When we think of Landor, let us forget his wrangles—forget his wild impetuosities—forget his coarsenesses, and his sad, lonely death; and—instead—keep in mind, if we can, that sweet picture I have given you.
Prose of Leigh Hunt.
It was some two years before George IV. came to the Regency, and at nearly the same date with the establishment of Murray’s Quarterly, that Mr. Leigh Hunt,[50] in company with his brother John Hunt, set up a paper called the Examiner—associated in later days with the strong names of Fonblanque and Forster. This paper was of a stiffly Whiggish and radical sort, and very out-spoken—so that when George IV., as Regent, seemed to turn his back on old Whig friends, and show favors to the Tories (as he did), Mr. Leigh Hunt wrote such sneering and abusive articles about the Regent that he was prosecuted, fined, and clapped into prison, where he stayed two years. They were lucky two years for him—making reputation for his paper and for himself; his friends and family dressed up his prison room with flowers (he loved overmuch little luxuries of that sort); Byron, Moore, Godwin, and the rest all came to see him; and there he caught the first faint breezes of that popular applause which blew upon him in a desultory and rather languid way for a good many years afterward—not wholly forsaking him when he had grown white-haired, and had brought his delicate, fine, but somewhat feeble pen into the modern courts of criticism.
I do not suppose that anybody in our day goes into raptures over the writings of Leigh Hunt; nevertheless, we must bring him upon our record—all the more since there was American blood in him. His father, Isaac Hunt, was born in the Barbadoes, and studied in Philadelphia; in the latter city, Dr. Franklin and Tom Paine used to be visitors at his grandfather’s house. At the outbreak of the Revolution, Hunt’s father, who—notwithstanding his Philadelphia wife—was a bitter loyalist, went to England—his departure very much quickened by some threats of punishing his aggressive Toryism. He appears in England as a clergyman—ultimately wedded to Unitarian doctrines; finding his way sometimes to the studio of Benjamin West—talking over Pennsylvania affairs with that famous artist, and encountering there, as it chanced, John Trumbull, a student in painting—who in after years bequeathed an art-gallery to Yale College. It happens, too, that this Colonel Trumbull, in 1812, when the American war was in progress, was suspected as a spy, and escaped grief mainly by the intervention of Isaac Hunt.
The young Hunt began early to write—finding his way into journalism of all sorts; his name associated sooner or later with The News, and dramatic critiques; with the Examiner, the Reflector, the Indicator, the Companion, and the Liberal—for which latter he dragged his family down into Italy at the instance of Byron or Shelley, or both. That Liberal was intended to astonish people and make the welkin ring; but the Italian muddle was a bad one, the Liberal going under, and an ugly quarrel setting in; Hunt revenging himself afterward by writing Lord Byron and his Contemporaries,—a book he ultimately regretted: he was never strong enough to make his bitterness respected. Honeyed words became him better; and these he dealt out—wave upon wave—on all sorts of unimportant themes. Thus, he writes upon “Sticks”; and again upon “Maid-servants”; again on “Bees and Butterflies” (which is indeed very pretty); and again “Upon getting up of a cold morning”—in which he compassionates those who are haled out of their beds by “harpy-footed furies”—discourses on his own experience and sees his own breath rolling forth like smoke from a chimney, and the windows frosted over.
“Then the servant comes in: ‘It is very cold this morning, is it not?’ ‘Very cold, sir.’ ‘Very cold, indeed, isn’t it?’ ‘Very cold, indeed, sir.’ ‘More than usually so, isn’t it, even for this weather?’ ‘Why, sir, I think it is, sir.’… And then the hot water comes: ‘And is it quite hot? And isn’t it too hot?’ And what ‘an unnecessary and villainous custom this is of shaving.’”
Whereupon he glides off, in words that flow as easily as water from a roof—into a disquisition upon flowing beards—instancing Cardinal Bembo and Michelangelo, Plato and the Turks. Listen again to what he has to say in his Indicator upon “A Coach”:—
“It is full of cushions and comfort; elegantly colored inside and out; rich yet neat; light and rapid, yet substantial. The horses seem proud to draw it. The fat and fair-wigged coachman lends his sounding lash, his arm only in action, and that but little; his body well set with its own weight. The footman, in the pride of his nonchalance, holding by the straps behind, and glancing down sideways betwixt his cocked hat and neckcloth, standing swinging from East to West upon his springy toes. The horses rush along amidst their glancing harness. Spotted dogs leap about them, barking with a princely superfluity of noise. The hammer cloth trembles through all its fringe. The paint flashes in the sun.”