[Footnote 2: The author of Boxiana and Life in London.]
It must be confessed that a less "fancy" vocabulary would here have shown a juster sense of Peter's position. Sometimes there is no burlesque intention apparent, but, in their curious way, the verses seem to express a genuine enthusiasm. It is neither to be expected nor to be feared that any one nowadays will seriously attempt to advocate the most barbarous of pastimes, and therefore, without conscientious scruples, we may venture to admit that these are very fine and very thrilling verses in their own unexampled class:
Oh, it is life! to see a proud
And dauntless man step, full of hopes,
Up to the P.C. stakes and ropes,
Throw in his hat, and with a spring
Get gallantly within the ring;
Eye the wide crowd, and walk awhile
Taking all cheerings with a smile;
To see him strip,—his well-trained form,
White, glowing, muscular, and warm,
All beautiful in conscious power,
Relaxed and quiet, till the hour;
His glossy and transparent frame,
In radiant plight to strive for fame!
To look upon the clean-shap'd limb
In silk and flannel clothèd trim;—
While round the waist the kerchief tied
Makes the flesh glow in richer pride.
'Tis more than life, to watch him hold
His hand forth, tremulous yet bold,
Over his second's, and to clasp
His rival's in a quiet grasp;
To watch the noble attitude
He takes,—the crowd in breathless mood,—
And then to see, with adamant start,
The muscles set,—and the great heart
Hurl a courageous, splendid light
Into the eye,—and then—the FIGHT.
This is like a lithograph out of one of Pierce Egan's books, only much more spirited and picturesque, and displaying a far higher and more Hellenic sense of the beauty of athletics. Reynolds' little volume, however, enjoyed no success. The genuine amateurs of the prize-ring did not appreciate being celebrated in good verses, and The Fancy has come to be one of the rarest of literary curiosities.
ULTRA-CREPIDARIUS
ULTRA-CREPIDARIUS; a Satire on William Gifford. By Leigh Hunt.
London, 1823: printed for John Hunt, 22, Old Bond Street, and 38,
Tavistock Street, Covent Garden.
If the collector of first editions requires an instance from which to justify the faith which is in him against those who cry out that bibliography is naught, Leigh Hunt is a good example to his hand. This active and often admirable writer, during a busy professional life, issued a long series of works in prose and verse which are of every variety of commonness and scarcity, but which have never been, and probably never will be, reprinted as a whole. Yet not to possess the works of Leigh Hunt is to be ill-equipped for the minute study of literary history at the beginning of the century. The original 1816 edition of Rimini, for instance, is of a desperate rarity, yet not to be able to refer to it in the grotesqueness of this its earliest form is to miss a most curious proof of the crude taste of the young school out of which Shelley and Keats were to arise. The scarcest of all Leigh Hunt's poetical pamphlets, but by no means the least interesting, is that whose title stands at the head of this chapter. Of Ultra-crepidarius, which was "printed for John Hunt" in 1823, it is believed that not half a dozen copies are in existence, and it has never been reprinted. It is a rarity, then, to which the most austere despisers of first editions may allow a special interest.
From internal evidence we find that Ultra-crepidarius; a Satire on William Gifford, was sent to press in the summer of 1823, from Maiano, soon after the break-up of Hunt's household in Genoa, and Byron's departure for Greece. The poem is the "stick" which had been recently mentioned in the third number of the Liberal:
Have I, these five years, spared the dog a stick, Cut for his special use, and reasonably thick?
It had been written in 1818, in consequence of the famous review in the Quarterly of Keats's Endymion, a fact which the biographers of Keats do not seem to have observed. Why did Hunt not immediately print it? Perhaps because to have done so would have been worse than useless in the then condition of public taste and temper. What led Hunt to break through his intention of suppressing the poem it might be difficult to discover. At all events, in the summer of 1823 he suddenly sent it home for publication; whether it was actually published is doubtful, it was probably only circulated in private to a handful of sympathetic Tory-hating friends.