to receive yet another disappointment. The London
Journal was too entirely reflective and gossiping, not to
say egoistic ; it took no note of what was passing around
it, and, in the hurry of the moment, was left behind.
The bound volurne, Iiowever, forms a princely folio, over
which every honest book-lover must delight to linger.
Without subscribing altogtther to the untempered
enthusiasm of Mr. Launcelot Cross's really diligent and
instructive Cliaracteristics of Leigh Hunt as exhibited ifi
that Typical Literary Periodical, Leigh HunCs Jjondon
Journcd, we may say without reservation that its
pages, abounding in happy appreciations, genial nature
sketches, and quaint narratives, contain an immense
variety of attractive matter in an eminently readable
shape.
Every number opened with one of the editor's mis-
cellaneous essays ā on "A Stone," "A Pinch of Snuff,"
or "Life after Death," followed by "The Week," i.e.,
reflections on the seasons, the flowers, birds, or crops
appropriate thereto. Then came " Romances of Real
Life," stories of passion and crime re-told from The
Lounger^s Commonplace- Book and other sources, and
" Birthdays of Eminent Men," brief and telling critical
biographies of the " Immortal who never die." " We
86 LEIGH HUNT.
must speak of them as they still exist among us, and not
of their memories." The remaining paragraphs were
occupied by extracts, with or without comment, from any
ancient or modern work, lying open by chance on
Hunt's desk as he wrote. Here appeared also, as sup-
plements, those wonderful paragraphs of historical and
literary gossip called "The Streets of London," which,
after being continued in a later periodical, were finally
incorporated in The Town : Its Memorable Characters
and Eveyits, 184S. The materials for this volume, in
which the reader is " taken through London quarter by
quarter, to notice the memorials as they arise," were
gleaned from Pennant and The Lounger^s Commonplace-
Bool; but it is instinct with the author's personality, and
forms, with The Old Court Suburb, Memorials of Kensing-
ton, Regal, Critical, and Anecdotal, 1855, originally
called Lounging through Kensington, and A Saunter
through the West End, 1861, a fascinating historical
guide-book to the Metropolis.
Indeed the greater part of The Lond(>n Journal was
reprinted in different forms, and much of Hunt's best
work, included in the ordinary collections, was first
published in this paper. After its failure he wrote re-
views for The Westminster and The Edinburgh on the
introduction of Macaulay, " Notes of a Lover of Books "
and laureate verses for The Monthly Chronicle, essays on
poetry and song in its relation to music for The Musical
World, and edited from July, 1837, to March, 1838, The
Monthly Kepository, originally a magazine in the Uni-
tarian interest, but made unsectarian by his editorial pre-
JOURNALIST. 87
decessors, W. J. Fox and R. H. Home. The Jar of
Honey fy^om 3Iount Hyhla also appeared in Ainsivorth's
Magazine, 1844, and some very thin Tahle Talk, i^rinted
in his volume of that name, over the signature " Adam
Fitz-Adam, Esquire," in The Atlas, 1846.
Leigh Hunt's Journal : A Miscellany for the Cultivation
of the Memorable, the Progressive, and the Beautiful, 1850,
185 1, was the last of his own papers, the most frankly
autobiographical and garrulous, by no means the least
worthy.
"The object which I have most at heart in the new Journal is
to help in assisting the right progress of the great changes coming
in the world by the cultivation of a spirit of cheerfulness, reason-
ableness, and peace ; and the most special means which I look for
to this end, and which I earnestly desire on all sides, from all parties
and shades of party, or of no party at all, is the countenance and co-
operation of men the most distinguished for genius and public spirit.
I hope they will deign to consider the Journal as a kind of neutral
ground or academic grove and resort of wit and philosophy in which,
while they freely express their o[)inions, whatever these may be,
they will do so in accordance with the particular sjjirit of the place,
and whether or not they think it the best and most useful spirit to
be evinced at other times. . . .
" But enough of enemies, for ever; of friends, never. I confidently
trust my undertaking in the hands of those, and of the public at
large, feeling sure that they will not disapprove its spirit, whatever
they may say to its power ; and hoping that the distinguished
correspondents who commence with it, and other younger and to-
be-distinguished ones whom I expect in their company, will save it
from falling off, should my own strength be insufficient. I feel no
abatement of it yet, think God, as far as brain, or as heart and hope
are concerned ; and success may give it me in respects less im-
portant. . . .
88 LEIGH HUNT.
" ' Chi la leggera, viva felice.'
*' May he, and she, that read it, live and prosper."
Failure of accord with some of his contributors, and
the small capital embarked by the proprietors, brought
this darling Benjamin to a speedy end ; but it contained
much excellent matter, both by the editor and his friends,
being similar in tone and spirit to The London Journal,
of which it was in some sort a revival.
Hunt now wrote for The Musical Times, Household
Words, Fr^aser's Magazine, and closed his career as a
journalist by sending sixteen chatty papers to The
Spectator under a characteristic heading "The Occa-
sional." The last appeared on August 20, 1859, just a
week before his death, and a memorial paper, by Edmund
Oilier, the son of his old friend, concluded the series.
III.ā POET.
Leigh Hunt, at least in early days, found his greatest
pleasure in the composition of verse, and fixed his ambi-
tions upon becoming a fine poet. He never quite
realised the hopelessness of the attempt, though his
eagerness waned, and he could criticise his own work
with even undue severity.
The earliest printed verses of which we have any record,
entitled "Melanclioly," appeared in The European Magazine
for 1 80 1, when the author was just sixteen ; and he con-
tributed in the same year to The Juvenile Library. But the
boy was already a voluminous writer, and, in 1801 again,
was published that "heap of imitations, all but absolutely
worthless," to quote his own description ā Juvenilia;
or, A Collection of Poems, written between the Ages of Txoelve
and Sixteen, by J. H. L. Hunt, late of the Grammar School
of Christ's Hospital, and dedicated by Permission to the
Hon. J. H. Leigh ; containing Miscellanies, Translations,
Sonnets, Pastorals, Elegies, Odes, Hymns, and Anthems.
In his Autobiography , Leigh Hunt is very severe upon
this ambitious production ; but subsequent critics have
found food for kindly comment within its pages. It was
really a clever book for so young a writer, and shows a
considerable acquaintance with many authors not gener-
ally beloved of schoolboys. Characteristics and senti-
90 LEIGH HUNT.
ments appear in this early volume which remained with
him through life. The pleasures of friendship, awarded
di first place in his "An Earth upon Heaven" {The Com-
panion, April 2, 182S), are here sung with unmeasured
enthusiasm ; a sincere affection for simple English, not
to say suburban, scenery is clearly evinced ; and, as
already hinted, a loving familiarity with literature per-
vades the work. Moreover, his own tastes, fancies, and
sentiments are expressed, with a strange combination of
self-confidence and modesty, in facile and colloquial
verse.
The abundant and, it need hardly be added, super-
fluous prefatory matter offers an amusing foretaste of
Hunt's maturer charming egoism. The elegant dedica-
tion to his godfather betrays that respect of persons
which enabled the man, who went to prison for denounc-
ing the Prince Regent, to play the amateur poet-laureate
during the last years of Southey's life, and to tolerate, if
not to welcome, the patronage formerly associated with
authorship from worthy persons demanding no sacrifice
of moral independence. In the advertisement, " J. H.
L. Hunt thinks it necessary to inform his readers, as
they will undoubtedly perceive how much superior some
of the following Poems are to others, that a few of the
first pages, all the Translations but one, the two first
Odes, and the first Hymn, were written at a very early
age ; that the Poem on ' Retirement/ the Pastorals,
in imitation of Pope and Virgil, ' Elegy written in Poet's
Corner, Westminster Abbey,' 'Ode to Truth,' the 'Pro-
gress of Painting,' ' Wandle's Wave,' the Hymns for the
POET. 9 1
Seasons, the ' Palace of Pleasure,' and the ' Funeral
Anthem,' were the productions of his present age
(sixteen) ; and the rest of his intermediate years." The
elaborate imitation of Spenser, already a favourite, is in-
troduced by some words "To the Public," containing an
apologetic defence of " the simple style and obsolete
diction " and concludinsf thus : ā
" Where the allegory is wanting in the survey of human life, the
youth and inexperience of the author will, it is hoped, be brought
to the recollection of the excusing reader ; and the moral, never to
be too often repeated, that is drawn from it, which endeavours to-
correct the vices of the age by showing the frightful landscape
that terminates the aHuring path of sinful pleasure, supply the
defects of a muse, who is entering into public in her sixteenth year,
bashful on her first exhibition, and listening with trembling expecta-
tion, as she passes, to the shouts of disapprolmtion or applause that
burst from the surrounding multitude."
This autobiographical naivety, perfectly natural in so
youthful an author, might surely have been restrained by
judicious relatives ; but there seems to have been a
tradition in the Hunt family for several generations
against any form of parental control, and the habit of
estabhshing personal intimacies with his readers proved
itself an integral part of Leigh Hunt's literary equipment.
The volume appaiently satisfied the author's immedi-
ate desire for verse publication, and the ensuing products
of his muse were either sent to the J'oetical Meyistei-, or
merely shown to his friends. The cares of making love
and finding a profession fully occupied his time. His
92 LEIGH HUNT.
next literary efforts were in critical prose, but when
The Examiner was brought out in iSoS, its pages were
naturally open to the editor's verse. It was not, how-
ever, until he had more or less established this paper and
started a quarterly magazine that his next poem of any
length or importance was published. This was The
Feast of the Poets {The Reflector, No. 4, 181 2), a jeti
d'esjirit suggested by Sir John Suckling's Session of the
Poets, and exhibiting a critical assumption and intoler-
ance entirely at variance with his later catholic apprecia-
tions. Wordsworth, Scott, and Coleridge, for instance,
fall under the lash of the satirist, and, as he afterwards
pointed out in tlie Autobiogrcq'jhy , the poem was well
calculated to offend almost every class of political or
literary thinkers. It is a very youthful, very impertinent,
but fairly vigorous production, which at least excites
more amusement than the revised version, afterwards
printed in his Poetical Works.
This was followed by The Descent of Liberty, 18 15, a
masque on the downfall of Napoleon, written in prison,
and designed as "a compliment to the allies, which they
deserved well enough, inasmuch as it was a failure ;
otherwise they did not deserve it at all, for it was founded
on a belief in promises which they never kept." The
masque contains some of the best lyrics Hunt ever
wrote, and a charming essay on the " Origin and Nature
of Masques," most characteristically summarised : ā
" In a word, as the present piece was written partly to indulge
the imagination of one who could realise no sights for himself, so it
POET. 95
is more distinctly addressed to such habitual readers of poetry as-
can yield him a ready mirror in the liveliness of their own apprehen-
sions. There is a good deal of prose intermixed, but the nature of a
masque requires it, and if the reader be of the description just
mentioned, and shall settle himself with his book in a comfortable
arm-chair condition, ā in winter, perhaps with the lights at his
shoulder, and his feet on a good fender, ā in summer, with a
window open to a smoothing air, and the consciousness of some green
trees about him, ā and in both instances (if he can muster up so
much poetical accompaniment) with a lady beside him, ā the author
does not despair of convening him into a very sufficient and satisfied
kind of theatre,"
Such were the conditions under which Leigh Hunt
loved to pore over the v^-ritings of others, and hoped
that they might enjoy his own.
In the following year appeared The Story of Rimini,
which led a reform in English poetry, and remains, in
spite of patent defects, the most solid monument of
Hunt's poetical achievements. There is a passage in
the Autobiography that accounts for the form in which
it was written, and estimates, not unwisely, its merits
and defects : ā
" Dryden, at that time, in spite of my sense of Milton's superior-
ity, and my early love of Spenser, was the most delightful name to
me in English literature. I had found in him more vigour, and
music too, than in Pope, who had been my closest poetical acquaint-
ance, and I could not rest till I had played upon his instrument.
I brought, however, to my task a sympathy with the tender
and the pathetic which I did not find in my master, and there
was also an impulsive difference now and then in the style,
and a greater tendency to simplicity of words. My versification
was not so vigorous as his. There were many weak lines in it. It
94 LEIGH HUNT.
succeeded best in catching the variety of his cadences ; at least, so
far as they broke up the monotony of Pope. But I had a greater
love for the beauties of external nature ; I think al?o I partook of a
more southern insight into the beauties of colour, of which I made
abundant use in the procession which is described in the first canto ;-^
and if I invested my story with too many circumstances of descrip-
tion, especially on points not essential to its progress, and thus took
leave i7i toto of the brevity, as well as the force of Dante, still the
enjoyment which led me into the superfluity was manifest, and so
far became its warrant."
The Story of Rimini, then, was a protest against the
polished couplet of Pope ā a call to revive the freer
manner of Dryden ā a protest and a call expressed
already to some extent in The Lyrical Ballads, but,
through Hunt's influence, guiding the pens of Keats,
Shelley, and some of their noblest successors. The
poem to which we indirectly owe so much was itself a
failure. In the first place, as Hunt himself points out,
the whole conception was an act of bad taste ā " to
enlarge upon a subject which had been treated with
exquisite sufficiency, and to his immortal renown, by a
great master " ā and the passions with which it deals are
not naturally introduced or vigorously depicted. The
digressions and descriptions, indeed, are the only parts
of the poem which can be read with pleasure. They
contain that evidence of his own enjoyment which Leigh
Hunt, as we see from the above quotation, regarded as a
warrant for their existence, and which does, in fact, form
one of the principal charms of his work in poetry and
prose.
^ Perhaps the most really poetical passage in the book.
POET. 95
The Story of Rimini elicited many expressions of en-
thusiasm from those who afterwards profited by its in-
fluence and from others of Hunt's own circle ; but it
was met by his political enemies with a storm of virulent
and personal abuse almost unparalleled in the history of
journalism. It was treated by Blachivood and the
Quarterly as an indecent manifesto of the so-called
Cockney school in whose dishonour they were eager to
triumph. The fact that the Cockney king had written a
poem (although he was not responsible for the plot)
about an intrigue between an Italian princess and her
brother-in-law afforded them an opportunity ā it cannot
be called an excuse ā for perpetually whispering insinua-
tions against his own private moral character, and imply-
ing that all his friends were equally disreputable.
Leigh Hunt himself found a moral lesson in the story,
that deceit is vicious and impolitic. He throws the
blame of Francesca's sin on her father, who, in order to
force her marriage, directed the surly Giovanni to woo
her by deputy in the person of his brother Paolo, and
told her that she should find the former as charming as
the latter was universally admitted to be. The defence
is not very effectively conducted, perhaps. The mere
attempt may serve to illustrate the kind of attitude
always adopted by Leigh Hunt on similar questions,
unconventional but not lax.
The versification was also abused, and here Hunt's
principles were far superior to his practice. He never
realised the proper dignity of poetry, and in discarding
monotony, became slipshod. Hard polish was replaced
gS LEIGH HUNT,
by limp jerkiness, and the couplet in his hands grew
pert and garrulous. There are beautiful passages in the
poem worthy of the great reform to be inaugurated, but
they are few and far between. In the matter of language,
again, he could not maintain a high standard. His very
simplicity was in part artificial, and he had a singular
taste for giving ordinary words an original significance
which ruined his phrases, though it never made him
obscure. The poem was considerably revised, but the
changes relate principally to the final development of the
plot, and are not all improvements.
In old age Leigh Hunt referred to Rimini as the work
of a " tyro," but it does not contain any signs of youth
from which he was afterwards exempt, and reaches as
high a level as any of his longer pieces. It proves con-
clusively that he was not, in the highest sense, a poet.
In Foliage, i8iS, we may notice the delicately fanciful
sub-titles ā " Greenwoods " and " Evergreens," for the
original poems and the translations from poets of
antiquity. It contained, moreover, the epistles to his
friends, Byron, Moore, Hazlitt, Baron Field, and Charles
Lamb, which are written with a good deal of careless
spirit ; the popular verses to T. L. H. and to J. H., and
some of his best sonnets ā particularly those To the Grass-
hopper and the Cricket (his own favourites), ^ and that on
The Nile, excelling, as is generally admitted, the sonnets
on the same subject by Shelley and Keats, with which
it was written in friendly competition in February
1818:ā
ā ^ See Correspondence, ii. 56.
POET. 97
" It flows through old hushed Egypt and its sands,
Like some grave mighty thought threading a dream,
And times and things, as in that vision, seem
Keeping along it their eternal stands, ā
Caves, pillars, pyramids, the shepherd bands
That roamed through the young world, the glory extreme
Of high Sesostris, and that southern beam,
The laughing queen that caught the world's great hands.
" Then came a mightier silence, stern and strong.
As of a world left empty of its throng.
And the void weighs on us ; and then we wake,
And hear the fruitful stream lapsing along
'Twixt villages, and think how we shall take
Our own calm journey on for human sake."
These are probably the strongest verses Hunt ever
wrote, and, as Professor Saintsbury points out, "the
eighth line is a re-discovery of a cadence which had been
lost for centuries, and which has been constantly borrowed
and imitated since."
In the following year, 1819, appeared Hero and
Leander, and Bacchus and Ariadne, a volume that de-
serves to be rescued from oblivion on account of the
third poem it contained, not mentioned on the title-page,
called The Panther, which has been rightly included in
every volume of selections from Hunt with which I am
acquainted. It is one of the short narrative pieces in
which he handled some old fable or episode suggested
by his reading, with a firm and delicate touch that he
seldom reached in other styles.
"About this time," says the Autobiography, "I trans-
98 LEIGH HUNT.
lated the Aminta of Tasso, a poem (be it said with the
leave of so great a name) hardly worth the trouble,
though the prologue is a charming presentment of love
in masquerade, and the Ode on the Golden Age a sigh
out of the honestest part of the heart of humanity."
Hunt's translation of the Ode is very delightful, and has
been frequently reprinted by itself.
It was soon after the publication of this volume that
he went to Italy^ where he published no poetry of any
importance except the heavy satire on Gifford ā the one
man he could never forgive ā called Ultra Crejndarius,
1823, and Bacchus in Tuscany from Redi (1825), an
exercise in dithyrambics which is by no means a success.
" I was the more incited to attempt a version of this poem, inas-
much as it was thought a choke-pear for translators. English
readers asked me how I proposed to render the famous
' Mostra aver poco giudizio '
(a Hne much quoted), and Italians asked what I meant to do
with the ' compound words ' (which are very scarce in their lan-
guage). I laughed at the famous 'mostra aver,' which it required
but a little animal spirits to ' give as good as it brought ' ; and I had
the pleasure of informing Italians that the English language
abounded in compound words, and could make as many more as it
pleased."'
He published some verses in his Literary Pocket-Book,
" or companion for the lover of art and nature" (i8ig-
1822), over the signature <^., and in The Liberxd (1822-
1823), among which were "The Lines to a Spider" and
" Mahmound ; " while The Companion, The Chat of the
POET. 99
Week, and The Tatler, all contained occasional poems
by their editor.
In 1819 several volumes of Hunt's had been bound
together and published under the title of his Poetical
Works, but the first genuine collection appeared in 1832,
published by subscription. The volume opens with a
" good gossiping preface" of 58 pages, designed, as he
frankly tells us, to bring it to a size " becoming " its price,
a method which he maintains, with some show of justice,
to be more honest than that of adding poems formerly re-
jected on their own merits. His self-selection is fairly
judicious, though it is disappointing to learn that he only
admitted the " Sonnet on the Nile " at the inducement of
a partial friend. He has suiificient critical instinct to see
that his best work will be in " a mixed kind of narrative
poetry, part lively and part serious, somewhere between
the longer poems of the Italians and the Fabliaux of the
old French." He would fain pass his days in writing
" eternal new stories in verse, of no great length, but
justsufificient to vent the pleasure with which he is stung
in meeting with some touching adventure, and which
haunts him till he can speak of it somehow."
His theories on poetry are more fully expressed else-
where,^ but he here declares that "laws in poetry are
nothing but the conclusions which critics have come to,
respecting the means adopted by the best poets, for
giving the greatest amount of pleasure." The sound
critic was, however, an extreme sentimentalist, as this
^ In the Preface lo Ima'jinaiion and Fancy most formally, (juoted
below, p. no.
lOO LEIGH HUNT,
Preface bears witness by the pleasure expressed in " the
very flowers on the tea-cups, and the grace with which a
ball of cotton is rolled up " ; and the argument for the
use of triplets : ā " I confess I like the very bracket that
marks out the triplet to the reader's eye, and prepares
him for the music of it. It has a look like the bridge of
a lute."
The volume contained nothing new but "The Gentle
Armour," a tame version of an old French romance, and
most of its contents were included in later collections.
During 1834 appeared the brilliant lines on Paganini,
one of his few compositions in blank verse {The London
Journal, April 16), and Ahrni Ben Adhem, the finest of
his narrative pieces (S. C. Hall's Aimdet). Captain
Sword and Ca2)tain Pen was published in 1835. Leigh
Hunt treats of this poem at some length in the Auto-
biography, and relates how strongly its terrible pictures
of the battlefield affected his imagination. But he was
never at home in the realms of strong passion, and it is
to be regretted that he should have thus exerted himself