[63] Ibid., IV, pp. 486-487.
[64] Medwin, Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron, p. 187.
[65] In the preface to the Story of Rimini (London, 1819, p. 16), Hunt says that a poet should use an actual existing language, and quotes as authorities, Chaucer, Ariosto, Pulci, even Homer and Shakespeare. He thought simplicity of language of greater importance even than free versification in order to avoid the cant of art: “The proper language of poetry is in fact nothing different from that of real life, and depends for its dignity upon the strength and sentiment of what it speaks, omitting mere vulgarisms and fugitive phrases which are cant of ordinary discourse.”
[66] Byron, Letters and Journals, III, p. 418.
[67] Mr. A. T. Kent in the Fortnightly Review (vol. 36, p. 227), points out that Leigh Hunt in the preface to the Story of Rimini, avoided the mistake of Wordsworth in “looking to an unlettered peasantry for poetical language,” and quotes him as saying that one should “add a musical modulation to what a fine understanding might naturally utter in the midst of its griefs and enjoyments.” Kent says we have here “two vital points on which Wordsworth, in his capacity of critic, had failed to insist.”
[68] Autobiography, II, p. 24.
[69] To be found chiefly in the Feast of the Poets.
[70] In 1855, in Stories in Verse, Hunt changed his acknowledged allegiance from Dryden to Chaucer.
[71] Canto, II, ll. 433-440.
[72] E. De Selincourt gives these three last as examples of Hunt’s derivation of the abstract noun from the present participle (Poems of John Keats, p. 577).