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I made him business proposals. I had him into my room. I said, "You are a man of business, I believe?" He replied, "I am." "Very well," said I, "then let us be business-like. Here is an inkstand, here are pens and paper, here are wafers. What do you want?" In reply to this he made use of the figurative expression-which has something Eastern about it-that he had never seen the color of my money. "My amiable friend," said I, "I never have any money. I never know anything about money." "Well, sir," said he, "what do you offer if I give you time?" "My good fellow," said I, "I have no idea of time; but you say you are a man of business, and whatever you can suggest to be done, in a business-like way, with pen and ink and paper-and wafers, I am ready to do. Don't pay yourself at another man's expense (which is foolish), but be business-like." However he wouldn't be, and there was an end of it.

Leigh Hunt had no sense either of time or of money-a grave fault, perhaps an unpardonable vice, in a man who had a wife and children depending upon him. As long as he lived he was thriftless and needy, a lender and a borrower, so generous that he could never afford to be just, bringing upon those whom he loved sincerely a constant burden of debt and care. How reprehensible this was he seems never to have felt (though he blames himself freely and light-heartedly); and if the reader of his autobiography is disposed to feel sorry for Mrs. Hunt, it is not because her husband sets him the example. This was Leigh Hunt's one vice, never amended nor actively repented of. Yet he had had his warning. It is pathetic to compare with each other the two following passages, and to see how clearly Leigh Hunt foresaw his danger, and how incapable he proved of escaping it:

I have seen [he writes in 1808] so much of the irritabilities, or rather the miseries, accruing from want of a suitable income, and the best woman of her time was so worried and finally worn out with the early negligence of others in this respect, that if ever I was determined in anything it is to be perfectly clear of the world, and ready to meet the exigencies of a married

life before I do marry; for I will not see a wife who loves me and is the comfort of my existence, afraid to speak to me of money matters; she shall never tremble to hear a knock at the door, or to meet a quarter-day.

And in 1832:

I never hear a knock at the door but I think somebody is coming to take me away from my family. Last Friday I was sitting down to dinner. . . when I was called away by a man who brought an execution into my house for forty shillings.

And it must have "tasted salt" to him to ask and receive a pension from the representatives of the prince whom he had so courageously if unwisely attacked in his hot youth.

We do not excuse the selfishness which this unthrift argues. Leigh Hunt might have given a practical proof of his love for his wife and children if he had mastered his constitutional dislike to hard facts, and cultivated justice rather than sensibility. But we claim for him an exemption from other and more common forms of selfishness. His son attributes to him, as two especial characteristics, an excessive wish to abstain from causing pain, and an "ultra-conscientiousness" which resulted in uncertainty of purpose; but though the consequence of this combination was too often a defective balance-sheet, in that affectionate family there seems to have been little thought of reparation or forgiveness due on the part of creditor or of debtor. Yet we feel that they might justly have complained of family interests postponed to those of friendship, of hardearned money lightly spent, sudden and capricious change of domicile, long, painful, and expensive journeys, sanguine schemes which cost money to begin and made none in the end, hospitality which could not be afforded, and generosity which gave out of an empty purse; errors which are severely judged by the hard English sense of justice, and rightly so. But he would have been easily forgiven by Uncle

Toby and the Vicar of Wakefield, and | Hunt together was broken by Shelley's

Sir Roger and Squire Allworthy, and others of the dear ideal folk whom he liked nearly as well as his more substantial friends; and, we may be sure, by Charles Lamb himself, and by Shelley too. He never spared his labor, nor even his health. If he spent foolishly, he earned industriously. His gentleness and cheerfulness melted Carlyle, though well aware of the hugger-mugger, comfortless existence of his neighbor's family.

Released from prison, with a constitution injured by confinement and finances hopelessly confused, Leigh Hunt struggled on for some years, perhaps the happiest of his life, for he

death. Byron was tired of him, and Hunt had not the tact to leave him alone. We give Byron's version of the estrangement rather than that of the other, for Leigh Hunt's answer for himself is a weaker apology, and had better have remained unwritten:

Hunt's letter is probably the exact piece of vulgar coxcombry you might expect from his situation. He is a good man, with some poetical elements in his chaos; but spoilt by the Christ-Church Hospital and a Sunday newspaper,-to say nothing of the Surrey jail, which conceited him into a martyr. . . . But Leigh Hunt is a good man and a good father-see his odes to all the Masters Hunt; a good husband -see his sonnet to Mrs. Hunt; a good

a great coxcomb, and a very vulgar person in everything about him. But that's not his fault, but of circumstances.

was a poet, young and hopeful, bring friend-see his epistles to different people; ing out his poems, the "Story of Rimini" and "Foliage," and the Indicator, which contains many of his most brilliant prose essays; and he was enjoying the friendship and fighting the battles of Keats and Shelley.

In 1821 came his visit to Italy, the rise and fall of his friendship with Byron, his ill-advised literary venture in that company-the earthen pot with the pot of brass-Shelley's death and lyric funeral-a period full of high thoughts and romantic fancies, only illstarred because poets and their families must eat to live.

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The death of Shelley was an irreparable loss to the friend who not only returned his love, but looked to him in everything as benefactor and sellor. Not only did Leigh Hunt never forget Shelley, but we may almost say that as long as he lived Shelley was never absent from his thought.

I cannot help thinking of him [he writes] as if he were alive as much as ever, so unearthly has he always appeared to me, and so seraphical a thing of the elements.

And again:

You see I write in spirits-I do so even though I never know what a mirthful thought is; but I think of dear, dear Shelley, and the want of his presence comes on me like a chill.

Again, though with no direct allusion to Hunt, he writes:

The pity of these men is that they never lived in high life nor in solitude; there is no medium for the knowledge of the busy or the still world. . . . If admitted into high life for a season, it is merely as spectators-they form no part of the mechanism thereof. Now Moore and I, the one by circumstances, and the other by birth, happened to be free of the corporation, and to have entered into its pulses and passions, quarum partes fuimus.

Well might Shelley say, "The vulgarity of rank and fashion is as gross, in its way, as that of poverty," and "Byron has many generous and exalted qualities, but the canker of aristocracy wants to be cut out."

Byron was to some extent in the right. Leigh Hunt was a vain man, whose self-assertion was sometimes exaggerated; he was a modest man, whose modesty is partly that of one who is not sure of himself, and does not always know what is a liberty and what an acceptable freedom; and modesty and vanity together made him sensitive and apt to take offence. It is almost incredible that he should have misunderstood Napier's request for

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The bond which kept Byron and "gentleman-like" article, as a sneer at

his birth; and when Macaulay put the matter right, Leigh Hunt showed as little dignity in his prompt reconciliation as in his unnecessary offence.

He was, indeed, seldom dignified. In his crusade against English laws and institutions he suggests to us Don Quixote mounted on Sancho's ass. His appreciation of his own deeds and sufferings is sometimes petty; his mention of the great is sometimes vulgar. On paper he could be as impudent as Monckton Milnes, without the fun and high spirits which commended impudence in that exuberant humorist. This want of taste was partly a natural defect, but much more the result of too early praise, followed by illiberal detraction and savage abuse. Such treatment might have poisoned all the honey on Hybla; but Leigh Hunt became neither sour nor bitter.

We return to the autobiography, a work which no one can read without loving, or at least liking, the author. He was a master of the art of portraitpainting-clear, humorous, and sympathetic. Where, for instance, shall we find a more graceful and vivid representation of the tragic and the comic muse than in these sketches of Pasta and Mrs. Jordan?

(Pasta).-She was a great tragic actress, and her singing, in point of force, tenderness and expression, was equal to her acting. All noble passions belonged to her, and her very scorn seemed equally noble, for it trampled only on what was mean.

When she measured her enemy from head to foot, in "Tancredi," you really felt for the man at seeing him so reduced to nothingness. . . . And when, in the part of Medea, she looked on the children she was about to kill, and tenderly parted their hair, and seemed to mingle her very eyes in lovingness with theirs, uttering at the same time notes of the most wandering and despairing sweetness, every gentle eye melted into tears. .. Perfect truth, graced by idealism, was the secret of Pasta's greatness. truth first always; and in so noble and sweet a mind grace followed it as a natural consequence.

She put

(Mrs. Jordan).-In comedy nature had never been wanting; and there was one comic actress who was nature herself, in

one of her most genial forms. This was Mrs. Jordan; who, though she was neither beautiful, nor handsome, nor even pretty, nor accomplished, nor "a lady," nor anything conventional or comme il faut whatsoever, yet was so pleasant, so cordial, so natural, so full of spirits, so healthily constituted in mind and body, had such a shapely leg withal, charming a voice, and such a happy and happy-making expression of countenance, that she appeared something superior to all those requirements of acceptability, and to hold a patent from Nature herself for our delight and good opinion.

SO

She made even Methodists love her. A touching story is told of her apologizing to a poor man of that persuasion for having relieved him. He had asked her name, and she expressed a hope that he would not feel offended when the name was told him. On hearing it the honest Methodist shed tears of pity and admiration, and trusted that he could do no wrong in begging a blessing on her head.

. . Mrs. Jordan was inimitable in exemplifying the consequences of too much restraint in ill-educated country girls, in romps, in hoydens, and in wards on whom the mercenary have designs. She wore a bib and tucker and pinafore with a bouncing propriety fit to make the boldest spectator alarmed at the idea of bringing such a household responsibility on his shoulders. To see her, when thus attired, shed blubbering tears for some disappointment, and eat all the while a great thick slice of bread and butter, weeping and moaning and munching, and eying at every bite the part she meant to bite next, was a lesson against will and appetite worth a hundred sermons.

His portrait of Wordsworth is full of humor, and the malice which inspires it was not incompatible with genuine admiration:

Mr. Wordsworth, whom Mr. Hazlitt designated as one that would have had the wide circle of his humanities made still wider, and a good deal more pleasant, by dividing a little more of his time between his lakes in Westmoreland and the hotels in the metropolis, had a dignified manner, with a deep and roughish, though not unpleasing voice, and an exalted mode of speaking. He had a habit of keeping his left hand in the bosom of his waistcoat, and in this attitude, except when he turned round to take one of the subjects of his criticism from the shelves (for

his contemporaries were there also), he sat dealing forth his eloquent, but hardly catholic judgments. In his "father's house" there were not "many mansions." He was as sceptical on the merits of all kinds of poetry but one as Richardson was on those of the novels of Fielding.

Under the study in which my visitor and I were sitting was an archway leading to a nursery ground; a cart happened to go through it while I was inquiring whether he would take any refreshment, and he uttered in so lofty a voice the words, "Anything which is going forward," that I felt inclined to ask him whether he would take a piece of the cart. Lamb would certainly have done it.

Walter Scott said that the eyes of Burns were the finest he ever saw. I cannot say the same of Mr. Wordsworth's; that is, not in the sense of the beautiful, or even of the profound. But certainly I never beheld eyes that looked so inspired or supernatural. They were like fires, halfburning, half-smouldering, with a sort of acrid fixture of regard, and seated at the further end of two caverns. One might imagine Ezekiel or Isaiah to have had such eyes. The finest eyes, in every sense of the word, which I have ever seen in a man's head (and I have seen many fine ones) are those of Thomas Carlyle.

Every word that Leigh Hunt wrote about Keats and Shelley is worth reading. This "matchless fireside companion," as Lamb called him, had, beyond all other points of genius, the genius of friendship. No man ever chose his friends more worthily, nor loved them more, nor was better loved in return.

Keats and I might have been taken for friends of the old stamp, between whom there was no such thing even as obligation, except the pleasure of it. I could not love him as deeply as I did Shelley. That was impossible. But my affection was only second to the one which I entertained for that heart of hearts. Keats, like Shelley himself, enjoyed the usual privilege of greatness with all whom he knew, rendering it delightful to be obliged by him, and an equal, and not greater, delight to oblige. It was a pleasure to his friends to have him in their houses, and he did not grudge it. When "Endymion" was published he was living at Hampstead with his friend Charles Armitage Brown, who attended him most

affectionately through a severe illness, and with whom, to their great mutual enjoyment, he had taken a journey into Scotland. The lakes and mountains of the North delighted him exceedingly. He beheld them with an epic eye. Afterwards he went into the South, and luxuriated in the Isle of Wight. On Brown's leaving home a second time to visit the same quarter, Keats, who was too ill to accompany him, came to reside with me, when his last and best volume of poems appeared, containing "Lamia," "Isabella," the "Eve of St. Agnes," and the noble fragment of "Hyperion." I remember Lamb's delight and admiration on reading this book; how pleased he was with the designation of Mercury as "the star of Lethe" (rising, as it were, and glittering as he came upon that pale region), and the fine, daring anticipation in that passage of the second poem:

So the two brothers and their murdered man
Rode past fair Florence.

So also the description, at once delicate and gorgeous, of Agnes praying beneath the painted window. The public are now well acquainted with those and other passages, for which Persian kings would have filled a poet's mouth with gold. Of Charles Lamb he writes:

As his frame, so was his genius. It was as fit for thought as could be, and equally as unfit for action; and this rendered him melancholy, apprehensive, humorous, and willing to make the best of everything as it was, both from tenderness of heart and abhorrence of alteration. His understanding was too great to admit an absurdity; his frame was not strong enough to deliver it from a fear. His sensibility to strong contrasts was the foundation of his humor, which was that of a wit at once melancholy and willing to be pleased. He would beard a superstition and shudder at the old phantasm while he did it. One could have imagined him cracking a jest in the teeth of a ghost and then melting into thin air himself, out of sympathy with the awful. His humor and his knowledge both were those of Hamlet, of Molière, of Carlin, who shook a city with laughter, and, in order to divert his melancholy, was recommended to go and hear himself.

Of Shelley, "Leontius" (as Shelley called him) says-but the whole book is full of love and regret for his dearest friend:

He was like a spirit that had darted out of its orb and found itself in another world. I used to tell him that he had come from the planet Mercury. When I heard of the catastrophe that overtook him it seemed as if this spirit, not sufficiently constituted like the rest of the world to obtain their sympathy, yet gifted with a double portion of love for all living things, had been found dead in a solitary corner of the earth, its wings stiffened, its warm heart cold-the relics of a misunderstood nature, slain by the ungenial elements.

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A man idolized by his friends, studious, temperate, of the gentlest life and conversation, and willing to have died to do the world a service. For my part I never can mention his name without a transport of love and gratitude. I rejoice to have partaken of his cares, and to be both suffering and benefiting from him at this moment; and whenever I think of a future state, and of the great and good Spirit that must pervade it, one of the first faces I humbly hope to see there is that of the kind and impassioned man whose intercourse conferred on me the title of the friend of Shelley. . .

...

Shelley... might well call himself Ariel. All the more enjoying part of his poetry is Ariel-the delicate yet powerful spirit, jealous of restraint, yet able to serve; living in the elements and the flowers; treading the "ooze of the salt deep," and running "on the sharp wind of the North;" feeling for creatures unlike himself; "flaming amazement" on them, too, and singing exquisitest songs. Alas! and he suffered for years, as Ariel did in the cloven pine; but now he is out of it, and serving the purposes of Beneficence with a calmness befitting his knowledge

and his love.

And of Coleridge:

open, indolent, good-natured mouth. This boylike expression was very becoming in one who dreamed and speculated as he did when he was really a boy, and who passed his life apart from the rest of the world with a book and his flowers. His forehead was prodigious-a great piece of placid marble- and his fine eyes, in which all the activity of his mind seemed to concentrate, moved under it with a sprightly ease, as if it was pastime to them to carry all that thought. . . .

His room looked upon a delicious prospect of wood and meadow, with colored gardens under the window, like an embroidery to the mantle. I thought, when I first saw it, that he had taken up his dwelling-place like an abbot. Here he cultivated his flowers, and had a set of birds for his pensioners, who came to breakfast with him. He might have been taking his daily stroll up and down, with his black coat and white locks, and a book in his hand, and was a great acquaintance of the little children. His main occupation, I believe, was reading. He loved to read old folios, and to make old voyages with Purchas and Marco Polo, the seas being in good visionary condition, and the vessel well stocked with botargoes.

Such portrait-painting as this is as good in its straightforward vision as the best bits of Carlyle. Here is no elaborate piecing out of impressions to make up a paragraph, but the natural expression of a clear and true mental picture.

Much of Leigh Hunt's prose was written for the day, and meant to be forgotten to-morrow. His "Men, Women, and Books," the transcriptions from Italian romances, the "Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla" (set off by Doyle's delightful illustrations), and the "Wit and Humor," served the purpose for which they were written, and may now be left on the shelf. The "Essays" remain, and have much of the felicity Coleridge was as little fitted for action of the autobiography. As an essayist, as Lamb, but on a different account. Hunt will bear comparison with HazHis person was of a good height, but as litt, if not with Lamb himself; though, sluggish and solid as the other's was light indeed, it is only fair to remember that and fragile. He had, perhaps, suffered Hunt, Hazlitt, and Lamb did not copy it to look old before its time for want one another, but used a common lanof exercise. . . . Nevertheless there was something invincibly young in the look of guage. his face. It It round and freshseems strange, nowadays, that colored, with agreeable features and an Leigh Hunt, as a poet, should have been

was

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