When, in 1895, after a prolonged absence from Hampstead, I again visited it for the purpose of reviving my impressions of certain localities, I naturally desired to revisit Leigh Hunt’s cottage; but time and the alterations in the neighbourhood had confused my recollection of the way to it, and upon inquiring, I am obliged to confess there is some truth in the accusations of certain American magazine writers, that the people generally are not well up in the traditions of their neighbourhood, nor greatly interested in the homes of the poets, painters, and other celebrities, the memory of whose fame has enriched it.
My quest was met by a frank ignorance: neither the cottage nor its memorable occupant had been heard of by the ordinary dwellers in the neighbourhood.
Wandering on, I was fortunate enough to recognise the high-hedged orchard-garden that had belonged to Vale Lodge, and I had no farther difficulty in finding my way to the whereabouts of Leigh Hunt’s cottage. Now, instead of the open space before it and its fellows, the approach is strangely narrowed and closed in, but on the top of the garden-gate of the last of the row of what were four white weather-boarded cottages in my time (of which only two remain, the place of the others being filled by two tall, narrow brick houses), the Town Council, or Board of Works, or some other local authority, had had inserted a brass plate, some two inches wide and five or six in length, inscribed ‘Hunt’s Cottage.’ After this, let no American or other traveller say that we do not commensurately keep alive the memory of our men of genius! For one mistaken moment I felt grateful; the next I had realized that this was not the cottage I had been assured on such excellent authority was the one lived in by Leigh Hunt, though next door to it. But what does it signify? Fame is far-reaching, and the space covered by the row so small that the memory of the one little home includes the whole, and clothes these few cottages on the south-west side of the Vale of Health with undying interest.
Then I remembered how Leigh Hunt had written: ‘Strada Smollett is delightful. By-and-by there will be such streets all over the world. People will know not only the name of a street, but the reason for it.’
Soon I found myself wondering if such an important body as the Town Council or the Board of Works could really be answerable for the sparse bit of brass, and the obscure ‘Hunt’s Cottage’ graven on it, which might mean any man’s cottage of the name of Hunt. There are quite a number in the London Directory, whereas there is only one Leigh Hunt, the author of ‘Rimini’ and ‘The Old Court Suburb,’ etc. Why, if intended to honour the poet, had they deprived him of the Christian name that distinguished him, and has a place in every reader’s memory?
I will not despair of seeing this rectified and expanded, so that all who pass by may see the ‘writing on the wall,’ and know that for some few years of his long life the ‘Pink of Poets,’ as his adverse critics sarcastically called him, resided in one of these cottages, where he wrote the greater part of, and finished, the story of ‘Rimini.’
In 1812, Leigh Hunt, writing from 37, Portland Street, Oxford Road, to Mr. Henry Brougham, tells him that he ‘longs to get into his Hampstead retreat, out of the stir and smoke of London.’ And a little later he informs the same correspondent that he is about to move to a cottage at West End, Hampstead, ‘a really bonâ-fide cottage, with humble ceilings and unsophisticated staircase; but there is green about it, and a garden with laurels.’
I mention this because I think it is to this circumstance he alludes when he writes in his Autobiography that ‘early in the spring of 1816 he went to reside again in Hampstead.’ His friend Charles Cowden Clarke tells us that soon after his release from Horsemonger Lane Gaol[184] Leigh Hunt ‘occupied a pretty little cottage in the Vale of Health.’ And Leigh Hunt himself, in a letter to a friend in 1821, observes, ‘I came to get well in our little packing-case here, dignified with the name of house.’
Again, in later years, in answer to a letter from his friend Mr. Dalby, he says: ‘I defy you to have lived in a smaller cottage than I have done. Yet it has held Shelley and Keats and half a dozen friends in it at once; and they have made worlds of their own within the rooms. Keats’ “Sleep and Poetry” is a description of a parlour that was mine, no larger than an old mansion’s closet.’
Cowden Clarke tells us that when Keats slept there a bed was improvised for him on a couch in Leigh Hunt’s library, a room at the back, rather larger, if I remember, than the parlour.[185] Keats himself writes of it in the poem Leigh Hunt alludes to: