The metre here used, with its quick recurrence of rhyme and heavy equability of accent, is finely adopted for the utterance of the emotion which is as placid as despair. Giovanni's lament over his brother's body in the " Story of Rimini" is conceived with a similar emphasis of sorrow.

'But noble passion touched Giovanni's soul; He seemed to feel the clouds of habit roll

Away from him at once, with all their scorn; And out he spoke, in the clear air of morn:By heaven, by heaven, and all the better part Of us poor creatures with a human heart,

I trust we reap at last, as well as plough ;-
But there, meantime, my brother, liest thou;
And, Paulo, thou wert the completest knight,
That ever rode with banner to the fight;
And thou wert the most beautiful to see,
That ever came in press of chivalry;
And of a simple man thou wert the best,
That ever for his friend put spear in rest;
And thou wert the most meek and cordial,
That ever among ladies eat in hall;
And thou wert still, for all that bosom gored,
The kindest man that ever struck with
sword.'"'

Most of the phraseology of this passage is taken from an old romance, but few, in the face of ancient and modern precedent, will think the less of it on that account. The concluding lines of the sonnet on Kosciusko are yet more loftily and directly impressive.

course,

He stuck as firmly to his friend as horse;
And only showed, for so complete a youth,
Somewhat too perfect a regard for truth;
He owned 'twas inconvenient, sometimes felt
A wish 'twere buckled in another's belt,
Doubted its modesty, its use, its right,-
Yet, after all, remained the same true knight.
So potent is a custom early taught,

And to such straits may honest men be brought."

The fresh and quiet humor of the last couplet is as pleasant as one of Dryden's But it is in the versions of Chaucer. more airy exuberance of mirthful trifling that Leigh Hunt is specially at home. Take, for example, the lines "On seeing a Pigeon make love." "Is not the picture strangely like? Doesn't the very bowing strike ? Can any art of love in fashion Express a more prevailing passion? That air-that sticking to her sideThat deference, ill-concealing pride,That seeming consciousness of coat, And repetition of one note,Ducking and tossing back his head, As if at every bow he said,

Madam, by heaven,' or 'Strike me dead!'

And then the lady! look at her!
What bridling sense of character!
How she declines and seems to go,
Yet still endures him to and fro;

"And collected Virtue smiled To think how sovereign her enduring hour." Few will deny this to be great poetry in any or every sense of the word, full of solemnity and sobriety, and having a special character and music of its own. Probably what is meant is, that such lines are not sufficiently frequent in Leigh Hunt; that the application of great ideas to life," which we are now given to understand is the proper business of the poet, is for the most part ignored. Even in the hands of their first authors, these theories of the moral purpose in poetry are apt to become the merest dogmatism. Was Milton, for example, in the wrong, when he delighted in a poem so completely unmoral as the Metamorphoses of Ovid? And, on the other hand, when these theories "descend into the street," instead of helping the average reader to attend to something which he might otherwise be prone to neglect, they rather tend to confirm him in the desperate condition of the frequenters of the galleries of our theatres, who, as many may lately have had occasion to observe, applaud Cassio's diatribes against drinking with more warmth than anything else in Othello.

Leigh Hunt's own opinion on this matter may be inferred from his judgment of Coleridge's poetry, that it was 'on the whole the finest of its time, that is to say, the most quintessential, the most purely emanating from imaginative feeling, unadulterated by' thoughts' and manner."

And dresses it in its mild singing clothes." An exquisite line, which could scarcely be attributed to any one but Leigh Hunt, and which bears us refreshingly away from the neighborhood of the discontented criticism which refuses to take books as it finds them.

Leigh Hunt's own estimate of his poetical status was the reverse of overweening, but shows his usual discrimination. I please myself with thinking, that had the circumstances of my life permitted it, I might have done something a little worthier of acceptance in the way of 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. My propensity would have been (and oh! had my duties permitted, how willingly would I have passed my life in it! how willingly now pass it!) to write 'eternal new stories' in verse, of no great length, but just sufficient to vent the pleasure with which I am stung on meeting with some touching adventure, and which haunts me till I can speak of it somehow. I would have dared to pretend to be a servant in the train of Ariosto, nay, of Chaucer,

"-and far off his skirts adore."

As it is, his best poetical work is limited in quantity, and he must be included in the long list of poets whose infertility is a stock grievance. As he makes Apollo lament

"There's Collins, it's true, had a good deal to say,

But the dog had no industry, neither had
Gray,"

And the same might be said even more truly of Coleridge and others. On Leigh Hunt's part there was no lack of industry; but his amiable eagerness to leave the world better than he found it, beguiled him into the then dangerous path of political journalism, brought him into collision with the law of libel, and was every way unfavorable to free poetical activity. It would be hasty and ungrateful to affirm that the world is none the better for his struggles and sufferings. It may be believed, for instance,

that every ill-judged prosecution for libel must have forwarded the legitimate freedom of the press. And if the good that a man does may in any degree be measured by the abuse that he gets for doing it, Leigh Hunt must be ranked very high among reformers. "He will live and die, wrote Gifford, in reviewing his poems, unhonored in his own generation; and for his own sake it is to be hoped, moulder unknown in those which are to follow." One cannot but feel that a very clever, a very honest, and a very good natured man, to quote Macaulay's description of Leigh Hunt, must have done good to an extent very considerable indeed, to be written of in this fashion.

His occupations as a critic further contributed to withdraw Leigh Hunt from poetry, but this was a distraction scarcely to be regretted. The pleasure of hearing the judgments of a poet on fine specimens of his own art is rare enough to reconcile us to the loss of a certain proportion of his own poetical work, especially when the criticism is not of that barren sort which disdains to dwell upon minutiae of style. In order to be fully alive to the improvement brought about in popular taste by Leigh Hunt's criticism, it should be remembered that it appeared in days when the criticism in vogue was of the following "The very essence of versification is uniformity; and while anything like versification is preserved, it is evident that uniformity continues to be aimed at. What pleasure is to be derived from an occasional failure in this aim, we cannot exactly understand. must afford the same gratification, we should imagine, to have one of the buttons on a coat a little larger than the rest, or one or two of the pillars of a colonnade a little out of the perpendicular."

sort.

It

cused of corrupting the taste of Barry Cornwall, and which was called the cockney school, apparently from a notion that daisies ceased to be daisies when they grew at Hampstead.

"

Leigh Hunt also occupied himself a good deal with translation, chiefly from the Italian poets, and incurred remonstrances from Shelley on the point. "I am sorry to hear," Shelley wrote, "that you have employed yourself in translating Aminta, though I doubt not it will be a just and beautiful translation. You ought to exercise your fancy in the perpetual creation of new forms of gentleness and beauty." Yet here, too, there are compensations. The following, for example, from Martial, is as good as a morsel of Herrick :

I have purposely selected for quotation this urbane version of somewhat hackneyed lines, as it seems to have been ousted in text-books of literature and history-for example, in Mr. Green's

Short History"-by a dull ridiculous quatrain ending, "God have mercy on this sot, the angels will begin, terance purely savage and shocking without any touch of pleasantry. No one will doubt that the original is conceived in a jocose vein, however serious the underlying intention may have been. Leigh Hunt found the lines in Camden's

Remains," and no doubt shared Camden's error with respect to the character of Walter Map.-Fortnightly Review.

IN the familiar spectacle of our streets and alleys the effect of the national fireside ideal of life in modifying an imported type is not less strongly exemplified than in the higher walks of art. For while, on Pulcinella's native soil, his bachelor escapades and mishaps in courtship and wooing furnish the favorite entertainment of his lazzaroni audience, it is the privacy of Mr. Punch's hearth and home that is laid bare for the edification of the British public, and the somewhat strained state of his family relations that forms the subject of the drama at which they are invited to assist. Thus, even this disreputable wanderer, by appearing before us in the sacred character of husband and father, and transforming himself into what our French neighbors call un homme d'intérieur, casts a halo of English respectability over the doubtful antecedents of his vagrant career that not even his slightly exaggerated notions of conjugal discipline and mistaken views on nursery management altogether suffice to dissipate.

But our vagabond friend, if we may believe antiquarians, can lay claim to our respect on another and more unexpected ground-that of classical association and aristocratic antiquity of descent. And as in other pedigrees the mere fact of remoteness is held to ennoble ancestors whose deeds might not otherwise seem a title to honor, we may be excused from looking too closely into the character of the early Oscan dramas, or Atellan farces, in which our popular hero is supposed to have his prototype. Suffice it to say that they were ancient rustic performances, depending very much for their power to amuse on rude buffoonery and wit of the broadest sort. Having survived, in remote districts, from prehistorical down to classical times, they were introduced to Roman audiences from the Campanian town of Atella, the modern Aversa, close to which is Acerra, the traditional home of the Neapolitan Pulcinella.

A conspicuous figure in these rustic farces was a character called Maccus, and in a small bronze statue of this per

sonage discovered in Rome in 1727, but only known to us now from engravings, we recognize the deformed figure, exaggerated nose, and staring eyes so familiar to us on our puppet stage. But it is a singular circumstance that these characteristics are much more distinctly traceable in the expatriated Punch than in his Neapolitan original, who is simply a blundering clown, clad in a loose white blouse or smock frock, and wearing a black mask over the lower part of his face. As Andrea Perrucci, the writer of a book published in Naples in 1699 claims the creation of this part for a comedian named Silvio Fiorillo, who lived some time previously, when the original of the English Punch must have already started or been about to start on his travels, we may perhaps conclude that this actor developed or improved upon a previously existing type preserved unchanged in the more primitive drama of the wandering showman.

Punch, with many other foreign visitors of still more questionable character, made his first appearance in England shortly after the Restoration. We may safely conclude that "the famous Italian puppet-play" witnessed by Pepys at Covent Garden, on May 9, 1662, where he says there was great resort of gallants,' and by John Evelyn five years later, was no other than the drama of which the immortal hunchback is the hero. In neither of these records, indeed, is he mentioned by name; but under a later date, April 30, 1669, the following passage occurs in Pepys' diary: "Among poor people there in the alley, did hear them call their fat child Punch, which pleased me mightily, that word being become a word of common use for all that is thick and short.' And in Aubrey's "Surrey," in describing a room in Sir Samuel Lely's house at Whitehall, he says, On the top was a Punchinello holding a dial"-two instances of the use of the word which leave no doubt that the character was already familiar to the English public.

We next find our hero, about the year 1703, at Bartholomew Fair, enlivening

by his wit a puppet-play representing the "Creation of the World," a survival of the old miracle or mystery plays. At a similar spectacle at Bath, in 1709, Punch and his wife danced in the ark with spirits unsubdued by the cosmic catastrophe of the deluge, which formed the subject of the drama, and the incorrigible jester, putting his head out to survey the rising waters, remarked aside to the patriarch,It is a little foggy, Mr. Noah."

In the Spectator of March 16, 1710-11, appears a letter, written in the character of the under-sexton of St. Paul's, Covent Garden, complaining that his congregation took the warning of his bell, morning and evening, "to go to a puppet-show set forth by one Powell, under the Piazzas," and begging that for the future Punchinello may be persuaded to choose less canonical hours. From another letter in the same paper we gather that "Whittington and his Cat" was the piece which competed so detrimentally with the attractions of the Church, and that there appeared in it a trained pig, which in the first scene danced a minuet with Punch. This puppet-theatre was the favorite lounge of the fashionable world, and among the most frequented places of amusement of its day; but since then the fame of Punch has been sadly on the wane.

No longer delighting by his freaks the idle hours of the upper ten thousand, he has had to stoop to furnish recreation to the lowest grades of society, and we see him reduced to seek an audience in the miscellaneous crowd of a by-street, among the gaping rustics of a village fair, or in the midst of the disreputable concourse at a provincial race meeting. Meantime, his once varied repertory has shrunk to a single piece, which has survived all the others by some inscrutable working of the laws of taste. Thus caught up, as it were, by a side-eddy, withdrawn from the main current of life, and circling as a stray waif in its backwaters, how long will it be before he is finally stranded with all the other flotsam and jetsam of the shore ?

It was in his passage through France that our itinerant adopted some of those characteristics by which he is known to

us.

His first appearance in French history is in the garb of a political satirist in the year 1649, when a letter to Cardi

nal Mazarin was signed in his name, and concluded with these lines :

Je suis Polichinelle Qui fait la sentinelle A la porte de Nesle.

This was in point of fact the spot where the famous Jean Brioché, or Briocci, the prince of puppet-players, had not long before established himself with his miniature troupe, of which Polichinelle was the central figure. It is here that we find the first suggestion of that canine companion whose antics we are accustomed to associate with those of Punch, though not a dog, but an ape, was the original partner of his performance. This was no other than the illustrious Fagotin, known as le Singe de Brioche, whose varied accomplishments and tragical end have earned for him an historical reputation. So apt was his counterfeit of humanity as to delude the noted duellist Cyrano de Bergerac, who, taking him for a lacquey, and believing his gesticulations to be meant for personal ridicule to himself, drew his sword and ran the poor little comedian through the body. This event, which occurred in 1655, was the subject of a pamphlet, and in it we find the following description of Fagotin's get up:

Il était grand comme un petit homme, et bouffon en diable; son maître l'avait coiffé d'un vieux vigogne, dont un plumet cachait les fissures et la colle; il luy avait ceint le cou d'une fraise à la Scaramouche; il luy faisait porter un pourpoint à six basques mouvantes,

garni de passements et d'aiguillettes, vêtement qui sentait le laquéisme; il luy avait concédé un baudrier, d'où pendait une lame sans pointe.

The individual Fagotin was dead, but the type survived, forming thenceforward an indispensable part of every puppet performance; and we can perceive from the foregoing description that the mantle of Brioché's murdered ape has fallen on Punch's four-footed ally, the dog Toby.

The elder Brioché was succeeded by his son; and during the lives of these two men Polichinelle remained a prominent figure in Parisian society, his escapades attaining sufficient importance to draw down the censures of Bossuet. There, as in England, however, obscurity has since overtaken him, and he has disappeared, probably forever, from social and historical notoriety.

We must visit Pulcinella at home to find him at the present day, in posses