[485] Hunt, Correspondence, I, p. 136.
[486] Daniel Maclise, A Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters (1830-1838). London, n. d., p. 132.
[487] William Dorling, Memoirs of Dora Greenwell, London, 1885, p. 75.
[488] Epistle to Barnes.
[489] This accusation has been made still more recently by Mr. Palgrave, who speaks of the “slipshod morality of Rimini and Hero.” Poetical Works of John Keats, p. 263.
[490] In 1844, however, he refashioned the whole poem, now representing Giovanni as deformed and as the murderer of his wife and brother, whereas in the version of 1816 Paolo had been slain in a duel and Francesca had died of grief. In 1855, he made a second change and went back to the 1816 version. The duel he preserved in the fragment, Corso and Emilia. Hunt’s translation of Dante’s episode appeared in Stories of Verse, 1855. In 1857 he made a third change and restored the version of 1844.
[491] The editor of Blackwood’s in a letter dated April 20, 1818, offered space to P. G. Patmore for a favourable critique of Hunt’s poetry, reserving to himself the privilege of answering such an article. He stated further that if Hunt had employed less violent language towards the reviewer of Rimini he might have been given a friendly explanation. Memoirs and Correspondence of Coventry Patmore, II, p. 438.
[492] This charge was renewed in a review of Hunt’s Autobiography in 1850 in the Eclectic Review, XCII, p. 416.
[493] Byron greatly resented Southey’s article: “I am glad Mr. Southey owns that article on Foliage which excited my choler so much. But who else could have been the author? Who but Southey would have had the baseness, under the pretext of reviewing the work of one man, insidiously to make it nest work for hatching malicious calumnies against others?... I say nothing of the critique itself on Foliage; with the exception of a few sonnets, it was unworthy of Hunt. But what was the object of that article? I repeat, to villify and scatter his dark and devilish insinuation against me and others.” (Medwin, Conversations of Lord Byron, p. 102.) Again Byron wrote of Southey in 1820: “Hence his quarterly overflowings, political and literary, in what he has termed himself ‘the ungentle craft,’ and his special wrath against Mr. Leigh Hunt, not withstanding that Hunt has done more for Wordsworth’s reputation as a poet (such as it is), than all the Lakers could in their interchange of praises for the last twenty-five years.” (Letters and Journals, V, p. 84.)
[494] London Magazine, October, 1823.