he consisted of one of the most impudent of the bigger ones; but as it was his custom to disguise his face, and as this aggravated the terror which made the little boys hide their own faces, his participation of our common human nature only increased the supernatural fearfulness of his pretensions. His office as Fazzer consisted in being audacious, unknown, and frightening the boys at night ; sometimes by pulling them out of their beds ; some- times by simply fazzing their hair (" fuzzing" meant pulling SCHOOL-DAYS. 93 or vexing, like a goblin); sometimes (which was horriblest of all) by quietly giving us to understand, in some way or other, that the " Fazzer was out," that is to say, out of his own bed, and then being seen (by those who dared to look) sitting, or otherwise making his appearance, in his white shirt, motionless and dumb. It was a very good horror, of its kind. The Fazzer was our Dr. Faustus, our elf, our spectre, our Flibbertigibbet, who " put knives in our pillows and halters in our pews." He was Jones, it is true, or Smith ; but he was also somebody else — an anomaly, a duality, Smith and sorcery united. My friend Charles Oilier should have written a book about him. He was our Old Man of the Mountain, and yet a common boy. One night I thought I saw this phenomenon under circum- stances more than usually unearthly. It was a fine moonlight night ; I was then in a ward the casements of which looked (as they still look) on the churchyard. My bed was under the second window from the east, not far from the statue of Edward the Sixth. Happening to wake in the middle of the night, and cast up my eyes, I saw, on a bed's head near me, and in one of these casements, a figure in its shirt, which I took for the Fazzer. The room was silent ; the figure motionless; I fancied that half the boys in the ward were glancing at it, without daring to speak. It was poor C n, gazing at that lunar orb, which might afterwards be supposed to have malignantly fascinated him. Contemporary with C n was Wood, before mentioned, whom I admired for his verses, and who was afterwards Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, where I visited him, and found him, to my astonishment, a head shorter than in) .self. Every upper boy at school appears a giant to a little one. 'Big boy" and senior are synonymous. Now and then, however, extreme Bmallness in a senior scholar gives a new kind of dignity, by reason of the testimony it bears to a cendancy of the intellect. It was the custom for the monitors at Christ Hospital, during prayers before meat, to stand fronting the tenants of their respective wards, while the objects of their attention were: kneeling. Looking up, on one of the e occasions, towards a new monitor who was thus Standing, and whose face was unknown to me (for there were six hundred of us, and his ward was not mine), I thought him the mallesl hoy that could ever have attained to so dis- tinguished an eminence. He was little in person, little in 94 AUTOBIOGKAPHY OP LEIGH HUNT. face, and lie had a singularly juvenile cast of features, even for one so petit. It was Mitchell, the translator of Aristophanes. He had really attained his position prematurely. I rose afterwards to be next to him in the school; and from a grudge that existed between us, owing probably to a reserve, which I thought pride, on his part, and to an ardency which he may have considered frivolous on mine, we became friends. Cir- cumstances parted us in after-life : I became a Reformist, and he a Quarterly Eeviewer; but he sent me kindly remem- brances not long before he died. I did not know he was declining; and it will ever be a pain* to me to reflect that delay conspired with accident to hinder my sense of it from being known to him; especially as I learned that he had not been so prosperous as I supposed. He had his weaknesses as well as myself, but they were mixed with conscientious and noble qualities. Zealous as he was for aristocratical government, he was no indiscriminate admirer of persons in high places ; and, though it would have bettered his views in life, he had declined taking orders, from nicety of religious scruple. Of his admirable scholarship I need say nothing. Equally good scholar, but of a less zealous temperament, was Barnes, who stood next me on the Deputy Grecian form, and who Avas afterwards identified with the sudden and striking increase of the Times newspaper in fame and in- fluence. He was very handsome when young, with a profile of Grecian regularity ; and was famous among us for a certain dispassionate humour, for his admiration of the works or Fielding, and for his delight, nevertheless, in pushing a narra- tive to its utmost, and drawing upon his stores of fancy for intensifying it ; an amusement for which he possessed an understood privilege. It was painful in after-life to see his good looks swallowed up in corpulency, and his once hand- some mouth thrusting its under lip out, and panting with asthma. I believe he was originally so well constituted in point of health and bodily feeling, that he fancied he could go on, all his life, Avithout taking any of the usual methods to preserve his comfort. The editorship of the Times, which turned his night into day, and would have been a trying burden to any man, completed the bad consequences of his negligence ; and he died painfully before he was old. Barnes wrote elegant Latin verse, a classical English style, and might assuredly have made himself a name in wit and literature, SCHOOL-DAYS. 95 had lie cared much for anything beyond his glass of wine and his Fielding. He left money to found a Barnes scholarship at Cambridge. What pleasant days have I not passed with him, and other schoolfellows, bathing in the New Kiver, and boating on the Thames ! Pie and I began to learn Italian together ; and anybody not within the pale of the enthusiastic, might have thought us mad, as we went shouting the beginning of Metastasio's Ode to Venus, as loud as we could bawl, over the Hornsey fields. I can repeat it to this day, from those first lessons. " Scendi propizia Col tuo splendore, bella Venere, Madre d'Amore; Madre d'Amore, Che sola sei Piacer degli uomini, E degli dei." * On the same principle of making invocations as loud as possible, and at the same time of fulfilling the prophecy of a poet, and also for the purpose of indulging ourselves with an echo, Ave used to lie upon our oars at Kichmond, and call, in the most vociferous manner, upon the spirit of Thomson to " rest." " Remembrance oft shall haunt the shore, When Thames in summer wreaths is drest, And oft suspend the dashing oar To bid his gentle spirit rest." Collins's Ode on the Death of Thomson. It was more like " perturbing" his spirit than laying if. One day Bamcs fell overboard, and, on getting into flic boat again, he drew a little edition of Seneca out of his pocket, whit ■! ed to have become fat with the water. It was like an extempore dropsy. Another time, several of us being tempted to bathe on a very hot day, near Hammersmith, and not exercising sulli- cient patience iii selecting our spot, we were astonished at receiving a sudden lecture from a lady. .She was in a hat and feathers, and riding-habit; and as the grounds turned out to belong to the Margravine of Anspach (Lady Craven), we persuaded ourselves that our admonitrix, who spoke b no * "!' :end propitious with thy brightness, beautiful Venus, Mother of Love;— Mother of Love, who alone art the pleasure of men and of gods.'' 96 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OP LEIGH HUNT. measured terms, was her Serene Highness herself. The obvious reply to her was, that if it was indiscreet in us not to have chosen a more sequestered spot, it was not exces- sively the reverse in a lady to come and rebuke us. I related this story to my acquaintance, Sir Robert Ker Porter, who knew her. His observation was, that nothing wonderful was to be wondered at in the Margravine. I was fifteen when I put off my band and blue skirts for a coat and neckcloth. I was then first Deputy Grecian, and I had the honour of going out of the school in the same rank, at the same age, and for the same reason, as my friend Charles Lamb. The reason was, that I hesitated in my speech. I did not stammer half so badly as I used ; and it is very seldom that I halt at a syllable now ; but it was understood that a Grecian was bound to deliver a public speech before he left school, and to go into the Church afterwards ; and as I could do neither of these things, a Grecian I could not be. So I put on my coat and waistcoat, and, what was stranger, my hat ; a very uncomfortable addition to my sensations. For eight years I had gone bareheaded, save now and then a few inches of pericranium, when the little cap, no larger than a crumpet, Avas stuck on one side, to the mystification of the old ladies in the streets. I then cared as little for the rains as I did for anything else. I had now a vague sense of worldly trouble, and of a great and serious change in my condition ; besides which, I had to quit my old cloisters, and my playmates, and long habits of all sorts ; so that what was a very happy moment to schoolboys in general, was to me one of the most painful of my life. I surprised my schoolfellows and the master with the melancholy of my tears. I took leave of my books, of my friends, of my scat in the grammar-school, of my good- hearted nurse and her daughter, of my bed, of the cloisters, and of the very pump out of which I had taken so many delicious draughts, as if I should never see them again, though I meant to come every day. The fatal hat was put on; my father was come to fetch me. " We, hand in hand, with strange new steps and slow, Through Holborn took our meditative way." 97 CHAPTER V. YOUTH. For some time after I left school, I did nothing but visit my schoolfellows, haunt the book-stalls, and write verses. My father collected the verses, and published them [in 1802, under the title of Juvenilia"], with a large list of subscribers, numbers of whom belonged to his old congregations. [The volume had a portrait by Jackson in the manner of that artist, imparti g to it an air of heavy laziness, said to have characterized the artist, but certainly foreign to the sitter.] I was as proud, perhaps, of the book at that time as I am ashamed of it now. The French Revolution, though the worst portion of it was over, had not yet shaken up and reinvigorated the sources of thought all over Europe. At least I was not old enough, perhaps was not able, to get out of the trammels of the regular imitative poetry, or versification rather, which was taught in the schools. My book was a heap of imitations, all but ab lutely worthless. But absurd as it was, it did me a serious mischief; for it made me suppose that I had attained an end, instead of not having reached even a commencement; and thus caused me to waste in imitation a good many years which I ought to have devoted to the study of the poetical art and of nature. Coleridge has praised Boyer for teaching us to laugh at "muses" and " Castalian streams;" but he ought rather to have lamented that lie did not teach us how to love them wisely, as he might have done had he really known anything about poetry, or loved Spenser and the old poets, as he thought, and admired the new. Even Coleridge's juvenile poems were none the better for Boyer's training. As to mine, they were for the most part as mi re trash as anti- alian heart could have desired. I wrote " odes " because [ins and Gray had written them, "pastorals" bet, Pope had written them, "blank verse" because Akenside and Thomson had written blank verse, and a "Palace of Plea- sure " bei had written a " Bower of Bliss." But in all the e authors I saw little but their words, and imitated even those badly. I had nobody to bid me to go to the nature which had o tted the books. Coleridge's lauded teacher put into my hands, at one time, the life of Pope by Ruffhead (the worst he could have chosen), and at another (for the 7 98 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. express purpose of cultivating my love of poetry) the Irene and other poems of Dr. Johnson ! Pope's smooth but un- artistical versification spell-bound me for a long time. Of Johnson's poems I retained nothing but the epigram begin- ning " Hermit hoar — " " ' Hermit hoar, in solemn cell, Wearing out life's evening gray, Strike thy bosom, sage, and tell, What is bliss, and which the way? ' Thus I spoke, and speaking, sighed, Scarce repressed the starting tear, When the hoary sage replied, ' Come, my lad, and drink some beer.' " This was the first epigram of the kind which I had seen ; and it had a cautionary effect upon me to an extent which its author might hardly have desired. The grave Dr. Johnson and the rogue Ambrose de Lamela, in Gil Bias, stood side by side in my imagination as unmaskers of venerable appear- ances ; that is to say, as persons who had no objection to the jolly hypocrisy which they unmasked. Not long after the publication of my book, I visited two of my schoolfellows, who had gone to Cambridge and Oxford. The repute of it, unfortunately, accompanied me, and gave a foolish increase to my self-complacency. At Oxford, I was introduced to Kett, the poetry professor, — a good-natured man with a face like a Houyhnlmm (had Swift seen it, he would have thought it a pattern for humanity). It was in the garden of the professor's college (Trinity); and he ex- pressed a hope that I should feel inspired then "by the muse of Warton." I was not acquainted with the writings of Warton at that time ; and perhaps my ignorance was fortu- nate ; for it was not till long after my acquaintance with them that I saw farther into their merits than the very first anti- commonplaces would have discerned, and as I had not acquired even those at that period, and my critical presumption was on a par with my poetical, I should probably have given the professor to understand that I had no esteem for that kind of secondhand inspiration. I was not aware that my own was precisely of the same kind, and as different from Warton's as poverty from acquirement. At Oxford, my love of boating had nearly cost me my life. I had already had a bit of a taste of drowning in the river Thames, in consequence of running a boat too hastily on shore; but it was nothing to what I experienced on this YOUTH. 99 occasion. The schoolfellow whom I was visiting was the friend whose family lived in Spring Gardens. We had gone out in a little decked skiff, and not expecting disasters in the "gentle Isis," I had fastened the sail-line, of which I had the direction, in order that I might read a volume which I had with me, of Mr. Cumberland's novel called Henry. My friend was at the helm. The wind grew a little strong ; and we had just got into Iffley Reach, when I heard him exclaim, " Hunt, we are over ! " The next moment I was under the water, gulping it, and giving myself up for lost. The boat had a small opening in the middle of the deck, under which I had thrust my feet ; this circumstance had carried me over with the boat, and the worst of it was, I found I had got the .sail-line round my neck. My friend, who sat on the deck itself, had been swept off, and got comfortably to shore, which was at a little distance. My bodily sensations were not so painful as I should have fancied they would have been. My mental reflections were very different, though one of them, by a singular meeting of extremes, was of a comic nature. I thought that I should never see the sky again, that I had parted with all my fri< and that I was about to contradict the proverb which said that a man who was born to be hanged, would nev. r be drowned ; for the sail-line, in which I felt entangled, seemed destined to inn for me both the offices. On a sudden, I found an oar in my hand, and the next minute I was climbing, with assist- ance, into a wherry, in which there sat two Oxonians, one of i helping me, and loudly and Ian . differing with the other, who did nol at all like the rocking of the boat, and who assured me, to the manifest contradiction of such senses as I had left, that there was no room. This gentleman is now ; and 1 shall not mention his nam do injustice to the mi f a brave man struck with a panic. The name of his companion, if 1 mistake not, was II. I 1 was related to an illustrious person of the name, to whom I have lately been indebted for what, have been another prolongation of my life. On returni wn, which I did on the top of an Oxford .. I was relating this story to the singular person who then drove it (Bobart, who had been a collegian), when a man who itting behind surprised us with the excei of iter. On a i the n, he touched bis hat, • t'm hi footman." Such are I In delicacies of 7—2 100 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. the livery, and the glorifications of their masters with which they entertain the kitchen. This Bobart was a very curious person. I have noticed him in the Indicator, in the article on " Coaches." He was a descendant of a horticultural family, who had been keepers of the Physic Garden at Oxford, and one of whom palmed a rat upon the learned world for a dragon, by stretching out its skin into wings. Tillimant Bobart (for such was the name of our charioteer) had been at college himself, probably as a sizer ; but having become proprietor of a stage-coach, he thought fit to be his own coachman; and he received your money and touched his hat like the rest of the fraternity. He had a round, red face, with eyes that stared, and showed the white ; and having become, by long practice, an excellent capper of verses, he was accustomed to have bouts at that pastime with the collegians whom he drove. It was curious to hear him whistle and grunt, and urge on his horses with the other customary euphonies of his tribe, and then see him flash his eye round upon the capping gentleman who sat behind him, and quote his never-failing fine out of Virgil or Horace. In the evening (for he only drove his coach half way to London) he divided his solace after his labours be- tween his book and his brandy-and-Avater ; but I am afraid with a little too much of the brandy, for his end was not happy.* There was eccentricity in the family, without any- thing much to show for it. The Bobart who invented the dragon chuckled over the secret for a long time with a satis- faction that must have cost him many falsehoods ; and the first Bobart that is known used to tag his beard with silver on holidays. If female society had not been wanting, I should have longed to reside at an university; for I have never seen trees, books, and a garden to walk in, but I saw my natural home, provided there was no "monkery" in it. I have always thought it a brave and great saying of Mohammed, — " There is no monkery in Islam." " From women's eyes this doctrine I derive: They are the books, the arts, the academes, Which shew, contain, and nourish all the world." * On the information of Mr. George Hooper, who kindly volun- teered the communication as a reader of the Indicator, and sent me a very curious letter on the subject; with details, however, that were rather of private than of public i YOUTH. 101 Were I to visit the universities now, I should explore every corner, and reverently fancy myself in the presence of every great and good man that has adorned them ; but the most important people to young men are one another ; and I was content with glancing at the haunts of Addison and Warton in Oxford, and at those of Gray, Spenser, and Milton, in Cambridge. Oxford, I found, had greatly the advantage of Cambridge in point of country. You could understand Avell enough how poets could wander about Iffley and Woodstock ; but when I visited Cambridge, the nakedness of the land was too plainly visible under a sheet of snow, through which gutters of ditches ran, like ink, by the side of leafless sallows, Avhich resembled huge pincushions stuck on posts. The town, however, made amends ; and Cambridge has the advantage of Oxford in a remarkable decree, as far as regards eminent names. England's two greatest philosophers, Bacon and Newton, and (according to Tyrwhitt) three out of its four great poets, were bred there, besides double the number of minor celebrities. Oxford even did not always know " the good the gods provided." It repudiated Locke; alienated Gibbonj; and had nothing but angry sullenness and hard ex- pulsion to answer to the inquiries which its very ordinances encouraged in the sincere and loving spirit of Shelley. Yet they are divine places, both; full of grace, and beauty, and scholarship; of reverend antiquity, and ever-young na- ture and hope. Their faults, if of worldliness in some, are those of time and of conscience in more, and if the more pertinacious on those accounts, will merge into a like con- servative firmness, when still nobler developments are in their keeping. So at least I hope; and so may the Fates have ordained; keeping their gowns among them as a symbol that learning is, indeed, something which ever learns ; and in- structing them to teach love, and charity, and inquiry, with the same accomplished authority as that with which they have taught assent. My book was unfortunately successful everywhere, parti- cularly in the metropolis. The critics were extremely kind ; and, as it was unusual at that time to publish at so early a period of life, my age made me a kind of " Young Roscius " in authorship. I was introduced to literati, and shown about among parties. My father took me to sec Dr. Raine, Master (rf the Charter-House, 'flic doctor, who was very kind and ant, but who probably drew none of our deductions 102 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OP LEIGH HUNT. in favour of the young writer's abilities, warned ine against the perils of authorship; adding, as a final dehortative, that " the shelves were full." It was not till we came away that I thought of an answer, Avhich I conceived would have " annihilated " him. " Then, sir " (I should have said), " we ■will make another." Not having been in time with this repartee, I felt all that anguish of undeserved and unnecessary defeat, which has been so pleasantly described in the Miseries of Human Life. This, thought I, would have been an answer befitting a poet, and calculated to make a figure in biography. A mortification that I encountered at a house in Cavendish Square affected me less, though it surprised me a good deal more. I had been held up, as usual, to the example of the young gentlemen and the astonishment of the. young ladies, when, in the course of the dessert, one of mine host's daugh- ters, a girl of exuberant spirits, and not of the austerest breeding, came up to me, and, as if she had discovered that I was not so young as I pretended to be, exclaimed, " What a beard you have got ! " at the same time convincing herself of the truth of her discovery by taking hold of it ! Had I been a year or two older, I should have taken my revenge. As it was, I know not how I behaved, but the next morning I hastened to have a beard no longer. I was now a man, and resolved not to be out of countenance next time. Not long afterwards, my grandfather, sensible of the new fame in his family, but probably alarmed at the fruitless consequences to which it might lead, sent me word, that if I would come to Philadelphia, " he would make a man of me." I sent word, in return, that " men grew in England as well as America : " an answer which repaid me for the loss of my repartee at Dr. Eaine's. I had got a dislike of my grandfather for reasons in which his only surviving daughter tells me I was mistaken ; and partly on a similar account, I equally disliked his friend Dr. Franklin, author of Poor Richard's Almanack: a heap, as it appeared to me, of " scoundrel maxims." * I think I now * Thomson's phrase, in the Castle of Indolence, speaking of a miserly money-getter : — " ' A penny saved is a penny got ;' Firm to this scoundrel maxim keepeth he, Ne of its rigour will he bate a jot, Till it hath quench'd his fire and banished his pot." The reader will not imagine that I suppose all money-makers to be YOUTH.- 103 appreciate Dr. Franklin as I ought; but although I can see the utility of such publications as his Almanack for a rising commercial state, and hold it useful as a memorandum to uncal- culating persons like myself, who happen to live in an old one, I think there is no necessity for it in commercial nations long- established, and that it has no business in others, who do not found their happiness in that sort of power. Franklin, with all his abilities, is but at the head of those who think that man lives " by bread alone." The respect which, in matters of religion, I felt for the " spirit which giveth life," in preference to the " letter which kiHeth," received a curious corroboration from a circum- stance which I witnessed on board a Margate hoy. Having nothing to do, after the publication of my poor volume, but to read and to look about me, a friend proposed an excursion to Brighton. We were to go first to Margate, and then walk the rest of the way by the sea-side, for the benefit of the air. "We took places accordingly in the first hoy that was about to sail, and speedily found ourselves seated and moving. We thought the passengers a singularly staid set of people for holiday-makers, and could not account for it. The imp sion by degrees grew so strong, that we resolved to inquire into the reason; and it was with no . able feelings, that we found ourselves fixed for the day on board what was called the " Methodist hoy." The vessel, it seems, was under the particular patronage of the sect of that denomination; and it professed to sail " by Divine Providence.'' Dinner brought a little more hilarity into the faces of these children of heaven. One innocently proposed a game at riddles; another entertain d a circle of hearers by a question in arithmetic; a third (or the Bame person, if 1 remember — ry gentleman) raised his voice into sonic remarks on " ath s," glancing, while he did it, at the of tins description. Very gallant spirits are to be found among I who only take to this mode of activity for want of P, and are as generous in disbursing as they are [taring. You always know the common run, as in other instances, by the soreness with vrhi< b I I attacks on the body corporate. Fur the ■'! isertioil that Dr. Franklin cut off bis sun with a shilling, my only authority is family tradition. It. is observable, howi that the fri< d igraphers are not only forced to admit that he • fond of money, but notice the mysterious secrecy in which his family history is involved. 104 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. small knot of the uninitiated who had got together in self- defence ; on which a fourth gave out a hymn of Dr. Watts's, which says that — " Religion never was designed To make our pleasures less." It was sung, I must say, in a tone of the most impartial misery, as if on purpose to contradict the opinion. Thus passed the hours, between formality, and eating and drinking, and psalm-singing, and melancholy attempts at a little mirth, till night came on ; when our godly friends vanished below into their berths. The wind was against us : we beat out to sea, and had a taste of some cold autumnal weather. Such of us as were not prepared for this, adjusted ourselves as well as we could to the occasion, or paced about the deck to warm ourselves, not a little amused with the small crew of sailors belonging to the vessel, who sat together singing songs in a low tone of voice, in order that the psalm- singers below might not hear them. During one of these pacings about the deck, my foot came in contact with a large bundle which lay as much out of the way as possible, but which I had approached unawares. On stooping to see what it was, I found it was a woman. She was sleeping, and her clothes were cold and damp. As the captain coidd do nothing for her, except refer me to the " gentlefolks " below, in case any room could be made for her in their dormitory, I repaired below accordingly; and with something of a malicious benevolence, persisted in waking every sleeper in succession, and stating the woman's case. Not a soul would stir. They had paid for their places: the woman should have done the same; and so they left her to the care of the " Providence " under which they sailed. I do not wish to insinuate by this story that many excellent people have not been Methodists. All I mean to say is, that here was a whole Margate hoy full of them; that they had feathered their nests well below ; that the night was trying ; that to a female it might be dangerous; and that not one of them, nevertheless, would stir to make room for her. As Methodism is a fact of the past and of the present, I trust it may have had its uses. The degrees of it are various, from the blackest hue of what is called Calvinistic Methodism to colours little distinguishable from the mildest and plea- santest of conventional orthodoxy. Accidents of birth, breed- ing, brain, heart, and temperament make worlds of difference YOUTH. 105 in this respect, as in all others. But where the paramount doctrine of a sect, whatever it may profess to include, is Self- preservation, and where this paramount doctrine, as it needs must when actually paramount, blunts in very self-defence the greatest final sympathies with one's fellow-creatures, the transition of ideas is easy from unfeelingness in a future state to unfeelingness in the present ; and it becomes a very little thing indeed to let a woman lie out in the cold all night, while saints are snoozing away in comfort. My companion and I, much amused, and not a little indig- nant, took our way from Ramsgate along the coast, turning cottages into inns as our hunger compelled us, and sleeping at night the moment we laid our heads on our pillows. The length of this journey, which did us good, we reckoned to be a hundred and twelve miles; and we did it in four days, which was not bad walking. But my brother Robert once went a hundred miles in two. He also, when a lad, kept up at a kind of trotting pace with a friend's horse all the way from Finchley to Pimlico. His limbs were admirably well set. The friend who was my companion in this journey had not been long known to me; but he was full of good qualities. He died a few years afterwards in France, where he unhappily found himself among his countrymen, whom Bonaparte so iruquitously detained at the commencement of the second war. He was brother of my old friend Henry Robertson, treasurer of Covent Garden theatre, in whose company and that of Vincent Novello, Charles Cowden Clarke, and other gifted and estimable men, I have enjoyed some of the most harmonious evenings of my life, in every sense of the word. Let me revert to a pleasanter recollection. The companion of my journey to Brighton, and another brother of his, who was afterwards in the Commissariat (all the brothers, alas! are now dead), set up a little club to which I belonged, called the " Elders," from our regard for the wine of that name, with hot goblets of which we finished the evening. It was not the wine so called which you buy in the shops, and which is a mixture of brandy and verjuice, but the vantage of the genuine berry, which is admired wherever it is known, and which the ancients unquestionably symbolized under the mystery of the Bearded Bacchus, the senior god of that ie — " Brother of Bacchus, elder born." 10G AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. The great Boerliaave held the tree in such pleasant reverence for the multitude of its virtues, that he is said to have taken off his hat whenever he passed it. Be this as it may, so happily it sent us to our beds, with such an extraordinary twofold inspiration of Bacchus and Somnus, that, falling to sleep, we would dream half an hour after of the last jest, and wake up again in laughter. CHAPTER VI. PLAYGOING AND VOLUNTEERS. A KNOCK at the doors of all England awoke us up from our dreams. It was Bonaparte, threatening to come among us, and bidding us put down " that glass." The " Elders," in common with the rest of the world, were moved to say him nay, and to drink, and drill themselves, to his confusion. I must own that I never had the slightest belief in this coming of Bonaparte. It did, I allow, sometimes appear to me not absolutely impossible; and very strange it was to think that some fine morning I might actually find myself face to face with a parcel of Frenchmen in Kent or Sussex, instead of playing at soldiers in Piccadilly. But I did not believe in his coming: first, because I thought he had far wiser things to attend to; secondly, because he made such an ostentatious show of it ; and thirdly, because I felt that what- ever might be our party politics, it was not in the nature of things English to allow it. Nobody, I thought, could believe it possible, who did but see and hear the fine, unaffected, manly young fellows that composed our own regiment of volun- teers, the St. James's, and whose counterparts had arisen in swarms all over the country. It was too great a jest. And with all due respect for French valour, I think so to this day. The case was not the same as in the time of the Normans. The Normans were a more advanced people than the Saxons ; they possessed a familiar and family interest among us ; and they had even a right to the throne. But in the year 1802, the French and English had for centuries been utterly dis- tinct as well as rival nations ; the latter had twice beaten the French on French ground, and under the greatest dis- advantages : how much less likely were they to be beaten on PLAYGOIXG AET> VOLUNTEERS. 107 their own, under every circumstance of exasperation ? They were an abler-bodied nation than the French; they had been bred up, hoAvever erroneously, in a contempt for them, which (in a military point of view) was salutary when it was not careless ; and, in fine, here were all these volunteers, as well as troops of the line, taking the threat with an ease too great even to laugh at it, but at the same time sedulously attending to their drills, and manifestly resolved, if the struggle came, to make a personal business of it, and see which of the two nations had the greatest pluck. The volunteers would not even take the trouble of patro- nizing a journal that was set up to record their movements and to flatter their self-respect. A word of praise from the king, from the commander-in-chief, or the colonel of the regiment, was well enough ; it was all in the way of business ; but why be told what they knew, or be encouraged when they did not require it? Wags used to say of the journal in question, which was called the Volunteer, that it printed only one number, sold only one copy, and that this copy had been purchased by a volunteer drummer-boy. The boy, seeing the paper set out for sale, exclaimed, " The Volunteer ! why, I'm a volunteer; " and so he bought that solilary image of himself. The boy was willing to be told that he was doing something more than playing at soldiers ; but what was this to the men ? This indifferent kind of self-respect and contentment did not hinder the volunteers, however, from having a good deal of pleasant banter of one another among themselves, or from feeling that 1 something now and then among them ridiculous in respect to appearances. A gallant officer in our regiment, who was much respected, went among its by the name of Lieutenant -Molly, on account of the delicacy of his complexion. Another, who was a strict disciplinarian, and had otherwise a spirit of love for the profession, as though he had been a born soldier, was not spared allusions to his balls r. Our major (now no more) was an undertaker in Piccadilly, of the name of Downs, very fat and jovial, yet active withal, and a good soldie*. He had one of those lively, juvenile faces that are sometimes observed in people of a certain sleek kind of Corpulency. This ample 6eld-officer was " cut and con lin'* for jokes of all sorts. Nor was (he colonel himself spared, though he was a highly respect- able nobleman, and nephew to an actual troop-of-the-line 108 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OP LEIGH HUNT. conqueror, the victor of Montreal. But this requires a para- graph or two to itself. We had been a regiment for some time without a colonel. The colonel was always about to be declared, but declared he was not ; and meantime we mustered about a thousand strong, and were much amazed, and, perhaps, a little indignant. At length the moment arrived — the colonel was named ; he was to be introduced to us ; and that nothing might be wanting to our dignity, he was a lord, and a friend of the minister, and nephew to the victor aforesaid. Our parade was the court-yard of Burlington House. The whole regiment attended. We occupied three sides of the ground. In front of us were the great gates, longing to be opened. Suddenly the word is given, " My lord is at hand !" Open burst the gates — up strikes the music. " Present arms!" vociferates the major. In dashes his lordship, and is pitched right over his horse's head to the ground. It was the most unfortunate anticlimax that could have happened. Skill, grace, vigour, address, example, ascendancy, mastery, victory, all were in a manner to have been pre- sented to us in the heroical person of the noble colonel ; and here they were, prostrated at our feet — ejected — cast out — humiliated — ground to the earth — subjected (for his merciful construction) to the least fellow-soldier that stood among us upright on his feet. The construction, however, was accorded. Everybody felt indeed, that the greatest of men might have been subjected to the accident. It was the horse, not he, that was in fault — it was the music — the ringing of the arms, &c. His spirit had led him to bring with him too fiery a charger. Bucephalus might have thrown Alexander at such a moment. A mole- hill threw William the Third. A man might conquer Bonaparte, and yet be thrown from his horse. And the con- clusion was singularly borne out in another quarter; for no conqueror, I believe, whose equitation is ascertained, ever combined more numerous victories with a greater number of falls from his saddle than his lordship's illustrious friend, the Duke of Wellington. During our field-days, which sometimes took place in the neighbourhood celebrated by Foote in his Mayor of Garrat, it was impossible for those who were acquainted with his writings not to think of his city-trained bands and their PLAYGOING AND VOLTJNTEEKS. 109 dreadful " marchings and counter-marchings from Acton to Ealing, and from Ealing back again to Acton." We were not " all robbed and murdered," however, as we returned home, " by a single footpad." We returned, not by the Ealing stage, but in right warlike style, marching and dusty. We had even, one day, a small taste of the will and appetite of campaigning. Some of us, after a sham-fight, were hasten- ing towards Acton, in a very rage of hunger and thirst, when we discerned coming toward:-; us a baker with a basket full of loaves. To observe the man, to see his loaves scattered on the ground, to find ourselves each with one of them under his arm, tearing the crumb out, and pushing on for the village, heedless of the cries of the pursuing baker, was (in the language of the novelists) the work of a moment. Next moment we found ourselves standing in the cellar of an Acton alehouse, with the spigots torn out of the barrels, and every- body helping himself as he could. The baker and the becr- a were paid, but not till we chose to attend to them ; and I fully comprehended, even from this small specimen of the will and pleasure of soldiers, what savages they could become on graver occasions. In this St. James's regiment of volunteers were three persons whom I looked on with great interest, for they were actors. They were Farley, Emery, and De Camp, all well- known performers at the time. The first was a celebrated melodramatic actor, remarkable for combining a short sturdy person with energetic activity ; for which reason, if I am not mistaken, in spite of his shortness and his sturdiness, he had got into the light infa company, where I think I have had the pleasure of standing both with him and Mr. De Camp. With De Camp certainly. The latter was brother of Miss De Can ard drs. Charles Kemble, an admirable, actress in the same line as Farley, and in such characters as Beatrice and Lucy Lochitt. She had a beau- tiful figure, fine large dark eyes, and elevated features, fuller of spirit than softness, but still capable of ■■■ ing great Her brother was nobody in comparison with her, though he was clever in his v« 1 more handsome. But it was a so ii ; tninate beauty, which made him look : to have been the sister, and she the brother. b was said of him, iii a c tensive bil of alliteration, that h ■ •■ failed in fops, bul there was fire in his footmen." le third of these histrionic pah i r. Emery, was one 110 AUTOBIOGEAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. of the best actors of his kind the stage ever saw. He ex- celled, not only in Yorkshiremen, and other rustical comic characters, but in parts of homely tragedy, such as criminals of the lower order; whose conscious guilt he exhibited with such a lively, truthful mixture of clownishness in the mode and intensity in the feeling, as made a startling and terrible picture of the secret passions to which all classes of men are liable. Emery was also an amateur painter — of landscape, I believe, and of no mean repute. He was a man of a middle height, rather tall perhaps than otherwise, and with quiet, respectable manners ; but with something of Avhat is called a pudding face, and an appearance on the whole not unlike a gentleman farmer. You would not have supposed there was so much emotion in him, though he had purpose, too, in his look, and he died early. I have been tempted to dilate somewhat on these gentle- men ; for though I made no acquaintance with them privately, I was now beginning to look with peculiar interest on the stage, to which I had already wished to be a contributor, and of which I was then becoming a critic. I had written a tragedy, a comedy, and a farce; and my Spring Garden friends had given me an introduction to their acquaintance, Mr. Kelly, of the Opera House, with a view to having the farce brought out by some manager with whom he was intimate. I remember lighting upon him at the door of his music-shop or saloon, at the corner of the lane in Pall Mall, where the Arcade now begins, and giving him my letter of introduction and my farce at once. He had a quick, snappish, but not ill-natured voice, and a flushed, handsome, and good-humoured face, with the hair about his ears. The look was a little rakish or so, but very agreeable. Mr. Kelly was extremely courteous to me ; but what he said of the farce, or did with it, I utterly forget. Himself I shall never forget; for as he was the first actor I ever beheld anywhere, so he was one of the first whom I saw on the stage. Actor, indeed, he was none, except inasmuch as he was an acting singer, and not destitute of a certain spirit in every- thing he did. Neither had he any particular power as a singer, or even a voice. He said it broke down while he was studying in Italy ; where, indeed, he had sung with applause. The little snappish tones I spoke of were very manifest on the stage : he had short arms, as if to match them, and a PLATGOING AND VOLUNTEERS. Ill hasty step: and yet, notwithstanding these drawbacks, he was heard with pleasure, for he had taste and feeling. He was a delicate composer, as the music in Blue Beard evinces ; and he selected so happily from other composers, as to give rise to his friend Sheridan's banter, that he was an " importer of music and composer of wines" (for he once took to being a wine-merchant). "While in Ireland, during the early part of his career, he adapted a charming air of Martini's to English words, which, under the title of " Oh, thou wert born to please me," he sang with Mrs. Crouch to so much effect, that not only was it always called for three times, but no play was suffered to be performed without it. It should be added, that Mrs. Crouch was a lovely woman, as well as a beautiful singer, and that the two performers were in love. I have heard them sing it myself, and do not wonder at the impres- sion it made on the susceptible hearts of the Irish. Twenty years afterwards, when Mrs. Crouch was no more, and while Kelly was singing a duct in the same country with Madame ! mi, a man in the gallery cried out, " Mr. Kelly, will you be good enough to favour us with ' Oh, thou Avert born to ■ me?'" The audience laughed; but the call went to the heart of the singer, and probably came from that of the honest fellow who made it. The man may have gone to the play in his youth, with somebody whom he loved by his side, and heard two lovers, as happy as himself, sing what he now wished to hear again. Madame Catalan! was also one of the singers I first re- member. I first heard her at an oratorio, where, happening to sit in a box right opposite to where she stood, the leaping forth of her amazingly powerful voice absolutely startled me. Women's voices on the stage are apt to rise above all others, but Catalani's seemed to delight in trying its strength with choruses and orchestras; and the louder they became, the high r and more victorious she ascended. In fact, 1 believe she is known to have provoked and enjoyed this sort of i 1 suspect, bowever, that I did not hear her when she at her best or swei " t. My recollection is, that with a great deal of taste and brilliancy, there was more force than Qg. She y,;,s a Roman, with the regular Italian antelope face (if I may so call it); large eyes, with a sensitive elegant , and lively expi i ion. Mr . Billington also appeared to me to have more brilliancy of execution than depth of feeling. She was a fat beauty, 112 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OP LEIGH HUNT. with regular features, and may be seen drawn to the life, in a portrait in Mr. Hogarth's Memoirs of the Musical Drama, where she is frightfully dressed in a cropped head of hair, and a Avaist tucked under her arms — the fashion of the day. Not so Grassini, a large but perfectly well-made as well as lovely woman, with black hair and eyes, and her countenance as full of feeling as her divine contralto voice. Largeness, or what is called fineness of person, was natural to her, and did not hinder her from having a tridy feminine appearance. She was an actress as well as singer. She acted Proserpina in Winter's beautiful opera, and might have remained in the recollection of any one who heard and beheld her, as an image of the goddess she represented. My friend, Vincent Novello, saw the composer when the first performance of the piece was over, stoop down (he was a very tall man) and kiss Mrs. Billington's hand for her singing in the character of Ceres. I wonder he did not take Grassini in his arms. She must have had a fine soul, and would have known how to pardon him. But, perhaps he did. With Billington used to perform Braham, from whose wonderful remains of power in his old age we may judge what he must have been in his prime. I mean, with regard to voice ; for as to general manner and spirit, it is a curious fact that, except when he was in the act of singing, he used to be a remarkably insipid performer; and that it was not till he was growing elderly that he became the animated person we now see him. This, too, he did all on a sudden, to the amusement as well as astonishment of the beholders. When he sang, he was always animated. The probability is, that he had been bred up under masters who were wdiolly untheatrical, and that something had occurred to set his natural spirit reflecting on the injustice they had done him ; though, for a reason which I shall give presently, the theatre, after all, was not the best field for his abilities. He had won- derful execution as well as force, and his voice could also be very sweet, though it was too apt to betray something of that nasal tone which has been observed in Jews, and which is, perhaps, quite as much, or more, a habit in which they have been brought up than a consequence of organization. The same thing has been noticed in Americans ; and it might not be difficult to trace it to moral, and even to monied causes; those, to wit, that induce people to retreat inwardly upon them- selves; into a sense of their shrewdness and resources; and to PLAYGOING AND VOLUNTEERS. 113 clap their finger in self-congratulation upon the organ through which it pleases them occasionally to intimate as much to a bystander, not "choosing to trust it wholly to the mouth. Perhaps it was in some measure the same kind of breeding (i do not say it in disrespect, but in reference to matters of ca?te, far more discreditable to Christians than Jews) which induced Mr. Braham to quit the Italian stage, and devote himself to his popular and not very refined style of bravura - singing on the English. It was what may be called the loud- and-soft style. There was admirable execution ; but the expression consisted in being very soft on the words love, peace, &c, and then bursting into roars of triumph on the words hite, war, and glory. To this pattern Mr. Braham composed many of the songs written for him ; and the public were enchanted with a style which enabled them to fancy that they enjoyed the highest style of the art, while it required only the vulgarest of their perceptions. This renowned vocalist never did himself justice except in the compositions of Handel. When he stood in the concert -room or the oratorio, and opened his mouth with plain, heroic utterance in the mighty strains of "Deeper and deeper still," or " Sound an alarm, 1 ' or, " Comfort ye my people," you felt indeed that you had a great singer before you. His voice which too often sounded like a horn vulgar, in. the catchpenny lyrics of Tom Dibdin, now became a veritable trumpet of grandeur and exaltation ; the tabernacle of his creed seemed to open before him in its most victorious days; and you might have fancied yourself in the presence of one of the sons of Aaron, calling out to the host of the people from some platform occu- pied by their prop!: About the same time Pasta made her first appearance in England, and produced no sensation. .She did not even seem to attempt any. Her nature Avas so truthful, that, having as yet no acquirements to display, it would appear that she did not pretend she had. She must either have been prematurely put forward by others, or, with an instinct of her future great- ness, supposed that the instinct itself would, be recognized. When ue the second time, after completing her studies, she took rank at, once as the greatest, genius in her line which the Italian theatre in England had witnessed. She was a great tragic actress ; and bj aginj , in point of Core-, tenderness, and expression, was equal to her acting. All noble passions belonged to her; and her very scorn seemed equally noble, for 8 114 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OP LEIGH HUNT. it trampled only on what was mean. When she measured her enemy from head to foot, in Tancredi, you really felt for the man, at seeing him so reduced into nothingness. When she made her entrance on the stage, in the same character — whicl: she did right in front of the audience, midway between tie side scenes, she waved forth her arms, and drew them quietly together again over her bosom, as if she sweetly, yet modestly, embraced the whole house. And when, in the part of Medea, she looked on the children she was about to kill, and tenderly parted their hair, and seemed to mingle her very eyes in lov- ingness with theirs, uttering, at the same time, notes of the most wandering and despairing sweetness, every gentle eye melted into tears. She wanted height, and had somewhat too much flesh ; but it seemed the substance of the very health of her body, which was otherwise shapely. Her head and bust were of the finest classical mould. An occasional rough- ness in her lower tones did but enrich them with passion, as people grow hoarse with excess of feeling; and while her voice was in its prime, even a little incorrectness now and then in the notes w r ould seem the consequence of a like boundless emotion ; but, latterly, it argued a failure of ear, and consoled the mechanical artists wdio had been mystified by her success. In every other respect, perfect truth, graced by idealism, was the secret of Pasta's greatness. She put truth first always ; and, in so noble and sweet a mind, grace followed it as a natu- ral consequence. With the exception of Lablache, that wonderful barytone singer, full of might as well as mirth, in whom the same truth, accompanied in some respects by the same grace of feeling, suffered itself to be overlaid with comic fat (except when he turned it into an heroic amplitude with drapery), I remember no men on our Italian stage equal to the women. Women have carried the palm out and out, in acting, singing, and dancing. The pleasurable seems more the forte of the sex ; and the opera house is essentially a palace of pleasure, even in its tragedy. Bitterness there cannot but speak sweetly ; there is no darkness, and no poverty ; and every death is the death of the swan. When the men are sweet, they either seem feeble, or, as in the case of Eubini, have execution without passion. Naldi was amusing ; Tramezzani was elegant ; Ara- brogetti (whose great big calves seemed as if they ought to have saved him from going into La Trappe) was a fine dash- ing representative of Don Juan, without a voice. But what PLAYGOISTG AND VOLUNTEERS. 115 were these in point of impression on the public, compared with the woman I have mentioned, or even with voluptuous Fodor, with amiable Sontag, with charming Malibran (whom 1 never saw), or with adorable Jenny Lind (whom, as an Irishman would say, I have seen still less ; for not to see her appears to be a deprivation beyond all ordinary conceptions of musical loss and misfortune) ? As to dancers, male dancers are almost always gaivHes, compared with female. One forgets the names of the best of them; but who, that ever saw, has forgotten Heberle, or Cerito, or Taglioni ? There was a great noise once in France about the Vestrises ; particularly old Vestris ; but (with all due respect to our gallant neighbours) I have a suspicion that he took the French in with the gravity and imposingness of his twirls. There was an imperial demand about Vestris, likely to create for him a corresponding supply of admiration. The most popular dancers of whom 1 have a recollection, when I was young, were Deshayes, who was rather an elegant posture- master than dancer, and Madame Parisot, who was very thin, and always smiling. I could have seen little dancing in those times, or I should have something to say of the Prcslcs, Didelots, and others, who turned the heads of the Yarmouths and Barrymores of the day. Art, in all its branches, has since grown more esteemed ; and I suspect that neither dancing nor singing ever attained so much grace and beauty as they have done within the last twenty years. The Fari- nellis and Pacchicrottis were a kind of monsters of execution. There were tones, also, in their voices which, in all proba- bility, were very touching. But, to judge from their printed -;, their chief excellence lay in difficult and everlasting And we may guess, even now, from the prevailing character of French dancing, thai difficulty was the g point of conquest with Vestris. There was no such graceful rstanding between the playgoers and the performers, no such implied recognition of the highest principles of emotion, as appears to be the , sent day with the Taglionis and Jinny Linds. To return to the English boards, — the first actor whom I remember seeing upon them \. cellent Jack Bannister. He ■>■ : a handsome pecimen of the best kind of Englishman. — jovial, manly, good-humoured, unaffected, with a great deal of whim and drollery, but never passing the I, I the de- ;is; and when he had made you laugh heartily as some 8—2 11G AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. yeoman or seaman in a comedy, lie could bring the tears into your eyes for some honest sufferer in an afterpiece. He gave you the idea of a good fellow, — a worthy household humourist, — whom it would be both pleasant and profitable to live with; and this was his real character. He had a taste for pictures, and settled down into a good English gout and the love of his family. I saw him one day hobbling with a stick in Gower Street, where he lived, and the same evening performing the part either of the young squire, Tony Lumpkin, in She Stoops to Conquer, or of Acres, in the Comedy of the Rivals, I forget which; but in either character he would be young to the last. Next day he would perform the old father, the Brazier, in Colman's sentimental comedy, John Bull; and everybody would see that it was a father indeed who was suffering. This could not be said of Fawcett in the same character, who roared like Bull, but did not feel like John. He was affecting, too, in his way; but it was after the fashion of a great noisy boy, whom you cannot help pitying for his tears, though you despise him for his vulgarity. Fawcett had a harsh, brazen face, and a voice like a knife-grinder's wheel. He was all pertness, coarseness, and effrontery, but with a great deal of comic force ; and whenever he came trotting on to the stage (for such was his walk) and pouring forth his harsh, rapid words, with his nose in the air, and a facetious grind in his throat, the audience were prepared for a merry evening. Munclen was a comedian famous for the variety and sig- nificance of his grimaces, and for making something out of nothing by a certain intensity of contemplation. Lamb, with exquisite wit, described him in one sentence, by saying, that Munden " beheld a leg of mutton in its quiddity." If he laid an emphasis on the word " Holborn," or " button," he did it in such a manner that you thought there was more in " Hol- born," or " button," than it ever before entered into your head to conceive. I have seen him, Avhile playing the part of a vagabond loiterer about inn-doors, look at, and gradually approach, a pot of ale on a table from a distance, for ten minutes together, while he kept the house in roars of laughter by the intense idea which he dumbly conveyed of its contents, and the no less intense manifestation of his cautious but in- flexible resolution to drink it. So, in acting the part of a credulous old antiquary, on whom an old beaver is palmed for the "hat of "William Tell," he reverently put the hat on his PLAYGOIXG AND VOLUNTEERS. 117 head, and then solemnly walked to and fro with such an ex- cessive sense of the glory with which he was crowned, such a weight of reflected heroism, and accumulation of Toll's whole history on that single representative culminating point, ele- gantly halting every now and then to put himself in the atti- tude of one drawing a bow, that the spectators could hardly have been astonished had they seen his hair stand on end, and cany the hat aloft with it. But I must not suffer myself to be led into these details. Lewis was a comedian of the rarest order, for he combined whimsicality with elegance, and levity with heart. He was the fop, the lounger, the flatterer, the rattlebrain, the sower of wild oats ; and in all he was the gentleman. He looked on the stage what he was off it, the companion of wits and men of quality. It is pleasant to know that he was a descendant of Erasmus Lewis, the secretary of Lord Oxford, and friend of Pope and Swift. He was airiness personified. He had a light person, light features, a light voice, a smile that showed the teeth, with good-humoured eyes; and a genial levity per- vaded his action, to the very tips of his delicately-gloved fingers. He drew on his glove like a gentleman, and then darted his fingers at the ribs of the character he was talking with, in a way that carried with it whatever was suggestive, and sparkling, and amusing. When he died, they put up a classical Latin inscription to his memory, about eleganticc and lepores (whims and graces) ; and you felt that no man better deserved it. He had a right to be recorded as the type of airy genteel comedy. Elliston was weightier both in manner and person ; and he was a tragedian as well as comedian. Not a great tragedian, though able to make a serious and affecting impression; and when 1 say weightier in comedy than Lewis, I do not mean heavy ; but that he had greater bodily substance and force. In Sir Harry Wildair, for instance, he looked more like the man who could bear rakcry and debauch. The engraved portrait of him in a coat bordered with fur is very like. He had dry as well as genial humour, was an admirable represen- tative of the triple hero in Three and the Deuce, of Charles Surface, Don Felix, the Duke in the Honeymoon, and of all gallant and gay lovers of a robust order, not omitting the most cordial. Indeed, he was the most genuine lover that I ever saw on the stage. No man approached a woman as he did, — with so flattering a mixture of reverence and passion — such 118 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OP LEIGH HUNT. closeness without insolence, and such a trembling energy in his words. His utterance of the single word "charming" was a volume of rapturous fervour. I speak, of course, only of his better days. Latterly, he grew flustered with impru- dence and misfortune ; and from the accounts I have heard of his acting, nobody who had not seen him before could have guessed what sort of man he had been. Elliston, like Lewis, went upon the stage with advantages of training and connec- tions. He was nephew of Dr. Elliston, master of one of the colleges at Cambridge ; and he was educated at Saint Paul's school. These are the actors of those days whom I recollect with the greatest pleasure. I include Fawcett, because he was identified with some of the most laughable characters in farce. To touch on some others. Liston was renowned for an excmisitely ridiculous face and manner, rich with half-con- scious, half-unconscious absurdity. The whole piece became Listonized the moment he appeared. People longed for his coming back, in order that they might dote on his oily, mantling face, and laugh with him and at him. Mathews was a genius in mimicry, a facsimile in mind as well as manner ; and he was a capital Sir Fretful Plagiary. It was a sight to see him looking wretchedly happy at his victimizers, and digging deeper and deeper into his morti- fication at every fresh button of his coat that he buttoned up. Dowton was perfect in such characters as Colonel Oldboy and Sir Anthony Absolute. Hi3 anger was no petty irrita- bility, but the boiling of a rich blood, and of a will otherwise genial. He was also by far the best FalstafF. Cooke, a square-faced, hook-nosed, wide-mouthed, malig- nantly smiling man, was intelligent and peremptory, and a hard hitter : he seized and strongly kept your attention ; but he was never pleasant. He was too entirely the satirist, the hypocrite, and the villain. He loved too fondly his own caustic and rascally words; so that his voice, which was otherwise harsh, was in the habit of melting and dying away inwardly in the secret satisfaction of its smiling malignity. As to his vaunted tragedy, it Avas a mere reduction of Shak- speare's poetry into indignant prose. He limited every cha- racter to its worst cpialities ; and had no idealism, no affec- tions, no verse. PLAYGOING AND VOLUNTEERS. 119 Kemble was a god compared with Cooke, as far as the ideal was concerned; though, on the other hand, I never could admire Kemble as it was the fashion to do. He was too artificial, too formal, too critically and deliberately conscious. Nor do I think that he had any genius whatsoever. His power was all studied acquirement. It was this, indeed, by the help of his stern Roman aspect, that made the critics like him. It presented, in a noble shape, the likeness of their own capabilities. Want of genius could not be imputed to his sister, Mrs. Siddons. I did not see her, I believe, in her best days ; but she must always have been a somewhat masculine beauty ; and she had no love in her, apart from other passions. She was a mistress, however, of lofty, of queenly, and of appalling tragic effect. Nevertheless, I could not but think that some- thing of too much art was apparent even in Mrs. Siddons ; and she failed, I think, in the highest points of refinement. When she smelt the blood on her hand, for instance, in Macbeth^ in the scene where she walked in her sleep, she made a face of ordinary disgust, as though the odour were offensive to the senses, not appalling to the mind. Charles Kemble, who had an ideal face and figure, was the nearest approach I ever saw to Shakspcare's gentlemen, and to heroes of romance. He also made an excellent Cassio. But with the exception of Mrs. Siddons, who was declining, all the reigning school of tragedy had retrograded rather than otherwise, towards the time that preceded Garrick ; and the consequence was, that when Kean brought back nature and impulse, he put an end to it at once, as Garrick had put an end to Quin. In comedy nature had never been wanting; and there was one comic actress, who was nature herself in one of her most genial forms. This was Mrs. Jordan; wdio, though she was neither beautiful, nor handsome, nor even pretty, nor accom- plished, nor "a lady," nor anything conventional or corn /'■nil, whatsoever, yet was so pleasant, so cordial, so natural, 'ill of sp althily constituted in mind and body, had such a shapely leg withal, so eharming a voice, and such a happy and happy-making expression of countenance, that I something superior to all those requirements of ptability, and to bold a. patenl from nature bi • elfforoujf delight and good opinion. It is creditable to the feelings of ety in general, that allowances are made for the tempta- 120 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. tions to which the stage exposes the sex ; and in Mrs. Jor- dan's case these were not diminished by a sense of the like consideration due to princely restrictions, and to the manifest domestic dispositions of more parties than one. But she made even Methodists love her. A touching story is told of her apologizing to a poor man of that persuasion for having relieved him. He had asked her name ; and she expressed a hope that he would not feel offended when the name was told him. On hearing it, the honest Methodist (he could not have been one on board the hoy) shed tears of pity and admi- ration, and trusted that he could not do wrong in begging a blessing on her head. {Serious Revieiver, interrupting. But, my good sir, suppose some of your female readers should take it into their heads to be Mrs. Jordan ? Author. Oh, my good sir, don't be alarmed. My female readers are not persons to be so much afraid for, as you seem to think yours are. The stage itself has taught them large measures both of charity and discernment. They have not been so locked up in restraint, as to burst out of bounds the moment they see a door open for consideration.) Mrs. Jordan was inimitable in exemplifying the conse- quences of too much restraint in ill-educated Country Girls, in Eomps, in Hoydens, and in Wards on whom the mercenary have designs. She wore a bib and tucker, and pinafore, with a bouncing propriety, fit to make the boldest spectator alarmed at the idea of bringing such a household responsi- bility on his shoulders. To see her when thus attired shed blubbering tears for some disappointment, and eat all the while a great thick slice of bread and butter, weeping, and moaning, and munching, and eyeing at every bite the part she meant to bite next, was a lesson against will and appetite worth a hundred sermons of our friends on board the hoy; and, on the other hand, they could assuredly have done and said nothing at all calculated to make such an impression in favour of amiableness as she did, when she acted in gentle, generous, and confiding characters. The way in which she would take a friend by the cheek and kiss her, or make up a quarrel with a lover, or coax a guardian into good-humour, or sing (without accompaniment) the song of " Since then I'm doom'd," or " In the dead of the night," trusting, as ' she had a right to do, and as the house wished her to do, to the sole effect of her sweet, mellow, and loving voice — the PLAYGOING AND VOLUNTEERS. 121 reader will pardon me, but tears of pleasure and regret come into my eyes at the recollection, as if she personified -what- soever was happy at that period of life, and which has gone like herself. The very sound of the little familiar word bud from her lips (the abbreviation of husband), as she packed it closer, as it were, in the utterance, and pouted it up with fondness in the man's face, taking him at the same time by the chin, was a whole concentrated world of the power of loving. That is a pleasant time of life, the playgoing time in youth, when the coach is packed full to go to the theatre, and brothers and sisters, parents and lovers (none of whom, perhaps, go very often) are all wafted together in a flurry of expectation ; when the only wish as they go (except with the lovers) is to go as fast as possible, and no sound is so delightful as the cry of "Bill of the Play;" when the smell of links in the darkest and muddiest winter's night is charming; and the steps of the coach are let down ; and a roar of hoarse voices round the door, and mud-shine on the pavement, are accompanied with the sight of the warm-looking lobby which is about to be entered ; and they enter, and pay, and ascend the pleasant stairs, and begin to hear the silence of the house, perhaps the first jingle of the music; and the box is entered amidst some little awkwardness in descending to their places, am! being looked at; and at length they sit, and are become used to by their neighbours, and shawls and smiles are adjusted, and the play-hill is handed round or pinned to the cushion, and the gods are a little noisy, and the music veri- tably commences, and at length the curtain is drawn up, and the first delightful syllables are heard: — " Ah ! my dear Charles, when did you see the lovely Olivia?" " Oh ! my dear Sir George, talk not to mc of Olivia. The cruel guardian," &c. Anon the favourite of the party makes his appearance, and then they are quite happy; and next day, besides his own merits, the points of the dialogue are attributed to him as if he were their inventor. It is not Sir Harry, or old Dornton, or Dubstcr, who said this or that; but " Lewis," "Munden," or " Keclcy." They seem to think the wit really originated with the man who uttered it so delightfully. Critical playgoing is very inferior in its enjoyments to this. It must of necessity blame as well as praise; it becomes difli- 122 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OP LEIGH HUNT. cult to please ; it is tempted to prove its own merits, instead of those of its entertainers ; and the enjoyments of self-love, besides, perhaps, being ill-founded, and subjecting it to the blame which it bestows, are sorry substitutes, at the best, for hearty delight in others. Never, after I had taken critical pen in hand, did I pass the thoroughly delightful evenings at the playhouse which I had done when I went only to laugh or be moved. I had the pleasure, it is true, of praising those whom I admired; but the retributive uneasiness of the very pleasure of blaming attended it ; the consciousness of self, which on all occasions except loving ones contains a bitter in its sweet, put its sorry obstacle in the way of an unem- barrassed delight ; and I found the days flown when I retained none but the good passages of plays and performers, and Avhen I irsed to carry to my old school-fellows rapturous accounts of the farces of Colman, and the good-natured come- dies of O'Keefe. I speak of my own feelings, and at a particular time of life: but forty or fifty years ago people of all times of life were much greater playgoers than they are now. They dined earlier, they had not so many newspapers, clubs, and piano- fortes ; the French Revolution only tended at first to endear the nation to its own habits ; it had not yet opened a thousand new channels of thought and interest ; nor had railroads con- spired to carry people, bodily as well as mentally,, into as many analogous directions. Everything was more concen- trated, and the various classes of society felt a greater concern in the same amusements. Nobility, gentry, citizens, princes, — all were frequenters of theatres, and even more or less acquainted personally with the performers. Nobility inter- married with them; gentry, and citizens too, wrote for them; princes conversed and lived with them. Sheridan, and other members of Parliament, were managers as well as dramatists. It was Lords Derby, Craven, and Thurlow that sought wives on the stage. Two of the most popular minor dramatists were Cobb, a clerk in the India House, and Birch, the pastrycook. If Mrs. Jordan lived with the Duke of Clarence (William IV.) as his mistress, nobody doubts that she was as faithful to him as a wife. His brother, the Prince of Wales (George the Fourth), besides his intimacy with Sheridan and the younger Colman, and to say nothing of Mrs. Robinson, took a pleasure in conversing with Kemble, and was the per- sonal patron of O'Keefe and of Kelly. The Kembles, indeed, PLAYGOING AND VOLUNTEERS. 123 as Garrick had been, were received everywhere among the truly- best circles ; that is to say, where intelligence was combined with high breeding; and they deserved it : for whatever difference of opinion may be entertained as to the amount of genius in the family, nobody who recollects them will dispute that they were a remarkable race, dignified and elegant in manners, with intellectual tendencies, and in point of aspect very like what has been called " God Almighty's nobility." 1 remember once standing behind John Kemble and a noble lord at a sale. It was the celebrated book sale of the Duke of Eoxburgh ; and by the same token I recollect another person that was present, of whom more by-and-by. The player and the nobleman were conversing, the former in his high, dignified tones, the latter in a voice which I heard but indistinctly. Presently, the aotor turned his noble profile to his interlocutor, and on his moving it back again, the man of quality turned his. What a difference! and what a voice! Kemble's voice was none of the best; but, like his profile, it was nobleness itself compared with that of the noble lord. I had taken his lordship for a young man, by the trim cut of his body and of his clothes, the " fall in" of his back, and the smart way in which he had stuck his hat on the top of his I ; but when I saw his profile and heard his voice, I '1 to have before me a premature old one. His mouth ; his voice was a hasty mumble. Without being aquiline, the face had the appearance of being what may be called an old " nose-and-mouth face." The sudden- ness with which it spoke added to the surprise. It was like a flash of decrepitude on the top of a young body. This was t' at which the unique copy of Boccaccio fetched a thousand ami four hundred pounds. It was bought by the Marquis of Blandford (the late Duke of Marlborough) mpetition with Earl Spencer, who conferred with his son, Lord Althorp, and gave it up. So at least I understand, for \ not aw; ■ the conference, or of the presence of Lord Althorp (after u ter, and late Earl Spencer). I mber his father well at the sale, ami how he sal at the farther end of the auctioneer's table, with an air of intelligi nt indifl ' ad on his hand so as to push up the hat a little from off it. 1 beheld with p in his pupil of Sir William Junes and brother of Cole- ire, it was curious, and scarcely mi. to see two Spencers thus bidding again I one another, 124 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. even though the bone of contention was a book; and the ghost of their illustrious kinsman, the author of the Faerie Queene, might have been gratified to see what book it was, and how high the prices of old folios had risen. What satisfaction the Marquis got out of his victory I cannot say. The Earl, who, I believe, was a genuine lover of books, coidd go home and reconcile himself to his defeat by reading the work in a cheaper edition. I shall have occasion to speak of Mr. Kemble again pre- sently, and of subsequent actors by-and-by. CHAPTER VII. ESSAYS IN CRITICISM. I had not been as misdirected in the study of prose as in that of poetry. It was many years before I discovered what was requisite in the latter. In the former, the very commonplaces of the schoolmaster tended to put me in the right path, for (as I have already intimated) he found the Spectator in vogue, and this became our standard of prose writing. It is true (as I have also mentioned) that in consequence of the way in which we were taught to use them by the school- master, I had become far more disgusted than delighted with the charming papers of Addison, and with the exaction of moral observations on a given subject. But the seed was sown, to ripen under pleasanter circumstances ; and my father, with his usual good-natured impulse, making me a present one day of a set of the British classics, which attracted my eyes on the shelves of Harley, the bookseller in Cavendish Street, the tenderness with which I had come to regard all my school recollections, and the acquaintance which I now made for the first time with the lively papers of the Con- noisseur, gave me an entirely fresh and delightful sense of the merits of essay-writing. I began to think that Avhen Boyer crumpled up and chucked away my " themes" in a passion, he had not done justice to the honest weariness of my anti- formalities, and to their occasional evidences of something better. The consequence was a delighted perusal of the whole set of classics (for I have ever been a " glutton of books ") ; and this was followed by my first prose endeavoiu:s in a series of ESSAYS IN CKITICISir. 125 papers called the Traveller, which appeared in the evening paper of that name [long since incorporated with the Globe'], under the signature of " Mr. Town, junior, Critic and Censor- general" — the senior Mr. Town, with the same titles, being no less a person than my friend of the Connoisseur, with whom I thus had the boldness to fraternize. I offered them with fear and trembling to the editor of the Traveller, Mr. Quin, and was astonished at the gaiety with which he accepted them. What astonished me more was a perquisite of five or six copies of the paper, which I enjoyed every Saturday when my essays appeared, and with which I used to reissue from Bolt Court in a state of transport. I had been told, but could not easily conceive, that the editor of a new evening paper would be happy to fill up his pages Avith any decent writing; but Mr. Quin praised me besides; and I could not behold the long columns of type, written by myself, in a public paper, without thinking there must be some merit in them, besides that of being a stop-gap. Luckily, the essays were little read ; they were not at all noticed in public; and I thus escaped the perils of another premature laudation lor my juvenility. I was not led to repose on the final merits either of my prototype or his imitator. The Connoisseur, nevertheless, gave me all the transports of a first love. His citizen at Vauxhall, who says, at every mouthful of beef, "There goes twopence;" and the creed of his unbeliever, who "believes in all unbelief," com- peted for a long time in my mind with the humour of Gold- smith. I was also greatly delighted with the singular account of himself, in the dual number, with which he con- cludes his work, shadowing forth the two authors of it in one person: — ■■ Mr. Town" (says he) "is a fair, black, middle-sized, very short person. He wears his own hair, and a periwig. He is about thirty rs of age, and not more than four-and-twenty. He is a student of the lav,- and a bachelor of physic. He was bred at the University of Oxford; where, having taken no less than three degrees, he looks down on many learned professors as his inferiors; yet, having b there but little longer than to take the first degree of bachelor ot arts, it has more than once happened that the censor-general of all England has been reprimanded by the censor of his college for neglecting to furnish the usual essay, or (in the collegiate phrase) e oi the w< ek." Probably the ns with school-terms, and with a juvenile time of life, gare me an additional liking for the 12G AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. Connoisseur. The twofold author, which he thus describes himself, consisted of Bonnell Thornton, afterwards the trans- lator of Plautus, and Colman, the dramatist, author of the Jealous Wife, and translator of Terence. Colman was the " very short person " of four-and-twenty, and Thornton was the bachelor of physic, though he never practised. The humour of these writers, compared with Goldsmith's, was caricature, and not deep; they had no pretensions to the genius of the Vicar of Wakefield: but they possessed great animal spirits, which are a sort of merit in this climate; and this was another claim on my regard. The name of Bonnell Thornton (whom I had taken to be the sole author of the Connoisseur) was for a long time, with me, another term for animal spirits, humour, and wit. I then discovered that there was more smartness in him than depth; and had I known that he and Colman had ridiculed the odes of Gray, I should, peidiaps, have made the discovery sooner ; though I was by no means inclined to confound parody with disrespect. But the poetry of Gray had been one of my first loves ; and I could as soon have thought of friendship or of the grave with levity, as of the friend of West, and the author of the Elegy and the Bard. An amusing story is told of Thornton, which may show the quick and ingenious, but, perhaps, not very feeling turn of his mind. It is said that he was once discovered by his father sitting in a box at the theatre, when he ought to have been in his rooms at college. The old gentleman addressing him accordingly, that youngster turned in pretended amaze- ment to the people about him, and said, " Smoke old wigsby, who takes me for his son." Thornton, senior, upon this, indignantly hastens out of the box, with the manifest inten- tion of setting off for Oxford, and finding the rooms vacant. Thornton, junior, takes double post-horses, and is there before him, quietly sitting in his chair. He rises from it on his father's appearance, and cries, " Ah ! dear sir, is it you ? To what am I indebted for this unexpected pleasure ? " Goldsmith enchanted me. I knew no end of repeating passages out of the Essays and the Citizen of the World — such as the account of the Club, with its Babel of talk; of Beau Tibbs, with his dinner of ox-cheek which " his grace was so fond of;" and of the wooden-legged sailor, who regarded those that were lucky enough to have their " legs shot off" on board king's ships (which entitled them to a ESSAYS IN CRITICISM. 127 penny a day), as being " born with golden spoons in their mouths." Then there "was his correct, sweet style; the village-painting in his poems; the Retaliation, which, though on an artificial subject, seemed to me (as it yet seems) a still more genuine effusion; and, above all, the Vicar of Wakefield — with Burchell, whom I adored ; and Moses, whom I would rather have been cheated with, than prosper; and the Vicar ' himself in his cassock, now presenting his " Treatise against Polygamy " (in the family picture) to his wife, habited as Venus; and now distracted for the loss of his daughter Olivia, who is seduced by the villanous squire. I knew not whether to laugh at him, or cry with him most. These, with Fielding and Smollett, Voltaire, Charlotte Smith, Bage, Mrs. Kadcliffe, and Augustus La Fontaine, were my favourite prose authors. I had subscribed, while at school, to the famous circulating library in Leadenhall Street, and I have continued to be such a glutton of novels ever since, that, except where they repel me in the outset with excessive wordiness, I can read their three-volume enormities to this day without skipping a syllable; though I guess pretty nearly all that is going to happen, from the mysterious gen- tleman who opens the work in the dress of a particular cen- tury, down to the distribution of punishments and the drying up of tears in the last chapter. I think the authors wonder- fully clever people, particularly those who write most; and I should like the most contemptuous of their critics to try their hands at doing something half as engaging. Should any chance er of these pages (for I look upon my customary perusers as people of deeper insight) pro- nounce such a course of reading frivolous, he will be exaspe- rated to hear that, had it not been for reverence to opinion, I should have been much inclined at that age (as, indeed, I am still) to pronounce the reading of far graver works frivo- lous ; history, for one. I read every history that came in my way, and could not help liking good old Herodotus, ditto Villain, picturesque, festive i b, and accurate and most entertaining, though artificial, Gibbon. But the contradic- tion., of historians in general, their assumption of a dignity for which I saw no particular grounds, their unphilosophic and ridiculous avoidance (on that score) of personal anecdote, and, above all, the narrow-minded and time-serving con- finement of their subjects to wars and party-government (for there arc time-servings, afl there are fashions, that last for 128 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. centuries), instinctively repelled me. I felt, though I did not know, till Fielding told me, that there was more truth in the verisimilitudes of fiction than in the assumptions of history; and I rejoiced over the story told of Sir Walter Raleigh, who, on receiving I forget how many different accounts of an incident that occurred under his own windows, laughed at the idea of his writing a History of the World. But the writer who made the greatest impression on me was Voltaire. I did not read French at that time, but I fell in with the best translation of some of his miscellaneous works; and I found in him not only the original of much which I had admired in the style and pleasantry of my favourite native authors, Goldsmith in particular (who adored him), but the most formidable antagonist of absurdities which the world had seen ; a discloser of lights the most overwhelm- ing, in flashes of wit ; a destroyer of the strongholds of super- stition, that were never to be built up again, let the hour of renovation seem to look forth ao;ain as it micrht. I was transported with the gay courage and unquestionable huma- nity of this extraordinary person, and I soon caught the tone of his cunning implications and provoking turns. He did not frighten me. I never felt for a moment, young as I was, and Christianly brought up, that true religion would suffer at his hands. On the contrary, I had been bred up (in my home circle) to look for reforms in religion : I had been led to desire the best and gentlest form of it, unattended with threats and horrors: and if the school orthodoxy did not countenance such expectations, it took no pains to discounte- nance them. I had privately accustomed myself, of my own further motion, to doubt and to reject every doctrine, and every statement of facts, that went counter to the plainest precepts of love, and to the final happiness of all the creatures of God. I could never see, otherwise, what Christianity ' could mean, that was not meant by a hundred inferior reli- ■ gions ; nor could I think it right and holy to accept of the greatest hopes, apart from that universality — Fiat justitia, mat caelum. I was prepared to give up heaven itself (as far as it is possible for human hope to do so) rather than that anything so unheavenly as a single exclusion from it should exist. Therefore, to me, Voltaire was a putter down of a great deal that was wrong, but of nothing that was right. I did not take him for a builder; neither did I feel that he knew much of the sanctuary which was inclosed in what ESSAYS IN CRITICISM. 129 he pulled down. He found a heap of rubbish pretending to be the shrine itself, and he set about denying its pretensions and abating it as a nuisance, without knowing, or considering (at least I thought so) what there remained of beauty and durability, to be disclosed on its demolition. I fought for him, then and afterwards, with those who challenged me to the combat; and I was for some time driven to take myself for a Deist in the most ordinary sense of the word, till I had learned to know what a Christian truly was, and so arrived at opinions on religious matters in general which I shall notice at the conclusion of these volumes. It is a curious circumstance respecting the books of Vol- taire — the greatest writer upon the whole that France has produced, and undoubtedly the greatest name in the eighteenth century — that to this moment they are far less known in England than talked of; so much so, that, with the exception of a few educated circles, chiefly of the upper class, and ex- clusively among the men even in those, he has not only been hardly read at all, even by such as have talked of him with admiration, or loaded him with reproach, but the portions of his writings that have had the greatest effect on the world are the least known among readers the most popularly acquainted with him. The reasons of this remarkable ignorance respect- ing so great a neighbour — one of the movers of the world, and an especial admirer of England — are to be found, first, in the exclusive and timid spirit, under the guise of strength, which came up with the accession of George the Third; second, as a consequence of this spirit, a studious ignoring of the Frenchman in almost all places of education, the colleges and foundations in particular; third, the ant i-Gallican spirit which followed and exasperated the prejudice against the French Revolution; and fourth, the very translation and popularity of two of his novels, the Candide and Zadig, which, though by no means among his finest productions, had yet enough wit and peculiarity to be accepted as sufficing specimens of him, even by his admirers. Unfortunately one of these, the Candide, contained some of his most licentious and even revolting writing. This enabled his enemies to adduce it as a sullicing specimen on their own side of the ion; and the idea of him which they succeeded in im- / upon the English community in general was that of a mere irreligious scoffer, who was opposed to everything good and ,-erious, and who did but mingle a little frivolous 9 130 AUTOBIOGEAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. wit with an abundance of vexations, hard-hearted, and dis- gusting effrontery. There is, it is true, a version, purporting to be that of his whole works, by Smollett, Thomas Franklin, and others, which is understood to have been what is called a bookseller's job; but I never met with it except in an old catalogue; and I believe it was so dull and bad, that readers instinctively recoiled from it, as an incredible representation of anything lively. The probability is, that Smollett only lent his name ; and Franklin himself may have done as little, though the ''translator of Sophocles" (as he styled himself) was well enough qualified to misrepresent any kind of genius. Be this as it may, I have hardly ever met, even in literary circles, with persons who knew anything of Voltaire, except through the medium of these two novels, and of later school editions of his two histories of Charles the Twelfth and Peter the Great: books which teachers of all sorts in his own country have been gradually compelled to admit into their courses of reading by national pride and the imperative growth of opinion. Voltaire is one of the three great tragic writers of France, and excels in pathos; yet not one English- man in a thonsand knows a syllable of his tragedies, or would do anything but stare to hear of his pathos. Voltaire inducted his countrymen into a knowledge of English science and meta- physics, nay, even of English poetry ; yet Englishmen have been told little about him in connection with them, except of his disagreements with Shakspeare. Voltaire created a fashion for English thinking, manner, and policy, and fell in love with the simplicity and truthfulness of their very Quakers; and yet, I will venture to say, the English knew far less of all this than they do of a licentious poem with which he degraded his better nature in burlesquing the history of Joan of Arc. There are, it is admitted, two sides to the character of Voltaire ; one licentious, merely scoffing, saddening, defective in sentiment, and therefore wanting the inner clue of the beautiful to guide him out of the labyrinth of scorn and per- plexity; all owing, be it observed, to the errors which he found prevailing in his youth, and to the impossible demands which they made on his acquiescence ; but the other side of his character is moral, cheerful, beneficent, prepared to encounter peril, nay, actually encountering it, in the only true Christian causes, those of toleration and charity, and raising that voice of demand for the advancement of reason and ESSAYS IN CRITICISM. 131 justice which is now growing into the whole voice of Europe. He was the only man perhaps that ever existed who repre- sented in his single person the entire character, with one honourable exception (for he was never sanguinary), of the nation in which he was born ; nay, of its whole history, past, present, and to come. He had the licentiousness of the old monarchy under which he was bred, the cosmopolite ardour of the Eevolution, the science of the Consulate and the "savans," the unphilosophic love of glory of the Empire, the worldly wisdom (without pushing it into folly) of Louis Philippe, and the changeful humours, the firmness, the weakness, the flourishing declamation, the sympathy with the poor, the bonhomie, the unbounded hopes of the best actors in the extraordinary scenes acted before the eyes of Europe in these last ten years. As he himself could not construct as well as he could pvdl down, so neither do his countrymen, with all the goodness and greatness among them, appear to be less truly represented by him in that particular than in others ; but in pulling down he had the same vague desire of the best that could set up ; and when he was most thought to oppose Christianity itself, he only did it out of an impatient desire to see the law of love triumphant, and was only thought to be the adversary of its spirit, because his revilers knew nothing of it themselves. Voltaire, in an essay written by himself in the English language, has said of Mdton, in a passage which would do honour to our best writers, that when the poet saw the Adamo of Andreini at Florence, he " pierced through the absurdity of the plot to the hidden majesty of the subject." It may be said of himself, that he pierced through the conventional m;ijesty of a great many subjects, to the hidden absurdity of tin' plot He laid the axe to a heap of savage abuses; pulled tin' corner-stones out of dungeons and inquisitions ; bowed and mocked the most tyrannical absurdities out of counte- nance ; and raised one prodigious peal of laughter at super- stition, from Naples to the Baltic. He was the first man who got th" power of opinion and common sense openly recognized as a reigning authority ; and who made the acknowledgment of it a point of wit and cunning, even with those who had hitherto thought they had the world to themselves. An abridgment that I picked up of the Philosophical Dic- tionary (a translation) was for a long while my text-book, botli lor opinion and style. I was also a great admirer of 9—2 132 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. ISIngenu, or the Sincere Huron, and of the Essay on the Phi- losophy of History. In the character of the Sincere Huron I thought I found a resemblance to my own, as most readers do in those of their favourites: and this piece of self-love helped me to discover as much good-heartedness in Voltaire as I dis- cerned wit. Candide, I confess, I could not like. I enjoyed passages ; but the laughter Avas not as good-humoured as usual ; there was a view of things in it which I never enter- tained then or afterwards, and into which the author had been led, rather in order to provoke Leibnitz, than because it was natural to him ; and, to crown my unwilling dislike, the book had a coarseness, apart from graceful and pleasurable ideas, which I have never been able to endure. There were pas- sages in the abridgment of the Philosophical Dictionary which I always passed over; but the rest delighted me beyond measure. I can repeat things out of it now. It must have been about the time of my first acquaintance with Voltaire, that I became member, for a short time, of a club of young men, who associated for the purpose of culti- vating public speaking. With the exception of myself, I be- lieve the Avhole of them were students at law ; but, to the best of my recollection, the subjects they discussed were as miscel- laneous as if they were of no profession ; though the case pro- bably became otherwise, as their powers advanced. At all events I did not continue long with them, my entrance into the club having mainly originated in a wish to please my friend Barron Field, and public speaking not being one of my objects in fife. It might have been much to my benefit if it had ; for it would in all probability have sooner rid me of my stammering, and delivered me from my fear of it among strangers and in the presence of assembled audiences ; — an anxiety, of which I have never been able to get rid, and which has deprived me of serious advantages. Far different was the case with another member of the club, Thomas Wilde, then an attorney in Castle Street, Falcon Square, afterwards Lord Chancellor, and a peer of the realm. Wilde had an impedi- ment in his speech, which he inflexibly determined to mend : an underhung jaw and a grave and fixed expression of coun- tenance seemed constantly to picture this resolution to me, as I beheld him. The world has seen how Avell he succeeded. Another member of the club, who had no such obstacle to surmount, but who might have been diverted from success by wider intellectual sympathies and the very pleasurableness of ESSAYS IN CRITICISM. 13 •> his nature, conquered those perils by an energy still more ad- mirable, and is the present Lord Chief Baron Pollock. My friend Field himself, though suffering under a state of health which prevented his growing old, became a judge in the colonies ; and very likely I should have more honours of the club to refer to, had I known it longer. I can with truth aver, that however much I admired the energy of Wilde, and have more than admired that of the Chief Baron (of whose legal as well as general knowledge, the former, if I am not mistaken, was in the habit of taking friendly counsel to the last), my feelings toward them, as far as ambition was con- cerned, never degenerated into envy. My path was chosen before I knew them ; my entire inclinations were in it ; and I never in my life had any personal ambition whatsoever, but that of adding to the list of authors, and doing some good as a cosmopolite. Often, it is true, when I considered my family, have I wished that the case could have been otherwise, and the cosmopolitism still not ineffectual ; nor do I mean to cast the slightest reflection on the views, personal or otherwise, of the many admirable and estimable men who have adorned the bench in our courts of law. My reverence, indeed, for the character of the British judge, notwithstanding a few mon- strous exceptions in former times, and one or two subse- quently of a very minor kind, is of so deep a nature, that I can never disassociate the feeling from their persons, however social and familiar it may please the most amiable of them to be in private. I respected as well as loved my dear friend Talfourd more and more to the last ; entertain the like sen- timents for others, of whose acquaintance, while living, it would not become me openly to boast ; and believe it would have been impossible for them to have done better or more nobly for the world as well as for themselves, than by obey- ing the inclination which took them where they ascended. Under these circumstances, it will be considered, I trust, neither indecorous nor invidious in me, if 1 close these legal remini- scences with relating, that having, when I was young, been solemnly rebuked one evening in company by a subsequently eminent person of my own age, now dead, and of no remark- able orthodoxy, for making what he pronounced to be an irre- verent remark on a disputed point of Mosaic history, I said to a friend of mine on coming away, "Now mark me, B , so' and BO (naming him) will go straight up the high load to prefer- ment, while 1 shall as surely belound in the opposite direction." 134 AUTOBIOGEAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. Besides Voltaire and the Connoisseur, I was very fond at that time of Johnson's Lives of the Poets, and a great reader of Pope. My admiration of the Rape of the Loch led me to write a long mock-heroic poem, entitled the Battle of the Bridal Ring, the subject of which was a contest between two rival orders of spirits, on whom to bestow a lady in marriage. I venture to say, that it would have been well spoken of by the critics, and was not worth a penny. I recollect one couplet, which will serve to show how I mimicked the tone of my author. It was an apostrophe to Mantua, — " Mantua, of great and small the long renown, That now a Virgil giv'st, and now a gown." Dryden, I read, too, but not with that relish for his nobler versification which I afterwards acquired. To dramatic read- ing, with all my love of the theatre, I have already mentioned my disinclination ; yet, in the interval of my departure from school, and my getting out of my teens, I wrote two farces, a comedy, and a tragedy ; and the plots of all (such as they were) were inventions. The hero of my tragedy was the Earl of Surrey (Howard, the poet), who was put to death by Henry the Eighth. I forget what the comedy was upon. The title of one of the farces was the Beau Miser, which may explain the nature of it. The other was called A Hundred a Year, and turned upon a hater of the country, who, upon having an annuity to that amount given him, on condition of his never going out of London, becomes a hater of the town. In the last scene, his annuity died a jovial death in a country tavern; the bestower entering the room just as my hero had got on a table, with a glass in his hand, to drink confusion to the me- tropolis. All these pieces were, I doubt not, as bad as need be. About thirty years ago, being sleepless one night with a fit of enthusiasm, in consequence of reading about the Spanish play of the Cid, in Lord Holland's Life of Guillen de Castro, I determined to write a tragedy on the same subject, which was accepted at Drury Lane. Perhaps the conduct of this piece was not without merit, the conclusion of each act throw- ing the interest into the succeeding one : but I had great doubts of all the rest of it ; and on receiving it from Mr. Elliston to make an alteration in the third act, very judi- ciously proposed by him, I looked the whole of the play over again, and convinced myself it was unfit for the stage. I therefore withheld it. I had painted my hero too after the beau-ideal of a modern reformer, instead of the half-godlike, ESSAYS IN CRITICISM. 135 half-bigoted soldier that he was. I began afterwards to re- cast the play, but grew tired and gave it up. The Cid would make a delicious character for the stage, or in any work ; not, indeed, as Corneille declaimed him, nor as interior writers might adapt him to the reigning taste ; but taken, I mean, as he was, with the noble impulses he received from nature, the drawbacks with which a bigoted age qualified them, and the social and open-hearted pleasantry (not the least evidence of his nobleness) which brings forth his hoar! , as it were, in flashes through the stern armour. But this would require a strong hand, and readers capable of grappling with it. In the mean- time, they should read of him in Mr. Southey's Chronicle of the Cid (an admirable summary from the old Spanish writers), and in the delightful verses at the end of it, translated from an old Spanish poem by Mr. Hookham Frere, with a trium- phant force and fidelity, that you feel to be true to the original at once. About the period of my writing the above essays, circum- stances introduced me to the acquaintance of Mr. Bell, the proprietor of the Weekly Messenger. In his house in the and I used to hear of politics and dramatic criticism, and of the persons who wrote them. Mr. Bell had been well known as a bookseller, and a speculator in elegant typo- graphy. It is to him the public arc indebted for the small edition of the Poets that preceded Cooke's, and which, with all my predilections for that work, was unquestionably supe- rior to it. Besides, it included Chaucer and Spenser. The omission of these in Cooke's edition was as unpoetical a sh is the pn il familiarity with their names is the reverse. It was t : a mark of good sense : — as if good matters of literature, did not consist as much in knowing what was poetical poetry, as brillianl in wit. Bell was upon the whole a remarkable person. He was a plain man, with a red face, and a m aggerated by intem- perance; and yel there i ting nol onpleasing in his countenanc poke. Ele had sparkling black eyes, 8 good-natured smile, gentlemanly manners, and the in le voices I ever heard. He had no acquirements, perhap grammar; bul his taste in putting forth a publication, and getting the besl artists to adortl it, was new in those times, and may be admired in any; < i trable In hi a house. He knew nothing oi poetry. He thoughl th< Delia Cruscans fine 136 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. people, because they were known in the circles; and for Mil- ton's Paradise Lost he had the same epithet as for Mrs. Crouch's face, or the phaeton of Major Topham : he thought it " pretty." Yet a certain liberal instinct, and turn for large dealing, made him include Chaucer and Spenser in his edition ; he got Stothard to adorn the one, and Mortimer the other ; and in the midst, I suspect, of very equivocal returns, issued a British Theatre with embellishments, and a similar edition of the plays of Shakspeare — the incorrectest publication, accord- ing to Mr. Chalmers, that ever issued from the press. Unfortunately for Mr. Bell, he had as great a taste for neat wines and ankles as for pretty books ; and, to crown his misfortunes, the Prince of Wales, to whom he was bookseller, once did him the honour to partake of an entertainment, or refreshment (I forget which, most probably the latter), at his house. He afterwards became a bankrupt. He was one of those men whose temperament and turn for enjoyment throw a sort of grace over whatsoever they do, standing them in stead of everything but prudence, and sometimes even sup- plying them with the consolations which imprudence has forfeited. After his bankruptcy he set up a newspaper, which became profitable to everybody but himself. He had become so used to lawyers and bailiffs, that the more his concerns flourished, the more his debts flourished with him. It seemed as if he would have been too happy without them; too exempt from the cares that beset the prudent. The first time I saw him he was standing in a chemist's shop, waiting till the road was clear for him to issue forth. He had a toothache, for which he held a handkerchief over his mouth ; and, while he kept a sharp look-out with his bright eye, was alternately groaning in a most gentlemanly manner over his gums, and addressing some polite words to the shopman. I had not then been introduced to him, and did not know his person ; so that the effect of his voice upon me was unequi- vocal. I liked him for it, and wished the bailiff at the devil.* * An intelligent compositor (Mr. J. P. S. Bicknell), who has been a noter of curious passages in his time, informs me, that Bell was the first printer who confined the small letter s to its present shape, and rejected altogether the older form, /. He tells me, that this inno- vation, besides the handsomer form of the new letter, was " a boon to both master-printers and the compositor, inasmuch as it lessened the amount of capital necessary to be laid out under the old system, and saved to the workman no small portion of his valuable time and labour." My informant adds, as a curious instance of conservative tendency ESSAYS IN CRITICISM. 137 In the office of the Weekly Messenger, I saw one day a person who looked the epitome of squalid authorship. He was wretchedly dressed and dirty; and the rain, as he took his hat off, came away from it as from a spout. This was a man of the name of Badini, who had been poet at the Opera, and was then editor of the Messenger. He was afterwards sent out of the country under the Alien Act, and became reader of the English papers to Bonaparte. His intimacy with some of the first families in the country, among whom he had been a teacher, is supposed to have been of use to the French Government. He Avrote a good idiomatic English style, and was a man of abilities. I had never before seen a poor author, such as are described in books; and the spectacle of the reality startled me. Like most authors, however, who are at once very poor and very clever, his poverty was his own fault. When he received any money he disappeared, « and was understood to spend it in alehouses. "We heard that in Paris he kept his carriage. I have since met with authors of the same squalid description ; but they were destitute of ability, and had no more right to profess literature as a trade than alchemy. It is from these that the common notions about the poverty of the tribe are taken. One of them, poor fellow! might have cut a figure in Smollett. lie was a proper ideal author, in rusty black, out at elbows, thin and pale. He brought me an ode about an eagle ; for which the publisher of a magazine, he said, had had "the inhumanity" to offer him half-a-crown. His necessity for money he did not deny ; but his great anxiety was to know whether, as a poetical composition, his ode was not worth more. " Is that poetry, sir?" cried he: "that's what I want to know — is that poetry ? " rising from his chair, and staring and trembling in all the agony of contested excellence. My brother John, at the beginning of the year 1805, set on small points, that Messrs. Rivington having got as far as three sheets, on a work of a late Bishop of Durham, in which the new plan was adopted, the Bishop sent back the sheets, in order to have the old letter restored, which compelled the booksellers to get a new supply from the type-foundry, the fount containing the venerable J' having been thrown away. Mr. Bicknell also informs me, that when Bell set up his news- paper, the Weekly Messenger (which had a wood-cut at the top of it, of a newsman blowing his horn), lie is said to have ltoiic to a masque- rade in the newsman's character, and distributed prospectuses to the company. 138 AUTOBIOGKAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. up a paper, called the News, and I went to live with him in Brydges Street, and write the theatricals in it. [Between quitting the Bluecoat School, and the establish- ment of the News, Leigh Hunt had been for some time in the law office of his brother Stephen.] It was the custom at that time for editors of papers to be intimate with actors and dramatists. They were often pro- prietors, as well as editors ; and, in that case, it was not expected that they should escape the usual intercourse, or wish to do so. It was thought a feather in the cap of all parties ; and with their feathers they tickled one another. The newspaper man had consequence in the green-room, and plenty of tickets for his friends; and he dined at amusing tables. The dramatist secured a good-natured critique in his journal, sometimes got it written himself, or, according to Mr. Beynolds, was even himself the author of it. The actor, if he was of any evidence, stood upon the same ground of reciprocity; and not to know a pretty actress would have been a want of the knowing in general. Upon new performers, and upon writers not yet introduced, a journalist was more impartial ; and sometimes, where the proprietor was in one interest more than another, or for some personal reason grew offended with an actor, or set of actors, a criticism would occasionally be hostile, and even severe. An editor, too, would noAv and then suggest to his employer the policy of exercising a freer authority, and obtain influence enough with him to show symptoms of it. I believe Bell's editor, who was more clever, was also more impartial than most critics ; though the publisher of the British Theatre, and patron of the Delia Cruscans, must have been hampered with literary inti- macies. The best chance for an editor, who wished to have any- thing like an opinion of his own, was the appearance of a rival newspaper with a strong theatrical connection. Influence was here threatened with diminution. It was to be held up on other grounds ; and the critic was permitted to find out that a bad play was not good, or an actress's petticoat of the lawful dimensions. Puffing and plenty of tickets were, however, the system of the day. It was an interchange of amenities over the dinner- table ; a flattery of power on the one side, and puns on the other ; and what the public took for a criticism on a play was a draft upon the box-office, or reminiscences of last Thursday's salmon and lobster-sauce. The custom was, to ESSAYS IN CRITICISM. 139 write as short and as favourable a paragraph on the new piece as conld be; to say that Bannister was " excellent" and Mrs. Jordan "charming;" to notice the "crowded house" or invent it, if necessary; and to conclude by observing that " the whole went off with eclat.' 1 '' For the rest, it was a critical religion in those times to admire Mr. Kemble : and at the period in question Master Betty had appeared, and been hugged to the hearts of the town as the young Roscius. We saw that independence in theatrical criticism would be a great novelty. We announced it, and nobody believed us ; we stuck to it, and the town believed everything we said. The proprietors of the News, of whom I knew so little that I cannot recollect with certainty any one of them, very hand- somely left me to myself. My retired and scholastic habits kept me so ; and the pride of success confirmed my inde- pendence with regard to others. I was then in my twentieth year, an early age at that time for a writer. The usual exaggeration of report made me younger than I was : and after being a "young Eoscius" political, I was now looked upon as one critical. To know an actor personally appeared to me a vice not to be thought of; and I would as lief have taken poison as accepted a ticket from the theatres. Good God ! To think of the grand opinion I had of myself in those days, and what little reason I had for it ! Not to accept the tickets was very proper, considering that I bestowed more blame than praise. There was also more good-nature than I supposed in not allowing myself to know any actors ; but the vanity of my position had greater weight with me than anything else, and I must have proved it to discerning eyes by the small quantity of information I brought to my task, and the ostentation with which I pro- duced it. I knew almost as little of the drama as the young Roscius himself. Luckily, I had the advantage of him in knowing how unfit, he was for his office; and, probably, he thought me as much so, though he could not have argued Upon it ; for I was in the minority respecting his merits, and tin; balance was then trembling on the beam; the Neivs, I tied the settlement of the question. I wish with all my heart we had let him alone, and he had got a little more money. However, he obtained enough to create him a provision for life. His positibn, which appeared so brilliant ai first, had a remarkable cruelty in it. Most men begin life Avith struggles, and have their vanity sufficiently knocked 140 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. about the head and shoulders to make their kinder fortunes the more welcome. Mr. Betty had his sugar first, and his physic afterwards. He began life with a double childhood, with a new and extraordinary felicity added to the natural enjoyments of his age; and he lived to see it speedily come to nothing, and to be taken for an ordinary person. I am told that he acquiesces in his fate, and agrees that the town were mistaken. If so, he is no ordinary person still, and has as much right to our respect for his good sense, as he is de- clared on all hands to deserve it for his amiableness. I have an anecdote of him to both purposes, which exhibits him iu a very agreeable light. Hazlitt happened to be at a party where Mr. Betty was present; and in coming away, when they were all putting on their great-coats, the critic thought fit to compliment the dethroned favourite of the town, by telling him that he recollected him in old times, and had been " much pleased with him." Betty looked at his me- morialist, as much as to say, " You don't tell me so!" and then starting into a tragical attitude, exclaimed, " Oh, memory! memory !" I was right about Master Betty, and I am sorry for it ; though the town was in fault, not he. I think I was right also about Kemble ; but I have no regret upon that score. He flourished long enough after my attack on his majestic dryness and deliberate nothings; and Kean would have taken the public by storm, whether they had been prepared for him or not : " One touch of nature makes the whole world kin." Kemble faded before him, like a tragedy ghost. I never denied the merits which that actor possessed. He had the look of a Roman; made a very good ideal, though not a very real Coriolanus, for his pride was not sufficiently blunt and unaffected : and in parts that suited his natural deficiency, such as Penruddock and the Abbe de l'Epee, would have been altogether admirable and interesting, if you could have forgotten that their sensibility, in his hands, was not so much repressed, as wanting. He was no more to be compared to his sister, than stone is to flesh and blood. There was much of the pedagogue in him. He made a fuss about trifles ; was inflexible on a pedantic reading : in short, was rather a teacher of elocution than an actor ; and not a good teacher, on that account. There was a merit in his idealism, as far as it went. He had, at least, faith in something classical and ESSAYS IX CRITICISM. 141 scholastic, and he made the town partake of it; but it was all on the surface — a hollow trophy : and I am persuaded, that he had no idea in his head but of a stage Roman, and the dig- nity he added to his profession. But if I was right about Kemble, whose admirers I plagued enough, I was not equally so about the living dramatists, whom I plagued more. I laid all the deficiencies of the modern drama to their account, and treated them like a parcel of mischievous boys, of whom I was the schoolmaster and whipper-in. I forgot that it was I who was the boy, and that they knew twenty times more of the world than I did. Not that I mean to say their comedies were excellent, or that my commonplaces about the superior merits of Con- greve and Sheridan were not well founded; but there was more talent in their " five-act farce " than I supposed ; and I mistook, in a great measure, the defect of the age — Its dearth of dramatic character — for that of the writers who were to draw upon it. It is true, a great wit, by a laborious process, and the help of his acquirements, might extract a pkoy or two from it, as was Sheridan's own case; but there was a great deal of imitation even in Sheridan, and he was fain to help himself to a little originality out of the characters of his l< - formalized countrymen, his own included. It is remarkable, that the three most amusing dramatists of the last age, Sheridan, Goldsmith, and O'Keefe, were all Irishmen, and all had characters of their own. Sheridan, after all, was Swift's Sheridan come to life again in the person of his grandson, with the oratory of Thomas Sheridan, the father, superadded and brought to bear. Goldsmith, at a disadvantage in his breeding, but full of address with his pen, drew upon his own absurdities and mistakes, and filled his dramas with ludicrous perplexity. O'Keefe was all for whim and impulse, but not without a good deal of conscience; and, accordingly, in his plays we have a sort of young and pastoral taste of life in the very midst of its sophistications. Animal spirits, quips and cranks, credulity, and good intention, are triumphant throughout and make a delicious mixture. It is eat credit to O'Keefe, that he ran sometimes close upon the borders of the sentimental drama, and did it not only with im- punity but advantage; but sprightliness and sincerity enable a man to do everything with advantage. It was a pity that as much could not be said of Mr. Col- man, who, after taking more licence in his writings than 142 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. anybody, became a licenser ex officio, and seemed inclined to license nothing but cant. When this writer got into the sentimental, he made a sad business of it, for he had no faith in sentiment. He mouthed and overdid it, as a man does when he is telling a lie. At a farce he was admirable : and he remained so to the last, whether writing or licensing. Morton seemed to take a coloiu- from the writers all round him, especially from O'Keefe and the sentimentalists. His sentiment was more in earnest than Colman's, yet, some- how, not happy either. There was a gloom in it, and a smack of the Old Bailey. It was best when he put it in a shape of humour, as in the paternal and inextinguishable tailorism of Old Eapid, in a Cure for the Heart- Ache. Young Rapid, who complains that his father " sleeps so slow," is also a pleasant fellow, and worthy of O'Keefe. He is one of the numerous crop that sprang up from Wild Oats, but not in so natural a soil. The character of the modern drama at that time was sin- gularly commercial : nothing but gentlemen in distress, and hard landlords, and generous interferers, and fathers who got a great deal of money, and sons who spent it. I remember one play in particular, in which the whole wit ran upon prices, bonds, and post-obits. You might know what the pit thought of their pound-notes by the ostentatious indif- ference with which the heroes of the pieces gave them away, and the admiration and pretended approval with which the spectators observed it. To make a present of a hundred pounds was as if a man had uprooted and given away an Egyptian pyramid. Mr. Reynolds was not behindhand with his brother drama- tists in drawing upon the taste of the day for gains and dis- tresses. It appears by his Memoirs that he had too much reason for so doing. He was, perhaps, the least ambitious, and the least vain (whatever charges to the contrary his animal spirits might have brought on him) of all the writers of that period. In complexional vivacity he certainly did not yield to any of them ; his comedies, if they were fugitive, were genuine representations of fugitive manners, and went merrily to their death ; and there is one of them, the Dra- matist, founded upon something more lasting, which promises to remain in the collections, and deserves it: which is not a little to say of any writer. I never wish for a heartier ESSAYS IN CRITICISM. 143 laugh than I have enjoyed, since I grew wiser, not only in seeing, but in reading the vagaries of his dramatic hero, and his mystifications of " Old Scratch." When I read the good- humoured Memoirs of this writer the other day, I felt quite ashamed of the ignorant and boyish way in which I used to sit in judgment upon his faults, without being aware of what was good in him ; and my repentance was increased by the very proper manner in which he speaks of his critics, neither denying the truth of their charges in letter, nor admitting them altogether in spirit; in fact, showing that he knew very well what he was about, and that they, whatsoever they fancied to the contrary, did not. Mr, Reynolds, agreeably to his sense and good-humour, never said a word to his critics at the time. Mr. Thomas Dibdin, not quite so wise, wrote me a letter, which Incledon, I am told, remonstrated with him for sending, saying, it would do him no good with the "d d boy." And he was right. I published it, with an answer, and only thought that I made dramatists " come bow to me." Mr. Colman attacked me in a prologue, which, by a curious chance, Fawcett spoke right in my teeth, the box I sat in happening to be directly oppo- site him. I laughed at the prologue; and only looked upon Mr. Colman as a great monkey pelting me with nuts, which I ate. Attacks of this kind were little calculated to obtain their end with a youth who persuaded himself that he wrote for nothing but the public good ; who mistook the impression which anybody of moderate talents can make with a news- paper, for the result of something peculiarly his own ; and who had just enough scholarship to despise the want of it in others. I do not pretend to think that the criticisms in the News had no merit at all. They showed an acquaintance with the style of Voltaire, Johnson, and others; were not Unagreeably sprinkled with quotation ; and, above all, were written with more care and attention than was customary with newspapei'S at that time. The pains I took to round a period with nothing in it, or to invent a simile that should appear offhand, would have done honour to better stuff. A portion of these criticisms subsequently formed the appendix of an original volume on the same subject, entitled Critical Assays on the Performers of the London Theatres \ 1807]. I have the book now before mec and if I thought it bad a chance of survival I should regrel and quality a good deal of uninformed judgment in it respecting the art of acting, 144 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OP LEIGH HUNT. which, with much inconsistent recommendation to the con- trary, it too often confounded with a literal, instead of a liberal imitation of nature. I particularly erred with respect to comedians like Munden, whose superabundance of humour and expression I confounded with farce and buffoonery. Charles Lamb taught me better. There was a good deal of truth, however, mixed up with these mistakes. One of the things on which I was always harping was Kemble's vicious pronunciation. Kemble had a smattering of learning, and a great deal of obstinacy. He was a reader of old books; and having discovered that pro- nunciation had not always been what it was, and that in one or two instances the older was metrically better than the new (as in the case of the word aches, which was originally a dissyllable — aitches), he took upon him to reform it in a variety of cases, where propriety was as much against him as custom. Thus the vowel e in the word " merchant," in de- fiance of its Latin etymology, he insisted upon pronouncing according to its French derivative, marchant. "Innocent" he called innocint ; " conscience " (in defiance even of his friend Chaucer), conshince ; " virtue," in proper slip-slop, varchue; " fierce," furse ; "beard," bird ; "thy," the (because we generally call " my," me); and "odious," "hideous," and " perfidious," became ojus, hijjus, and perfijjus. Nor were these all. The following banter, in the shape of an imaginary bit of conversation between an officer' and his friend, was, literally, no cai'icature : — A. Ha ! captain ! bow dost ? (') The appearance would be much improved by a little more attention to the ( 2 ) bird. B. Why, so I think : there's no ( 3 ) sentimint in a bird. But then it serves to distinguish a soldier, and there is no doubt much military ( 4 ) varchue in looking (^)furful. A. But the girls, Jack, the girls ! Why, the mouth is enough to banish kissing from the ( 6 ) airth ( 7 ) etairnully. B. In ( 8 ) maircy, no more of that ! Zounds, but the shopkeepers and the ( 9 ) marchants will get the better of us with the dear souls ! However, as it is now against military law to have a tender coun- tenance, and as some birds, I thank heaven, are of a tolerable ( 10 ) qual-itij, I must make a varchue of necessity; and as I can't look soft for the love of my girl, I must e'en look ( u ) hijjus for the love of my country. (') thy; ( 2 ) beard; ( 3 ) sentiment ; ( 4 ) virtue; ( 5 ) fearful ; ( 6 ) earth; ( 7 ) eternally; ( 8 ) mercy; ( 9 ) merchants; ( 10 ) quality (with the a as in universality); (") hideuus. 145 CHAPTER VTTL SUFFERING AND REFLECTION. But the gay and confident spirit in which I began this critical career received a check, of which none of my friends suspected the anguish, and very few were told. I fell into a melancholy state of mind, produced by ill-health. I thought it was owing to living too well; and as I had great faith in temperance, I went to the reverse extreme; not considering that temperance implies moderation in self-denial as well as in self-indulgence. The consequence was a nervous condition, amounting to hypochondria, which lasted me several months. I experienced it twice afterwards, each time more painfully than before, and for a much longer period; but I have never had it since ; and I am of opinion that I need not have had it at all had I gone at once to a physician, and not repeated the mistake of being over abstinent. I mention the whole circumstance for the benefit of others. The first attack came on me with palpitations of the heart. These I got rid of by horseback. I forget what symptoms attended the approach of the second. The third was pro- duced by sitting out of doors too early in the spring. I attempted to outstarve them all, but egregiously failed. In one instance, I took wholly to a vegetable diet, which made me so weak and giddy, that I was forced to catch hold ot rails in the streets to hinder myself from falling. In another, I confined myself for some weeks to a milk diet, which did nothing but jaundice my complexion. In the third, I took a modicum of meat, one glass of wine, no milk except in tea, and no vegetables at all ; but though I did not suffer quite so much mental distress from this regimen as from the milk, I suffered more than from the vegetables, and for a much longer period than with either. To be sure, I continued Lt longer; and, perhaps, it gave me greater powers of en- durance; but for upwards of lour years, without intermission, and above six years in all, [underwent, a burden of wretched- ness, which I afterwards felt convinced 1 ueed not have en- dured tor as many weeks, perhaps not. as many days, had I not absurdly taken to the extreme I .-poke of in the first instance, and then as absurdly persisted hi seeking no advice, partly from fear of hearing worse things ioretuid me, and 10 146 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. partly from a hope of Avearing out the calamity by patience. At no time did my friends guess to what amount I suffered. They saw that my health was bad enough, and they condoled with me accordingly ; but cheerful habits enabled me to retain an air of cheerfulness, except when I was alone ; and I never spoke of it but once, which was to my friend Mitchell, whom I guessed to have undergone something of the kind. And what was it that I suffered ? and on what account ? On no account. On none whatsoever, except my ridiculous super-abstinence, and my equally ridiculous avoidance of speaking about it. The very fact of having no cause what- soever, was the thing that most frightened me. I thought that if I had but a cause, the cause might have been removed or palliated ; but to be haunted by a ghost which was not even ghostly, which was something I never saw, or could even imagine, this, I thought, was the most terrible thing that could befall me. I could see no end to the persecutions of an enemy, who was neither visible nor even existing ! Causes for suffering, however, came. Not, indeed, the worst, for I was neither culpable nor superstitious. I had wronged nobody ; and I now felt the inestimable benefit of having had cheerful opinions given me in religion. But I plagued myself with things which are the pastimes of better states of health, and the pursuits of philosophers. I mooted with myself every point of metaphysics that could get into a head into which they had never been put. I made a cause of causes for anxiety, by inquiring into causation, and outdid the Vicar of Wakefield's Moses, in being my own Sancho- niathan and Berosus on the subject of the cosmogony ! I jest about it now ; but oh ! what pain was it to me then ! and what pangs of biliary will and impossibility I underwent in the endeavour to solve these riddles of the universe ! I felt, long before I knew Mr. Wordsworth's poetry, — " the burthen and the mystery Of all this unintelligible world." I reverence the mystery still, but I no longer feel the burden, because for these five-and-thirty years I have known how to adjust my shoulders to it by taking care of my health. I should rather say because healthy shoulders have no such burden to carry. The elements of existence, like the air which we breathe, and which Avould otherwise crush us, are so nicely proportioned to one another within and around them, SUFFERING AND REFLECTION. 147 that we are unconsciously sustained by them, not thoughtfully oppressed. One great benefit, however, resulted to me from this suffer- ing. It gave me an amount of reflection, such as in all pro- bability I never should have had without it ; and if readers have derived any good from the graver portion of my writings, I attribute it to this experience of evil. It taught me patience ; it taught me charity (however imperfectly I may have exer- cised either) ; it taught me charity even towards myself; it taught me the worth of little pleasures, as well as the dignity and utility of great pains ; it taught me that evil itself con- tained good ; nay, it taught me to doubt whether any such thing as evil, considered in itself, existed ; whether things altogether, as far as our planet knows them, could have been so good without it ; whether the desire, nevertheless, which nature has implanted in us for its destruction, be not the signal and the means to that end; and whether its destruction, finally, will not prove its existence, in the meantime, to have been necessary to the very bliss that supersedes it. I have been thus circumstantial respecting this illness, or series of illnesses, in the hope that such readers as have not had experience or reflection enough of their own to dispense with the lesson, may draw the following conclusions from suf- ferings of all kinds, if they happen to need it : — ■ First, — That however any suffering may seem to be purely mental, body alone may occasion it; which was undoubtedly the case in my instance. Second, — That as human beings do not originate their own bodies or minds, and as yet very imperfectly know how to manage them, they have a right to all the aid or comfort they can procure, under any sufferings whatsoever. Third, — Tl. ■ w h< ther it be the mind or body that is ailing, or both, they may save themselves a world of perplexity and of illness by going at once to a physician. Fourth, — Thai till they do so, or in case they are unable ■ 1'. it,.i feCOUrfle to the first principles of health is their only wise proceeding; by which principles I understand air and ise, bathing, ments, and whatsoever else tends to enliven and purify the blood. Fifth, — That tli" blackest ' lay have a bright morrow; for my last and worsl illnesa suddenly lefl me, probably in Consequence of the removal, though unconsciously, of some internal obstruction; and it is now for the Ion- period above 10—2 148 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. mentioned that I have not had the slightest return of it, though I have had many anxieties to endure, and a great deal of sick- ness. Sixth, — That the far greater portion of a life thus tried may nevertheless be remarkable for cheerfulness ; which has been the case with my own. Seventh, — That the value of cheerful opinions is inestim- able; that they will retain a sort of heaven round a man, when everything else might fail him ; and that, consecpiently, they ought to be religiously inculcated in children. Eighth and last, — That evil itself has its bright, or at any rate its redeeming, side; probably is but the fugitive requisite of some everlasting good ; and assuredly, in the meantime, and in a thousand obvious instances, is the admonisher, the producer, the increaser, nay, the very adorner and splendid investitor of good ; it is the pain that prevents a worse, the storm that diffuses health, the plague that enlarges cities, the fatigue that sweetens sleep, the discord that enriches harmonies, the calamity that tests affections, the victory and the crown of patience, the enrapturer of the embraces of joy. I was reminded of the circumstance which gave rise to these reflections, by the mention of the friend of whom I spoke last, and another brother of whom I went to see during my first illness. He was a young and amiable artist, residing at Gainsborough in Lincolnshire. He had no conception of what I suffered ; and one of his modes of entertaining me was his taking me to a friend of his, a surgeon, to see his anatomical preparations, and delight my hypochondriacal eyes with grin- nings of skulls and delicacies of injected hearts. I have no more horror now, on reflection, of those frameworks and ma- chineries of the beautiful body in which we live, than I have of the jacks and wires of a harpsichord. The first sight revolts us simply because life dislikes death, and the human being is jarred out of a sense of its integrity by these bits and scraps of the material portion of it. But I know it is no more me, than it is the feeling which revolts from it, or than the harpsichord itself is the music that Haydn or Beethoven put into it. In- deed, I did not think othenvise at the time, with the healthier part of me ; nor did this healthier part ever forsake me. I always attributed what I felt to bodily ailment, and talked as reasonably, and for the most part as cheerfully, with my friends as usual, nor did I ever once gainsay the cheerfulness and hopefulness of my opinions. But I could not look com- SUFFERING AND REFLECTION. 149 fortably on the bones and the skulls nevertheless, though I made a point of sustaining the exhibition. I bore anything that came, in order that I might be overborne by nothing ; and I found this practice of patience very useful. I also took part in every diversion, and went into as many different places and new scenes as possible ; which reminds me that I once rode with my Lincolnshire friend from Gainsborough to Don- caster, and that he and I, sick and serious as I was, or rather because I was sick and serious (for such extremes meet, and melancholy has a good-natured sister in mirth), made, in the course of our journey, a hundred and fifty rhymes on the Avord " philosopher." We stopped at that number, only be- cause we had come to our journey's end. I shall not apologize to the reader for mentioning this boy's play, because I take every reader who feels an interest in this book to be a bit of a philosopher himself, and therefore prepared to know that boy's play and man's play are much oftener identical than people suppose, especially when the heart has need of the pastime. 1 need, not remind him of the sage, who while play- ing with a parcel of schoolboys suddenly stopped at the ap- proach of a solemn personage, and said, " We must leave off, boys, at present, for here's a fool coming." The number of rhymes might be a little more surprising ; but the wonder will cease when the reader considers that they must have been doggerel, and that there is no end to the forms in which rhymes can Bet off from new given points ; as, (jo so far, throw so far; nose of her, beaux of her; toss of her, cross of her, &c. Spirits of Swift and Butler ! come to my aid, if any chance reader, not of our right reading fashion, happen to light upon this passage, and be inclined to throw down the book. Come to his aid ; for he does not know what he is going to do ; — how many illustrious jingles he is about to vituperate! The surgeon I speak of was good enough one day to take me with him round the country, to visit his patients. J was startled in a respectable farmhouse to hear language openly talked in a mixed party of males and females, "1' a kind that >m court- publicity, and that would have struck with mient an eulogizer of pastoral innocence. Yet nobody arprised at. ii ; nor did it bring a blush on the cheek of a very nice, mo< girl. She only smiled, and aed to think it was the man'.- way. Probably it was no- thing more than the language- which was spoken in the first 150 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. circles in times of old, and which thus survived among the peasantry, just as we find them retaining words that have grown obsolete in cities. The guilt and innocence of manners very much depend on conventional agreement ; that is to say, on what is thought of them with respect to practice, and to the harm or otherwise which they are actually found to produce. The very dress which would be shameless in one age or coun- try, is respectable in another ; but in neither case is it a moral test. When the shame goes in one respect, it by no means comes in another ; otherwise all Turks would be saints, and all Europeans sinners. The minds of the people in the Lin- colnshire farmhouse were " naked and not ashamed." It must be owned, however, that there was an amount of con- sciousness about them, which savoured more of a pagan than a paradisaical state of innocence. One of this gentleman's patients was very amusing. He was a pompous old gentleman-farmer, cultivating his gout on two chairs, and laying clown the law on the state of the nation. LordEldon he called " my Lord Elfin* (Elgin); and he showed us what an ignorant man this chancellor was, and what a dreadful thing such want of knowledge was for the country. The proof of his own fitness for setting things right was thus given by his making three mistakes in one Avord. He took Lord Eldon for Lord Elirin ; he took Lord Elsnn for the chan- cellor ; and he pronounced his lordship's name with a soft g instead of a hard one. His medical friend was of course not bound to cure his spelling as well as his gout ; so we left him in the full-blown satisfaction of having struck awe on the Londoner. Dr. Young talks of— " That hideous sight — a naked human heart :" a fine not fit to have been written by a human being. The sight of the physical heart, it must be owned, was trying enough to sick eyes ; that of the Doctor's moral heart, accord- ing to himself, would have been far worse. I don't believe it. I don't believe he had a right thus to calumniate it, much less that of his neighbour, and of the whole human race. I saw a worse sight than the heart, in a journey which I took into a neighbouring country. It was an infant, all over sores, and cased in steel — the result of the irregularities of its father ; and I confess that I would rather have seen the heart of the very father of that child, than I Avould the child him- SUFFERING AND REFLECTION. 151 self. I am sure it must have bled at the sight. I am sure there would have been a feeling of some sort to vindicate nature, granting that up to that moment the man had been a fool or even a scoundrel. Sullenness itself would have been some amends ; some sort of confession and regret. As to the poor child, let us^trust that the horrible spectacle prevented more such; that he was a martyr, dying soon, and going to some heaven where little souls are gathered into com- fort. I never beheld such a sight, before or since, except in one of the pictures of Hogarth, in his Rake's Progress ; and I sadden this page with the recollection, for the same reason that induced him to paint it. I have mentioned that I got rid of a palpitation of the heart, which accompanied my first visitation of hypochondria, by riding on horseback. The palpitation was so strong and incessant, that I was forced, for some nights, to sleep in a reclining posture, and I expected sudden death; but when I began the horseback, I soon found that the more I rode, and (I used to think; the harder I rode, the less the palpitation line. Galloping one day up a sloping piece of ground, the horse suddenly came to a stand, by a chalk-pit, and I was agreeably surprised to find myself not only unprecipitated over his head (for though a decent, I was not a skilful rider), but in a state of singular calmness and self-possession — a right proper masculine state of nerves. I might have dis- covered, as I did afterwards, what it Avas that so calmed and .strengthened me. I was of a temperament of body in which the pores were not easily opened ; and the freer they were kept, the better I was ; but it took me a long time to discover that in oider to be put into a state of vigour as well as com- posure, 1 required either vigorous exercise or some strong moral excitement connected with tin; sense of action. Un- fortunately, 1 had a tendency to extremes in self-treatment. At one time 1 thought to cure myself by cold-water baths, in which J |' I through a winter season; and, subse- atly, 1 hurt myself by hot baths. Late hours at night not mended by Lying in bed of a morning ; nor incessant and writing, I > \ weeks in which 1 did little but stroll and visit. It is true, I can hardly be said to have ever been without a book; for if not in my hand, it was at my side, or in my p hut what 1 needed was ordinary, regular habits, accompanied with a more than ordinary amount of exercise. 1 was never either so happy or so tranquil, as 152 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. when I was in a state the most active. I could very well understand the character of an unknown individual, described in the prose works of Ben Jonson, who would sit writing day and night till he fainted, and then so entirely give himself up to diversion, that people despaired of getting him to work again. But I sympathized still more with one of the Eucellai family, who was so devoted to a sedentary life, that he could not endure the thought of being taken from it; till being forced, in a manner, to accept a diplomatic mission, he became as vehement for a life of action as he had before been absorbed in indolence, and was never satisfied till he was driving every- thing before him, and spinning, with his chariot-wheels, from one court to another. If I had not a reverence, indeed, for whatever has taken place in the ordinance of things, great and small, I should often have fancied that some such business of diplomacy would have been my proper vocation; for I delight in imagining conferences upon points that are to be carried, or scenes in which thrones are looked upon, and national compliments are to be conveyed ; and I am sure that a great deal of action would have kept me in the finest health. Whatever dries up the surface of my body, inti- midates me ; but when the reverse has been effected by any- thing except the warm bath, fear has forsaken me, and my spirit has felt as broad and healthy as my shoulders. I did not discover this particular cause of healthy sensation till long after my recovery. I attributed it entirely to exer- cise in general; but by exercise, at all events (and I mention the whole circumstance for the benefit of the nervous), health was restored to me; and I maintained it as long as I per- severed in the means. Not long after convalescence, the good that had been done me was put further to the test. Some friends, among whom were two of my brothers and myself, had a day's boating up the Thames. We were very merry and jovial, and not prepared to think any obstacle, in the way of our satisfaction, possible. On a sudden we perceive a line stretched across the river by some fishermen. We call out to them to lower, or take it away. They say they will not. One of us holds up a knife, and proclaims his intention to cut it. The fisher- men defy the knife. Forward goes the knife Avith the boat, and cuts the line in the. most beautiful manner conceivable. The two halves of the line rushed asunder. " OiF," cry the fishermen to one another, " and duck 'em." SUFFERING- AXD REFLECTION. 153 They push out their boat. Tlieir wives (I forget -whence they issued) appear on the bank, echoing the cry of " Duck 'em ! " We halt on our oars, and are come up with, the fishermen looking as savage as wild islanders, and swearing might and main. My brother and myself, not to let us all be run down (for the fishermen's boat was much larger than ours, and we had ladies with us, who were terrified) told the enemy we would come among them. We did so, going from our boat into theirs. The determination to duck us now became manifest enough, and the fishermen's wives (cruel with their husbands' lost fishing) seemed equally determined not to let the intention remit. They screamed and yelled like so many furies. The fishermen seized my brother John, whom they took for the cutter of the line, and would have instantly effected their purpose, had he not been clasped round the waist by my brother Robert, who kept him tight down in a corner of the hold. A violent struggle ensued, during which a ruffianly fellow aiming a blow at my brother John's face, whose arms were pinioned, I had the good luck to intercept it. Mean- while the wives of the boaters were screaming as well as the wives of the fishermen; and it was asked our antagonists, whether it was befitting brave men to frighten women out of their senses. The fury seemed to relax a little at this. The word " pay- ment " was mentioned, which seemed to relax it more; but it was still divided between threat and demand, when, in the midst of a fresh outbreak of the first resolution, beautiful evidence was furnished of the magical effects of the word " law." Luckily for our friends and ourselves (for the enemy had the advantage of us, both in strength and numbers), ihe r of the boat, it seems, had lately been worsted in some action of tre . probably of the very nature of what they had been doing with their line. I was then living with my In-other Stephen, who was in the law. 1 happened to be dressed in black; and I had gathered from some words which fell from them during their rage, thai what they had been about with their fishing-net was in .all probability illegal. I assumed it to be so. 1 mentioned the dreaded word "law;" my black coat corroborated its impree ion; and, to our equal f and surprise, we found them on the sudden converting their rage and extortion into an assumption that we meant to 154 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. settle with their master, and quietly permitting us to get back to our friends. Throughout this little rough adventure, which at one time threatened very distressing, if not serious consequences, I was glad to find that I underwent no apprehensions but such as became me. The pain and horror that used to be given me at sight of human antagonism never entered my head. I felt nothing but a flow of brotherhood and determination, and returned in fine breathing condition to the oar. I subse- quently found that all corporate occasions of excitement affected me in the same healthy manner. The mere fact of being in a crowd when their feelings were strongly moved, to whatever purpose, roused all that was strong in me ; and from the alacrit}'-, and even comfort and joy, into which I was warmed by the thought of resistance to Avhatever wrong might demand it, I learned plainly enough what a formid- able thing a human being might become if he took wrong for right, and what reverence was due to the training and just treatment of the myriads that compose a nation. I was now again in a state of perfect comfort and enjoy- ment, the gayer for the cloud Avhich had gone, though occa- sionally looking back on it with gravity, and prepared, alas ! or rather preparing myself by degrees, to undergo it again in the course of a few years by relapsing into a sedentary life. Suffer as I might have done, I had not, it seems, suffered enough. However, the time was very delightful while it lasted. I thoroughly enjoyed my books, my walks, my com- panions, my verses ; and I had never ceased to be ready to fall in love with the first tender-hearted damsel that should encourage me. Now it was a fair charmer, and now a brunette ; now a girl who sang, or a girl who danced ; now one that was merry, or was melancholy, or seemed to care for nothing, or for everything, or was a good friend, or good sister, or good daughter. With this last, who completed her conquest by reading verse's better than I had ever yet heard, I ultimately became wedded for life; and she reads verses better than ever to this day, especially some that shall be nameless.* [* Written nearly ten years before the present edition was pub- lished : the reader had gone before the author revised his own writing, which he left unaltered.] 155 CHAPTER IX. THE "EXAMINE E." At the beginning of the year 1808, niy brother John and myself set up the weekly paper of the Examiner in joint partnership. It was named after the Examiner of Swift and his brother Tories. I did not think of their politics. I thought only of their wit and fine writing, which, in my youthful confidence, I proposed to myself to emulate; and I coidd find no previous political journal equally qualified to be its godfather. Even Addison had called his opposition paper the Whig Examiner. Some years afterwards I had an editorial successor, Mr. Fonblanque, who had all the wit for which I toiled, without making any pretensions to it. He was, indeed, the genuine successor, not of me, but of the Swifts and Addisons them- selves; profuse of wit even beyond them, and superior in political knowledge. Yet, if I laboured hard for what was so easy to Mr. Fonblanque, I will not pretend to think that I did not sometimes find it ; and the study of Addison and Steele, of Goldsmith and Voltaire, enabled me, when I was pleased with my subject, to give it the appearance of ease. At other times, especially ob serious occasions, I too often got into a declamatory vein, full of what I thought fine turns and Johnsonian antitheses. The new office of editor conspired with my success as a critic to turn my head. I wrote, though anonymously, in the first person, as if, in addition to my theatrii il preto d -ions, I had suddenly become an oracle in polities; the words philosophy, poetry, criticism, states- manship, nay, even ethics and theology, all took a final tone in my lips. When I remember the virtue as well as know- Ledge which i demanded from everybody whom i had occasion to notice, and how much charity my own juvenile errors ought to have considered themselves in nee