It is a touching circumstance that Hunt’s last letter bore reference to Shelley, and that his last effort as a public writer, made only a few days before his death, was in vindication of Shelley’s character.[284] The publication of the Shelley Memorials, 1859, in which Hunt had a part, provoked an unfavorable review in The Spectator. Hunt replied in the next number[285] of the same paper. In particular he asserted Shelley’s truthfulness, which had been assailed in respect to his story of the attempted assassination in Wales. He held that Shelley was not a man to be judged by ordinary rules, but that he was the highest possible exponent of humanity—an approach to divinity.
Hunt’s literary relation with Shelley falls into two divisions; publications written for Hunt’s periodicals, and received by Hunt in order to give Shelley an outlet of expression denied him in the more conservative papers; and second, positive literary imitation. Besides the poems quoted in Hunt’s criticisms of Shelley, the first includes a review of Godwin’s Mandeville,[286] a letter of protest regarding the second edition of Queen Mab,[287] Marianne’s Dream,[288] Song on a Faded Violet,[289] The Sunset,[290] The Question,[291] Good Night,[292] Sonnet, Ye Hasten to the Grave,[293] To —— (Lines to a Reviewer),[294] November, 1815,[295] Love’s Philosophy,[296] and the contributions designed by Shelley for The Liberal and published after his death.[297] Productions which were written for Hunt’s papers, but were not accepted, were Peter Bell the Third, The Mask of Anarchy, Julian and Maddalo, a letter on the persecution of Richard Carlile,[298] letters on Italy, and a review of Peacock’s Rhododaphne. Hunt’s failure to accept what was sent him greatly discouraged Shelley at times: “Mine is a life of failures; Peacock says my poetry is composed of day dreams and nightmares, and Leigh Hunt does not think it good enough for The Examiner.”
On a Fete at Carlton House, an attack on the Prince Regent, though perhaps directly inspired by the account in the dailies of the ball at Carlton House on June 20, 1811, was doubtless influenced by the continued attacks of The Examiner. As there are extant only two or three lines of the poem,[299] it is impossible to judge of the extent of the influence, but in Shelley’s letters to Hogg and to Edward Graham describing the poem, there is resemblance in tone and epithet to The Examiner. A letter from Shelley to Lord Ellenborough on the occasion of Eaton’s sentence for publishing the third part of Paine’s Age of Reason followed a long series of articles by Hunt on the prerogative of liberty of speech.[300]
A meeting of Reformers at Manchester on the sixteenth of August, 1819, for the purpose of discussing quietly the annual meeting of Parliament, universal suffrage, and voting by ballot, was dispersed by military force. Articles setting forth the long sufferings of the Reformers, charging the authorities with wanton bloodshed, and ridiculing the absurd trial of the offenders, appeared in The Examiner of August 22, 29, September 5, 19 and 26. The Mask of Anarchy, written on the occasion of the massacre at Manchester, was sent to Leigh Hunt for publication sometime before the first of November, 1819. The sentiment of both men is the same regarding the affair.
Accounts of the death of the Princess Charlotte and of the executions for high treason at Derby of Brandreth, Ludlam and Turner, after a horrible imprisonment, two articles in The Examiner of November 9, 1819, inspired Shelley’s Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte, sometimes known as We Pity the Plumage, but Forget the Dying Bird, dated November 12 of the same year. Hunt followed with a second article, Death of the Princess Charlotte and Indecent Advantage Taken of It, November 16, 1819. Both writers called attention to the disposition of the public to forget the sufferings of the poor, while it mourned hysterically with royalty; they declared that the administration of justice and the events leading to such crimes were of much greater importance. Three articles in The Examiner of October 17, 24 and 31, 1819, on the trial of Richard Carlile for libel, were followed by an open letter on the same case from Shelley to Hunt dated November 3, 1819. By scattered references it can be seen that Shelley fully agreed with Hunt in his opinion of the Prince Regent and of the Ministers, in his attitude toward the corruption of the court and of the army; and in his proposed regulation of taxes and of the public debt.
Œdipus Tyrannus or Swellfoot the Tyrant, begun August, 1820, succeeded a series of articles, beginning in The Examiner of June 11, 1820, and continuing throughout nineteen numbers,[301] on the subject of George IV’s attempt to divorce his wife.[302] Abhorrence of the king’s perfidy and of his ministers’ support, sympathy for Queen Caroline, and minor details parallel closely Hunt’s version in The Examiner. This passage occurs in the article of June 9: “An animal sets himself down, month after month, at Milan, to watch at her doors and windows, to intercept discarded servants and others who know what a deposition might be worth, and thus to gather poison for one of those venomous Green Bags, which have so long infected and nauseated the people, and are now to infect the Queen.” This seems to be the germ of the passage in Shelley’s poem beginning:
“Behold this bag! it is
The poison Bag of that Green Spider huge,
On which our spies sulked in ovation through
The streets of Thebes, when they were paved with dead.”
Then follows the plot to throw the contents upon the Queen.
The handling of the heroic couplet, employed in the Letter to Maria Gisborne and in Epipsychidon, as well as in Julian and Maddalo,[303] has been already discussed in its relationship to Hunt’s use of the same. Shelley, in a letter to Hunt, explains his position in regard to the language of Julian and Maddalo:
“You will find the little piece, I think, in some degree consistent with your own ideas of the manner in which poetry ought to be written. I have employed a certain familiar style of language to express the actual way in which people talk to each other, whom education and a certain refinement of sentiment have placed above the use of vulgar idioms. I use the word vulgar in its most extensive sense. The vulgarity of rank and fashion is as gross, in its way, as that of poverty, and its cant terms equally expressive of base conceptions, and therefore, equally unfit for poetry. Not that the familiar style is to be admitted in the treatment of a subject wholly ideal, or in that part of any subject which relates to common life, where the passion, exceeding a certain limit, touches the boundary of that which is ideal. Strong passion expresses itself in metaphor, borrowed alike from subjects remote or near, and casts over all the shadow of its own greatness.”[304]