noticed.

Passing over the rather intolerant "Attempt to show
the Folly and Danger of Methodism," reprinted from The
Examiner in 1809, and other volumes on special subjects
to be noticed elsewhere, we come first to his own admir-
able selection from The Indicator and The Companion,
1834, by which alone his reputation might be safely left
to stand or fall. This was afterwards published with The
Seer, which had been chosen from other periodicals,
The London Journal, The Liberal, The Taller, etc.,
with the motto, " Love adds a precious seeing to the
eye," and had first appeared in 1841. Men, Women and
Boolcs, 1847, is a similar collection, but, though the most
accessible, and therefore the best known, is unfortunately
not a good example of Hunt's powers. The Jar of Honey
from Mount Hyhla, 1848, contains some suggestive
papers on pastoral poets; while in Table Talk, 1851, we
have the counter-sweepings of a voluminous journalist.
Many collections, of varying interest and importance,
have appeared since Hunt's death. He himself also
116



MISCELLANIST. 1 1 ^

reprinted three respectable compilations, that might well
have been contributed to the pages of Tit Bits ; namely,
(Jyie Hundred Romances of Real Life, 1843, and the two
series of Readings for Railways, 1850 and 1853, in the
second of which he was assisted by J. B. Syme.

Hunt will be best appreciated, however, by a study of
the original Indicator, 182 1, Comixmion, 1828, and
London Journcd, 1834-5, which include the more im-
portant contents of the above volumes, and many
charming papers never reprinted. His deservedly most
popular work is " purely miscellaneous, depending for its
subject and treatment on the suggestion of the moment :
as he said in ' The Wishing Cap,' ' I will take up in this
paper any subject to which I feel an impulse.' And the
subjects are often commonplace enough, but ' he brings
poetry to our breakfast-table, and strikes light out of the
pebble at our feet,' finding —

' Sermons in stones, and good in everything.' "

These casual writings, however, according to the testi-
mony of those who knew him best, " were the result of
very considerable labour and painstaking, of the most
conscientious investigation of facts, where facts were
needed; and of a complete devotion of his faculties
towards the objects to be accomplished." At one time
admirable examples of the colloquial style, at another
they are shockingly constructed and even ungram-
matical.

They take up a position in the history of literature



I I 8 LEIGH HUNT

somewhere between the Tatlers and Spectators of Steele
and the magazines of the present day. Leigh Hunt
studied, and in his early days copied, the direct imitators
of Steele and his contemporaries — The Observer, The
Connoisseur, The Lounger, etc. ; but he seems to have
been himself largely responsible for the combination of
aesthetic and contemplative writing with matters of
immediate or political interest with which we are so
familiar. He helped to introduce magazine methods
into the newspapers without destroying their sensational-
ism, as we are now trying to introduce newspaper
methods into the magazines without discrediting their
prestige. He shared of course the didactic philanthropic
enthusiasms of his day, and appealed designedly to a
humbler class of readers than his masters. Addison and
Steele wrote for "The Town," "The Wit," and "The
Dandy," only occasionally condescending to the worthy
citizen. Leigh Hunt is frankly bourgeois ; he addresses
himself " to those who have not had the advantages of
a classical education." He chose Hampstead for his
Paradise, and among the vineyards of Italy " pitched
himself in imagination into the thick of Covent Garden."
These elements of the true Cockney, in that they were
sincere and nowise despicable, secured to him a certain
measure of popularity among the habitual newspaper
readers.

In prose, as in poetry, Leigh Hunt holds the peculiar
position of a leader among giants taller than himself,
a humble teacher of the mighty. His junior con-
temporaries, certainly recognising his influence, entered



MISCELLANIST, 1 19

the lists, and passed him easily. But the comparison
need not always be kept in view, and, by looking through
and beyond it, we may discover a personality inde-
pendent, distinguishable, and not altogether unworthy.
The unique sanity of his criticism has been noticed. In
the miscellaneous essays now under consideration he
adopted a manner that has since become indissolubly
associated with the name of Elia ; and he seems, at first
sight, comparatively commonplace. But though his
achievements are unquestionably of a lower order than
Lamb's, they also differ from his by coming nearer to
human nature, and possessing greater sincerity and
earnestness. Much of Lamb's peculiar charm arises
from a certain whimsical far-awayness and delicate
romanticism that hardly touches our actual experience,
while Leigh Hunt's sentiments and characters are literal
transcripts, sifted and composed, but not touched up.
This true realism gives them a place in our hearts which
the powers of imagination alone cannot secure. They
throw sunlight on the path of real life.

Though, in the strictest sense of the word, miscel-
laneous, Leigh Hunt's essays fall naturally into certain
general divisions according to the subject treated, or,
more accurately, according to the originally inspiring
subject, for he never " keeps to the point."

We may first consider the semi-philosophic or con-
templative, of which the best known is probably the
beautiful Deaths of Little Children. The opening sentence
strikes the keynote of the problem, how to face the
greatest of all sorrows : — " A Grecian philosopher, being



I20 LEIGH HUNT.

asked why he wept for the death of his son, since the
sorrow was in vain, repUed, ' I weep on that very account.'
And his answer became his wisdom." The thought sug-
gests reminiscences of his mother's grave, praise of tears,
and the pretty offer of consolation. " Those who have lost
an infant are never, as it were, without an infant child. . . .
This one alone is rendered an immortal child. Death has
arrested it with his kindly harshness and blessed it into
an eternal image of youth and innocence." In a manner
equally informal, he expounds {An Earth upon Heaven)
his views of a future state, pleading, with half-veiled
seriousness, for an intermediate heaven of "these natural
homes and resting-places, which are so heavenly to our
imaginations, even though they be built of clay, and are
situate in the fields of our infancy"; a few centuries of
preparation for the state of final bliss, " where every-
thing is marvellous and opposed to our experience " : —

"la a word, we cannot but persuade ourselves, that to realise
everything that we have justly desired on earth, will he heaven ; we
mean, for that period ; and that afterwards, if we behave ourselves
in a proper pre-angelical manner, we shall go to another heaven
still better, where we shall realise all that we desired in our first."

This early Paradise, where " there can be no clergymen,
as there are no official duties for them," shall contain a
friend — " no shirker of his nectar," — a mistress, " with
one or two charming little angelical peccadilloes ; " and
new hooks by Shakespeare and Spenser, another De-
cameron, and forty more novels by Walter Scott.



MISCELLANIST. 121

" A book of verses underneath the bough,
A jug of wine, a loaf of bread — and thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness.
Oh, wilderness were paradise enow."^

" The weather will be extremely fine, but not without such
varieties as shall hinder it from being tiresome. April will dress
the whole country in diamonds, and there will be enough cold in
winter to make a fire pleasant of an evening. The fire will be
made of sweet-smelling turf and sunbeams ; but it will have a look
of coal. If we choose, now and then, we shall even have in-
conveniences."



He often touches upon kindred subjects with the
same delicate appeal to natural emotions, preaching thus
indirectly the undogmatic faith that inspired his Religion
of the Heart. He betrays, moreover, an obstinate
moral sense, not disposed to deny itself the pleasure
of expression, but unexpectedly charitable to vices
committed with good grace, if redeemed by a good
heart.

In the famous character-sketches. Hunt is working in
that borderland between history and fiction which may
be described as class-biography. His methods are very
different from those of the old " characters " of Butler
or Overbury, in which we read, for example, of A Lover; —

" His heart is catched in a net with a pair of bright shining eyes,
as larks are with pieces of a looking-glass. He makes heavy com-



^ The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.



122 LEIGH HUNT.

plaints against it for deserting of him, and desires to have another
in exchange for it ; which is a very unreasonable request, for if it
betrayed its bosom-friend, what will it do to a stranger that should
give it trust and entertainment ? . . . All lovers are poets for the
time being, and make their ladies a kind of mosaic work of several
coloured stones joined together by a strong fancy, but very stiff and
unnatural ; and though they steal stars from heaven, as Prome-
theus did fire, to animate them, all will not make them alive or
alive-like."

Leigh Hunt's style is far more closely allied to that
of modern fiction. He illustrates character by man-
ners, without formally analysing it ; and makes the
type life-like by a kind of borrowed individuality. The
Old Gentleman is a pathetic figure " very clean and neat ;
and, in warm weather, proud of opening his waistcoat
half-way down, and letting so much of his frill be seen,
in order to show his hardiness as well as taste." The
gentle, unassuming creature must win the reader's heart ;
from the morning, when he is " cheapening a new old
print for his portfolio," or hearing of the newspapers,
until the evening, when he plays cards or goes to the
theatre, where, " during the splendid scenes, he is
anxious that the little boy should see." " When he gets
very old indeed, he will sit for whole evenings and say
little or nothing; but informs you that there is Mrs.
Jones (the housekeeper), ' sAe'/^ talk.'" His counter-
part, The Old Lady, " generally dresses in plain silks
that make a gentle rustling as she moves about in the
silence of her room ; and she wears a nice cap with a
lace border that comes under the chin. . . . Her waist
is rather tight and trim than otherwise, as she had a fine



MISCELLANIST. 1 23

one when young ; and she is not sorry if you see a pair
of her stockings on a table that you may be aware of
the neatness of her leg and foot." She thinks "the
clergyman a nice man," remembers being complimented
by Mr. Wilkes — "a sad, loose man, but engaging," and
is passionately loyal.

These are the principal portraits in the gallery, but
there are many others, drawn with equal care and the
same tender and humorous insight. The Maidservant,
who sighs over a good supper and reads Pamela, The
Waiter, with a little money in the funds, whose nieces
look up to him, and the delightful Seamen on Shorey
drawn from actual persons, as we learn from the Auto-
biography/, are among the best of these. From The
Conductor, Inside an Omnibus, On tJie Sight of Shops, etc.^
etc., we may learn of an ever-recurring delight in the
streets of London, as keen and more widely observant
than Lamb's. The Monthly Nurse, "a middle-aged,,
motherly sort of gossiping, hushing, flattering, dictatorial,
knowing, ignorant, not very delicate, comfortable, uneasy,,
slip-slop kind of blinking individual, between asleep and
awake," is obviously a near relation to some of Dickens's
characters ; and an unexpected likeness may be dis-
covered between the Maidservant and Miss Martineau's
Maid of all Worl^, readers of which supposed that the
authoress must have experienced the life she was describ-
ing. AVriting of a slightly later period, and with a
motive wholly didactic. Miss Martineau emjiloys the
same proportions of generalisation and detail, the sanie
balance between the type and the individual, and is



124 LEIGH HUNT.

•often led to a consideration of the same items. The
picture is far less attractive or artistic, but it is more
truthful by virtue of its high moral earnestness. Leigh
Hunt maintains, with his wonted optimism, that in spite
of indigestion and depression imitated from her young
mistress, the "mop and the scrubbing-brush" keep the
maidservant cheerful and healthy; whereas the object
of Miss Martineau's paper is to prove that the labour
usually demanded must ruin her health and shorten her
life.

Hunt approaches still more closely the method of
fiction in certain Tales (tastefully collected by Prof.
Knight, 1S91), which, like his narrative poems, are para-
phrases of favourite episodes in ancient literature. They
have been chosen, as a rule, for some touch of delicate
and rare sentiment which is most hapjiily reproduced
in a simple and effective style. They indicate certain
ideals of character in men and women, not altogether
usual, but full of romantic chivalry and charm, most fully
exemplified, perhaps, in A Generous Woman and the
Hamadryad. — " The hand that could strike my bee with
a lingering death, and prefer the embracing of the
dice-box to that of affectionate beauty, is not worthy of
love and the green trees."

The essays on animals, such as " The Cat by the
Pire," "A Pigeon making Love," and the amusing
papers on " The Zoological Gardens," are in a similar
vein to the above; and in speaking of inanimate objects
such as " Sticks," " Hats," and others even more remote
from humanity, he adopts a personal point of view.



MISCELLANIST. 1 25

The paper on " Coaches," extending over two Indicators^
is full of good things. After rejecting as " gouty and
superfluous " the carriage "full of cushions and comfort j
elegantly coloured inside and out ; rich, yet neat ; light
and rapid, yet substantial ; " and scouting the " ambition
to have Tandem written on his tombstone," he declares
that " a postchaise involves the idea of travelling, which
in the company of those we love is home in motion,"
and finally descends to a consideration of the hackney
coach : — " One of the greatest helps to a sense of merit in
other things is a consciousness of one's own wants. Do
you despise a hackney coach ? Get tired ; get old ; get
young again. Lay down your carriage, or make it less
uneasily too easy. Have to stand up half an hour, out
of a storm, under a gateway. Be ill, and wish to visit a
friend who is worse. Fall in love, and want to sit next
your mistress, or if all this will not do, fall in a cellar."
Of the coaches themselves, " some look chucked under
the chin, some nodding, some coming at you sideways."
Their submissiveness is only surpassed by the " vital
patience of the horses " : —

" Can anylliing Ijctter illustrate the poet's line about
' Years that bring the philosophic mind,'

than the still hung head, the dim indifferent eye, the dragged and
blunt-cornered mouth, and the gaunt imbecility of body dropping
its weight on three tired legs in order to give repose to the lame
one? When it has blinkers on, they seem to be shutting up its
eyes for death, like the windows of a house. Fatigue and the
habit of suffering have become as natural to the creature as the bit



126 LEIGH HUNT.

to its mouth. Once in half an liour it moves the position of its leg,
or shakes its drooping old ears. The whip makes it go, more from
habit than from pain. Its coat has become almost callous to minor
stings. The blind and staggering fly in autumn might come to die
against its clieek.

" Of a pair of hackney-coach horses, one so much resembles the
other that it seems unnecessary for them to compare notes. They
have that within which is beyond the comparative. They no longer
bend their heads towards each other as they go. They stand to-
gether as if unconscious of each other's company, but they are not.
An old horse misses his companion, like an old man. The presence
of an associate, who has gone through pain and suffering with us,
need not say anything. It is talk, and memory, and everything."

There are also a number of charming papers on the
different occupations of daily life. One of the most
trying of minor virtues is (jetting xvp on cold mornings.
The unwilling " are ' haled ' out of their beds, says
Milton, by ' harpy-footed furies,' fellows who come to
call them." The spirits may be revived, however, by
hreahfast ^ with flowers, " one of these green smiles
upon the board," and a book " standing among the cups,
edgeways, plam-looking, perhaps poor and battered,
perhaps bought of some dull huckster in a lane for a few
pence." Let us avoid, at this cheerful hour, '•' too much
potted gout and twelve shilling irritability." "Boiling,
proportion, and attention, are the three magic words of
tea-making. ... In tea, properly so-called, you should
slightly taste the sugar, be sensible of a balmy softness
in the milk, and enjoy at once a solidity, a delicacy, a
relish, and a fragrance in the tea." By a natural associa-

1 London Jourmil, July 2nd, 1834, seq.



MISCELLANIST. I27

tion our thoughts are turned to the Chinese : — " How
the Chinese came to invent tea, as Sancho would say, we
do not know ; but it is the most ingenious, humane, and
poetical of their discoveries. It is their epic poem;" '
and " the very word tea, so petty, so infantine, so
winking-eyed, so expressive, somehow or other, of some-
thing inexpressibly minute, and satisfied with a little
{tee !), resembles the idea one has (perhaps a very mis-
taken one) of that extraordinary people, of whom
Europeans know little or nothing, except that they sell
us this preparation, bow back again our ambassadors,
have a language consisting only of a few hundred words,
gave us China ware, and the strange pictures on our tea-
cups, made a certain progress in civilisation long before
we did, mysteriously stopped at it and would go no
further, and if numbers, and the customs of ' venerable
ancestors ' are to carry the day, are at once the most
populous and the most respectable nation on the face of
the earth." Inevitably reminded of Dr. Jolinson, the
essayist touches on a host of allusions to tea-drinking in
literature from Redi to D'Israeli, and compares a child
over a milk-bowl to " everything that is young and
innocent, the morning, the fields, the dairies " : —

"You m;^y make a landscape, if you will, out of your breakfast
table, better than Mr. Kirk's picture. Here where the bread stands
is its father, the field of corn, glowing in the sun, cut by the tawny
reapers, and presenting a path for lovers. The village church
(where they are to be married) is on a leafy slope, on one side, and
on the other is a woudy hill, with fountains. There, far over the

1 The Indicator— "■ Table Wits at Breakfast."



128 LEIGH HUNT,

water (for this basin of water, with island lumps of butter in it,
shall be the sea), are our friends the Chinese, picking the leaves of
their tea-trees, a beautiful plant ; or the Arabs plucking the berries
of the coffee-tree, a still more beautiful one, with a profusion of
white blossoms and an odour like jasmine. For the sugar (instead
of a bitterer thought, not so harmonious to our purpose, but not to
be forgotten at due times) you may think of Waller's Sacharissa, so
named from the Latin word for sugar (sacchanim), a poor compli-
ment to the lady; but the lady shall sweeten the sugar, instead of
the sugar doing honour to the lady ; and she was a very knowing as
well as beautiful woman, and saw farther into love and sweetness
than the sophisticate court poet ; so she would not have him, not-
withstanding his sugary verses, but married a higher nature."

In writing of natural objects, on wliich the Cockney
poet has put forth some of his best work, Leigh Hunt
dwells upon the same kind of cheerful detail, preaching
by the mere expression of happiness, " the art of making
the best of what is before us." He cannot appreciate, it
must be admitted, the lofty grandeur and rugged majesty
of Nature's highest moods ; but he loves the brook, the
hedge, the lane, the undulation, the " little glow-worm
lighting up her trusting lamp, to show her lover where
she is:" — in a word, the suburb. He heralds "the
union of the two best things in the world, the love of
nature, and the love of each other." The Months Descrip-
tive of the Successive Beauties of the Year, 1821, is a dainty
calendar of popular natural history, but the papers on
such congenial subjects as Spring and May -Day, are
quite as significant. The Stone, " musician of the
brook," is not overlooked, nor the Daisy with its
"homely face," — "Belle et douce marguerite, aimable



MISCELLANIST. 1 29

sceur du roi king-cup, we would tilt for thee with a
hundred pens, against the stoutest poet that did not find
perfection in thy cheek."

One who talks so much, and all his writings are
colloquial, is naturally often reduced to be witty upon
the weather^ and thereby becomes occasionally tedious.
We hear too much about the duty of cheerfulness, though
it should be remembered in extenuation that the essays
were written at different times, for different papers, alter-
nating with others on very different subjects, and were
never intended by their author to be considered e^i masse.
He has published, indeed, through a lapse of memory,
two papers on A Rainy Day {Indicator, June 21, 1S20,
and London Journal, Aug. i, 1835), which are strangely
dissimilar. In the former, after recounting the clever
imitation of Tate Wilkinson, by Charles Matthews, after-
wards incorporated in the Autobiography, and dilating
upon the folly of not lighting a fire on a cold day be-
cause it is summer, he stoops to chuckle over the agonies
of a fat leg in a white stocking splashed by the mud. In
the latter he gives us a charming dialogue between
" little fond heart and bright eyes," watching the rain, and
almost tear-conquered by her longing for a party, and
her "nice, kind mamma" who, instead of scolding, tries
to make it up to her child by a treat at home, bidding
her " make the best of a bad day by thinking of some-
thing superior to it." Mists and Fogs, A Dusty Day, To
One Whom Bad Weather Depresses, and Bad Weather, are
all directed towards the same object. In the course of
the last he naively apologises for not being so pleasant as

I



130 LEIGH HUNT.

he desired " because some friends of ours the other night
were the 2^l^(i-^(intest 2)eople in the world till five 6'clocTc
in the morning." In Fine Days in January and
Fehru'xry, and the two famous papers entitled Now, he
dwells, on the other hand, on the positive delights of
good weather.

Leigh Hunt possesses both wit and humour in no
ordinary degree, and he is an admirable critic of these
qualities in others ; yet nowhere has he failed so lament-
ably as in certain deliberate attempts at being funny. A
Letter to the Bells of a Fari&h Church in Italy, The True
Enjoyment of Splendour, and his version of Cresset's Ver-
Vert are really amusing, but the sheer buffoonery of
Carfington Bhmdell, Esq., and of Jack Abbot's Breakfast
is depressing in the extreme. The animal spirits, else-
where so delightful, have run riot, and are veritably
drunk with noisy laughter. The former essay, however,
is partially redeemed by one excellent paragraph : —

" You know, obsen-ant reader, the way in which sheep carry
themselves on abrupt and saltatory occasions ; how they follow one
another with a sort of spurious and involuntary energy ; what a
pretended air of determination they have ; how they really have it,
as far as example induces and fear propels them ; with what a heavy
kind of lightness they take the leap ; how brittle in the legs, lumpish
in the body, and insignificant in the face ; how they seem to quiver
with apprehension while they are bold in act ; and with what a
provoking and massy springiness they brush by you, if you happen
to be in the way, as though they wouldn't avoid the terrors of your
presence if possible, or rather as if they W'Ould avoid it with all their
hearts, but insulted you out of a desperation of inability. Baas inter-
mix their pensive objections with the hurr)', and a sound of feet as



MISCELLANIST. 13I

of water. Then, ever and anon, come the fiercer leaps, the con-
glomerating circuits, the dorsal visitations, the yelps and tongue
lollings of the dog, lean and earnest minister of compulsion ; and