A Man of Letters of the Last Generation.
There are fashions in books, as there are in the cut of clothes, or the building of houses; and if from the great library of our race we take down the representative volumes, we shall find that successive ages differ almost as much as the several countries of the world. The one half of the century scarcely knows what the other half has done, save through its lasting works, among which books alone possess the gift of speech. Yet the guild of literature properly knows no bounds of space or time. If the tricks of craft like those of society belong to the passing day, literature has been, beyond all other human influences, enduring and continuous in the main current of its spirit; and each period has been the stronger if it has recognized so much of its possessions as was inherited from its predecessor, including the power to conquer more. A powerful sense of brotherhood clings to all the veritable members of the fraternity, whose highest diploma is posthumous; and we cannot see the lingering representatives of a past day depart, without feeling that one of the great family has gone. A writer whom we have lost in the year just closed peculiarly associated past and present, by his own hopeful work for “progress” towards the future, and his affectionate lingering with the past, and above all by the strong personal feeling which he brought to his work. Leigh Hunt belonged essentially to the earlier portion of the nineteenth century; but, born in the year when Samuel Johnson died, living among the old poets, and labouring to draw forth the spirit which the first half has breathed into the latter half of the century, he may be said to have been one of those true servitors of the library who unite all ages with the one we live in. The representative man of a school gone by, in his history we read the introduction to our own.
Isaac, the father of Leigh Hunt, was the descendant of one of the oldest settlers in luxurious Barbadoes. He was sent to develop better fortunes by studying at college in Philadelphia, where he unsettled in life; for, having obtained some repute as an advocate, and married the daughter of the stern merchant, Stephen Shewell, against her father’s pleasure, Isaac contumaciously opposed the sovereign people by espousing the side of royalty, and fled with broken fortunes to England. Here he found not much royal gratitude, much popularity as a preacher in holy orders—taken as a refuge from want,—but no preferment. With tutorships, and help from relatives, he managed to rub on; he sent Leigh, the first of his sons born in England, to the school of Christ Hospital, and he lived long enough to see him an established writer. Isaac was a man rather under than above the middle stature, fair in complexion, smoothly handsome, so engaging in address as to be readily and undeservedly suspected of insincerity, and in most things utterly unlike his son. His wife, Mary Shewell, a tall, slender woman, with Quaker breeding, a dark thoughtful complexion, a heart tender beyond the wont of the world, and a conscience tenderer still, contributed more than the father to mould the habits and feelings of the son. School and books did the rest. His earlier days, save during the long semi-monastic confinement of the Blue-coat School, were passed in uncertain alternations between the care-stricken home and the more luxurious houses of wealthier relatives and friends. In his time Christ Hospital was the very nursery for a scholarly scholar. It was divided into the commercial, the nautical, and the grammar schools; in all, the scholars had hard fare, and much church service; and in the grammar school plenty of Greek and Latin. Leigh’s antecedents and school training destined him for the church; a habit of stammering, which disappeared as he grew up, was among the adverse accidents which reserved him for the vocation to which he was born—Literature. But before he left the unsettled roof of his parents, the youth had been to other schools besides Christ Hospital. His father had been a royalist flying from infuriated republicans, and doomed to learn in the metropolitan country the common mistrust of kings. He left America a lawyer, to become a clergyman here; and entered the pulpit a Church of England-man, to become, after the mild example of his wife, a Universalist. Born after his mother had suffered from the terrors of the revolution, and a severe attack of jaundice, Leigh inherited an anxious, speculative temperament; to be the sport of unimaginative brothers, who terrified him by personating the hideous “Mantichora,” about which he had tremblingly read and talked, and of schoolfellows, with their ghostly traditions and rough, summary, practical satire. He had been made acquainted with poverty, yet familiarized to the sight of ease and refined luxury. His father, if “socially” inclined, yet read eloquently and critically; his mother read earnestly, piously, and charitably; reading was the business of his school, reading was his recreation; and at the age of fifteen, he threw off his blue coat, a tall stripling, with West Indian blood, a Quaker conscience, and a fancy excited rather than disciplined by his scholastic studies, to put on the lax costume of the day, and be tried in the dubious ordeal of its laxer customs.
His severest trial arose from the vanities, rather than the vices to which such a youth would be exposed. He had already been sufficiently “in love,”—now with the anonymous sister of a schoolfellow, next with his fair cousin Fanny, then with the enchanting Almeria,—to be shielded from the worst seductions that can beset a youth; and he was early engaged to the lady whom he married in 1809. But the vanities beset him in a shape of unwonted power. The stripling, whose essays the terrible Boyer, of the Blue-coat School, had crumpled up, became the popular young author of published poems, and not much later the stern critic of the News, whose castigations made actors wince and playwrights launch prologues at him. Thenceforward the vicissitudes of his life, save in the inevitable vicissitudes of mortality, were professional rather than personal; though he always threw his personality into his profession. He tried a clerkship under his brother Stephen, an attorney; and a clerkship in the War Office, under the patronage of the dignified Mr. Addington; but finally he left the desk, legal or official, for the desk literary, to devote himself to the Examiner, set up in 1808 with his brother John. He went to prison for two years in 1813, rather than forfeit his consistency as a political writer. It was as a vindicator of liberal principles in politics, sociology (word then unused), and art, that he attracted the friendship of Byron and Shelley; it was to accomplish the literary speculation of the Liberal that he set out for Italy in 1821; it was to study Italy and the Italians, with a view to “improve” that and other “subjects,” that he stopped in Italy till the autumn of 1825. He returned to England to try his fortune with books in prose and verse, in periodicals of his own or others’; and it was in the midst of unrelinquished work that he placidly laid himself down to sleep in August, 1859,—his last words of anxiety being for Italy and her enlarging hopes, his latest breath uttering inquiries and messages of affection. This is essentially a literary life; but it is given to a literature in which there is life,—for Leigh Hunt, although he dwelled and passed his days in the library, was no “book-worm,” divorced from human existence, its natural instincts and affections. On the contrary, he carried into his study a large heart and a strong pulse; to him the books spoke in the voice of his fellow-men, audible from the earliest ages, and he loved to be followed into his retreat by friends from the outer world.
Leigh Hunt certainly was not driven to this little-broken retirement by the want of qualities which are attractive in society, or by the tastes that render society attractive; but under the force of remarkable contradictions in his character, he was often fain to waive what he desired and could easily have—“letting I would not wait upon I may,” with an apparent caprice most exasperating to the bystander. He professed readiness for “whatever is going forward,” seemed eager to meet any approaching pleasure; and then hung back with a coy, reluctant, anxious delay, that forbore its own satisfaction altogether. Probably this apparent contradiction may be traced to his origin and nurture. According to all evidence respecting his immediate progenitors, he was little of a Hunt, save in his gaiety and avowed love of “the pleasurable.” His natural energy, which showed itself in a robust frame, a powerful voice, a great capacity for endurance, and a strong will, seems to have been inherited from Stephen Shewell, the stern, headstrong, and implacable. From the Bickleys, possibly—the gallant Knight Banneret of King William’s Irish wars will pardon the doubt—his mother transmitted her own material tendency to an over-conscientious, reflective, hesitating temperament, which drew back from any action not manifestly and imperatively dictated by duty. The son showed all these contradictory traits even in his aspect and bearing.
He was tall rather than otherwise,—five feet ten inches and a half when measured for the St. James’s Volunteers; though, in common with men whose length is in the body rather than the legs, his height diminished as he advanced in life. He was remarkably straight and upright in his carriage, with a short, firm step, and a cheerful, almost dashing approach,—smiling, breathing, and making his voice heard in little inarticulate ejaculations as he met a friend, in an irrepressible satisfaction at the encounter that not unfrequently conveyed high gratification to the arriver who was thus greeted. He had straight black hair, which he wore parted in the centre; a dark but not pale complexion; features compounded between length and a certain irregularity of outline, characteristic of the American mould; black eyebrows, firmly marking the edge of a brow, over which was a singularly upright, flat, white forehead, and under which beamed a pair of eyes dark, brilliant, reflecting, gay, and kind, with a certain look of observant humour, that suggested an idea of what is called slyness when it is applied to children or girls; for he had not the aspect given to him in one of his portraits, of which he said that “the fellow looked as if he had stolen a tankard.” He had a head massive and tall, and larger than most men’s,—Byron, Shelley, and Keats wore hats which he could not put on; but it was not out of proportion to the figure, its outlines being peculiarly smooth and devoid of “bumps.” His upper lip was long, his mouth large and hard in the flesh; his chin retreating and gentle like a woman’s. His sloping shoulders, not very wide, almost concealed the ample proportions of his chest; though that was of a compass which not every pair of arms could span. He looked like a man cut out for action,—a soldier; but he shrank from physical contest, telling you that his sight was short, and that he was “timid.” We shall understand that mistaken candour better when we have examined his character a little further. Yet he did shrink from using his vigorous faculties, even in many ways. Nature had gifted him with an intense dramatic perception, an exquisite ear for music, and a voice of extraordinary compass, power, flexibility, and beauty. It extended from the C below the line to the F sharp above: there were no “passages” that he could not execute; the quality was sweet, clear, and ringing: he would equally have sung the music of Don Giovanni or Sarastro, of Oroveso or Maometto Secondo. Yet nature had not endowed him with some of the qualities needed for the practical musician,—he had no aptitude for mechanical contrivance, but faint enjoyment of power for its own sake. He dabbled on the pianoforte; delighted to repeat airs pleasing or plaintive; and if he would occasionally fling himself into the audacious revels of Don Giovanni, he preferred to be Lindoro or Don Ottavio; and still more, by the help of his falsetto, to dally with the tender treble of the Countess in Figaro, or Polly in Beggars’ Opera. This waiving of the potential, this preference for the lightsome and tender, ran through all his character,—save when duty bade him draw upon his sterner resources; and then out came the inflexibility of the Shewell and the unyielding determination of the Hunts. But as soon as the occasion passed, the manner passed with it; and the man whose solemn, clear-voiced indignation had made the very floor and walls vibrate was seen tenderly and blandly extenuating the error of his persecutor and gaily confessing to a community of mistake.
While he was yet at school, Hunt was pronounced by one of his schoolfellows a “fool for refining”—that is, one who was a fool in his judgment through a hair-splitting anxiety to be precise. A boy all his life, this leading foible of his boyhood attended him throughout. He has been likened to Hamlet,—only it was a Hamlet who was not a prince, but a hard-working man. The defect was increased in Leigh Hunt, as it evidently was in the prince, by a certain imperfection in understanding, appreciating, or thoroughly mastering the material, tangible, physical part of nature. This, again, is inconsistent with his own account of himself, but it will be confirmed by a close critical scrutiny of his writings. Over-sensitive, he was exquisitely conscious of such physical perceptions as he had. He was passionately fond of music, which he took to as we have seen. He was keenly impressed by painting and by colours,—which he defined with uncertainty, unless they were, what he liked them to be, very intense. He revelled in the aspect of the country,—but needed literary, poetic, or personal association, or habit, to help the appreciation of the landscape. His animation, his striking appearance, his manly voice, its sweetness and flexibility, the exhaustless fancy to which it gave utterance, his almost breathlessly tender manner in saying tender things, his eyes deep, bright, and genial, with a dash of cunning, his delicate yet emphatic homage,—all made him a “dangerous” man among women;—and he shrank back from the danger, the quickest to take alarm; confessing that “to err is human,” as if he had erred in any but the most theoretical or imaginative sense! Remind him of his practical virtue, and, to disprove your too favourable construction, he would give you a sermon on the sins of the fancy, hallowed by quotations from the Bible—of which he was as much master as any clergyman—and illustrated by endless quotations from the poets in all languages, with innumerable biographical anecdotes of the said poets, to prove the fearful peril of the first step; and also to prove that, though men, they were not bad men;—that it is not for us to cast the first stone, and that, probably, if they had been different, their poetry would have suffered, to the grievous loss of the library and mankind.
He inculcated the study of minor pleasures with so much industry, that his writings have caused him to be taken for a minor voluptuary. His special apparatus for the luxury consisted in some old cloak to put about his shoulders when cold—which he allowed to slip off while reading or writing; in a fire—“to toast his feet”—which he let out many times in the day, with as many apologies to the servant for the trouble; and in a bill of fare, which he preposterously restricted for a fancied delicacy of stomach, and a fancied poison in everything agreeable, and which he could scarcely taste for a natural dulness of palate. Unable to perceive the smell of flowers, he habitually strove to imagine it. The Epicurean in theory was something like a Stoic in practice; and he would break off an “article” on the pleasures of feasting to ease his hunger, literally, with a supper of bread; turning round to enjoy by proxy, on report, the daintier food which he had provided for others. Eyeing the meat in another’s plate, he would quote Peter Pindar—
“On my life, I could turn glutton,
On such pretty-looking mutton;”
but would still, with the relish of Lazarillo de Tormes, stick to his own “staff of life,” and quaff his water, jovially repeating after Armstrong, “Nought like the simple element dilutes.”
Now, most excellent reader, are you in something of a condition to understand the man’s account of his own failings—his “improvidence” and his “timidity.” He had no grasp of things material; but exaggerating his own defects, he so hesitated at any arithmetical effort, that he could scarcely count. He has been seen unable to find 3s. 6d. in a drawer full of half-crowns and shillings, since he could not see the “sixpence.” Hence his stewardship was all performed by others. He laboured enormously,—making fresh work out of everything he did; for he would not mention anything, however parenthetically, without “verifying” it. Hence it is true that he had scarcely time for stewardship, unless he had neglected his work and wages as a master-workman. He saw nothing until it had presented itself to him in a sort of literary, theoretical aspect, and hence endowed his friends, all round, with fictitious characters founded on fact. One was the thrifty housewife, another the steady man of business, a third the poetic enthusiast—and so on. And he acted on these estimates, until sometimes he found out his mistake, and confessed that he “had been deceived.” The discovery was sometimes as imaginary as the original estimate, and friends, whose sterling qualities he could not overrate, have seen him, for the discovery of his mistake in regard to some fancied grace, avert his eye in cold “disappointment.” He made the same supposititious discoveries and estimates with himself. His mother had the jaundice before he was born; he had unquestionably a tendency to bilious affections; in the Greek poet’s account of Hercules and the Serpents, the more timid, because mortal, child, who is aghast at the horrid visitors sent by the relentless Juno, is called, as Leigh Hunt translated the oft-repeated quotation, “the extremely bilious Iphiclus;” and being bilious, Leigh Hunt set himself down as “timid.” He had probably felt his heart beat at the approach of danger, been startled by a sudden noise, or hesitated “to snuff a candle with his fingers,” which Charles the Fifth said would make any man know fear. Yet he had braved persecution in the refusal to fag at school; was an undaunted though not skilful rider; a swimmer not unacquainted with drowning risks; undismayed, except for others, when passing the roaring torrent at the broad ford,—when braving shipwreck in the British Channel, or the thunder-hurricane in the Mediterranean; he instantly confronted the rustic boors who challenged him on the Thames, or in the Apennines, and stood unmoved to face the sentence of a criminal court, though the sentence was to be the punishment he most dreaded—the prison.
Such was the character of the man who came from school to be the critic, first of the drama, then of literature and politics; and then to be a workman in the schools where he had criticized. He brought to his labours great powers, often left latent, and used only in their superficial action; a defective perception of the tangible part of the subject; an imagination active, but overrating its own share in the business; an impulsive will, checked by an over-scrupulous, over-conscientious habit of “refining;” a nice taste, and an overwhelming sympathy with every form and aspect of human enjoyment, suffering, or aspiration. His public conduct, his devotion to “truth,” whether in politics or art, won him admiration and illustrious friendships. In a society of many severed circles he formed one centre, around which were gathered Lamb, Ollier, Barnes, Mitchell, Shelley, Keats, Byron, Hazlitt, Blanchard, Forster, Carlyle, and many more, departed or still living; some of them centres of circles in which Leigh Hunt was a wanderer, but all of them, in one degree or other, attesting their substantial value for his character. They influenced him, he influenced them, and through them the literature and politics of the century, more largely, perhaps, than any one of them alone. Let us see, then, what it was that he did.
Even in the News of 1805, when he was barely of age, and when he wrote with the dashing confidence of a youth wielding the combined ideas of Sam Johnson and Voltaire, the “damned boy,” as Kemble called him, established a repute for cultivation, consistency, taste, and independence; and he originated a style of contemporary criticism unknown to the newspaper press. In other words, he brought the standards of criticism which had before been confined to the lecture of academies or the library, into the daily literature which aids in shaping men’s judgments as they rise.
We have seen how, under a name borrowed from the Tory party, the Examiner was established, with little premeditation, a literary ambition, and the hope of realizing a modest wage for the work done. It found literature, poetry especially, sunk to the feeblest, tamest, and most artificial of graces,—the reaction upon the long-felt influence left by the debauchery of the Stuarts and the vulgarer coarseness of the early Georges. It found English monarchs and statesmen again forgetting the great lessons of the British constitution, with the press slavishly acquiescing. In 1808, an Irish Major had a “case” against the Horse Guards, of most corrupt and illicit favouritism: the Examiner published the case, and sustained it. In 1809, a change of ministry was announced: the Examiner hailed “the crowd of blessings that might be involved in such a change;” adding, “Of all monarchs, indeed, since the Revolution, the successor of George the Third will have the finest opportunity of becoming nobly popular.” In 1812, on St. Patrick’s day, a loyal band of guests significantly abstained from paying the usual courtesy to the toast of the Prince Regent, and coughed down Mr. Sheridan, who tried to speak up for his royal and forgetful friend. A writer in a morning paper supplied the omitted homage in a poem more ludicrous for its wretched verse than for the fulsome strain in which it called the Prince the “Protector of the Arts,” the “Mæcenas of the Age,” the “Glory of the People,” a “Great Prince,” attended by Pleasure, Honour, Virtue, Truth, and other illustrious vassals. The Examiner showed up this folly by simply turning it into English, and in plain language describing the position and popular estimate of the Prince. For all these various acts the Examiner was prosecuted, with various fortunes; but in the last case it was fined 1,000l., and its editor and publisher, the brothers Leigh and John Hunt, were sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. The Examiner was no extravagant or violent paper; its writing was pretty nearly of the standard that would be required now for style, tone, and sentiment; but what would now be a matter of course in cultivated style, elevated tone, and independent sentiment, was then supposed to be not open to writers unprotected by privilege of Parliament. Not that the paper stood alone. Other writers, both in town and country, vied with it in independence; it excelled chiefly, perhaps, in the literary finish which Leigh Hunt imparted to journalism; but it was the more conspicuous for that finish. Its boldness won it high esteem. Offers came from “distinguished” quarters, on the one side, to bribe its silence for the Royal Horse Guards and its peccadilloes; on the other, to supply the proprietors with subscription, support, and retaliatory evidence. The Examiner equally declined all encroachments on its complete independence, which was carried to a pitch of exclusiveness. This conduct told. The journal was thought dangerous to the régime—it was prosecuted, and its success was only the greater. The Court ceased to be what it had been, and the political system changed: the press of England became generally what the Examiner was.
The Reflector was a quarterly journal, based on the Examiner and its corps. Its more literary portion in its turn laid the basis for the Indicator, in which Leigh Hunt designed, with due deference, to revive the essays of the old Spectator and Tatler. The grand distinction was, that in lieu of mere literary recreation, like the illustrious work of Addison, Steele, and Swift, it more directly proposed to indicate the sources of pleasurable association and æsthetical improvement. In the Reflector, the Indicator, Tatler, and subsequent works of the same class, Leigh Hunt was assisted by Lamb, Barnes [afterwards editor of the Times], Aikin, Mitchell [Aristophanes], Keats, Shelley, Hazlitt, and Egerton Webbe,—the last cut short in a career rendered certain by his accomplishments, his music, his wit, and his extraordinary command of language as an instrument of thought. As in Robin Hood’s band, each man could beat his master at some one art, or perhaps more; but none excelled him in telling short stories, with a simplicity, a pathos, and a force that had their prototype less in the tales of Steele and Addison, than in the romantic poets of Italy. Few essayists have equalled, or approached, Leigh Hunt in the combined versatility, invention, and finish of his miscellaneous prose writings; and few, indeed, have brought such varied sympathies to call forth the sympathies of the reader—and always to good purpose,—in favour of kindness, of reflection, of natural pleasures, of culture, and of using the available resources of life. He used to boast that the Indicator laid the foundation for the “two-penny trash” which assumed a more practical and widely popular form under Charles Knight’s enterprise. It has had a host of imitators, but is still special, and keeps its place in the library.
Of his one novel, Sir Ralph Esher, suffice it to say, that he had desired to make it a sort of historical literary essay,—a species of unconcealed forgery, after the manner of a more cultivated and critical Pepys; and that the bookseller persuaded him to make it a novel:—of his dramatic works,—although he had an ambition to be counted among British dramatists, and had a discriminating dramatic taste,—that he combined, with the imperfect grasp of the tangible, a positive indifference to dramatic literature. The dramatic work which is reputed to be the most interesting of his compositions in this style, the Prince’s Marriage, is still unacted and unpublished.
But in regard to the veritable British Parnassus, he had solid work to do, and he did it. Poetry amongst us had sunk to the lowest grade. Leigh Hunt found the mild Hayley, and the mechanical Darwin, occupying the field, Pope the accredited model, and he revolted against the copybook versification, the complacent subserviency and mean moralities of the muse in possession. He had read earnestly and extensively in the classics, ancient and English; he carried with him to prison the Parnaso Italiano, a fine collection of Italian poetical writers, in fifty-two volumes; and he was deeply imbued with the spirit which he found common to the poetical republic of all ages. He selected the episode of Paolo and Francesca, whom Dante places in the Inferno, and whose history was diligently hunted up to tell in the Story of Rimini. In it Leigh Hunt insisted on breaking the set cadence for which Pope was the professed authority, as he broke through the set morals which had followed in reaction upon the licence of many reigns. He shocked the world with colloquialisms in the heroic measure, and with extenuations of the fault committed by the two lovers against the law matrimonial. The offence, too, was perpetrated by a writer condemned to prison for bearding the constituted authorities. The poem and its fate were characteristic of the man and his position in poetical literature. The work was designed as a picture of Italy, and a tale of the natural affections rebelling against a tyranny more corrupt than the licence which it claimed to check. But when he wrote it, the poet had not been in Italy; and afterwards, with habitual anxiety to be “right,” he corrected many mistakes in the scenery—such as “the smoke goes dancing from the cottage trees,” where there are no such cottages as he imagined, and smoke is no feature in the landscape. He also restored the true historical conclusion, and instead of a gentlemanly duel, comme il faut, made the tale end in the fierce double murder by the husband. In its original shape, the Story of Rimini touched many a heart, and created more sensation for its bolder verse and nature than others which followed it; in its amended form it gained in truth to art and fact, and in force of verse and colouring. Leigh Hunt had not the sustained melody and pulpit morals of the Lake School; but he gave the example and encouragement to writers of still greater force and beauty. He vindicated human right against official wrong, and suffered imprisonment, and denunciation more bitter than that poured on Shelley, whose political vindications burst forth with such a torrent of eloquence and imagination in the Revolt of Islam. Leigh Hunt asserted the beauty of natural passion,—but he did it tenderly and obliquely, himself returning from the slightest taste of passion to “the domesticities,” half begging pardon for his hardihood, and thus by implication confessing his naughtiness; and all the while hinting at the delicate subject of his tale by circumstance, rather than following it to its full inspirations. The greater part of the Story of Rimini is scene-painting, as if it were told by some bystander in the street, or some topographical visitor of the place. In the scene where the lovers so dangerously and fatally fall to reading “Launcelot of the Lake,”—“quel giorno non legemmo più avanti”—the larger portion of the canto is devoted to a description of the garden. Leigh Hunt does not, as Keats did, describe the sickening passion that gave the Lamia so ghastly a sense of her own hated form,—nor does he, as in the Lamia, pursue the couple to the place where Love
“Hover’d and buzz’d his wings with fearful roar
Above the lintel of their chamber door.”
If pharisaical critics discovered objectionable “tendencies” in passages—almost in the omitted passages of his writings—they could find no such impetuous and sublime argument as that to which the Revolt of Islam rises in the canto where “the meteor to its far morass returned;” nor such lines as show that a fair authoress, whose book has been “the rage” at Mudie’s, had been among the myriads of Shelley’s readers. But although hesitating himself to plunge into the impetuous torrent of passion, like the fowl mistrustful of its own fitness for so stormy waters, Leigh Hunt was the friend, instigator, and encourager of that rebellion of letters which in the earlier half of our age produced Keats and Shelley, and the poetical literature of the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Others improved upon the example, no doubt, and bore away the “honores.” At a late day, Lord John Russell obtained for Leigh Hunt a royal pension of £200 a year—a most welcome and gratefully acknowledged compensation of time and money torn from him in early years.
Leigh Hunt’s miscellaneous poems extend over a great variety of subjects, from the classic legend of Hero and Leander, to the mediæval fabliau of the Gentle Armour, and the satirical critique of the Feast of the Poets. This last was published early in the author’s maturer career; it is “in his second manner,” and he afterwards revised many of the dicta on contemporary writers which he placed in the mouth of the chairman on that festive occasion, Apollo. But it helped to loosen the trammels of conventionalism in verse. The Gentle Armour, although true to a modern refinement, is also true to the spirit of the days of chivalry; it relates, in straightforward language, how a knight who had refused the bidding of his mistress to defend a falsehood—not her own—is punished by receiving the most feminine of garments as his cognizance at a tournament; and how, wearing that alone, he takes in his own person a bloody and reproving vengeance for the slight, in the end winning both fight and lady. The subject was thought “indelicate” by some who were less refined than the author—some descendants, perchance, of the proverbial Peeping Tom. The Hero and Leander is a flowing and vivid recital of the ancient tale. The three works form good specimens of the spirit as well as execution of Leigh Hunt’s poetical writings. Of some of his smaller pieces it may be said that they had become classic in his lifetime—such as the reverential sonnet “On the Lock of Milton’s Hair” which he possessed; the exquisite parental tenderness of the lines “To T. L. H., in Sickness;” and the grandly Christian exaltation of charity in his Abou-ben-Adhem.
As few men brought their personality more thoroughly into their writings, so few men, out of the bookworm pale aforesaid, were more thoroughly saturated with literature. He saw everything through books, or saw it dimly. Speaking of his return from Italy, he writes:—“I seemed more at home in England, even with Arcadian idealisms, than I had been in the land nearer their birthplace; for it was in England I first found them in books, and with England even my Italian books were more associated than with Italy itself.” And speaking of the Parnaso Italiano, he goes on:—“This book aided Spenser himself in filling my English walks with visions of gods and nymphs,—of enchantresses and magicians; for the reader might be surprised to know to what a literal extent such was the case.” He used to “envy” the “household waggon that one meets with in sequestered lanes” for its wanderings, but was daunted at the bare imagination of “parish objections” and raffish society; and so he ever recurred to “the stationary domesticities.” He failed in practical life, because he was not guided in it by literature. He could only apprehend so much of it as he found in the cyclopædia. On the other hand, he could render all that literature could give. His memory was marvellous; and to try him in history, biography, bibliography, or topography, was to draw forth an oral “article” on the topic in question. Ask him where was the Ouse, and he would tell you of all the rivers so called; what were the books on a given subject, and you had the list; “who was Colonel O’Kelly?” and you had a sketch of the colonel, of the horse “Eclipse,” of Epsom, and of horse-racing in general, as distinguished from the racing of the ancients or the modern riderless races of Italy—where, as in Florence, may still be seen a specimen of the biga sweeping round the meta “fervidis evitata rotis.” His conversation was an exhaustless Curiosities of Literature. The delighted visitor read his host,—but it was from a talking book, with cordial voice naturally pitched to every change of subject, animated gesture, sparkling eyes, and overflowing sympathy. In society Leigh Hunt was ever the perfect gentleman, not in the fashion, but always the scholar and the noble-minded man. But his diffidence was disguised, rather than removed, by his desire to agree with those around him, and to fall in with the humour of the hour. He was better known to his reader, either in his books, or, best of all, in his home, where familiarity tested his unfailing courtesy, daily intercourse brought forth the persevering goodness of his heart and conscience, and poverty did but fetch out the thorough-going generosity that not only “would share,” but did share the last crust.