and in lively colloquial verse the use, not uncommon also with the Elizabethans, of disyllabic rhymes:—
“I come, kind gentlemen, strange news to tell ye;
I am the ghost of poor departed Nelly.
Sweet ladies, be not frighted; I’ll be civil;
I’m what I was, a little harmless devil.”
In the hands of Pope, the poetical legislator of the following century, these expedients are discarded, and the fixed and purely metrical element in the design is suffered to regulate and control the other element entirely. The sentence-structure loses its freedom: and periods and clauses, instead of being allowed to develope themselves at their ease, are compelled mechanically to coincide with and repeat the metrical divisions of the verse. To take a famous instance, and from a passage not sententious, but fanciful and discursive:—
“Some in the fields of purest æther play,
And bask and whiten in the blaze of day.
Some guide the course of wand’ring orbs on high,
Or roll the planets through the boundless sky.
Some less refined, beneath the moon’s pale light
Pursue the stars that shoot across the night,
Or seek the mists in grosser air below,
Or dip their pinions in the painted bow,
Or brew fierce tempests on the wintry main,
Or o’er the glebe distil the kindly rain.”
Leigh Hunt’s theory was that Pope, with all his skill, had spoiled instead of perfecting his instrument, and that the last true master of the heroic couplet had been Dryden, on whom the verse of Rimini is avowedly modelled. The result is an odd blending of the grave and the colloquial cadences of Dryden, without his characteristic nerve and energy in either:—
“The prince, at this, would bend on her an eye
Cordial enough, and kiss her tenderly;
Nor, to say truly, was he slow in common
To accept the attentions of this lovely woman,
But the meantime he took no generous pains,
By mutual pleasing, to secure his gains;
He entered not, in turn, in her delights,
Her books, her flowers, her taste for rural sights;
Nay, scarcely her sweet singing minded he
Unless his pride was roused by company;
Or when to please him, after martial play,
She strained her lute to some old fiery lay
Of fierce Orlando, or of Ferumbras,
Or Ryan’s cloak, or how by the red grass
In battle you might know where Richard was.”
It is usually said that to the example thus set by Leigh Hunt in Rimini is due the rhythmical form alike of Endymion and Epipsychidion, of Keats’s Epistles to his friends and Shelley’s Letter to Maria Gisborne. Certainly the Epistles of Keats, both as to sentiment and rhythm, are very much in Hunt’s manner. But the earliest of them, that to G. F. Mathew, is dated Nov. 1815: when Rimini was not yet published, and when it appears Keats did not yet know Hunt personally. He may indeed have known his poem in MS., through Clarke or others. Or the likeness of his work to Hunt’s may have arisen independently: as to style, from a natural affinity of feeling: and as to rhythm, from a familiarity with the disyllabic rhyme and the ‘overflow’ as used by some of the Elizabethan writers, particularly by Spenser in Mother Hubbard’s Tale and by Browne in Britannia’s Pastorals. At all events the appearance of Rimini tended unquestionably to encourage and confirm him in his practice.
As to Hunt’s success with his ‘ideas of what is natural in style,’ and his ‘free and idiomatic cast of language’ to supersede the styles alike of Pope and Wordsworth, the specimen of his which we have given is perhaps enough. The taste that guided him so well in appreciating the works of others deserted him often in original composition, but nowhere so completely as in Rimini. The piece indeed is not without agreeable passages of picturesque colour and description, but for the rest, the pleasant creature does but exaggerate in this poem the chief foible of his prose, redoubling his vivacious airs where they are least in place, and handling the great passions of the theme with a tea-party manner and vocabulary that are intolerable. Contemporaries, welcoming as a relief any departure from the outworn poetical conventions of the eighteenth century, found, indeed, something to praise in Leigh Hunt’s Rimini: and ladies are said to have wept over the sorrows of the hero and heroine: but what, one can only ask, must be the sensibilities of the human being who can endure to hear the story of Paolo and Francesca—Dante’s Paolo and Francesca—diluted through four cantos in a style like this?—
“What need I tell of lovely lips and eyes,
A clipsome waist, and bosom’s balmy rise?—”
“How charming, would he think, to see her here,
How heightened then, and perfect would appear
The two divinest things the world has got,
A lovely woman in a rural spot.”
When Keats and Shelley, with their immeasurably finer poetical gifts and instincts, successively followed Leigh Hunt in the attempt to add a familiar lenity of style to variety of movement in this metre, Shelley, it need not be said, was in no danger of falling into any such underbred strain as this: but Keats at first falls, or is near falling, into it more than once.