“Every reader turns with pleasure to those passages of Horace, Pope, and Boileau, which describe how they lived, and where they dwelt.”
Samuel Rogers—Preface to An Epistle to a Friend.Some thirty years ago, three youths went forth, one fine
summer’s day, from the quiet town of Mansfield, to enjoy a long
luxurious ramble in Sherwood forest. Their limbs were full of
youth—their hearts of the ardour of life—their heads of dreams of beauty. The
future lay before them, full of brilliant, but undefined achievements in the land of poetry and
romance. The world lay around them, fair and musical as a new paradise. They traversed long
dales, dark with heather—gazed from hilltops over still and immense
landscapes—tracked the margins of the shining waters that hurry over the clear gravel of
that ancient ground, and drank in the freshness of the air, the odours of the forest, the
distant cry of the curlew, and the music of a whole choir of larks high above their heads.
Beneath the hanging boughs of a wood-side they threw themselves down to lunch, and from their
pockets came forth, with other good things, a book. It was a new book. A hasty peep into it had
led them to believe that it would blend well in the perusal with the spirit of the region of
Robin Hood and Maid Marian, and with the
| 348 | Leigh Hunt. |
For thirty years and more from that time the author of Rimini has gone on adding to the wealth of English literature, and to the claims on his countrymen to gratitude and affection. The bold politician, when it required moral bravery to be honest; the charming essayist; the poet, seeming to grow with every new effort only more young in fancy and vigorous in style—he has enriched his country’s fame, but his country has not enriched him. It is still time to think of it, and it might save many future regrets, if a government, becoming daily more liberal, were to show that it knows the wishes of the public, and is glad to fulfil them.
We have the authority of Mr. Leigh Hunt himself, in a memoir
written six and thirty years ago, for the fact that he was born in 1784, at
Southgate. His parents were the Rev. J.
Hunt, at that time tutor in the family of the Duke of
Chandos, and Mary, daughter of Stephen Shewell, merchant of Philadelphia, whose sister was
the lady of Mr. President West. Thus the poet was by his
mother’s marriage nearly related to the great American painter; and here, he says, he
could enlarge seriously and proudly; but this boasting, it turns out very characteristically,
is not of any adventitious alliance with cele-
| Leigh Hunt. | 349 |
That is a fine filial eulogy; but still finer and more eloquent has been
the practical one of the life and writings of the son. Whoever knows anything of these,
perceives how the qualities of the mother have lived on, not only in the grateful
admiration of the poet, but in his character and works. This is another proud testimony
added to the numerous ones revealed in the biographies of illustrious men, of the vital and
all-prevailing influence of mothers. What does not the world owe to noble-minded women in
this respect? and what do not women owe to the world and themselves in the consciousness of
the possession of this authority? To stamp, to mould, to animate to good, the generation
that succeeds them, is their delegated office. The are admitted to the co-workmanship with
God; his actors in the after age are placed in their hands at the outset of their career,
when they are plastic as wax, and pliant as the green withe. It is they who can shape and
bend as they please. It is they—as the your, beings advance into the world of life,
as passions kindle, as eager desires seize them one after another, as they ire alive with
ardour, and athirst for knowledge and experience of the great scene of existence into which
they are
| 350 | Leigh Hunt. |
It is what we could hardly have expected, that Leigh Hunt is
descended of a high Church and Tory stock. On his father’s side his ancestors were Tories
and Cavaliers, who fled from the tyranny of Cromwell,
and settled in Barbadoes. For several generations they were clergymen.
His grandfather was rector of St.
Michael’s, in Bridgetown,
Barbadoes. His father was intended for the same profession, but
being sent to college at Philadelphia, he there commenced, on the
completion of his studies, as a lawyer, and married. It was, again, curious, that the
Revolution breaking out, the conservative propensities of the family broke out so strong in
him, as to cause him to flee for safety to England, as his ancestors had formerly fled from it.
He had been carted through Philadelphia by the infuriated mob, only
escaped tarring and feathering by a friend taking the opportunity of overturning the tar-barrel
set ready in the street, and, being consigned to the prison, he escaped in the night by a bribe
to the keeper. On the arrival of his wife in England, some time afterwards, she found him who
had left America a lawyer, now a clergyman, preaching from the pulpit, tranquillity. Mr. Hunt seems to have been one of those who are not made to
succeed in the world. He did not obtain preferment, and fell into much distress. At one time he
was a very popular preacher, and was invited by the Duke of
Chandos, who had a seat hear Southgate, to become tutor to his nephew, Mr. Leigh. Here he occupied a house at
Southgate called Eagle Hall; and here his
| Leigh Hunt. | 351 |
Mr. Hunt, in his autobiography, describes his mother as feeling the distresses into which they afterwards fell very keenly, yet bearing them patiently. She is represented as a tall, lady-like person, a brunette, with fine eyes, and hair blacker than is seen of English growth. Her sons much resembled her.
At seven, Leigh Hunt was admitted into the grammar school of Christ’s hospital, where be remained till he was fifteen, and received a good foundation in the Greek and Latin languages. Mr. Hunt describes very charmingly the two houses where, as a boy, he used to visit with his mother; one of these being that of West, the painter, who had married his mother’s aunt; the aunt, however, being much of the same age as herself: the other was that of Mr. Godfrey Thornton, of the great mercantile house of that name. “How I loved,” says Leigh Hunt, “the graces in the one, and everything in the other! Mr. West had bought his house not long, I believe, after he came to England; and he had added a gallery at the back of it, terminating in a couple of lofty rooms. The gallery was a continuation of the hall passage, and, together with the rooms, formed three sides of a garden, very small, but elegant, with a grass-plot in the middle, and busts upon stands under an arcade, in the interior, the gallery made an angle at a little distance as you went up it; then a shorter one, and then took a longer stretch into the two rooms; and it was hung with his sketches and pictures all the way. In a corner between the two angles, and looking down the lower part of the gallery, was a study, with casts of Venus and Apollo on each side of the door. The two rooms contained the largest of the pictures; and in the further one, after stepping softly down the gallery, as if respecting the dumb life on the walls, you generally found the mild and quiet artist at his work; happy, for he thought himself immortal.” West, it is well known, was brought up a Quaker, and had been so poorly educated that he could hardly read. Leigh Hunt states his belief that West did a great deal of work for George III. for very little profit; then, as since, the honour was thought of itself nearly enough.
“As Mr. West,” continues Leigh Hunt, “was almost sure to
| 352 | Leigh Hunt. |
Here Mrs. West and Mrs. Hunt used to sit talking of old times and Philadelphia. West never made his appearance, except at dinner and tea-time, retiring again to his painting-room directly afterwards; but used to contrive to mystify the embryo poet with some such question as, “Who was the father of Zebedee’s children?” “The talk,” he says, “was quiet; the neighbourhood quiet; the servants quiet; I thought the very squirrel in the cage would have made a greater noise anywhere else. James the porter, a fine athletic fellow, who figured in his master’s pictures as an apostle, was as quiet as he was strong. Even the butler, with his little twinkling eyes, full of pleasant conceit, vented his notions of himself in half tones and whispers.”
The house of the Thorntons was a different one, and a more socially attractive
place. “There was quiet in the one; there were beautiful statues and pictures; and
there was my Angelica for me, with her intent eyes at the fireside.
But, besides quiet in the other, there was cordiality, and there was music, and a family
brimful of hospitality and good-nature; and dear Almeria
T., now Mrs. P—e, who in vain pretends that she is growing old. These
were indeed holidays on which I used to go to Austin Friars. The
house, according to my boyish recollections, was of the description I have been ever
fondest of; large, rambling, old-fashioned, solidly built; resembling the
| Leigh Hunt. | 353 |
The whole description of this charming and cordial family, is one of those beautiful and sunny scenes in human life, to which the heart never wearies of turning. It makes the rememberer exclaim:—“Blessed house! May a blessing be upon your rooms, and your lawn, and your neighbouring garden, and the quiet old monastic name of your street; and may it never he a thoroughfare; and may all your inmates he happy! Would to God one could renew, at a moment’s notice, the happy hours we have enjoyed in last times, with the same circles, in the same houses!”
But a wealthy aunt, with handsome daughters, came from the West Indies, and Great Ormond-street, and afterwards Merton, in Surrey, where this aunt went to live, became a new and happy resort for him.
After Leigh Hunt quitted Christchurch, of which, and of
the life there, he gives a very interesting description, at the age of sixteen was published a
volume of his schoolboy verses. He then spent some time in what he calls “that gloomiest
of all ‘darkness palpable’”—a lawyer’s
office; he became theatrical critic in a newly established paper, the News; and his zeal, integrity, and talent, formed a striking contrast to
the dishonest criticism and insufferable dramatic nonsense then in public favour. In 1805, an
amiable nobleman, high in office, procured him an
humble post under government but this was as little calculated for the public spirit of honest
advocacy
| 354 | Leigh Hunt. |
What a different portrait is this to that of the affected, finicking, artificial
cockney, which the critics of that day would fain have made the world accept for
Leigh Hunt. Lord Byron was a man of
the world as well as a poet; he could see into
| Leigh Hunt. | 355 |
In process of time the Examiner was made over to other parties, and Mr. Hunt devoted his pen more exclusively to literary subjects. His connexion with Byron and Shelley led him to Italy, where the Liberal, a journal the joint product of the pens of those three celebrated writers, was started but soon discontinued; and Leigh Hunt, before his return, saw the cordiality of Lord Byron towards him shaken, and witnessed one of the most singular and solemn spectacles of modern times—the burning of the body of his friend Shelley on the sea-shore, where he had been thrown up by the waves.
The occasion of Leigh Hunt’s visit to Italy,
and its results, have been placed before the public, in consequence of their singular
nature, and of the high standing of the parties concerned, in a more prominent position
than any other portion of his life. There has been much blame and recrimination thrown
about on all sides. Mr. Hunt has stated his own case, in his work on
Lord Byron and his Contemporaries. The
case of Lord Byron has been elaborately stated by Mr. Moore, in his Life and Letters of the noble poet. It is not the place
here to discuss the question; but posterity will very easily settle it. My simple opinion
is, that Mr. Hunt had much seriously to complain of, and, under the
circumstances, has made his statement with great candour. The great misfortune for him, as
for the world, was, that almost immediately on his arrival in Italy with his family, his
true and zealous friend, Mr. Shelley, perished From
that moment, any indifferent spectator might have foreseen the end of the connexion with
Lord Byron. He had numerous aristocratic friends, who would, and
who did spare no pains to alarm his pride at the union with men of the determined character
of Hunt and Hazlitt for
progress and free opinion. None worked more earnestly for this purpose, by his own
confession, than Moore. From that hour there could be nothing for
Mr. Hunt but disappointment and mortification.
| 356 | Leigh Hunt. |
The chief places of Mr. Hunt’s Italian sojourn were Pisa, Genoa, and Florence. At Leghorn he and his family landed, and almost immediately went on with Shelley to Pisa, where Byron joined them; but at Monte Nero, near Leghorn, was at once introduced to a curious scene of mixed English and Italian life. “In a day or two, I went to see Lord Byron, who was in what the Italians call villeggiatura, at Monte Nero; that is to say, enjoying a country house for the season. I there met with a singular adventure, which seemed to make me free of Italy and stilettos, before I had well set foot in the country. The day was very hot; the road to Monte Nero was very hot, through dusty suburbs; and when I got there, I found the hottest-looking house I ever saw. Not content with having a red wash over it, the red was the most unseasonable of all reds, a salmon colour. Think of this flaming over the country in a hot Italian sun.
“But the greatest of all the heats was within. Upon seeing Lord Byron, I hardly knew him, he was grown so fat; and he was longer in recognising me, I was grown so thin. He was dressed in a loose nankeen jacket and white trowsers, his neckcloth open, and his hair in thin ringlets about his throat; altogether presenting a very different aspect from the compact, energetic, and curly-headed person whom I had known in England.
“He took me into an inner room, and introduced me to a young lady in a state of great
agitation. Her face was flushed, her eyes lit up, and her hair, which she wore in that
fashion,
| Leigh Hunt. | 357 |
“How long things had continued in this state I cannot say but the hour was come when
Lord Byron and his friends took their evening ride,
and the thing was to be put all end to somehow. Fletcher, the valet, had been despatched for the police, and was not
returned. . . . . At length we set out, Madame
Guiccioli earnestly entreating ‘Bairon’ to keep hack, and all of
us uniting to keep in advance of Conte Pietro, who
was exasperated. It was a curious moment for a stranger from England. I fancied myself
pitched into one of the scenes in the Mysteries of Udolpho, with Montoni and his tumultuous
companions. Everything was new, foreign, and violent. There was the lady, flushed and
dishevelled, exclaiming against the ‘scelerato’; the young count, wounded and threatening; the
assassin waiting for us with his knife; and last, not least in the novelty, my English
friend metamorphosed, round-looking, and jacketted, trying to damp all this fire with his
cool tones, and an air of voluptuous indolence. He had now, however, put on his loose
riding coat of mazarine blue, and his velvet cap, looking more lordly then, but hardly less
foreign. It was an awkward moment for him, not knowing what might happen; but he put a good
| 358 | Leigh Hunt. |
This was a curious introduction to Italian life. Leghorn, Mr. Hunt says, is a polite Wapping, with a square and a theatre. The country around, though delightful to a first view, from its vines hanging from the trees, and the sight of the Apennines, is uninteresting, when you become acquainted with it. They left here and proceeded to Pisa. There they occupied the ground floor of the Casa Lanfranchi, on the Lung’ Arno. The house is said to have been built by Michael Angelo, and is worthy of him. It is, says Mr. Hunt, in a bold and broad style throughout, with those harmonious graces of proportion which are sure to be found in an Italian mansion. The outside is of rough marble.
Here poor Shelley saw his friends settled in their apartments, and took his leave for ever! Here they spent their time in the manner which has been made so well known by the Life and Letters of Lord Byron,—talking or reading till afternoon in the house; then riding out to a wood or a vineyard, and firing pistols, after which they would occasionally alight at a peasant’s cottage, and eat figs in the shade-returning to dinner. “In the evening,” observes Mr. Hunt, “I seldom saw Byron. He recreated himself in the balcony, or with a book; and at night when I went to bed, he was just thinking of setting to work with Don Juan.”
In the autumn, they left Pisa for Genoa; and in their way visited the deserted house of Shelley. Wild as the place is, it now seemed additionally so. It was melancholy, its rooms empty, and its garden neglected, “The sea fawned upon the shore, as though it could do no harm.”
| Leigh Hunt. | 359 |
Genoa now became, as it would appear, the residence of Leigh Hunt for the greater part of the time that he continued in Italy, for he describes himself as quitting it for Florence, three years afterwards. Mrs. Shelley had preceded them thither, and had furnished houses both for herself and Lord Byron, in the village of Albaro. With her they took up their residence in the Casa Negroto. There were forty rooms in it, some of them such as would be considered splendid in England, and all neat and new, with borders and arabesques. The balcony and staircase were of marble; and there was a little flower garden. The rent was twenty pounds a year. Byron paid for his twenty-four pounds. It was called the Casa Saluzzi, was older and more imposing, with rooms in still greater plenty, and a good piece of ground. Mr. Hunt describes himself as passing a melancholy time at Albaro, walking about the stony alleys, and thinking of Shelley. Here the first number of that unfortunate publication, The Liberal, reached them; here they prepared the few numbers which succeeded it, and here the coldness between Byron and Hunt grew to its height, and they parted.
We next, and lastly, find Mr. Hunt at
Florence. “I hailed it,” he says, “as a good omen in
Florence, that the two first words that caught my ears were,
flowers and women—‘fiori’ and
‘donne.’ The night of our
arrival, we put up at an hotel in a very public street, and were kept awake by songs and
guitars. It was one of the pleasantest pieces of the south we had experienced; and, for the
moment, we lived in the Italy of books. One performer, to a jovial accompaniment, sang a
song about somebody’s fair wife—‘bianca
moglie’—which set the street in roars of laughter. From
the hotel, we went into a lodging in the street of beautiful women—Via
delle Belle Donne—a name which is a sort of tune to pronounce. We
there heard one night a concert in the street, and looking out, saw music stands, books,
etc. in regular order, and amateurs performing as in a room. Opposite our lodging was an
inscription on a house, purporting that it was the Hospital of the Monks of
Vallombrosa. Wherever you turned was music, or a graceful
memory. From the Vie delle Belle Donne, we went to live in the
Piazza Santa Croce, next to the church of that name, containing
the ashes of
| 360 | Leigh Hunt. |
“The church of Santa Croce,” says Mr.
Hunt, “would disappoint you as much inside as out, if the presence of
great men did not always cast a mingled shadow of the awful and beautiful over our
thoughts.” He then adds, “agreeably to our old rustic propensities, we did not
stop long in the city. We left Santa Croce to live at
Maiano, a village on the slope of one of the Fiesolan
hills, about two miles off. I passed there a very disconsolate time; yet
the greatest comfort I experienced in Italy was from being in that neighbourhood, and
thinking, as I went about, of Boccaccio.
Boccaccio’s father had a house at
Maiano, supposed to have been situate at the Fiesolan extremity
of the hamlet. That divine writer, whose sensibility outweighed his levity a hundred
fold—as a divine face is oftener serious than it is merry—was so fond of the
place, that he not only laid the two scenes of the Decamerone on each side of it, with the valley his
company resorted to in the middle, but has made the two little streams that embrace
Maiano, the Affrico and the Mensola, the hero and heroine of his
Nimphale Fiesolano. A lover and
his vestal mistress are changed into them, after the fashion of Ovid. The scene of another of his works is on the banks of the
Mugnone, a river a little distant; and the Decamerone is full of the neighbouring villages. Out of the windows of one side
of our house, we saw the turret of the Villa Gherardi, to which his
‘joyous company’ resorted in the first instance; a house belonging to the
Machiavelli was nearer, a little on the left;
and farther to the left, amongst the blue hills, was the white village of
Settignano, where Michael
Angelo was born. The house is still remaining in the possession of the
family. From our windows on the other side, we saw, close to us, the
Fiesole of antiquity and of Milton, the site of the Boccaccio house before
mentioned still closer, the valley of Ladies at our feet; and we looked towards the quarter
of
| Leigh Hunt. | 361 |
“But I stuck to my Boccaccio haunts, as to an old home. I lived with the divine human being, with his friends of the Falcon and the Basil, and my own not unworthy melancholy; and went about the flowery hills and lanes, solitary, indeed, and sick to the heart, but not unsustained. * * * My almost daily walk was to Fiesole, through a path skirted with wild myrtle and cyclamen; and I stopped at the cloister of the Doccia, and sate on the pretty melancholy platform behind it, reading, or looking though the pines down to Florence. In the valley of Ladies, I found some English trees,—trees not vine and olive,—and even a bit of meadow; and these, while I made them furnish me with a bit of my old home in the north, did no injury to the memory of Boccaccio, who is of all countries, and finds his home wherever we do ourselves, in love, in the grave, in a desert island.”
In the twenty-third article of the Wishing Cap, Mr. Hunt gives us this further description of Fiesole and the valley of Ladies:—
“Milton and Galileo give a glory to Fiesole beyond even its
starry antiquity: nor perhaps is there a name eminent in the best annals of
Florence, to which some connexions cannot be traced with this
favoured spot. When it was full of wood, it must have been eminently beautiful. It is at
present indeed full of vines and olives, but this is not wood woody:
not arboraceous, and properly sylvan. A few poplars and forest trees mark out the course of
the Affrico; and the convent ground contrived to retain a good slice
of evergreens, which make a handsome contrast on the hill-side with its white cloister. But
agriculture, quarries, and wood-fires have destroyed the rest. Nevertheless, I now found
the whole valley beautiful. It is sprinkled with white cottages; the corn-fields presented
agreeable paths, leading among vines and fig-trees; and I discovered even a meadow; a
positive English meadow, with the hay cut,
| 362 | Leigh Hunt. |
“A white convent, a woody valley, chestnut-trees intensely green, a sky intensely blue, a stream at which it is a pleasure to stop and drink,—behold a subject fit for a day in August.
“This then is the ‘Valle delle Donne. ’ If Boccaccio’s spirit ever visits his native country, here must it repose. It is a place for a knight in romance to take his rest in, his head on his elbow, and the sound of the water in his ear.
“I whisk to England in my Wishing Cap, and fetch the reader to enjoy the place with me.
“How do you like it? Is it not a glen most glen-icular? a confronting of two leafy
banks, with a rivulet between? Shouldn’t you like to live in the house over the way
where the doves are? If you walk a little way to the left through the chestnut trees, you
see Florence. The convent up above us on the right, is the one I
spoke of. There is nobody in it now, but a peasant for housekeeper. Look at this lad
coining down the path with his olive complexion and black eyes. He is bringing goats. I see
them emerging from the trees; huge creatures, that when they rise on their hind legs to
nibble the boughs, almost look formidable. There is Theocritus for you. And
| Leigh Hunt. | 363 |
From this charming and celebrated spot of earth, Leigh Hunt
turned northward and homeward through Switzerland and France. Every lover
of true poetry and of an excellent and high-hearted man, must regret that his visit to
Italy was dashed by such melancholy circumstances, for no man was ever made more thoroughly
to enjoy that fine climate and classical land. Yet as the friend of Shelley, Keats,
Charles Lamb, and others of the first spirits of
the age, Mr. Hunt must be allowed, in this respect, to have been one
of the happiest of men. It were no mean boon of providence to have been permitted to live
in the intimacy of men like these; but, besides this, he had the honour to suffer, with
those beautiful and immortal spirits, calumny and persecution. They have achieved justice
through death—he has lived injustice down. As a politician, there is a great debt of
gratitude due to him from the people, for he was their firm champion when reformers
certainly did not walk about in silken slippers. He fell on evil days, and he was one of
the first and foremost to mend them. In literature he has distinguished himself in
various walks; and in all he has manifested the same genial, buoyant, hopeful, and happy
spirit. His Sir Ralph Esher, a novel of Charles II’s time, is a work which is full of thought and fine painting
of men and nature. His Indicator, and his London Journal, abound with papers which make us in love at once
with the writer and ourselves. There is a charm cast over every-day life, that makes us
congratulate ourselves that we live. All that is beautiful and graceful in nature, and
love-inspiring in our fellow-men, is brought out and made part of our daily walk and pleasure.
His Months, a calendar of nature, bears testimony to his
intense love of nature, which breathes equally in every page of his poetry. In these prose
works, however, as well as in some of his earlier poetry, we find certain artificialities of
phrase, fanciful expressions, and what are often termed conceits, which the critics treated as
cockneyisms, and led them to style him the head of the Cockney school. There are certainly many
indications, particularly in The Months, of his regarding the country
rather as a visitor than an inhabitant. His “Standpunct,” as the Germans call it, his point of standing, or in our
phraseology, his point of view from which he contemplates nature, is the town. He thus produces
to a countryman a curious inversion of illustration. For instance, he compares April to a lady
watering her flowers at a balcony; and we almost expect him, in praising real flowers, to say
that they are nearly equal to artificial ones. But these are but the specks on a sun-disc, all
glowing with the most genuine love of nature. In no writer does the love of the beautiful and
the good more abound. And, after all, the fanciful epithets in which he endeavours to clothe as
fanciful notions, are, as he himself has explained, nothing whatever belonging to London or the
land of Cockayne, but to his having imbued his mind long and deeply with the poetry, and, as a
matter of course, with the poetic language of our older writers. In a wider acquaintance with
nature, the world, and literature, these have vanished from his style; and I know of no more
manly, English, and chastely vigorous style than that of his poems in general. In conformity
with the strictures of various critics, he has, moreover, rewritten his fine poem Rimini. It was objected that the story was not very moral,
and he has now, in the smaller edition published by Moxon, altered the story so is to palliate this objection as much as possible,
and, as he says, to bring it, in fact, nearer to the truth of the case. For my part, I know not
what moral the critics would have, if wretchedness and death as the consequence of sin, be not
a solemn moral, if the selfish old father, who deceives his daughter into a marriage by
presenting to her the proxy as the proposed spouse, is punished by finding his daughter and
this proxy prince, who went out from him with pomp and joy, soon come back to him in a hearse,
and with all his ambitious projects thus dashed to the ground, is not held as a solemn warning,
where shall such be found? However, the poet has shown his earnest desire to set himself right
with the public, and the public has now the poem in its two shapes, and can accommodate its
| Leigh Hunt. | 365 |
“The sacrifice By girls and shepherds brought, with reverend eyes, And goats with struggling horns and planted feet.” Of sylvan drinks and foods, simple and sweet, |
The sun is up, and ’tis a morn of May Round old Ravenna’s clear-shown towers and bay,— |
The days were then at close of autumn—still, A little rainy, and towards night-fall chill: There was a fitful moaning all abroad; And ever and anon over the road, The last few leaves came fluttering from the trees, etc. |
| 366 | Leigh Hunt. |
It remains only to take a glance or two at his English homes. To several of these we can trace him. Soon after his quitting Horsemonger-lane prison, he was living at Paddington, having a study looking over the fields towards Westbourne-green. In this he had a narrow escape one morning of being burnt, owing his escape to some “fair cousin” not named. There he was visited by Lord Byron and Wordsworth. At one time he was living at 8, York-buildings, New-road, Marylebone. In the London Journal of January 7, 1835, Mr. Hunt gives a very charming account of a very happy Twelfth Night spent there, and in commemoration of it planted some young plane trees within the rails by the garden gate. Under these trees, but a year or two ago, he had the pleasure of seeing people sheltering from the rain; but they are now cut down. Here he first had the pleasure of seeing John Keats, and here he was visited by Foscolo. At other times he lived in Lisson-grove; at Hampstead, in the Vale of Health, where, as already observed, Keats wrote Sleep and Poetry; at Highgate, near Coleridge; and at Woodcote-green, near Ashstead-park, in Surrey, where he laid the scene, and I believe wrote the romance, of Sir Ralph Esher.
Since his return to England he has lived chiefly in the suburbs of London, in
what Milton called “garden houses;” for some
years in Chelsea, near Thomas
Carlyle; and now in
| Leigh Hunt. | 367 |
Such, is a hasty sketch of the many wanderings and sojourns of Leigh Hunt. May his age be rewarded for the services of his youth. In closing this article I would, also with this wish, express another, and that is, that he would some time publish that small, but most beautiful manual of domestic devotion, called by him Christianism, and printed only for private circulation, some years ago. The object of this little work seems to be, to give to such as had not full faith in Christianity an idea of what is excellent in it, and by which they might be benefited and comforted, even though they could not attain full belief in its authenticity. The spirit and style of it are equally beautiful.