^ y-S lA" /<^A^ ■^.^vAA-*^^^*/"^^— V-^- LEIGH HUNT n Journal was reprinted in different forms, and much of Hunt's best work, included in the ordinary collections, was first published in this paper. After its failure he wrote re- views for The Westminster and The Edinburgh on the introduction of Macaulay, " Notes of a Lover of Books " and laureate verses for The Monthly Chronicle, essays on poetry and song in its relation to music for The Musical World, and edited from July, 1837, to March, 1838, The Monthly Kepository, originally a magazine in the Uni- tarian interest, but made unsectarian by his editorial pre- JOURNALIST. 87 decessors, W. J. Fox and R. H. Home. The Jar of Honey fy^om 3Iount Hyhla also appeared in Ainsivorth's Magazine, 1844, and some very thin Tahle Talk, i^rinted in his volume of that name, over the signature " Adam Fitz-Adam, Esquire," in The Atlas, 1846. Leigh Hunt's Journal : A Miscellany for the Cultivation of the Memorable, the Progressive, and the Beautiful, 1850, 185 1, was the last of his own papers, the most frankly autobiographical and garrulous, by no means the least worthy. "The object which I have most at heart in the new Journal is to help in assisting the right progress of the great changes coming in the world by the cultivation of a spirit of cheerfulness, reason- ableness, and peace ; and the most special means which I look for to this end, and which I earnestly desire on all sides, from all parties and shades of party, or of no party at all, is the countenance and co- operation of men the most distinguished for genius and public spirit. I hope they will deign to consider the Journal as a kind of neutral ground or academic grove and resort of wit and philosophy in which, while they freely express their o[)inions, whatever these may be, they will do so in accordance with the particular sjjirit of the place, and whether or not they think it the best and most useful spirit to be evinced at other times. . . . " But enough of enemies, for ever; of friends, never. I confidently trust my undertaking in the hands of those, and of the public at large, feeling sure that they will not disapprove its spirit, whatever they may say to its power ; and hoping that the distinguished correspondents who commence with it, and other younger and to- be-distinguished ones whom I expect in their company, will save it from falling off, should my own strength be insufficient. I feel no abatement of it yet, think God, as far as brain, or as heart and hope are concerned ; and success may give it me in respects less im- portant. . . . 88 LEIGH HUNT. " ' Chi la leggera, viva felice.' *' May he, and she, that read it, live and prosper." Failure of accord with some of his contributors, and the small capital embarked by the proprietors, brought this darling Benjamin to a speedy end ; but it contained much excellent matter, both by the editor and his friends, being similar in tone and spirit to The London Journal, of which it was in some sort a revival. Hunt now wrote for The Musical Times, Household Words, Fr^aser's Magazine, and closed his career as a journalist by sending sixteen chatty papers to The Spectator under a characteristic heading "The Occa- sional." The last appeared on August 20, 1859, just a week before his death, and a memorial paper, by Edmund Oilier, the son of his old friend, concluded the series. III.— POET. Leigh Hunt, at least in early days, found his greatest pleasure in the composition of verse, and fixed his ambi- tions upon becoming a fine poet. He never quite realised the hopelessness of the attempt, though his eagerness waned, and he could criticise his own work with even undue severity. The earliest printed verses of which we have any record, entitled "Melanclioly," appeared in The European Magazine for 1 80 1, when the author was just sixteen ; and he con- tributed in the same year to The Juvenile Library. But the boy was already a voluminous writer, and, in 1801 again, was published that "heap of imitations, all but absolutely worthless," to quote his own description — Juvenilia; or, A Collection of Poems, written between the Ages of Txoelve and Sixteen, by J. H. L. Hunt, late of the Grammar School of Christ's Hospital, and dedicated by Permission to the Hon. J. H. Leigh ; containing Miscellanies, Translations, Sonnets, Pastorals, Elegies, Odes, Hymns, and Anthems. In his Autobiography , Leigh Hunt is very severe upon this ambitious production ; but subsequent critics have found food for kindly comment within its pages. It was really a clever book for so young a writer, and shows a considerable acquaintance with many authors not gener- ally beloved of schoolboys. Characteristics and senti- 90 LEIGH HUNT. ments appear in this early volume which remained with him through life. The pleasures of friendship, awarded di first place in his "An Earth upon Heaven" {The Com- panion, April 2, 182S), are here sung with unmeasured enthusiasm ; a sincere affection for simple English, not to say suburban, scenery is clearly evinced ; and, as already hinted, a loving familiarity with literature per- vades the work. Moreover, his own tastes, fancies, and sentiments are expressed, with a strange combination of self-confidence and modesty, in facile and colloquial verse. The abundant and, it need hardly be added, super- fluous prefatory matter offers an amusing foretaste of Hunt's maturer charming egoism. The elegant dedica- tion to his godfather betrays that respect of persons which enabled the man, who went to prison for denounc- ing the Prince Regent, to play the amateur poet-laureate during the last years of Southey's life, and to tolerate, if not to welcome, the patronage formerly associated with authorship from worthy persons demanding no sacrifice of moral independence. In the advertisement, " J. H. L. Hunt thinks it necessary to inform his readers, as they will undoubtedly perceive how much superior some of the following Poems are to others, that a few of the first pages, all the Translations but one, the two first Odes, and the first Hymn, were written at a very early age ; that the Poem on ' Retirement/ the Pastorals, in imitation of Pope and Virgil, ' Elegy written in Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey,' 'Ode to Truth,' the 'Pro- gress of Painting,' ' Wandle's Wave,' the Hymns for the POET. 9 1 Seasons, the ' Palace of Pleasure,' and the ' Funeral Anthem,' were the productions of his present age (sixteen) ; and the rest of his intermediate years." The elaborate imitation of Spenser, already a favourite, is in- troduced by some words "To the Public," containing an apologetic defence of " the simple style and obsolete diction " and concludinsf thus : — " Where the allegory is wanting in the survey of human life, the youth and inexperience of the author will, it is hoped, be brought to the recollection of the excusing reader ; and the moral, never to be too often repeated, that is drawn from it, which endeavours to- correct the vices of the age by showing the frightful landscape that terminates the aHuring path of sinful pleasure, supply the defects of a muse, who is entering into public in her sixteenth year, bashful on her first exhibition, and listening with trembling expecta- tion, as she passes, to the shouts of disapprolmtion or applause that burst from the surrounding multitude." This autobiographical naivety, perfectly natural in so youthful an author, might surely have been restrained by judicious relatives ; but there seems to have been a tradition in the Hunt family for several generations against any form of parental control, and the habit of estabhshing personal intimacies with his readers proved itself an integral part of Leigh Hunt's literary equipment. The volume appaiently satisfied the author's immedi- ate desire for verse publication, and the ensuing products of his muse were either sent to the J'oetical Meyistei-, or merely shown to his friends. The cares of making love and finding a profession fully occupied his time. His 92 LEIGH HUNT. next literary efforts were in critical prose, but when The Examiner was brought out in iSoS, its pages were naturally open to the editor's verse. It was not, how- ever, until he had more or less established this paper and started a quarterly magazine that his next poem of any length or importance was published. This was The Feast of the Poets {The Reflector, No. 4, 181 2), a jeti d'esjirit suggested by Sir John Suckling's Session of the Poets, and exhibiting a critical assumption and intoler- ance entirely at variance with his later catholic apprecia- tions. Wordsworth, Scott, and Coleridge, for instance, fall under the lash of the satirist, and, as he afterwards pointed out in tlie Autobiogrcq'jhy , the poem was well calculated to offend almost every class of political or literary thinkers. It is a very youthful, very impertinent, but fairly vigorous production, which at least excites more amusement than the revised version, afterwards printed in his Poetical Works. This was followed by The Descent of Liberty, 18 15, a masque on the downfall of Napoleon, written in prison, and designed as "a compliment to the allies, which they deserved well enough, inasmuch as it was a failure ; otherwise they did not deserve it at all, for it was founded on a belief in promises which they never kept." The masque contains some of the best lyrics Hunt ever wrote, and a charming essay on the " Origin and Nature of Masques," most characteristically summarised : — " In a word, as the present piece was written partly to indulge the imagination of one who could realise no sights for himself, so it POET. 95 is more distinctly addressed to such habitual readers of poetry as- can yield him a ready mirror in the liveliness of their own apprehen- sions. There is a good deal of prose intermixed, but the nature of a masque requires it, and if the reader be of the description just mentioned, and shall settle himself with his book in a comfortable arm-chair condition, — in winter, perhaps with the lights at his shoulder, and his feet on a good fender, — in summer, with a window open to a smoothing air, and the consciousness of some green trees about him, — and in both instances (if he can muster up so much poetical accompaniment) with a lady beside him, — the author does not despair of convening him into a very sufficient and satisfied kind of theatre," Such were the conditions under which Leigh Hunt loved to pore over the v^-ritings of others, and hoped that they might enjoy his own. In the following year appeared The Story of Rimini, which led a reform in English poetry, and remains, in spite of patent defects, the most solid monument of Hunt's poetical achievements. There is a passage in the Autobiography that accounts for the form in which it was written, and estimates, not unwisely, its merits and defects : — " Dryden, at that time, in spite of my sense of Milton's superior- ity, and my early love of Spenser, was the most delightful name to me in English literature. I had found in him more vigour, and music too, than in Pope, who had been my closest poetical acquaint- ance, and I could not rest till I had played upon his instrument. I brought, however, to my task a sympathy with the tender and the pathetic which I did not find in my master, and there was also an impulsive difference now and then in the style, and a greater tendency to simplicity of words. My versification was not so vigorous as his. There were many weak lines in it. It 94 LEIGH HUNT. succeeded best in catching the variety of his cadences ; at least, so far as they broke up the monotony of Pope. But I had a greater love for the beauties of external nature ; I think al?o I partook of a more southern insight into the beauties of colour, of which I made abundant use in the procession which is described in the first canto ;-^ and if I invested my story with too many circumstances of descrip- tion, especially on points not essential to its progress, and thus took leave i7i toto of the brevity, as well as the force of Dante, still the enjoyment which led me into the superfluity was manifest, and so far became its warrant." The Story of Rimini, then, was a protest against the polished couplet of Pope — a call to revive the freer manner of Dryden — a protest and a call expressed already to some extent in The Lyrical Ballads, but, through Hunt's influence, guiding the pens of Keats, Shelley, and some of their noblest successors. The poem to which we indirectly owe so much was itself a failure. In the first place, as Hunt himself points out, the whole conception was an act of bad taste — " to enlarge upon a subject which had been treated with exquisite sufficiency, and to his immortal renown, by a great master " — and the passions with which it deals are not naturally introduced or vigorously depicted. The digressions and descriptions, indeed, are the only parts of the poem which can be read with pleasure. They contain that evidence of his own enjoyment which Leigh Hunt, as we see from the above quotation, regarded as a warrant for their existence, and which does, in fact, form one of the principal charms of his work in poetry and prose. ^ Perhaps the most really poetical passage in the book. POET. 95 The Story of Rimini elicited many expressions of en- thusiasm from those who afterwards profited by its in- fluence and from others of Hunt's own circle ; but it was met by his political enemies with a storm of virulent and personal abuse almost unparalleled in the history of journalism. It was treated by Blachivood and the Quarterly as an indecent manifesto of the so-called Cockney school in whose dishonour they were eager to triumph. The fact that the Cockney king had written a poem (although he was not responsible for the plot) about an intrigue between an Italian princess and her brother-in-law afforded them an opportunity — it cannot be called an excuse — for perpetually whispering insinua- tions against his own private moral character, and imply- ing that all his friends were equally disreputable. Leigh Hunt himself found a moral lesson in the story, that deceit is vicious and impolitic. He throws the blame of Francesca's sin on her father, who, in order to force her marriage, directed the surly Giovanni to woo her by deputy in the person of his brother Paolo, and told her that she should find the former as charming as the latter was universally admitted to be. The defence is not very effectively conducted, perhaps. The mere attempt may serve to illustrate the kind of attitude always adopted by Leigh Hunt on similar questions, unconventional but not lax. The versification was also abused, and here Hunt's principles were far superior to his practice. He never realised the proper dignity of poetry, and in discarding monotony, became slipshod. Hard polish was replaced gS LEIGH HUNT, by limp jerkiness, and the couplet in his hands grew pert and garrulous. There are beautiful passages in the poem worthy of the great reform to be inaugurated, but they are few and far between. In the matter of language, again, he could not maintain a high standard. His very simplicity was in part artificial, and he had a singular taste for giving ordinary words an original significance which ruined his phrases, though it never made him obscure. The poem was considerably revised, but the changes relate principally to the final development of the plot, and are not all improvements. In old age Leigh Hunt referred to Rimini as the work of a " tyro," but it does not contain any signs of youth from which he was afterwards exempt, and reaches as high a level as any of his longer pieces. It proves con- clusively that he was not, in the highest sense, a poet. In Foliage, i8iS, we may notice the delicately fanciful sub-titles — " Greenwoods " and " Evergreens," for the original poems and the translations from poets of antiquity. It contained, moreover, the epistles to his friends, Byron, Moore, Hazlitt, Baron Field, and Charles Lamb, which are written with a good deal of careless spirit ; the popular verses to T. L. H. and to J. H., and some of his best sonnets — particularly those To the Grass- hopper and the Cricket (his own favourites), ^ and that on The Nile, excelling, as is generally admitted, the sonnets on the same subject by Shelley and Keats, with which it was written in friendly competition in February 1818:— ■^ See Correspondence, ii. 56. POET. 97 " It flows through old hushed Egypt and its sands, Like some grave mighty thought threading a dream, And times and things, as in that vision, seem Keeping along it their eternal stands, — Caves, pillars, pyramids, the shepherd bands That roamed through the young world, the glory extreme Of high Sesostris, and that southern beam, The laughing queen that caught the world's great hands. " Then came a mightier silence, stern and strong. As of a world left empty of its throng. And the void weighs on us ; and then we wake, And hear the fruitful stream lapsing along 'Twixt villages, and think how we shall take Our own calm journey on for human sake." These are probably the strongest verses Hunt ever wrote, and, as Professor Saintsbury points out, "the eighth line is a re-discovery of a cadence which had been lost for centuries, and which has been constantly borrowed and imitated since." In the following year, 1819, appeared Hero and Leander, and Bacchus and Ariadne, a volume that de- serves to be rescued from oblivion on account of the third poem it contained, not mentioned on the title-page, called The Panther, which has been rightly included in every volume of selections from Hunt with which I am acquainted. It is one of the short narrative pieces in which he handled some old fable or episode suggested by his reading, with a firm and delicate touch that he seldom reached in other styles. "About this time," says the Autobiography, "I trans- 98 LEIGH HUNT. lated the Aminta of Tasso, a poem (be it said with the leave of so great a name) hardly worth the trouble, though the prologue is a charming presentment of love in masquerade, and the Ode on the Golden Age a sigh out of the honestest part of the heart of humanity." Hunt's translation of the Ode is very delightful, and has been frequently reprinted by itself. It was soon after the publication of this volume that he went to Italy^ where he published no poetry of any importance except the heavy satire on Gifford — the one man he could never forgive — called Ultra Crejndarius, 1823, and Bacchus in Tuscany from Redi (1825), an exercise in dithyrambics which is by no means a success. " I was the more incited to attempt a version of this poem, inas- much as it was thought a choke-pear for translators. English readers asked me how I proposed to render the famous ' Mostra aver poco giudizio ' (a Hne much quoted), and Italians asked what I meant to do with the ' compound words ' (which are very scarce in their lan- guage). I laughed at the famous 'mostra aver,' which it required but a little animal spirits to ' give as good as it brought ' ; and I had the pleasure of informing Italians that the English language abounded in compound words, and could make as many more as it pleased."' He published some verses in his Literary Pocket-Book, " or companion for the lover of art and nature" (i8ig- 1822), over the signature <^., and in The Liberxd (1822- 1823), among which were "The Lines to a Spider" and " Mahmound ; " while The Companion, The Chat of the POET. 99 Week, and The Tatler, all contained occasional poems by their editor. In 1819 several volumes of Hunt's had been bound together and published under the title of his Poetical Works, but the first genuine collection appeared in 1832, published by subscription. The volume opens with a " good gossiping preface" of 58 pages, designed, as he frankly tells us, to bring it to a size " becoming " its price, a method which he maintains, with some show of justice, to be more honest than that of adding poems formerly re- jected on their own merits. His self-selection is fairly judicious, though it is disappointing to learn that he only admitted the " Sonnet on the Nile " at the inducement of a partial friend. He has suiificient critical instinct to see that his best work will be in " a mixed kind of narrative poetry, part lively and part serious, somewhere between the longer poems of the Italians and the Fabliaux of the old French." He would fain pass his days in writing " eternal new stories in verse, of no great length, but justsufificient to vent the pleasure with which he is stung in meeting with some touching adventure, and which haunts him till he can speak of it somehow." His theories on poetry are more fully expressed else- where,^ but he here declares that "laws in poetry are nothing but the conclusions which critics have come to, respecting the means adopted by the best poets, for giving the greatest amount of pleasure." The sound critic was, however, an extreme sentimentalist, as this ^ In the Preface lo Ima'jinaiion and Fancy most formally, (juoted below, p. no. lOO LEIGH HUNT, Preface bears witness by the pleasure expressed in " the very flowers on the tea-cups, and the grace with which a ball of cotton is rolled up " ; and the argument for the use of triplets : — " I confess I like the very bracket that marks out the triplet to the reader's eye, and prepares him for the music of it. It has a look like the bridge of a lute." The volume contained nothing new but "The Gentle Armour," a tame version of an old French romance, and most of its contents were included in later collections. During 1834 appeared the brilliant lines on Paganini, one of his few compositions in blank verse {The London Journal, April 16), and Ahrni Ben Adhem, the finest of his narrative pieces (S. C. Hall's Aimdet). Captain Sword and Ca2)tain Pen was published in 1835. Leigh Hunt treats of this poem at some length in the Auto- biography, and relates how strongly its terrible pictures of the battlefield affected his imagination. But he was never at home in the realms of strong passion, and it is to be regretted that he should have thus exerted himself upon what seemed to him, as a lover of peace, an act of duty. "The Blue-Stocking Revels, or Feast of the Violets," a kind of feminine Feast of the Poets, which appeared in The Monthly Repository, 1837, must be condemned for faults of which its author was seldom guilty. Leigh Hunt was so essentially " gallant," in the highest sense of that noble and much-abused term, that it is painful to accuse him of discourtesy towards women ; but there is, un- fortunately, no denying that in some of his early criti- POET, lOI cisms upon actresses, in this satire, and in a few other passages, he was — without the sHghtest failure in good intention — both vulgar and pert. It can only be pleaded in extenuation that these occasional lapses arose from the non-essential or outside characteristics of his nature. He always promoted, to the best of his abilities, a genuine social and intellectual equality between the sexes ; and in women of the highest culture, such as Mrs. Browning and Mrs. Shelley, he inspired a special sentiment of love and reverence. Carlyle and his wife both exercised the privileges of the candid friend towards Leigh Hunt, but the former noticed more than once his chivalrous bearing towards Mrs. Carlyle — the heroine of his entirely exquisite and most popular rondeau, which appeared in The Monthly Chronide, 1838 : — " Jenny kissed me, when we met, Jumping from the chair she sat in ; Time, you thief, who love to get Sweets into your list, put that in : Say I'm weary, say I'm sad. Say tliat health and wealth have missed me, Say I'm growing old, l)ul add — Jenny kissed me." This poem, which of course is 7iot a rondeau, though Hunt — for some inexplicable reason — always so called it, was inspired by an impulsive embrace from Mrs. Carlyle, the expression of gratitude for his sonnet, "On a Lock of Milton's Hair":— 102 LEIGH HUNT. " It lies before me there, and my own breath Stirs its thin outer threads, as thoug]i beside The living head I stood in honoured pride, Talking of lovely things that conquer death. Perhaps he pressed it once, or underneath Ran his fine fingers, when he leant, blank-eyed, And saw in fancy Adam and his bride With their rich locks, or his own Delphic wreath. " There seems a love in hair, though it be dead. It is the gentlest, yet the strongest, thread Of our frail plant, — a blossom from the tree Surviving the proud trunk ; as if it said, Patience and Gentleness is Power, In me Behold aftectionate Eternity." Two years later, in 1840, appeared his first and prin- cipal play, The Legend of Florence, written many years before, "in six weeks, in a state of delightful absorption, notwithstanding the nature of the story, and the cares that beset him." By his familiarity with the theatre, and his varied literary talents, he was enabled to produce a graceful and pleasing poem, but it lacked the essenti- ally dramatic qualities, and contained no strongly-drawn characters. It was performed, however, with some suc- cess, and he wrote a few other dramas, of which only one, The Lover's Amazements, was ever published or acted. In spite of his excellent theatrical criticisms, and " a strong propensity to dramatic writing," Leigh Hunt was but a poor play-wright. In 1841, he contributed three tales to The Poems of Chaucer Modernised,''- and thereby bore witness to the ^ He published a fourth in Eraser's Maja-ine, Feb., 1857. POET. 103 crusade in honour of Chaucer, on which he had been engaged during the greater part of his hfe. His Journals are full of references to the father of English poetry, and he always maintained the thesis, now gener- ally acknowledged, that Chaucer's verse was smooth and musical, if correctly pronounced. The Monthly Magazme for 1842 contained the characteristic "Rustic Walk and Dinner," never reprinted ; and that somewhat dreary "poemettikin," "The Palfrey," came out in the same year. He had soon the pleasure of arranging with Moxon for a pocket edition of his Poetical Works, which was pub- lished in 1844. "It is truly delightful to me, I confess," he writes to De Wilde, " to think that I am going at last, with the prestige of a cheap and popular verse as well as prose writer, headlong into the pockets of the community. You know in what sense, and in what sense alone, I am speaking of these recipients, of whatever importance to me may be the half-crowns which I shall replace." And again, " At all events, the book, as you say, will be a book wearable and worn-outable in the pocket, and God send it may be reduced there to shreds, in happy and relishing sympathy with crumbs of biscuits." It con- tained the greater part of his best work, and was re- printed, 1846, 1888. After the appearance of this volume he seems to have written little poetry, though the " Fancy Concert," which appeared in Ainsworth's Magazine in 1845, is worthy of mention. His Poetical Works were reprinted in America, with an Introduction by his friend S. Adams Lee,^ and ^ 1857 and 1866, the only edition containing both his plays. 104 LEIGH HUNT, finally collected, revised by himself, and edited by his son Thornton, for Messrs. Routledge, Warne, & Rout- ledge. This volume appeared in i860, about a year after his death, but it is by no means a complete edition. It includes the whole of the 1844 edition, except The Legend of Florence ; but in every other volume of Leigh Hunt's poetry it would be possible to find verses, many of them on a level with his best work, which would be new to readers of the i860 collection. Perhaps the most striking omissions are Abraham and the Fire Wor- shippers ; The Fancy Concert ; the sonnets. The Poets, and Ariosto's (or Tlie Lover's) Prison ; such dainty lyrics as The Nnn, and the Dirge for an Infant ; Catullus' Atys the Enthusiast; Poses, and Sprightly Old Age from Anacreon, and other translations. At the same time we need not hesitate to judge of Leigh Hunt's poetical powers from this volume, in which he certainly designed to perpetuate his best work. His strength lies, as he himself suspected, in the brief narrative poems of which Abou Pen Adhem is the highest example. Here the impulse is from without, the lines are prompted by the enjoyment of a " tale that is told," and by the desire to express and impart that pleasure. The critical powers guide the creative, and lend them a vigour not their own. His manner at such times is simple and lucid, playful or tender according to circum- stances, but always sincere and glowing. His ear, so keen for judgment, directs the rhythm, and makes the verse flowing and easy. His many admirable transla- tions are composed in the same spirit. A loyal enthu- POET. 105 siasm for the originals prompts him to a rare fidelity in language and style, often achieved with marked suc- cess. Could Hunt have maintained these qualities of taste and self-control for any considerable period, he might have taken high rank as a poet. But, in spite of evi- dence concerning the labour he actually expended on the polishing process, we cannot refute the charge of care- lessness against almost everything he wrote. Whether from the blindness of partiality, or the incapacity of sus- tained concentration, he permitted flaws in his own work which he would have been the first to detect in that of others. Thus it is that in any longer pieces he is certain to offend the critical reader, and weaken his own claims to consideration. The qualities of grace, delicate fancy, and tender sentiment have enabled him, however, to produce some more strictly original poems of undoubted merit, in the lyrical form ; while the limitations of the sonnet have sometimes checked his animal vivacity and lent an un- wonted firmness of touch to the expression of thoughts, themselves worthy of a poetical dress. He lacks passion, dignity, and restraint, his imagina- tion is almost entirely fanciful ; but by the winning charm of his own fresh and cultured personality he attracts and even occasionally subdues. Part of the secret may be told in his own words. After relating the nervous excitement caused by serious composition, he proceeds : — " The reader may be surprised to hear, after these Io6 LEIGH HUNT. remarks, that what I write with the greatest composure is verses. He may smile, and say that he does not wonder, since the more art the less nature, the more artificiality the less earnestness. But it is not that ; it is that I write verses only when I most like to write ; that I write them slowly, with loving recurrence, and that the musical form is a perpetual solace and refreshment. The earnestness is not less. In one respect it is greater, for it is more concentrated. It is forced, by a sweet necessity, to say more things in less compass. But the necessity is sweet. The mode, and the sense of being able to meet its requirements, in however comparative a degree, are more than a sustainment : they are a charm. This is the reason why 'poetry^ not of the highest order, is sometimes found so accejjtahle. The author feels so viuch happiness in his task, that he cannot hut convey happiness to his reader." IV.— CRITIC. Leigh Hunt's directly critical work is almost entirely confined to prefaces, the earliest of which appeared in Classic Tales, Serious and Lively, a Selection from English, and Foreign Authors, with Critical Essays on the Merits' and Rejmtations of the Authors, 1806 and 1807. Several volumes of this collection have been lately reprinted, but they are more in demand for the text than for the criticism. The introduction to the rare first edition of Shelley's Masqxie of Anarchy is more notable. It is a spirited, though slightly discursive defence of the man he loved and honoured beyond all others. The Dramatic Works of Wycherley, Congreve, Vanh7'ugh, and Farqiihary 1840, is remembered chiefly for the prefatory contribu- tions of Lamb and Hazlitt, and the brilliant essay by Macaulay of which it was the occasion. The " Bio- graphical and Critical Sketch " prefixed to an edition of Sheridan's Works in the same year is comparatively un- important, though it does not arouse the sense of regret with which we approach the Stories from the Italian PoetSy 1846. The text of this volume is delightful, but the in- troduction is disfigured by a foolish abuse of Dante which it is rather difficult to forgive. Hunt recognised ] Xante's greatness without really /fe/m^ it, and hated him for the cold spirit of revenge which he exhibited. 107 3o8 LEIGH HUNT. Beaumont and Fletcher, or the Finest Scenes, Lyrics, and other Beauties of these Two Poets, now First Selected from the Whole of their Worhs, to the Exclusion of Whatever is Morally Objectionable, 1855, is described in the prefatory ■" Remarks " as a volume — " Where, in a word, is all the best passion and poetry of the two friends, such as I hope and believe they would have been glad to see brought together ; such as would have reminded them of those happiest evenings which they spent in the same room, not, perhaps, when they had most wine in their heads, and were loudest, and merriest, and least pleased, but when they were most pleased both with themselves and with all things, serene, sequestered, feeling their companionship and their poetry sufficient for them, without needing the satisfaction of its fame, or echo ; such evenings as those in which they wrote the description of the boy by the fountain's side, or his confession as Euphrasia, or Caratach's surrender to the Romans, or the address to sleep in Valentinian, or the divine song •on ' Melancholy,' which must have made them feel as if they had •created a solitude of their own, and heard the whisper of it stealing by their window." Rather more than twenty years earlier he had written in The Liberal (" Book of Beginnings ") on the same subject : — " What divine plays would not Beaumont and Fletcher have left us, if they had not been fine gentlemen about town, and ambitious to please a perishing generation ! Their muse is like an accom- plished country beauty, of the most exquisite kind, seduced up to town, and made familiar with the most devilish parts of it, yet re- taining, through all her debauchery, a sweet regret and an adoring fondness for nature. She has lilies about her paint and patch-boxes, and loves them almost as much as when she was a child." CRITIC. 109 There is nothing peculiarly noteworthy in the prefatory essay to the Book of the Sonnet, 1867. Leigh Hunt meditated the production of an anthology of English poetry, to which his peculiar qualities would have given an unique value. In the preface to his Imagination and Fancy, we read : — " The editor pro- poses to give in succession corresponding volumes of the poetry of action and passion (narrative and dramatic) from Chaucer to Campbell — of contemplation, from Surrey to Campbell — of wit and humour, from Chaucer to Byron — of song or lyrical poetry, from Chaucer again to Campbell, and Burns and O'Keefe." The volume on Wit and Humour alone appeared, though the character- istically named Booh for a Coryier informally covered some of the ground. From his Tahh-Talh we hear of another fascinating but unrealised conception : — "Cast your eye down any list of English writers, such, for instance, as that at the end of Mr. Craik's History of our Literature, and almost the only names that strike you as belonging to personally cheerful men are Beaumont and Fletcher, Suckling, Fielding, Farquhar, Steele, O'Keefe, Andrew Marvell, and Sterne. That Shakespeare was cheerful I have no doubt, for he was almost everything ; but still it is not his predominant characteristic, which is thought. Sheridan could ' set the table in a roar,' but it was a flustered one, at somebody's expense. His wit wanted good- nature. Prior had a smart air, like his cap. But he was a rake who became cynical. He wrote a poem in the character of Solomon on the vanity of all things. Few writers make you laugh more than Peter Pindar ; but there was a spice of the blackguard in him. You could not be sure of his triilh or his good-will. . . . no LEIGH HUNT. " There should he a joyous set of elegant extracts — a Literatura Hilaris or Gaudens — in a score of volumes that we cotdd have at hand, like a cellaret of good wine, against April or November weather. Fielding should be the port, and Farquhar the champagne, and Sterne the Malmsey ; and whenever the possessor cast an eye on his stock, he should know that he had a choice draught for him- self after a disappointment, or for a friend after dinner — some cordial extract of Parson Adams, or Plume, or Uncle Toby, generous as heart could desire, and as wholesome for it as laughter for the lungs." The opening volume of the projected series appropri- ately contained an essay on the theory of the subject, Hunt's most deliberate confession of faith— "An Answer to the Question, ' What is Poetry? ' " "Poetry, strictly and artistically so-called, that is to say, considered not merely as poetic feeling, which is more or less shared by the world, but as the operation of that feeling, such as we see it in the poet's book, is the utterance of a passion for truth, beauty, and power, em- bodying and illustrating its conceptions by imagination and fancy, and modulating its language on the principle of variety in uniformity. Its means are whatever the universe contains, and its ends pleasure and exaltation. Poetry stands between nature and convention, keeping alive among us the enjoyment of the external and the spiritual world ; it has constituted the most enduring fame of nations ; and, next to love and beauty, which are its parents, is the greatest proof to man of the pleasure to be found in all things, and of the probable riches of infinitude. . . . Poetry is imaginative passion. The quickest and subtlest test of the possession of its CRITIC. Ill essence is in expression ; the variety of things to be expressed shows the amount of its resources : and the continuity of the song completes the evidence of its strength and greatness. He who has thought, feeling, expression, imagination, action, character, and con- tinuity, all in the largest amount and highest degree, is the greatest poet. . . . "Imagination, teeming with action and character, makes the greatest poets ; feeling and thought, the next ; fancy (by itself), the next ; wit, the last. Thought by itself makes no poet at all ; for the mere conclusions of the understanding can at best be only so many intellectual matters of fact. Feeling, even destitute of conscious thought, stands a far better poetical chance ; feeling being a sort of thought without the process of thinking, a grasper of the truth without seeing it. And what is very remarkable, feeling seldom makes the blunders that thought does. An idle distinction has been made be- tween taste and judgment. Taste is the very maker of judgment. Put an artificial fruit in your mouth, or only handle it, and you will soon perceive the difference between judging from taste or tact, and judging from the abstract figment called judgment. The latter does but throw you into guesses and doubts. . . . Luckily, delight- fulness is not incompatible with greatness, willing soever as men may be in their present imperfect state to set the power to subjugate above the power to please. Truth, of any great kind whatsoever, makes great writing. . . . What the poet has to cultivate above all things, is love and truth ; what he has to avoid, like poison, is the 112 LEIGH HUNT. fleeting and the false. He will get no good by propos- ing to be ' in earnest at the moment.' His earnestness must be innate and habitual ; born with him, and felt to be his most, precious inheritance. . . . No man rec- ognises the worth of utility more than the poet ; he only desires that the meaning of the term may not come short of its greatness, and exclude the noblest necessities of his fellow-creatures. He is quite as much pleased, for instance, with the facilities for rapid conveyance afforded him by the railroad, as the dullest confiner of its ad- vantages to that single idea, or as the greatest two-idea'd man, who varies that single idea with hugging himself on his ' buttons,' or his good dinner. But he sees also the beauty of the country through which he passes, of the towns, of the heavens, of the steam-engine itself, thundering and fuming along like a magic horse, of the affections that are carrying, perhaps, half the passengers on their journey, nay, of those of the great two-idea'd man ; and, beyond all this, he discerns the incalculable- amount of good, and knowledge, and refinement, and mutual consideration, which this wonderful invention is fitted to circulate over the globe, perhaps to the dis- placement of war itself, and certainly to the diffusion of millions of enjoyments." There is no occasion to expatiate upon the value or the limitations of this conception ; it speaks for itself, and entirely prepares us for the method of criticism always adopted by Leigh Hunt — the expression of his own enjoyment. Accepting Wordsworth's dictum that the chief business of the poet is to give pleasure, he might CRITIC. 113 have added that the chief business of the critic is to give thanks for the pleasure thus bestowed. He dwelt always on particular passages, not on general theories, and it is interesting to note that Matthew Arnold, starting from the very different conception of poetry as a " criticism of life," recommends and practises a similar course : — " Critics give themselves great labour to draw out what in the ab- stract constitutes the characters of a high quality of poetry. It is much better simply to have recourse to concrete examples ; to take specimens of poetry of the high, the very highest quality, and to say: The characters of a high quality of poetry are what is expressed there. They are far better recognised by being felt in the verse of the master, than by being perused in the prose of the critic."^ Leigh Hunt, however, carried the fashion of sign-post criticism to an extreme, and committed the abomination of italicising favourite passages. Many of his essays are practically reproductions from some volume in his posses- sion with his own underlinings and marginal notes transcribed. Mrs. Fields has shown us, in her gossiping Shelf of Old Books, how he marked and scored his " poets," without even waiting to mend his pen ; and it is certain that such conduct in a personal friend or con- temporary would be as unpardonable as Wordsworth's habit of cutting other people's books with a buttery knife. But while the lapse of time can never redeem Words- worth's iniquity, it has already justified Leigh Hunt's, Scribbling over books is allowable or, at least, it was allowable, to men whose critical opinions are worthy of respect ; and the volume so disfigured gains a value not 1 General preface to Mr. Humphrey Ward's En'jlixih Poets. 114 LEIGH HUNT. its own. These, at any rate, were Leigh Hunt's methods, and it is undeniable that by the pubUcation of these labelled extracts he created, encouraged, or revived, as the case might be, with different readers or different authors, a taste for nearly everything most truly beautiful in English poetry. "He delighted to consider himself a taster in literature, the Indicator, or honey-hunter-"- among the flowers of the past," and his judgment was re- markably sure and sane. Among his contemporaries, Lamb was undeniably more subtle, Coleridge more pro- found, and Hazlitt more brilliant ; but none of them shared his breadth of sympathy and catholic open- mindedness. In his younger days, when poetry was not, he turned men's minds to Chaucer and Spenser ; and at the dawn of a new era, bid them sit at the feet of Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, and Browning. Professor Saintsbury, 1 Over each number of the original Indicator was printed this little paragraph of Natural History :—" There is a bird in the in- terior of Africa, whose habits would rather seem to belong to the interior of Fairy-land ; but they have been well authenticated. It indicates to honey-hunters where the nests of wild-bees are to be found. It calls them with a cheerful cr}% which they answer ; and on finding itself recognised, flies and hovers over a hollow tree con- taining the honey. While they are occupied in collecting it, the bird goes to a little distance, where he observes all that passes ; and the hunters, when they have helped themselves, take care to leave him his portion of the food. This is the Cuculits Indicator of Linnaeus, otherwise called the Aloroc, Bee Cuckoo, or Honey-Bird." " There he arriving round about doth flie, And takes survey with busie, curious eye, Now this, now that, he tasteth tenderly." — SrENSER. CRITIC. 115 the most severe of Hunt's modern critics, says that, " he jumped at good things when he came near them almost as involuntarily as the needle to the magnet," and the simile may be accepted without qualification. His limitations were those of a sentimentalist, and resulted chiefly from an inability to enter into certain moods ; the tragic and the sublime never appealed to him so completely as the gay and the graceful ; sustained thought was less congenial than tender fancy. He worked in detail, and occasionally, by losing the sense of proportion, missed a central motive or total effect. Always loving verse above prose, he wrote more fre- quently on the former, and judged it better ; but all his work is enriched by the critical results of his wide and thoughtful reading. Appreciations arise incidentally on every page, often most happily compressed into a single sentence. For example, in Rahelais, "hunger and thirst personified sate down to a feast of revelry, with wit for their host." The literary career of Sir Egerton Brydges " is like some long evening sigh over a barren moor, or through the ruins of an old castle." O'Keefe's " muse was as fresh as a dairymaid." The essays of Elia "will take their place among the daintiest productions of English wit-melancholy." "Luxuriant, remote Spenser, immortal child in poetry's most poetical solitudes." "Parson Adams should have been Shakespeare's chap- lain, and played at bowls with him." v.— MISCELLANIST. The greater number of Leigh Hunt's essays appeared originally in periodicals, and are therefore more naturally grouped under subjects than chronologically. A few collections, mostly reprints, may, however, be briefly noticed. Passing over the rather intolerant "Attempt to show the Folly and Danger of Methodism," reprinted from The Examiner in 1809, and other volumes on special subjects to be noticed elsewhere, we come first to his own admir- able selection from The Indicator and The Companion, 1834, by which alone his reputation might be safely left to stand or fall. This was afterwards published with The Seer, which had been chosen from other periodicals, The London Journal, The Liberal, The Taller, etc., with the motto, " Love adds a precious seeing to the eye," and had first appeared in 1841. Men, Women and Boolcs, 1847, is a similar collection, but, though the most accessible, and therefore the best known, is unfortunately not a good example of Hunt's powers. The Jar of Honey from Mount Hyhla, 1848, contains some suggestive papers on pastoral poets; while in Table Talk, 1851, we have the counter-sweepings of a voluminous journalist. Many collections, of varying interest and importance, have appeared since Hunt's death. He himself also 116 MISCELLANIST. 1 1 ^ reprinted three respectable compilations, that might well have been contributed to the pages of Tit Bits ; namely, (Jyie Hundred Romances of Real Life, 1843, and the two series of Readings for Railways, 1850 and 1853, in the second of which he was assisted by J. B. Syme. Hunt will be best appreciated, however, by a study of the original Indicator, 182 1, Comixmion, 1828, and London Journcd, 1834-5, which include the more im- portant contents of the above volumes, and many charming papers never reprinted. His deservedly most popular work is " purely miscellaneous, depending for its subject and treatment on the suggestion of the moment : as he said in ' The Wishing Cap,' ' I will take up in this paper any subject to which I feel an impulse.' And the subjects are often commonplace enough, but ' he brings poetry to our breakfast-table, and strikes light out of the pebble at our feet,' finding — ' Sermons in stones, and good in everything.' " These casual writings, however, according to the testi- mony of those who knew him best, " were the result of very considerable labour and painstaking, of the most conscientious investigation of facts, where facts were needed; and of a complete devotion of his faculties towards the objects to be accomplished." At one time admirable examples of the colloquial style, at another they are shockingly constructed and even ungram- matical. They take up a position in the history of literature I I 8 LEIGH HUNT somewhere between the Tatlers and Spectators of Steele and the magazines of the present day. Leigh Hunt studied, and in his early days copied, the direct imitators of Steele and his contemporaries — The Observer, The Connoisseur, The Lounger, etc. ; but he seems to have been himself largely responsible for the combination of aesthetic and contemplative writing with matters of immediate or political interest with which we are so familiar. He helped to introduce magazine methods into the newspapers without destroying their sensational- ism, as we are now trying to introduce newspaper methods into the magazines without discrediting their prestige. He shared of course the didactic philanthropic enthusiasms of his day, and appealed designedly to a humbler class of readers than his masters. Addison and Steele wrote for "The Town," "The Wit," and "The Dandy," only occasionally condescending to the worthy citizen. Leigh Hunt is frankly bourgeois ; he addresses himself " to those who have not had the advantages of a classical education." He chose Hampstead for his Paradise, and among the vineyards of Italy " pitched himself in imagination into the thick of Covent Garden." These elements of the true Cockney, in that they were sincere and nowise despicable, secured to him a certain measure of popularity among the habitual newspaper readers. In prose, as in poetry, Leigh Hunt holds the peculiar position of a leader among giants taller than himself, a humble teacher of the mighty. His junior con- temporaries, certainly recognising his influence, entered MISCELLANIST, 1 19 the lists, and passed him easily. But the comparison need not always be kept in view, and, by looking through and beyond it, we may discover a personality inde- pendent, distinguishable, and not altogether unworthy. The unique sanity of his criticism has been noticed. In the miscellaneous essays now under consideration he adopted a manner that has since become indissolubly associated with the name of Elia ; and he seems, at first sight, comparatively commonplace. But though his achievements are unquestionably of a lower order than Lamb's, they also differ from his by coming nearer to human nature, and possessing greater sincerity and earnestness. Much of Lamb's peculiar charm arises from a certain whimsical far-awayness and delicate romanticism that hardly touches our actual experience, while Leigh Hunt's sentiments and characters are literal transcripts, sifted and composed, but not touched up. This true realism gives them a place in our hearts which the powers of imagination alone cannot secure. They throw sunlight on the path of real life. Though, in the strictest sense of the word, miscel- laneous, Leigh Hunt's essays fall naturally into certain general divisions according to the subject treated, or, more accurately, according to the originally inspiring subject, for he never " keeps to the point." We may first consider the semi-philosophic or con- templative, of which the best known is probably the beautiful Deaths of Little Children. The opening sentence strikes the keynote of the problem, how to face the greatest of all sorrows : — " A Grecian philosopher, being I20 LEIGH HUNT. asked why he wept for the death of his son, since the sorrow was in vain, repUed, ' I weep on that very account.' And his answer became his wisdom." The thought sug- gests reminiscences of his mother's grave, praise of tears, and the pretty offer of consolation. " Those who have lost an infant are never, as it were, without an infant child. . . . This one alone is rendered an immortal child. Death has arrested it with his kindly harshness and blessed it into an eternal image of youth and innocence." In a manner equally informal, he expounds {An Earth upon Heaven) his views of a future state, pleading, with half-veiled seriousness, for an intermediate heaven of "these natural homes and resting-places, which are so heavenly to our imaginations, even though they be built of clay, and are situate in the fields of our infancy"; a few centuries of preparation for the state of final bliss, " where every- thing is marvellous and opposed to our experience " : — "la a word, we cannot but persuade ourselves, that to realise everything that we have justly desired on earth, will he heaven ; we mean, for that period ; and that afterwards, if we behave ourselves in a proper pre-angelical manner, we shall go to another heaven still better, where we shall realise all that we desired in our first." This early Paradise, where " there can be no clergymen, as there are no official duties for them," shall contain a friend — " no shirker of his nectar," — a mistress, " with one or two charming little angelical peccadilloes ; " and new hooks by Shakespeare and Spenser, another De- cameron, and forty more novels by Walter Scott. MISCELLANIST. 121 " A book of verses underneath the bough, A jug of wine, a loaf of bread — and thou Beside me singing in the wilderness. Oh, wilderness were paradise enow."^ " The weather will be extremely fine, but not without such varieties as shall hinder it from being tiresome. April will dress the whole country in diamonds, and there will be enough cold in winter to make a fire pleasant of an evening. The fire will be made of sweet-smelling turf and sunbeams ; but it will have a look of coal. If we choose, now and then, we shall even have in- conveniences." He often touches upon kindred subjects with the same delicate appeal to natural emotions, preaching thus indirectly the undogmatic faith that inspired his Religion of the Heart. He betrays, moreover, an obstinate moral sense, not disposed to deny itself the pleasure of expression, but unexpectedly charitable to vices committed with good grace, if redeemed by a good heart. In the famous character-sketches. Hunt is working in that borderland between history and fiction which may be described as class-biography. His methods are very different from those of the old " characters " of Butler or Overbury, in which we read, for example, of A Lover; — " His heart is catched in a net with a pair of bright shining eyes, as larks are with pieces of a looking-glass. He makes heavy com- ^ The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. 122 LEIGH HUNT. plaints against it for deserting of him, and desires to have another in exchange for it ; which is a very unreasonable request, for if it betrayed its bosom-friend, what will it do to a stranger that should give it trust and entertainment ? . . . All lovers are poets for the time being, and make their ladies a kind of mosaic work of several coloured stones joined together by a strong fancy, but very stiff and unnatural ; and though they steal stars from heaven, as Prome- theus did fire, to animate them, all will not make them alive or alive-like." Leigh Hunt's style is far more closely allied to that of modern fiction. He illustrates character by man- ners, without formally analysing it ; and makes the type life-like by a kind of borrowed individuality. The Old Gentleman is a pathetic figure " very clean and neat ; and, in warm weather, proud of opening his waistcoat half-way down, and letting so much of his frill be seen, in order to show his hardiness as well as taste." The gentle, unassuming creature must win the reader's heart ; from the morning, when he is " cheapening a new old print for his portfolio," or hearing of the newspapers, until the evening, when he plays cards or goes to the theatre, where, " during the splendid scenes, he is anxious that the little boy should see." " When he gets very old indeed, he will sit for whole evenings and say little or nothing; but informs you that there is Mrs. Jones (the housekeeper), ' sAe'/^ talk.'" His counter- part, The Old Lady, " generally dresses in plain silks that make a gentle rustling as she moves about in the silence of her room ; and she wears a nice cap with a lace border that comes under the chin. . . . Her waist is rather tight and trim than otherwise, as she had a fine MISCELLANIST. 1 23 one when young ; and she is not sorry if you see a pair of her stockings on a table that you may be aware of the neatness of her leg and foot." She thinks "the clergyman a nice man," remembers being complimented by Mr. Wilkes — "a sad, loose man, but engaging," and is passionately loyal. These are the principal portraits in the gallery, but there are many others, drawn with equal care and the same tender and humorous insight. The Maidservant, who sighs over a good supper and reads Pamela, The Waiter, with a little money in the funds, whose nieces look up to him, and the delightful Seamen on Shorey drawn from actual persons, as we learn from the Auto- biography/, are among the best of these. From The Conductor, Inside an Omnibus, On tJie Sight of Shops, etc.^ etc., we may learn of an ever-recurring delight in the streets of London, as keen and more widely observant than Lamb's. The Monthly Nurse, "a middle-aged,, motherly sort of gossiping, hushing, flattering, dictatorial, knowing, ignorant, not very delicate, comfortable, uneasy,, slip-slop kind of blinking individual, between asleep and awake," is obviously a near relation to some of Dickens's characters ; and an unexpected likeness may be dis- covered between the Maidservant and Miss Martineau's Maid of all Worl^, readers of which supposed that the authoress must have experienced the life she was describ- ing. AVriting of a slightly later period, and with a motive wholly didactic. Miss Martineau emjiloys the same proportions of generalisation and detail, the sanie balance between the type and the individual, and is 124 LEIGH HUNT. •often led to a consideration of the same items. The picture is far less attractive or artistic, but it is more truthful by virtue of its high moral earnestness. Leigh Hunt maintains, with his wonted optimism, that in spite of indigestion and depression imitated from her young mistress, the "mop and the scrubbing-brush" keep the maidservant cheerful and healthy; whereas the object of Miss Martineau's paper is to prove that the labour usually demanded must ruin her health and shorten her life. Hunt approaches still more closely the method of fiction in certain Tales (tastefully collected by Prof. Knight, 1S91), which, like his narrative poems, are para- phrases of favourite episodes in ancient literature. They have been chosen, as a rule, for some touch of delicate and rare sentiment which is most hapjiily reproduced in a simple and effective style. They indicate certain ideals of character in men and women, not altogether usual, but full of romantic chivalry and charm, most fully exemplified, perhaps, in A Generous Woman and the Hamadryad. — " The hand that could strike my bee with a lingering death, and prefer the embracing of the dice-box to that of affectionate beauty, is not worthy of love and the green trees." The essays on animals, such as " The Cat by the Pire," "A Pigeon making Love," and the amusing papers on " The Zoological Gardens," are in a similar vein to the above; and in speaking of inanimate objects such as " Sticks," " Hats," and others even more remote from humanity, he adopts a personal point of view. MISCELLANIST. 1 25 The paper on " Coaches," extending over two Indicators^ is full of good things. After rejecting as " gouty and superfluous " the carriage "full of cushions and comfort j elegantly coloured inside and out ; rich, yet neat ; light and rapid, yet substantial ; " and scouting the " ambition to have Tandem written on his tombstone," he declares that " a postchaise involves the idea of travelling, which in the company of those we love is home in motion," and finally descends to a consideration of the hackney coach : — " One of the greatest helps to a sense of merit in other things is a consciousness of one's own wants. Do you despise a hackney coach ? Get tired ; get old ; get young again. Lay down your carriage, or make it less uneasily too easy. Have to stand up half an hour, out of a storm, under a gateway. Be ill, and wish to visit a friend who is worse. Fall in love, and want to sit next your mistress, or if all this will not do, fall in a cellar." Of the coaches themselves, " some look chucked under the chin, some nodding, some coming at you sideways." Their submissiveness is only surpassed by the " vital patience of the horses " : — " Can anylliing Ijctter illustrate the poet's line about ' Years that bring the philosophic mind,' than the still hung head, the dim indifferent eye, the dragged and blunt-cornered mouth, and the gaunt imbecility of body dropping its weight on three tired legs in order to give repose to the lame one? When it has blinkers on, they seem to be shutting up its eyes for death, like the windows of a house. Fatigue and the habit of suffering have become as natural to the creature as the bit 126 LEIGH HUNT. to its mouth. Once in half an liour it moves the position of its leg, or shakes its drooping old ears. The whip makes it go, more from habit than from pain. Its coat has become almost callous to minor stings. The blind and staggering fly in autumn might come to die against its clieek. " Of a pair of hackney-coach horses, one so much resembles the other that it seems unnecessary for them to compare notes. They have that within which is beyond the comparative. They no longer bend their heads towards each other as they go. They stand to- gether as if unconscious of each other's company, but they are not. An old horse misses his companion, like an old man. The presence of an associate, who has gone through pain and suffering with us, need not say anything. It is talk, and memory, and everything." There are also a number of charming papers on the different occupations of daily life. One of the most trying of minor virtues is (jetting xvp on cold mornings. The unwilling " are ' haled ' out of their beds, says Milton, by ' harpy-footed furies,' fellows who come to call them." The spirits may be revived, however, by hreahfast ^ with flowers, " one of these green smiles upon the board," and a book " standing among the cups, edgeways, plam-looking, perhaps poor and battered, perhaps bought of some dull huckster in a lane for a few pence." Let us avoid, at this cheerful hour, '•' too much potted gout and twelve shilling irritability." "Boiling, proportion, and attention, are the three magic words of tea-making. ... In tea, properly so-called, you should slightly taste the sugar, be sensible of a balmy softness in the milk, and enjoy at once a solidity, a delicacy, a relish, and a fragrance in the tea." By a natural associa- 1 London Jourmil, July 2nd, 1834, seq. MISCELLANIST. I27 tion our thoughts are turned to the Chinese : — " How the Chinese came to invent tea, as Sancho would say, we do not know ; but it is the most ingenious, humane, and poetical of their discoveries. It is their epic poem;" ' and " the very word tea, so petty, so infantine, so winking-eyed, so expressive, somehow or other, of some- thing inexpressibly minute, and satisfied with a little {tee !), resembles the idea one has (perhaps a very mis- taken one) of that extraordinary people, of whom Europeans know little or nothing, except that they sell us this preparation, bow back again our ambassadors, have a language consisting only of a few hundred words, gave us China ware, and the strange pictures on our tea- cups, made a certain progress in civilisation long before we did, mysteriously stopped at it and would go no further, and if numbers, and the customs of ' venerable ancestors ' are to carry the day, are at once the most populous and the most respectable nation on the face of the earth." Inevitably reminded of Dr. Jolinson, the essayist touches on a host of allusions to tea-drinking in literature from Redi to D'Israeli, and compares a child over a milk-bowl to " everything that is young and innocent, the morning, the fields, the dairies " : — "You m;^y make a landscape, if you will, out of your breakfast table, better than Mr. Kirk's picture. Here where the bread stands is its father, the field of corn, glowing in the sun, cut by the tawny reapers, and presenting a path for lovers. The village church (where they are to be married) is on a leafy slope, on one side, and on the other is a woudy hill, with fountains. There, far over the 1 The Indicator— "■ Table Wits at Breakfast." 128 LEIGH HUNT, water (for this basin of water, with island lumps of butter in it, shall be the sea), are our friends the Chinese, picking the leaves of their tea-trees, a beautiful plant ; or the Arabs plucking the berries of the coffee-tree, a still more beautiful one, with a profusion of white blossoms and an odour like jasmine. For the sugar (instead of a bitterer thought, not so harmonious to our purpose, but not to be forgotten at due times) you may think of Waller's Sacharissa, so named from the Latin word for sugar (sacchanim), a poor compli- ment to the lady; but the lady shall sweeten the sugar, instead of the sugar doing honour to the lady ; and she was a very knowing as well as beautiful woman, and saw farther into love and sweetness than the sophisticate court poet ; so she would not have him, not- withstanding his sugary verses, but married a higher nature." In writing of natural objects, on wliich the Cockney poet has put forth some of his best work, Leigh Hunt dwells upon the same kind of cheerful detail, preaching by the mere expression of happiness, " the art of making the best of what is before us." He cannot appreciate, it must be admitted, the lofty grandeur and rugged majesty of Nature's highest moods ; but he loves the brook, the hedge, the lane, the undulation, the " little glow-worm lighting up her trusting lamp, to show her lover where she is:" — in a word, the suburb. He heralds "the union of the two best things in the world, the love of nature, and the love of each other." The Months Descrip- tive of the Successive Beauties of the Year, 1821, is a dainty calendar of popular natural history, but the papers on such congenial subjects as Spring and May -Day, are quite as significant. The Stone, " musician of the brook," is not overlooked, nor the Daisy with its "homely face," — "Belle et douce marguerite, aimable MISCELLANIST. 1 29 sceur du roi king-cup, we would tilt for thee with a hundred pens, against the stoutest poet that did not find perfection in thy cheek." One who talks so much, and all his writings are colloquial, is naturally often reduced to be witty upon the weather^ and thereby becomes occasionally tedious. We hear too much about the duty of cheerfulness, though it should be remembered in extenuation that the essays were written at different times, for different papers, alter- nating with others on very different subjects, and were never intended by their author to be considered e^i masse. He has published, indeed, through a lapse of memory, two papers on A Rainy Day {Indicator, June 21, 1S20, and London Journal, Aug. i, 1835), which are strangely dissimilar. In the former, after recounting the clever imitation of Tate Wilkinson, by Charles Matthews, after- wards incorporated in the Autobiography, and dilating upon the folly of not lighting a fire on a cold day be- cause it is summer, he stoops to chuckle over the agonies of a fat leg in a white stocking splashed by the mud. In the latter he gives us a charming dialogue between " little fond heart and bright eyes," watching the rain, and almost tear-conquered by her longing for a party, and her "nice, kind mamma" who, instead of scolding, tries to make it up to her child by a treat at home, bidding her " make the best of a bad day by thinking of some- thing superior to it." Mists and Fogs, A Dusty Day, To One Whom Bad Weather Depresses, and Bad Weather, are all directed towards the same object. In the course of the last he naively apologises for not being so pleasant as I 130 LEIGH HUNT. he desired " because some friends of ours the other night were the 2^l^(i-^(intest 2)eople in the world till five 6'clocTc in the morning." In Fine Days in January and Fehru'xry, and the two famous papers entitled Now, he dwells, on the other hand, on the positive delights of good weather. Leigh Hunt possesses both wit and humour in no ordinary degree, and he is an admirable critic of these qualities in others ; yet nowhere has he failed so lament- ably as in certain deliberate attempts at being funny. A Letter to the Bells of a Fari&h Church in Italy, The True Enjoyment of Splendour, and his version of Cresset's Ver- Vert are really amusing, but the sheer buffoonery of Carfington Bhmdell, Esq., and of Jack Abbot's Breakfast is depressing in the extreme. The animal spirits, else- where so delightful, have run riot, and are veritably drunk with noisy laughter. The former essay, however, is partially redeemed by one excellent paragraph : — " You know, obsen-ant reader, the way in which sheep carry themselves on abrupt and saltatory occasions ; how they follow one another with a sort of spurious and involuntary energy ; what a pretended air of determination they have ; how they really have it, as far as example induces and fear propels them ; with what a heavy kind of lightness they take the leap ; how brittle in the legs, lumpish in the body, and insignificant in the face ; how they seem to quiver with apprehension while they are bold in act ; and with what a provoking and massy springiness they brush by you, if you happen to be in the way, as though they wouldn't avoid the terrors of your presence if possible, or rather as if they W'Ould avoid it with all their hearts, but insulted you out of a desperation of inability. Baas inter- mix their pensive objections with the hurr)', and a sound of feet as MISCELLANIST. 13I of water. Then, ever and anon, come the fiercer leaps, the con- glomerating circuits, the dorsal visitations, the yelps and tongue lollings of the dog, lean and earnest minister of compulsion ; and loud, and dominant over all, exult the no less yelping orders of the drover, indefinite, it is true, but expressive — rustical cogencies of 00 and oxi, the unintelligible jargon of the Corydon or Thrysis of Chalk- Ditch, who Cometh, final and humane, with a bit of candle in his hat. a spike at the end of his stick, and a hoarseness full of pastoral catarrh and juniper." It remains that Hunt's first and chief inspiration, in his miscellanies as elsewhere, was literature. His best essays, without considering those devoted to actual criticism, are still on books and their makers. Such are Social Genealogy, in which he traces "a link of ' beamy hands ' from our own times up to Shake- speare," and recalls, with fond enthusiasm, many notable friendships between great writers ; and A Novel Party, " in which the company consisted of those immortal, though familiar creatures, the heroes and heroines of the wonderful persons who have lived among us, called novelists. . . . The Camillas and Evelinas were ex- tremely entertaining, and told us a number of stories that made us die with laughter. Their fault consisted in talking too much about lords and pawnbrokers. . . . We are afraid, from what we saw this evening, that poor Joseph is not as well as he would be with his sister Pamela. ... It seems that Lovelace and Clarissa live in a neighbouring quarter, called Romance, a very grave place, where few of the company visited. . . . Lady Grandison was a regular beauty, but did not become a 132 LEIGH HUNT, cloak. She was best in full dress. Pamela was a little, soft-looking thing, who seemed as if butter would melt in her mouth ! But she had a something in the corner of her eye which told you that you had better take care how you behaved yourself." There is a passage on Bookstalls which betrays, through all its playful delicacy, the writer's inherent carelessness about his own practical interests : — " In some instances (for it is not the case with everyone) your second-hand bookseller condescends even to expect to be beaten down in the price he charges, petty as it is ; and accordingly is good enough to ask more than he will take, as though he did nothing but refine upon the pleasures of the purchaser. Not content with valuing knowledge and delight at a comparative nothing, he takes ingenious steps to make even that nothing less ; and under the guise of a petty struggle to the contrary (as if to give you an agreeable sense of your energies) seems dissatisfied unless he can send you away thrice blessed — blessed with the book, blessed with the cheapness of it, and blessed with the advantage you have had over him in making the cheapness cheaper. Truly we fear that out of a false shame we have too often defrauded our second-hand friend of the generous self-denial he is thus prepared to exercise in our favour, and by giving him the price set down in his catalogue, left him with impressions to our disadvantage." Boohhinding and Indexes are pleasant papers, showing indirectly that Leigh Hunt cared very little for any part of a book but its thoughts. He was not a bibliophile, as we understand the term, and probably never yearned after a "first edition." In The World of Booh he main- tains a thesis, undoubtedly true for himself, that we may really learn more of a country from books than by MISCELLANIST. 135 actually visiting it : — " You See that young man there, turning down the corner of the dullest spot in Edinburgh, with a dead wall over against it, and delight in his eyes? He sees No, 4, the house where the girl lives he is in love with. Now, what that place is to him, all places are, in their proportion, to the lover of books, for he has beheld them by the light of imagination and sympathy." None of the above, however, can be compared for variety of interest and sustained excellence to the de- servedly popular My BooJcs. — " I entrench myself in my books equally against sorrow and the weather. . . . When I speak of being in contact with my books, I mean it literally. I like to lean my head against them. . . . I turn my back upon the sea ; I shut up even one of the side windows looking upon the mountains,^ and retain no prospect but that of the trees. On the right and left of me are book-shelves ; a bookcase is affectionately open in front of me ; and thus kindly enclosed with my books and the green leaves, I write. ... I like a great library next my study ; but for the study itself, give me a small snug place, almost entirely walled with books. . . . The very perusal of the backs is a 'discipline of humanity.' . . . I have been a meek son in the family of book-losers. I may affirm upon a moderate calculation, that I have lent and lost in my time (and I am eight-and-thirty), half-a- dozen decent-sized libraries — I mean books enough to fill so many ordinary bookcases. ... I own I borrow books with as much facility as I lend. ... I yield to none in my love of bookstall urbanity. . . . Book-prints ' Written in Italy. 134 LEIGH HUNT. of all sorts, bad and good, take with me as much as when I was a child ; and I think some books, such as Prior's Poems, ought always to have portraits of the authors. ... I love an author the more for having been himself a lover of books. The idea of an ancient library perplexes our sympathies by its map-like volumes, rolled upon cylinders. We cannot take kindly to a yard of wit, or to thirty inches of moral observation, rolled out like linen in a draper's shop. . . . The ancients had little of what we call learning. They made it. They were also no very eminent buyers of books. They made books for posterity." The paper closes with a familiar gossip of all the most famous book-lovers, and the often-quoted aspiration : — " In one small room, like the compressed spirits of Milton, can be gathered together ' The assembled souls of all that men held wise.' May I hope to become the meanest of these existences ? This is a question which every author, who is a lover of books, asks himself some time in his life, and which must be pardoned, because it can- not be helped. I know not. I cannot exclaim with the poet, ' Oh, that my name were number'd among theirs. Then gladly would I end my mortal days.' For my mortal days, few and feeble as the rest of them may be, are of consequence to others. But I should like to remain visible vi this shape. The little of myself that pleases myself I could wish to be accounted worth pleasing others. I should like to survive so, were it only for the sake of those who love me in private, knowing MISCELLANIST. 135 as I do what a treasure is the possession of a friend's mind, when he is no more. At all events, nothing while I live and think can deprive me of any value for such treasures. I can help the apprecia- tion of them while I last, and love them till I die ; and perhaps, if fortune turns her face once in kindness upon me before I go, I may chance, some quiet day, to lay my over-beating temples on a book, and so have the death I most envy." VI. -CONCLUSION. It had been Leigh Hunt's original intention, from which he was dissuaded by friends, to include in Lord Byron and his ContemjMraries an estimation of his own char- acter. Most fortunately, the fragment was printed and preserved, for, altliough written at the comparatively early age of forty-four, and ill-suited for its original destination, the frankness and insight which it exhibits are indeed phenomena). This " estimate " is a confession of unique value, revealing, with extraordinary coolness and discrimination, the inner man : — An Attempt of the Author to Estimate his Own Character. "As I have said so much of others, it may be proper that I should be equally explicit with regard to myself. I will be so, and solely on that account. There are some things in this book, which make it proper to show how little I desire to have qualities attributed to me, bad or good, that I do not possess. What I have to say will contain matter which no reputation for candour could render it agreeable to say, and which nothing could in- duce me to set down, if I did not believe that truth in society were the one thing needful. 136 CONCLUSION. 137 " Born of parents of very different temperaments, and after they had undergone great adversity, I beheve that my existence has been modified accordingly. I am at once the sickUest and most sanguine of my race, the liveliest and most thoughtful, the most social and the most solitary, the most indolent and the most laborious. " I am not naturally a teller of truth. Impulse and fancy would tend to make me the reverse ; but I saw the danger of it ; I should admire sincerity, if it were for nothing but the graces of it ; but I have learnt to love it with all my heart and soul, as the only safe ground for humanity to go upon, and the one thing desirable above all others in the moral world. I believe truth to be that, in words, which the discovery of the experimental philo- sophy has been in science ; and that as the latter will in- fallibly alter the face of society, and give it the most new, golden, and unhoped-for opportunities, so the former will be the secret for securing its happiness. I feel certain, that if men could but compare notes to- morrow, and confess to one another their real feelings and desires, society would alter at once, by acclamation. " I am naturally hasty and jealous ; or rather I was made jealous as I believe others to be, in the common course of education, for I do not believe that unloving interferer with love to be a natural human passion. But I have become jealous for others, more than of them ; and the necessity for great patience has entirely subdued my hastiness : but the power of pleasing, and great in- dulgence from my friends, have left me a secret store of self-love, by reason of which I find the first smarting of 138 LEIGH HUNT. any wound to my vanity extremely painful to me, so that I have to blush for myself for the very blushing that heats my cheek. But the next minute I philosophise myself quite out of the paroxysm ; and I will affirm, as one of the surest things I know, that nobody can wound my self-love so much as to hinder me from valuing what is good in him, and proclaiming it. Melancholy has done me that kind service, that it has taught me to think too deeply of human nature, to quarrel at heart with any being that belongs to it. "Revenge I should be too indolent to care about, even if I had not learnt to know it for what it is. I pretend to be above nothing in a proud sense ; but some things I have got remote from, and this is one. " Early delicacy of temperament, imagination, and a life of letters, accompanied with an improvidence partly oc- casioned by indolence, partly by animal spirits, and partly by the most singular missing of everything like an arithmetical education, have rendered excitement so tempting to me, that were it not for my love of what is graceful, I fear that the necessity for health itself would hardly hinder me from being a drinker, and even a gourmand ; and I confess it is a constant and hard exercise of my philosophy not to eat too much, and make my stomach worse than it is. " iSIy friends will be surprised to hear this. But I flatter myself they will be more surprised when I tell them (and I suffer inexpressible pain in the telling it) that I am not a courageous man. I feel as if the respect of one sex, and the love of the other, were forsaking me when I say CONCLUSION. 139 SO ; but they ought not ; and this reflection re-assures me. Yes : — circumstances, known only to myself, have shown me that the organisation I was born with has been weakened, by subsequent cares and demands upon it, into a mortifying destitution of physical courage. In a family of men remarkable for their bravery, I am the only timid person. When I look round upon my brothers I think that the fears of a mother, and the calamities caused by the American War, have deprived me of a part of my birthright. But I have great moral courage. Allow me a pale face and a little reflection ; and as there is scarcely a danger in life which I have not hazarded, so there is none I could not go through with in a good cause. " I differ with the world upon some great points of morals and religion. Modern philosophy, and new views for society, have taught me to do so. I know that I could have stood to the last — that I should not have been the first or even the last ' faithless friend,' — by the side of an unequivocally good system — good for all, sincere, plain, equable, and fit for eternity. But I can- not and will not be a traitor to the nobler aspirations planted within us, and tending to produce such a system. If the world can be altered, I will not be one to baulk an event so glorious : if it cannot, my endeavours shall be among those that keep it in heart. I have, indeed, something of the Hamlet in me (these speculations are far beyond either modesty or vanity), which makes me sometimes misgive myself, and doubt whether what ap- pears to me best at one time is the same at another. 140 IsEIGH HUNT. But I was educated under one system, and learnt to believe in another. I pretend to be exempt from no weaknesses but falsehood, revenge, and implacability ; and must take my chance among other stragglers, sure only of good intentions. Oh, were others only sincere, how gladly would I learn of them, instead of teach ; and how surely would the world know what is best for it, by the comparisons of their experience ! " It is a singular chance in my history, that I have been led to give a personal account of another man — and that an unfavourable one — when there is nobody less given than myself to tattle and gossip, ( r who cares less to make a case out for himself at another's expense. But perhaps the greatest difference between me and any other living writer (with the exception of Mr. Hazlitt) is that I speak all in my own name and at my own risk, whereas the custom is to rail and play the hypocrite in a mask ; and none will have been so loud against me on this occasion, as those who have played it most. I have sympathised deeply with almost every pain and pleasure of humanity ; — perhaps I might leave out the ' almost' ; for as there is scarcely a pain, bodily or mental, which I have not felt, so I am not aware of one which I have not, at some period or other, apprehended, however foolishly. "I would not have missed the obligations I have had from my friends, no, hardly to have been exempt from all the cares of money ; so little do I hold with that writer, who spoke the other day of ' the degrading obligations of private friendship.' T see beyond that. But 1 do not CONCLUSION. 141 the less hold with him, that it is ' comely and sweet ' to be able to earn one's own sufficiency. I only think that it should not be made so hard a matter to do so as it very often is, by the systems of society, and the effects which they have in reserve for us even before we are born, and in our very temperaments as well as fortunes ; and I think also that the world would have been losers in a very large way, — far beyond what the utilitarians suppose, and yet on their own ground — if certain men of a lively and improvident genius — humanists, of the most per- suasive order, had not sometimes left themselves under the necessity of being assisted in a smaller way. But I desire, for my own part, not to be excused in anything, in which I do not take the whole of my fellow-creatures and their errors along with me. Let me not be left out of the pale of humanity, for praise or for blame; and I am content. I desire only to teach and be taught ; or if that be too presumptuous a saying, to learn and compare notes. Happy and proud as I am to have been obliged, [I] could have waived even that felicity to have saved myself from the remorse of not having secured some- thing for my children. But this I trust I am now in the way of doing. They have wits of their own, thank God 1 if I should fail ; and they at least have a happy child- hood, and learn to have a passion for a liberal justice. "The rest of my character is to be seen in my writings ; from which, for aught I know, the reader may draw a truer picture than I can do of it in all its parts. A clever but dishonourable French critic, who visited this country, and got his notions of some of the Liberal writers from 142 LEIGH HUNT. the tables of the Scotch Tories, has described me as a great sensuah'st. He is mistaken. I am more candid than others, and perhaps more voluptuous ; but I demand also more refinement in my pleasures, and cannot sepa- rate them from sentiment and affection ; and hypocrites take advantage of my candour in this instance, as they do in others. I own I have an extreme sense of the pleasurable, but never unassociated with grace and with the heart; and I as little partake of some of those abuses of license, which coarse minds and narrow views for society have rendered legitimate, as I do in the face- making with which they are carried on. I have not even a secret from those I love ; no, not one. " Let the reader think what a state society must be in, from the surprise which that confession alone will in- voluntarily create in him. " As to my person, I am dark and black-haired, almost as a Creole ; and have nothing to boast of but a gentle- manly carriage and a thoughtful face. Thought alone rescues my face from insignificance ; but I must say it has not the expression, nor the villainous lower jaw, which the engraver in his ' hurry ' has given it in this book." To the last paragraph may be added his son's descrip- tion : — "He was rather tall, as straight as an aiTOW, 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. CONCLUSION. 143 There was in his whole carriage and manner an extraordinary degree of life." And Carlyle's : — " Dark complexion (a trace of the African, I believe) ; copious, clean, strong, black hair ; beautifully-shaped head ; fine, beaming, serious, hazel eyes ; seriousness and intellect the main expression ot the face." Such were the soul-convictions, and such the outward seeming of the man who, pampered to priggishness in boyhood, and by the malice of political enemies con- firmed in his own conceit, was never weary of preaching to his own generation the gospel of tolerance, charity, and good-humour. In some respects he required, and expected, a lenient judgment towards himself, though his sympathies with graceful, high-spirited vice did not involve the slightest deviation in thought or deed from personal morality. He presents at first sight a baffling combination of weak- ness and strength, the result, as we have seen, of inherent temperament. He could fight, without a thought of possible consequences, in the school play- ground, or in the arena of public life, against the two vices he detested — meanness and cruelty ; but he never fairly faced his own social responsibilities, or recognised in such matters the importance of the final step from in- tention to achievement. Troubles, largely of his own making, it is admitted, and his bookworm tastes, made him a trying daily companion, and he was far from an 144 .LEIGH HUNT. ideal bread-winner or educator ; but the affections of all who had once loved him, and they were many, seem to have grown stronger with years. They went to him in times of trouble, and their testimony is unvarying in its enthusiasm. The gallant cheerfulness with which he met real sorrows unfortunately blinded him to the methods of preventing their recurrence ; and he did not realise the practical requirements of his day and generation. He cherished a vague partiality for the old-world literary patron, the cultured aristocrat, at once a friend and master to the needy man of letters. Pending the appearance of this obsolete being, he accepted, without hesitation, from any friend who could afford it, that treacherous means of temporary support, the loan without an expectation of repayment which, had the opportunity arisen, he would have bestowed on others with no ungrudging hand. The perpetual inwardness of his point of view shut him out from the ordinary lessons of experience, producing the charming naivety and garrulous egoism of his writings, but leading, in private life, to the acceptance of gushing flattery from little men, which often made him ridiculous. But he exhibited a true genius for friendship, and attracted to himself many spirits nobler and wiser than his own. It is in the reflected light of their memories that his name most surely lives ; but it would be at once ungenerous and unjust to spare no private niche in the temple of fame for one so nearly connected with some of our most precious literary associations, the chosen com- rade of those who helped to bring in the dawn of a new CONCLUSION. 145 century, who had his influence on their work, recognised and proclaimed its significance, and displayed in his own writings an independent and undeniable originality. Hunt himself was never deceived concerning the relative importance of his own work and theirs. Com- plaining of Hallam for having put him "in juxta- position with eminent men " (Shelley and Keats), " in whose department " he did " not claim to be found, and then dismissed him as not belonging to it," he thus humbles himsdi {Tatler, August i, 1831): — " There was scarcely anything in common with any one of us but our affections, our zeal for mankind, and our love of the old poets. Mr. Shelley was a Platonic philosopher of the acutest and loftiest kind, poetizing. He came out of the school (if the word must be used) of Plato and Qischylus. Mr. Keats was a poet of the school of Spenser and Milton— places, indeed, which the third person in question recommended and delighted in, but not in which he had treasured a hopeless attempt at success. That person (if he may be allowed in self-defence to characterise himself at all as a writer of verse) came out of the lower forms of the narrative schools of poetry, of which, perhaps, he might be called a run-away disciple, sentimentalised — to move a tear with a verse is the highest poetical triumph he can boast of. Generally speaking, he is something be- tween poetry and prose, a compound of the love and wit of nature." As usual his unerring instinct strikes the key-note. He was poet, critic, essayist, and politician — senti- mentalised. The affection for suburban detail, which limited his genuine nature-worship, may be recognised in his attitude towards life and art. He loved men more than man, and beautiful lines or phrases above K 146 LEIGH HUNT. great books. In every direction his judgment was led by sprightly feeling in submission to certain moral principles. By energy and fearless loyalty, involving the endur- ance of something like martyrdom, he achieved a solid service to the cause of Liberalism in one of its darkest periods ; by persistent faithfulness to the " old masters " in literature he materially assisted, though to some ex- tent on lines of his own, the popularisation of taste and information, which may be said to have begun in his age; and by the exercise of independent critical judgment he encouraged new leaders. Gratitude, therefore, should teach us to forgive the undeniable shallowness of his in- tellect, and the serious faults in style, which are too fre- quently the result of his habitual indifference to the formal conventions. He may gain our affections, as he did those of his contemporaries, by the winning person- ality, so far removed from the strenuousness of to-day, that pervades every line he wrote, and finds its supreme utterance in a few admirable verses, many felicitous appreciations, and certain studies in the humorous- pathetic that defy definition. As I have said elsewhere, "his nature was essentially romantic. His thoughts kept company with brave knights and fair ladies, wandering in beautiful gardens and exchanging tender compliments. The ceremonies and customs that had grown archaic in the world of action retained their full significance in his imagination, and it was upon them that he delighted to dwell . . . " His writings are the expression of his moral nature. CONCLUSION. 147 They are genial, sympathetic, and chivalrous like him- self; revealing the main motive of his life — the desire to increase the happiness of mankind. They seem to echo the ever-memorable petition of Abou Ben Adhem — ' I pray thee then Write me as one that loves his fellow-men.'" THE END. INDEX. The names of Leigh Hunt's es?ays or poems, of books written or edited by him, and of magazines or papers to which he contributed, are printed in italics. Bleak House, 55, 56 Blue-Stocking Ret'els, 100, loi Boccaccio, 43, 44, 120 Bonnycastle, 16 Book /or a Corner, 109 Book 0/ the So7inet, 109 Book-binding, 132 Breakfast, 126-128 Brougham, Lord, 22-25, 28 Browning, 52, 114 — Mrs., loi Brj'dges, Sir Egerton, 115 BulFs Court liiagazine, 81 Buonapart, 72 Burdett, 72 Butler, quoted, 121, 122 BjTon, 27, 28, 30, 35, 36, 37,*38, 39. 4°, 41, 79, 80, 96; his opinion oi Foli- age, 41 ; herd B. and his Con- temporaries, 48, 49, 80, 136 — Lady, 30 Abou Ben Adlu7n, 100, 104, 147 Abraliam and the Fire-ivorshipf>C' s, 104 Adams, Parson, 115 Addison, 118 Aikin, 78 Ains7uorth's Magazine, 87, 103 Alsager, 29 Aminto, The, of Tasso, 98 Ajniilet, The, 100 Anacreon, 104 Andrews, A., 67 Anthologies projected, 109 Archer, W., 66 Ariosto's, or the Loiiers, Prison, 104 Arnold, Matthew, 113 Atlas, The, 65, 87 Atys the Enthusiast, 104 Autobiography, 16, 26, 29, 50, 50, 61, 92, 93, 97, 123, 129, et passim Bacchus in Tuscany, 98 Bad Weather, 129, 130 ; To One U'l B. IV. Depresses, 129 Bannister, 67, 68 Barnes, 78 Beaumont ana Fletcher, 108, log Bentham, 28 Betterton, Miss, 68 Betty, Master, 67 Birthday s of Eminent Men, 85 Blackwood, 65, 95 Blanchard, Laman, 52 148 Cairnes, 75 Calendar of the Seasons, 7 he, 79 Campbell. T., t6, 64 — J. Dykes, quuted, 48 Carfington Blundell, Esq., 130, 131 Carlyle, 30, 52, quoted, 57, 58 (Froude's Life, ii., 439, and the Remin- iscences, ii., 209), 143 {Remin- iscences, ii., 210) — Mrs., 58, and the Rondeau, loi Cat by the Fire, The, i.'4 Catullus, 104 Cenci, Leigh Hunt's welcome to, 34 ; dedication, 35 INDEX. 149 Chat 0/ the Week, The, 51, So, Si, 99 Chaucer, 103 and note, 114 Chaucer Modernised, 102 Cherry, 6rf Christiatiism, 45-47 Clarke, Cowden, 28, quoted, 36 (Recol- lectioits 0/ ]Vriteys, pp. 16, 45) — Mary, 36 Classic Tales, loy Coaches, 125, 126 Cobbe, Miss Frances Power, 75 Cobbett, 70, 72 Coleridge, 31, 48, 64, 92, 114 Colman, 65 Companion, The, 51, 80, 90, 99, 116, 117 Conductor, The, i?3 Connoisseur, The, 65, iiS Cooke, 68 — 's edition of the poets, 5 Cornwall, Barry (Procter), 36, 52, 56, 79 Correspondence, quoted, 6, 96 (note), etc. Covent Garden, 54 Critical Es^^ays on the Performers of the London Theatres, 66 Cross, Launcelot, on The London Journal, 85 Daisy, The, 12S, 129 Dante, 107 Day by I he Fire, A , 78 Davrell, Mrs., 6 — Fanny, 7 Deaths oj' Little Childivn, 119, 120 Descent of I^iberty, 92, 93 Dibdin, 68 Dickens, 52, 123, his " Skimpole," 55, 56 D'Israeli, 127 Double, 1 he, 59 Dryden, 93, 94 Du Bois, 16 Dusty I'ny, A , 12q Dyer, 78 E Earth upon I/eaTCn, An, 90, 120, 121 Edinburgh Review, 65, 86 Elia, 115. (See also Lamb, C.) Ellenborough, Lord, 22, '-5 Emery, 63 European Magazine, The, 89 Examitier, T he, 13, 15, 17, 36, 38, 30, 34, 37, and note, 43, 63, 64, 65, 80, 92 ; and the Prince Regent, 18-25 ; its policy, etc., 69-77 '> charges against, 71 ; " the Robin Hood of its cause," 73 ; after Leigh Hunt's editorship, 74, 75 ; a typical number, 75-77. P Fancy Concert, 103, 104 Fawcett (the actor), 63 — Henry, 75 — Mrs., 75 Feast 0/ the Poets, The, 92, 100 Fellowes, Dr., 74 Field, Baron, 96 Fields, Mrs., 113 Fine Days in January and Februarv, .130 Foliae:e, 35, 96; Lord Hyron on, 41 Fonblanque, Albany, 17, 74 Forster, J., 45, 52, 56, and note Fox, VV. J., 87 Fox-Bourne, H. R., 63, 75 Eraser's Magazine, 88 Fuseli, 16 G Garrow, Sir W., 25 Gattie, 36 Garnett, R., 75 Generous Woman, A, 124, Gentle Armour, The, 100 Getting up on Cold Mornings, 126 Gifford, 98 Globe, 'J he, 65 Goldsmith, 65 Grasshopper and the C>-!chit, To the, 96 H Hall, S. C, 100 Hallani, 145 Hamadryad, The, 124 Harrison, Frederic, 75 Haydon, 28; quoted, 36, 37 ("Letter to Wilkie " in bis Correspondence and Table-Talk, i., 309) Hawthorne, 57 Hazlitt, 28, 35, 42, 64, &o, E2 (note) 107, 114 Jlero and f^cander, 97 Hogg, 36 150 Hook, Theodore, i6 Home, R. H., 87 Household Words, 56, 88 Hunt, Rev. Isaac, i, 2 — Mrs. Isaac, 3, 6, 123 — Henr>', 72 — Henry Leigh, 74 — John, 42, 65 ; his character, 17 — Leigh, his ancestors, i ; born, 3 ; at Christ's Hospital, 4-8 ; meets Marianne Kent, to ; a volunteer, a clerk to an attorney, and in AVar Office, 12; marriage, 14 ;j habits, 15, 60 ; books read, 5, 6, 12, 60 ; friends, 16, 30, 31, 36, 52, 55, 144; houses, 17, 50; prison life, 25-30; to Italy, 37-47 ; annuities, 55 ; Carlyle on, 57, 58, 143 ; " Skim- polism," 55, 56 ; laureate verses, 58, 86 ; death, 61, 62 ; " Cockney king," 95 ; chivalry, loi ; self- estimate, 136-142, 145 — Mrs. Leigh, 37, 41, 45, 61. (See also Kent, ^Marianne.) — Thornton, "his son," quoted, 15, 61, 142 — Vincent, 61 Hunter (the bookseller), 16 — W. A., 75 Jmaguiation and Fancy, 53, 99 (note), iog-ii2 Indexes, 132 Indicator, The, 30, 78, 79, 80, 82, 114 (note), 116, 117, 127 (note), 129 /. H., To, 96 Jack A that's Breakfast, 1 30 Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla, 87, 116 Jerrold, Douglas, 55 Johnson, Dr., 127 Jordan, Mrs., 67, 58, 69 Juvenile Library, Tlie, 8, 9, 89 Juvenilia, 9, 10, 12, 89-91 Keats, 31, 32, 38, 39, 48, 79, 94, 96, 114. 145 Kemble, 67, 63 Kent, Elizabeth, n — Marianne, 10, 11. (See Mrs. L. H.) — Mrs., 10, 16 King, 68 Kinnaird, 16 Knight, Charles, 52, 82 — Prof. , 124 Knowles, Sheridan, 52 Lamb, C, 7, 28, 31, 48, 64, 78, 82, and note, 96, 107, 114, 115 ; epistle tO) 35 '. quoted, 37 (The famous " Letter," Londo^i Magazine, Oct. 1S23) ; compared to L. H., 119 Landor, 52 Legend of Florence, 54, 102, 104 Leigh Hunt's Journal, 59, 87, 88 Lemon, Mark, 55 Letter to the Bells of a Parish Chjirch in Italy, 130 Lewis, G. H., 55 Liberal, Tlu, 40, 42, 48, 79, 80, 98, 108, 116 Life after Death, 85 Lines to a Spider, 99 Liston, John, 68 Literary Examijier, 45, 78 Literary Pocke.-Book, 79, 98 Lloyd, C., 36 London Journal, Leigh Hunt's, 51 (note), 52, S3, 59, 81-86, 88, 100, 116, 117, 129 London Magazine, 64 Look to your Morals, 59 Lord Byron and his Co7itemporaries, 48, 49, 80, 136 Lounger, The, 118 Loz'ers' A mazements, 59, 102 Lowe, Robert W. , 66 (note) Lowell, 57 Lyceum, The, 59 M Macintosh, 64 Macaulay, 52, 55, 86, 107 ; suggests L. H. for Laureateship, 58 Mahinound, 99 Maidservant, The, 123, 124 Martineau, Miss, her "Maid of all Work," 123, 124 Masgue of A narchy. The, 34, 107 Masques, Origin and Nature of, 92, 93 INDEX. 151 Matthews, C, 16, 54, 129 Men, IVomeii^ and Books, 43, 53, 116 Methodism, The Folly and Dange?- of, 116 Mill, J. S., 28, 75 Milton's Hair, On a Lock of, 102 Minto, W., 75 Mists and Fogs, izg Monkhouse, Cosmo, quoted, 17, 29, 68, 72 Monthly Chronicle, 86, loi — Magazine, 103 — JVitrse, 123 — Preceptor, 10 — Repository, 73, 100 ; edited by L. H., 52, 86 Months, The, 12S ; (see Calendar oj the Seasons, The) Morning Chronicle, 64 Morning Post, 18, 22, 64 Moore, Th., 27, 28, 35, 41, 4S, 52, 64, 96 Munden, 68 Musical Times, 88 — IVorld, 86 N New Monthly Magazine, 78 News, The, 13, 66-69 Nile, The, 96, 97, 99 Novel Party, A, 131, 132 Novellos, The, 36 Now, A, 12,0 Niin, The, 104 Observer, The, 118 Occasional, The, 61, 88 Ode on the Goldeit Age, 98 Ode to Truth, 8 O'Keefe, 115 Old Court Suburb, 86 Old Gentleman, 122 Old Lady, 122, 123 Oilier, C, 36, 82 — Edmund, 88 Omar Khayyam, quoted, 121 and note 0)nnibits, Inside an, 123 One Hundred Romances of Real Life, 53> 85, 117 Orger, Mrs., 54 Overbury, 121 Pagajiini, 53, 100 Palfrey, The, 103 Panther, The, 97 Peacock, 36 Pepys, 66 Perry, 64 Pigeon making Love, A, 124 Pinch of Snuff, /I, 85 Planch^, 54 Poetical Register, 91 Poetical Works, The, 1819 ed., 99 ; the 1832 ed., 99, 100; the 1844 ed., 103 ; the i860 ed., 92, 104-106 Poets, The, 104 Poetry, Theory of, 99, 110-112 Political Register, The, 70 Pope, 93, 94 Prince's Marriage, The, 59 Pra'ier-Natural History, 74 Procter (Barry Cornwall), 36, 52, 56, 79 Q Quarterly, The, 65, 95 Queen, The, and The Legend of F lor- _ ence," 54 Quia, 65 R Rabelais, 115 Rainy Day, A, the two essays so- called, 129 Readings for Railways, 117 Redi, 127 ; his Bacchus in Tuscany, 98 Rejtector, The, 77, 7S Regent, The, 18-26, 90 Religion oftlie Heart, '1 he, 45-47, I2i Retiremetit, or the Golden Mean, 8 Reynell, C, 61, 65 Reynolds, 68 Rimini, 93-96 Robertson, H., 36, 54 Romances of Real Life, 53, 85, 117 Rondeau, 53, 54, loi Roses, 104 Round Table, The, 74 Rustic Walk and Dinner, 103 Saintsbury, Prof., quoted, 97, 114, iiS Saunter through the West Etui, A, 86 152 INDEX. Scholefield, Professor, 7S Scott, 92, 120 Seavicn on Shore, 123 Seer, The, 53, 58, 116 Severn, Letter to, 31, 32 Shelley, 28, 33-35, 37, 48, 61, 79, 94, 96, 107, 114, 145 ; his death and burial, 38-40 ; his verses in The Liberal, 42, 80 — Mrs., loi ; the Shelley family, 55 Sheridan s IVorks, 107 Sig^his of Shops, On the, 123 Sir Ralph Eslur, 51 SketcJies oj Living Poets, 74 Skimpole, 55, 56 Smith, J. and H., 16 Social Ge7iealogy, 131 Southey, 58, 64 Spectator, The, 61, 65, 88; Steele's S., 118 Spencer, H., 75 Spenser, 91, 114, 115, 120 Sprightly Old Age, 104 Spring, 128 Statesman, The, 65 Stone, A, 85, 12S Stories from tlve Italian Poets, 107 Story of Rimini, 1 he, 93-96 Stuart, D., 64 Suckling, 92 Swinburne, 75 r. L. H., To, 96 Table-Talk, 87, log, 116 Tail's Magazine, 81 Tales, 124 Tasso, his Aminta, 98 Taller, Tlie, 51, 52, 66, 69, 81, 99, 116, 145 ; Steele's T., 118 Taylor, P. A., 75 Tennyson, 114 ; recommended for Laureateship by Leigh Hunt, 59 Thornton, Honnel, 65 — Godfrey, 6 -W. T.,75 Times, The, 64, 76 Tit Bits, 117 Towers, M'CuUagh, 75 " Town, Mr.," 65 Town, 'J he, 43, 53, 86 Traill, 75 Traveller, The, 65 Tree, Miss, 54 Trelawny, 38, 39, 41 Trtie Enjoyjiient of Splendour, 1 True Sitn Daily Review, The, 8 1 Ultra-Crepidaritis, ( Ver-Vert, 130 w Waiter, The, ■s.'z-i Walter, J., 64, 65 Ward, Humphrey, 113 (note) Week, TJu\, 85 West (the artist), 6 Westminster Revieiu, The, 53, 86 Wilde, De, 103 Williams, Captain, 38, 39 -R.,75 Wilson, Professor, 52 Wishing Cap Papers, The, 43, 44, 74, 80, 117 ; the 2nd series, 81 Wit and Humour, 53, 109 Wordsworth, 30, 41, 52, 64, 92, 112 World cf Books, The, 132, 133 Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbriigh, and Farquhar, Dramatic Works of, 107 Year of Honeymoons, A, 81 Young (the actor), 68 z Zoological CardenSi The, 124 Printidby Cowuii iSr" Co., Limited, Perth. V THE LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW. ^PM---^%8 'V 50m-l,'63(D474388)476 3 1205 02043 5887 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY A A 001 423 971