AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT.* pe WITH no poet of the nineteenth century | where a fellow-feeling unites the community do we feel ourselves more familiarly ac- as with one heart. Of this school, judging quainted than with Leigh Hunt; and that, from Charles Lamb's description of it, the without reading so much as half of all that culiar tendency is favorable to the expansion he has written, or receiving, even from what of the best feelings, and superinduces two we have read, a pleasure the highest or most important elements of poetry-revermost enduring. But there is something in ence and love. Hunt's muse has no vagaries, the name, so frequently mentioned among but is always cheerful and compliant. He his literary associates, and more in his own delays not, like Coleridge, for the storm or once frequent and friendly greetings. In other cause to swell the current of his verse, short, his free conversational style affects us nor does it ever become, like his, the mighty like the cordial countenance of a person whom river rolling onward to the ocean and reflect-meeting for the first time, we forget, after ing the broad heavens. Hunt's genius is half an hour's chit-chat, that we have not not the "giant element" like Byron's, leapknown him all our lives. No one hears ing "the headlong height," and shaking the the name of Leigh Hunt without a smile of abyss. Neither does he, like Wordsworth, recognition; and an allusion to his "Feast brood over his subject to the exclusion of of the Poets" is sure to call up the recollec- what suggested it, concentrating within himtion of some favorite couplet. With men self the strong poetic power till a fitting ocof genius, his contemporaries, Byron, Words-casion to give out its fertilizing streams. worth, Coleridge and Moore, though we have His fancies spring up in jets continually, held (as who has not?) delighted intercourse, there is no such familiar recognition. To speak of Hunt as a poet among these may be deemed irregular, the critics having ranked him long since with the minors. His poetry, indeed, is not of that noble stamp which elevates while it charms, and hallows every object that it touches; but trifling and even coxcombical as he frequently becomes, there is a cheerful humanity about him, a bright, playful wit, which bears us forward as it were with a sympathetic influence, catching refinements from his delicate fancies, growing merry with his mirth, and witty with his bon mots; and we leave him at last in a mood as genial and animated as after a game of romps with chil-politician that, in England, Hunt became dren in the hay fields. The secret of Hunt's power lies in the ultra-sympathetic sensibility which he learned of his mother, and the natural cheerfulness which he inherited from his father, assisted by his education at Christ's Hospital, clear and distinct, and sprinkling with their dropping freshness whatever they can reach. Of all that he touches, we realize the presence; and he throws over it a descriptive elegance and grace, causing it to "glisten with livelier ray," just as he converted his English prison into a bower of roses beneath Italian skies,-literally covering its bars with flowers, and singing amidst them like a bird. His descriptions are always graphic, and in those of rural scenery he verifies his own couplet: And when you listen you may hear a coil remarkable. He was the first who took an Autobiography of Leigh Hunt; with Reminiscences of Friends and Contemporaries. NewYork: Harper & Brothers. provided he does it in good faith: provided we are not obliged to swallow the whole, we can even relish a dish of egotism, prepared with the seasoning of such rich and spicy condiments. Brought by his position, as editor of the Examiner, to take an active part in the public events of the period, Hunt was accustomed to see men in their public relations with society, and to take an enlarged view of its operations. Thus his volume, predicated upon long and wide experience, affords, in the matter of the very errors it unfolds, subject for reflection as well as entertainment, and we shall offer our readers no apology for the large extracts we intend presenting to them. a host of enemies, for which he was com- | hear him talk a great deal about himself pensated by the acquisition of as many for the sake of the lesson of his experience, friends; the political articles condemned him to a two years' imprisonment. He comes before us now, in the decline of his eventful life, with a claim upon our kindest reciprocities which we heartily acknowledge. Somebody has said that "literary men talk less than they did." We are happy to see that our old friend has lost none of his pleasant garrulity, and we gladly welcome him to his old place at our fireside to call up the reminiscences of "auld lang syne." We wish he did not make so many excuses for presenting his autobiography. Diffidence does not sit naturally at all upon Leigh Hunt. This hesitation is not genuine these apologies, and this long account of whys and wherefores, must have been superinduced by some pretty severe critical thrusts at that habit of talking to the reader in his own person, and comparing notes with him by implication on all sorts of personal subjects, to which he freely The family of Hunt laid no claim to high acknowledges he has all his lifetime accus- ancestral honors. Our author takes the tomed himself. His own sincerity naturally main stock to have been mercantile, and is made him confident in that of others, and even of opinion that Hunt is quite a plebeian such good faith in an author rarely fails to name. His father, the son of a clergyman insure the accordance of the reader. Hunt in Barbadoes, was educated in Philadelphia, knows this, and no sooner gets clear of his and practised law there up to the time of preface, than he falls back into his own un- the Revolution, when, by his Tory princiaffected and sprightly freedom, and more-ples and loyalist pamphlets and speeches, he over-for we must say it-into his own old egotistical habit. The Autobiography, as it now appears, is a revision, but includes some letters never before published, and several articles which have only appeared in the Examiner, and are new to most readers. The whole work, indeed, the author thinks, may be new to the present reading generation, and interesting, inasmuch as times have altered, and writers are willingly heard now who would not have been listened to thirty or forty years ago. This is likely to be especially true in his case, whose matured judgment has dictated the acknowledgment of former errors of opinion, and who, while with frankness he states the origin of those opinions and their change, illustrates them with racy anecdotes both of himself and the literati of his day, with most of whom he was on terms of intimacy, or in some way connected. When an author candidly acknowledges vanity and other faults, and the mistakes in his life consequent thereon, we lose all heart to upbraid him; we are willing to Upon the biography proper, as having been already before the public, we shall enlarge but slightly. drew upon himself the popular odium, and found it expedient to withdraw as secretly and speedily as possible from his country. His wife, following nearly three years later, found her husband transferred from the bar to the pulpit, where his fine voice, agreeable declamation, and handsome person, together with his charity sermons, (against which, to the good man's astonishment, Bishop Lowth remonstrated,) acquired for him a great popularity. His sermons being chiefly remarkable for elegance of diction and graceful morality, the delivery was their principal charm. "I remember," says his son, "when he came to that part of the Litany where the reader prays for his deliverance in the hour of death and at the day of judgment,' he used to make a pause after the word 'death,' and drop his voice on the rest of the sentence. The effect was striking; but repetition must have hurt it. I am afraid it was a little theatrical." The Reverend Mr. Hunt seems to have delighted over much in the pleasures of the table, and, with all his popularity, "A gentle wife, A poor, a pensive, yet a happy one, found it difficult to make his way in the | Americans. A likeness has been discovered Church, more especially as, being of a specu- between us and some of the Indians in his lative turn, he had taken up some modifica- pictures." Hunt describes his mother as tion of church opinions. Through the influence of "Pope and Swift's Duke of Chandos," in whose family he had become a private tutor, and also through that of Sir Benjamin West," who enjoyed the King's confidence in no ordinary degree," Mr. Hunt obtained a pension of one hundred pounds a year, which however he was obliged to mortgage, and he continued for several years in a condition of great pecuniary embarrassment. "He grew deeply acquainted with prisons, and began to lose his graces and his good name." Nevertheless he left no poor inheritance to his children in his aniinal spirits, and independent mode of thinking. Many years before his death he relaxed so far in his religious tenets as to become a Universalist. He had the art of making his home comfortable, and settling himself to the most tranquil pleasures. So "We thus struggled on between quiet and disturbance, between placid readings and frightful knocks at the door, and sickness, and calamity, and hopes, which hardly ever forsook us. sanguine was my father in his intentions to the last, and so accustomed had my mother been to try to believe in him, and to persuade herself she did, that not long before she died he made the most solemn promises of amendment, which by chance I could not help overhearing, and which she received with a tenderness and a tone of joy, the remembrance of which brings the tears into my eyes. My father had one taste well suited to his profession. He was very fond of sermons, which he was rarely tired of reading or my mother of hearing. It is a pity my father had been so spoilt a child, and had strayed so much out of his sphere; for he could be contented with little. He was one of the last of the gentry who retained the old fashion of smoking. He indulged in it every night before he went to bed, which he did at an early hour; and it was pleasant to see him sit, in his tranquil and gentlemanly manner, and relate anecdotes of 'My Lord North, and the Rockingham administration, interspersed with those mild puffs and urbane resumptions of the pipe." With the discursive talent of his father, Hunt inherited the kindness and candor of his mother's nature. She was an American, and her son bore in his personal appearance the proof of his American descent. "The late Mr. West," he says, "told me that if he had met myself or any of my brothers in the streets, he should have pronounced, without knowing us, that we were The fatigue of the tired husband probably arose from reading and smoking. Mrs. Hunt was a Universalist and almost a Republican; somewhat intolerant, but only in theory, her charity always running before her faith. She was fond of poetry, and encouraged her son's perseverance and vanity by treasuring up his verses and showing them to his friends. Leigh Hunt was born in 1784, at Southgate, a village lying on a road running from Edmonton, through Enfield Chase, into Hertfordshire, which he shows to be classical ground, and associated with the best days of English genius, both old and One of the earliest sketches in Mr. Hunt's book is that of his father's friend the Rev. W. M. Trinder, who was also, as the title page of a volume of sermons declares, LL.B. and M.D. How the doctor combined in his person the three professions of law, physic and divinity we are not informed, but Hunt suggestively signifies that the triplicity might have arisen from a philanthropic disposition, and that law and medicine were added to the paramount profession of divinity for the same reason that Shelley was led to walk the hospitals,-for the purpose of doing good among the poor. One of Trinder's sermons, "On Cruelty," condemns the gentle craft of anglers, which gives occasion to our autobiographer to enlarge very agreeably and sensibly upon that subject. Though many brave and good men have been anglers, he thinks their goodness would have been more complete, and their bravery of a more generous sort, had they abstained from procuring themselves pleasure at the expense of a needless infliction. It was received upon the subject of religion, and formerly thought effeminate not to hunt Jews-then, not to roast heretics-then, not to bait bears and bulls-then, not to fight cocks; all which evidences of manhood came gradually to be looked upon as no evidences at all. He has not found anglers or sportsmen in general braver than others, but on the contrary, that they make a great fuss if they hurt their fingers, while all their reasoning in favor of the amusement is disingenuous and selfish. "As to old Izaak Walton, who is put forward as a substitute for argument on this question, and whose sole merits consisted in his having a taste for nature and his being a respectable citizen, the trumping him up into an authority and a kind of saint is a burlesque. He was a writer of conventionalities; who having comfortably feathered his nest, as he thought, both in this world and in the world to come, concluded he had nothing more to do than to amuse himself by putting worms on a hook and fish into his stomach, and so go to heaven, chuckling and singing psalms. There would be something in such a man and in his book offensive to a real piety, if that piety did not regard whatever has happened in the world, great and small, with an eye that makes the best of what is perplexing, and trusts to eventual good out of the worst. Walton was not the hearty and thorough advocate of nature he is supposed to have been. There would have been something to say for him on that score, had he looked upon the sum of evil as a thing not to be diminished. But he shared the opinions of the most commonplace believers in sin and trouble, and only congratulated himself on being exempt from their consequences. overweening old man found himself comfortably off somehow; and it is good that he did. It is a comfort to all of us, wise or foolish. But to reverence him is a jest. You might as well make a god of an otter. Mr. Wordsworth, because of the servitor manners of Walton and his biographies of divines, (all anglers,) wrote an idle line about his meekness' and his heavenly memory.' When this is quoted by the gentle brethren, it will be as well if they add to it another passage from the same poet, which returns to the only point at issue, and upsets the old gentleman altogether. Mr. Wordsworth's admonition to us is, "Never to link our passion, or our pride, With suffering to the meanest thing that lives."" The Leigh Hunt was naturally sensitive to impressions of awe and fear. In his childhood he was frightened with ghastly pictures in story books, and particularly of one called the Mantichora, with the head of a man and the body of a beast; "the same animal which figures in Pliny, and which the ancients called Martichora." It was fortunate for him that the cheerful views he had his own cheerful temperament in general, were a check upon the bad effect of all this. We learn from Lamb, who suffered equally under nervous terrors, that Hunt took warning from his early experience, and was careful to exclude from his own children every taint of superstition. Yet, "It is not," says Elia, "books, nor pictures, nor stories of foolish servants which create terrors in children. These can, at most, but give them a direction. Dear little T. H., (Thornton Hunt,) who was never allowed to hear of goblin or apparition, or scarcely to be told of bad men, or to read or hear any distressing story, finds all this world of fear, from which he has been so rigidly excluded, ab extra, in his own thick coming fancies;' and from his little midnight pillow, this nurse-child of optimism will start at shapes, unborrowed of tradition, in sweats to which the reveries of the cell-damned murderer are tranquillity." This is so poetical a theory that we are loath to combat it; but it must be said that common observation is opposed to it. No doubt the "chimeras dire which pervade the brain of superstition are there before they indicate themselves, but they are there only through some yet earlier and unsuspected impression, received silently-unconsciously perhaps, and brought into action through association. The very mistakes which a child makes in the meaning of a word may be sufficient to plant the seeds of terror. A picture may indicate a mystery, and even so much cultivation of the imagination as is necessary to sympathy, or to render refined language intelligible, may, by the merest accident, result in a superstitious enthusiasm. Who can say what subtle agencies, impossible for the most watchful parent to guard against; what words, looks or tones engender dreams that haunt the pillow of a child? Had "little T. H." no hours of play with other children? Did his parents never, even out of their very guardedness, allude obscurely in his presence to forbidden subjects, or awaken his attention by suddenly checking the discussion? Did he never hear his father read that This child, who was never allowed to read or hear a story of distress, might he, by no possible accident, have heard sung, only once perhaps, and therefore with the more wondering attentiveness: "Old woman, old woman, oh whither so high? To sweep the cobwebs ont of the sky: And I shall be back again by-and-by?" The disposition to associate ideas varies in different temperaments. With children who associate strongly and rapidly, the slightest circumstances prevail and the merest accident is liable to counteract the closest attention and care. Secret associations govern such children, of the very existence of which their parents have no suspicion. Proceeding farther in Mr. Hunt's book, since writing the above, we find the confirmation of our suggestions in the following: has wove; Henry cull'd the flow'ret's bloom; 0, thou wert born to please me; Here's a health to all good lasses; Youth's the season made for joys; Gently touch the warbling lyre; No, 'twas neither shape nor feature; Pray, Goody,please to moderate; Hope told a flattering tale, and a hundred others, were all foreign compositions, chiefly Italian. Every burlesque or buffo song, of any pretension, was pretty sure to be Italian. Even the When Edwin, Fawcett, and others, were rattling away in the happy comic songs of O'Keefe, with his triple rhymes and illustrative jargon, the audience little suspected that they were listening to some of the finest animal spirits of the southto Piccini, Paesiello, and Cimarosa. wild Irishman thought himself bound to go to Naples, before he could get a proper dance for his gayety. The only genuine English compositions worth anything at that time, were almost confined to Shield, Dibdin, and Storace, the last of whom, the author of Lullaby, who was an Italian born in England, formed the golden link between the music of the two countries, the only one, perhaps, in which English accentuation and Italian flow were ever truly amalgamated; though I must own that I am heretic enough (if present fashion is orthodoxy) to believe, that Arne was a real musical genius, of a very pure, albeit not of the very first water. He has set, indeed, two songs of Shakspeare's (the Cuckoo song, and Where the bee sucks) in a spirit of perfect analogy to the words, as well as of the liveliest musical invention; and his air of Water parted, in Artaxerxes,' winds about the feelings with an earnest and graceful tenderness of regret, worthy in the highest degree of the affecting beauty of the sentiment. All the favorite poetry of the day, however, was of one cast." Hunt's mother was fond of music and "a gentle singer." Her son looks back with a pleased and affectionate recollection of the songs of that day, of which, as well as in the Hunt's recollection of "Encompassed in pastoral poetry of the time, "the feeling was an angel's frame," "Fresh and strong the true though the expression was somewhat breeze is blowing," and "Alone by the sophisticate." Hooke, Boyce, Dibdin, Jack-light of the moon," recalls the days when son, Shield and Storace were the fashionable our own childhood was delighted by the composers, and the songs most in vogue were the "Lass of Richmond Hill," ""Twas within a mile of Edinborough Town," "Ah, dearest Henry," &c. Many of these, which have been, and we believe are still, looked upon as purely English, were borrowed, our author thinks, from the Italian. "I have often, in the course of my life, heard Whither, my love? and For tenderness formed, boasted of as specimens of English melody. For many years I took them for such myself, in common with the rest of our family, with whom they were great favorites. The first, which Stephen Storace adapted to some words in the Haunted Tower,' is the air of La Rachelina in Paesiello's opera, La Molinara.' The second, which was put by General Burgoyne to a song in his comedy of the Heiress,' is Io sono Lindoro, in the same enchanting composer's Barbiere di Seviglia.' The once popular English songs and duets, &c., How imperfect is expression; For me, my fair a wreath same; and we should have stood well pleased by his side at the music-stall where, dragging these long-lost favorites to light, he was carried back in pleasant abstraction to when, a "smooth-faced boy," he sung them at his mother's knee. In reference to the song of "Dans votre lit," the favorite of his sister, because, in her ignorance of the French language, she associated with the last word the name of her brother, he says: "The song was a somewhat gallant, but very decorous song, apostrophizing a lady as a lily in the flower-bed. It was silly, sooth,' and 'dallied with the innocence of love,' in those days, after a fashion which might have excited livelier ideas in the more restricted imaginations of the present. The reader has seen, that my mother, notwithstanding her charitableness to the poor maid-servant, was a woman of strict morals; the |