progress to overtake her. We trust that she will not enter upon a course of retrogression for the sake of their company.

An attempt has been made to cause the impression that the exclusion of laymen from the highest councils of the Church rests upon a tacit imputation to them of inferiority to ministers in intelligence and piety. This is not the case. If other reasons quite sufficient cannot be given, we shall abandon the argument. Great talents and moral worth are demanded in the various departments of business and professional life. Besides, our laymen are entitled and expected to occupy posts of high honor and responsibility in civil government. We expect them to be our sheriffs, judges, senators, governors, generals; and if we have not a Methodist president of the Republic, it is not because we have not men of talents and virtue equal to the office. The ends of society would not be answered by crowding all the distinguished talent and virtue into the Christian ministry, if it were possible to do so. Is political sovereignty withheld from all females and male minors on the ground of a want of intelligence and trustworthiness? Is the naturalized foreigner, who cannot write his name, or read his naturalization papers, superior in these qualities to the great body of American students between the ages of nineteen and twenty-one? Is every brainless profligate over twenty-one years of age superior, in these respects, to the mothers, wives, and sisters of our eminent statesmen? It is not difficult to find other reasons. We conclude, not because the subject is exhausted. It is scarcely opened. But limits are assigned, and must be observed.

ART. IV.-LEIGH HUNT.

The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, with Reminiscences of Friends and Cotemporaries. Two volumes. New York: Harper & Brothers.

The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt. Two volumes. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. The Prose Works of Leigh Hunt. Four volumes. New York: Derby & Jackson.

In this country where every one, like the knight of La Mancha, professes to be son of his own deeds, there is much impatience with minute details of genealogy. This leads to the loss of many useful lessons. By some study of their ancestors, men may know more of themselves than by confining their observations to the small space and time in which they personally live. If they would read their own lives and characters with intelligent eye, they should collate the earlier editions of themselves which may be found by careful FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XIL-16

search in unfrequented corners of the great library of humanity. Having patiently deciphered the half-obliterated pages, and become familiar with the black-letter type of those old volumes, we shall better appreciate the style of the page of life which to-day demands our notice.

Leigh Hunt had a theory that a man is but his parents or some other of his ancestors drawn out. The two extremes of mirth and melancholy which met in him were contributed to his character by his parents. With all the thoughtfulness of a biographer, who sincerely aims to aid his readers in understanding his hero, he gives us on the threshold a key to his character. Wisely and filially he devotes several pages of his autobiography to his parents, thus enabling readers to see in fountains springing in the far West those ingredients which flow in all the current of his after life.

Leigh Hunt's father was a native of the West Indies. He married a lady of Philadelphia, and settled in New York as attorney and barrister. On the breaking out of the Revolution he unwisely adhered to the cause of George III. He was treated so roughly for his toryism that he fled to England. He soon after abandoned the law, and became a preacher in the Established Church. The ingratitude of republics is proverbial, and the zealous loyalist soon found that it is not confined to one form of government, but sometimes forms a trait of royal character. Though he had suffered severely from his espousal of the royal cause, and soon became a preacher of distinguished talent, he looked in vain for preferment from the head of the Anglican Church.

Leigh Hunt was born on the 19th of October, 1784. Though a native of England, he always had the kindness to regard Americans. as cousins, and had the liberality to be pleased with the popularity of his books on this side of the Atlantic. We can appreciate this liberality the more when we know that his cash account owed little enlargement to the publication and sale of his works in America.

Had Hunt been born in America, we should have had him, according to a theory of his own, without poetical genius. While he makes exceptions of certain individuals, he says: "As a nation I cannot get it out of my head that Americans are Englishmen with the poetry and romance taken out of them." He dislikes our proclivity for money-getting. He imagines a great counter built along the American coast from north to south, behind which we are all standing, like so many linen-drapers, ready to drive bargains. He has hope for us, however, not doubting that "in time this unchristian opinion will come to nought."

If his portraiture of character is correct, it was fortunate for

Hunt that he was not born in America. He would have aspired in vain for standing behind our great counter. He had no capacity for accounts; he had a horror of dates and figures, and only learned the value of money from the trouble it gave his friends to extricate him from his pecuniary embarrassments. He confessed ignorance of the multiplication-table; and when editor of the Examiner was ignorant of the simplest financial fact pertaining to the paper-the price of its stamp. In the two fascinating volumes of his autobiography few dates are to be found. We are led along from one occurrence to another without knowing the dates of the most important events. Our hero manifests as much reluctance to inform us of his age, as the vulgar theory attributes to ladies of uncertain years.

There is one pleasant exception to our general lack of knowledge. A portrait adorns the entrance to the volumes, in which the author wears a countenance so youthful that few would suppose him to have passed his twentieth year. To obviate misapprehensions, the engraver inscribed "ætat 36" below the picture.

No one in all the history of English literature could laugh at dates with a better grace than Leigh Hunt. He preserved the glow and spirit of his youth to his latest years. His heart was always young. Years passed over him, and silvered his head, and made his step infirm; but his youthful sympathies were alive and vigorous to the last. When "a gray-headed senior," his senses were alive to the pleasing sights and sounds which charmed his youth. One day, while in a music store, he fell upon some songs which he had sung in childhood. The discovery called up pleasing recollections, to which he gives utterance in agreeable style. "They were the only songs I recollect singing when a child, and I looked on them with the accumulated tenderness of sixty-three years. ber to have set eyes on them in the interval. between the little smooth-faced boy at his mother's knee, encouraged to lift up his voice to the piano, and the battered, gray-headed senior, looking again for the first time on what he had sung at the distance of more than half a century!"

I do not rememWhat a difference

While his youthful temperament was a source of great beauty to his character, there was with it a shade of defect. He was once described, in no inaccurate terms, as "the spoiled child of the public." Smiled upon and flattered in very early years by the public, then treated coldly for a time, and at length looked upon again with. favor, he acquired a sensitiveness to praise and blame which is a mark of youthful rather than manly character.

By going to other sources, as well as the autobiography, we pre

sent the following paragraph of dates: Leigh Hunt was born October 19, 1784. He published a small volume of juvenile verses in 1802. In 1807 he published a series of critical articles on the London Theaters, which attracted attention from their bold tone and independent spirit. He and his brother became proprietors of the Examiner in 1808, which soon attracted popular attention for its literary ability, and the independence with which it advocated liberal. principles in politics. So truthful were its strictures on men in high places, and the corrupt practices of government, that bitter and powerful animosity was aroused against it. In 1810 a series of prosecutions for libel was instituted against the editors, succeeded by an imprisonment of two years, which terminated on the 3d of February, 1815. Some of Leigh Hunt's best and most popular poetry was published soon after his liberation, as the fruit of his involuntary retirement from society. In 1818 Leigh Hunt established a weekly paper, entitled the Indicator, conducted after the manner of the Spectator and Rambler. The essays published under this title, collected and republished many times, constitute their author's most substantial claim to remembrance. In 1822 Hunt went to Italy, at the earnest solicitation of Byron and Shelley. In 1828 we find him again in England, prosecuting his literary labors with redoubled ardor. Essays, translations, compilations, and original works almost without number, fell from his fruitful pen. His death, which occurred August 29, 1859, severed one of the strongest ties which bind us to the literature and literary men of the early years of this century.

The series of malicious prosecutions of the editors of the Examiner, and their final conviction and imprisonment, form a thrilling and highly instructive chapter in the history of the press. The Examiner was a progressive newspaper, the chivalrous champion of reforms, and the avowed opponent of abuses. Its editors were young, ardent, and sincere, and sufficiently regardless of consequences to give utterance to the most unflattering truths. "The Examiner," says its autobiographical historian, "began its career like most papers, with thinking the worst of those from whom it differed, and expressing its mind with fearless sincerity."

Considering itself the champion of the injured, the Examiner espoused the cause of Major Hogan, of the British army, who, not having received promotion as rapidly as he deserved, had written a pamphlet, in which he exposed the unjust manner in which preferment was sold, and the highly dishonorable means which were employed to obtain it. The Examiner noticed this pamphlet, and made such editorial comments upon it as were prompted by its ardor in the

cause of reform. The facts revealed by Major Hogan warranted severe strictures on the conduct of the Duke of York, Commanderin-Chief of the Army, which the Examiner did not hesitate to utter. Action was brought against the editors for their temerity. The prosecution fell to the ground by the timely espousal of the cause of the Examiner by a hitherto unknown friend, who, in his capacity as member of Parliament, procured the summons of certain persons to the bar of the House of Commons, that inquiry might be made into the character and capacity of the commander-in-chief. The Duke of York was voted innocent of connivance, and yet so many unpleasant disclosures were made in course of the investigation that the prosecution against the Examiner was quietly and gladly abandoned.

Foiled in their first attempt to crush the Examiner, its enemies kept on the look-out for another ground of accusation. At length the character of the king was aspersed by the following mild remark: "Of all the monarchs since the Revolution, the successor of George III. will have the finest opportunity of becoming nobly popular."

This time the prosecutors blindly overshot the mark by bringing action against the editors of the Morning Chronicle for having quoted the libelous assertion. The acquittal of the Chronicle parried the blow so furiously directed against the Examiner.

The enemies of the ill-fated paper remained on the alert with a vigilance worthy of a better cause, and a third prosecution speedily followed. The Stamford News had so far broken from the wholesome restraints with which monarchists deem it proper that newspapers should be hedged about, as to publish some sensible and humane views on the subject of flogging in the army. The editorial scissors which made extracts for the Examiner were so little guided by wisdom as to clip the unscrupulous article for the benefit of its readers. The editors were summoned before the bar of justice to answer for a high misdemeanor. It is painful evidence that the scales of justice are not always held with a steady hand; that while the Examiner was acquitted, through the eloquent and valiant advocacy of its cause by Mr. Brougham, the editor of the Stamford News, with the same able advocate, was subsequently condemned on a prosecution for publishing the same article.*

• It would seem from the following account, published as news in a late issue of the London Times, that barbarity yet characterizes the treatment of soldiers in the British army. Two men, whose home feelings had overcome them, were thus flogged for temporary desertion before disbandment:

"The first man, named Green, bore his punishment, as stated by an eye-witness, like a true soldier;' but the second, named Davis, a young recruit, protested his innocence of the crime of desertion, bellowed and screamed for mercy, and sup