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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:

"Shelley delighted to play with children, particularly my eldest boy; the seriousness of whose imagination and his susceptibility of a grim' impression (a favorite epithet of Shelley's) highly interested him. He would play at frightful creatures' with him, from which the other would snatch a fearful joy,' only begging him 'not to do the horn,' which was a way Shelley had of screwing up his hair in front, to imitate a weapon of that

sort."

has wove; Henry cull'd the flow'ret's bloom; O, thou wert born to please me; Here's a health to all good touch the warbling lyre; No, 'twas neither shape lasses; Youth's the season made for joys; Gently 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 ratwith his triple rhymes and illustrative jargon, the tling away in the happy comic songs of O'Keefe, 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 Iam 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.

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All the favorite poetry of the day, however, was of one cast."

Hunt's recollection of "Encompassed in an angel's frame," "Fresh and strong the breeze is blowing," and "Alone by the

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 pastoral poetry of the time, "the feeling was true though the expression was somewhat sophisticate." Hooke, Boyce, Dibdin, Jack-light of the moon," recalls the days when son, Shield and Storace were the fashionable 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.

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"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

our own childhood was delighted by the 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

tone of the family conversation was scrupulously correct, though, perhaps, a little flowery and Thomson-like, (Thomson was our favorite poet;) yet the songs that were sung at that time by the most fastidious, might be thought a shade freer than would suit the like kind of society at present. Whether we are more innocent in having become more ashamed, I shall not judge. Assuredly, the singer of those songs was as innocent as the mother that bade him sing them."

The name of the morning reader was Salt. He was a worthy man, and might have been a clever one, but he had it all to himself. He spoke in his throat, and was famous for saying "murracles," instead of "miracles."

Among Hunt's earliest memories is that of having seen, at different times in his boy-inaudible hum-drum. hood, Wilkes, Pitt, and Fox. He describes the former in a flap-waistcoated suit of scarlet and gold, and Mr. Pitt, some years later, in a blue coat, buckskin breeches and boots, and a round hat, with powder and pig-tail. "He was thin and gaunt, with his hat off his forehead and his nose in the air." "I saw him again," he says, "in the House of Commons, sawing the air and occasionally turning to appeal to those about him, while he spoke in a loud, important, and hollow voice." When the persons he appealed to said, "Hear! hear!" Hunt thought they said, Dear! dear! in objection, and wondered that Pitt did not appear disconcerted. Later still he saw Mr. Fox, "fat and jovial, though he was then declining. He who had been a 'beau' in his youth, then looked something Quaker-like as to dress, with plain-colored clothes, a broad-round hat, white waistcoat, and white stockings."

"Our usual evening preacher was Mr. Sandiford, who had the reputation of learning and piety. It was of no use to us, except to make us associate the ideas of learning and piety in the pulpit with Mr. Sandiford's voice was hollow and low; and he had a habit of dip ping up and down over his book, like a chicken drinking. Mr. Salt was eminent for a single word. Mr. Sandiford surpassed him, for he had two audible phrases. There was, it is true, no great variety in them. One was the dispensation of Moses; the other, (with a due interval of hum,) 'the Mosaic dispensation.' These he used to repeat so often, that in our caricatures of him they sufficed for an entire portrait. The reader may conceive a large church, (it was Christ Church, Newgate street,) with six hundred boys, seated like charity-children up in the air, on each side of the organ, Mr. Sandiford humming in the valley, and a few maid-servants who formed his afternoon congregation. We did not dare to go to sleep. We were not allowed to read. The great boys used to get those that sat behind them to play with their hair. Some whispered to their neighbors, and the others thought of their lessons and tops. I have been good listeners, and most of us attentive can safely say, that many of us would ones, if the clergyman could have been heard. As it was, I talked as well as the rest, or thought of my exercise. Sometimes we could not help joking' and laughing over our weariness; and then the fear was lest the steward had seen us. It was part of the business of the steward to preside over the boys in church time. He sat aloof, in a place where he could view the whole of his flock. There

whenever a particular part of the Bible was read. This was the parable of the Unjust Steward. The boys waited anxiously till the passage commenced; and then, as if by a general conspiracy, at the words thou unjust steward, the whole school turned their eyes upon this unfortunate officer, who sat

'Like Teneriffe or Atlas unremoved.'

Christ's Hospital, at which Leigh Hunt was educated, is said to have sent out, toward the close of the last century and the beginning of the present, more living writers in its proportion than any other English school-was a ludicrous kind of revenge we had of him, among them were Charles Lamb and Coleridge. Christ's Hospital, which in the time of Henry the Eighth was a monastery of Franciscan friars, had its revenues assigned by Edward the Sixth, at the instigation of Ridley, to the maintenance and education of a certain number of orphan boys, born of citizens of London. It has since been extended, so that boys from all ranks are now admitted; and it is considered as a medium between the patrician pretension of such schools as Eton and Westminster, and the plebeian submission of the charity schools. Of the religious education at this institution, Mr. Hunt thinks the effect produced was not what was intended. The persons who were in the habit of preaching might as well have hummed a tune, for they inspired nothing in the boys but mimicry.

We persuaded ourselves, that the more unconscious he looked, the more he was acting."

Of Bowyer, the head master, well known through Coleridge and Lamb, Hunt gives a ludicrous description, and some very remarkable anecdotes. We have room for only two. The first relates to a boy towards whom the master had a peculiar dislike:—

"One day he comes into the school, and finds him

placed in the middle of it with three other boys. He was not in one of his worst humors, and did not seem inclined to punish them, till he saw his

antagonist. Oh, oh! sir,' said he; 'what, you are among them, are you? and gave him an exclusive thump on the face. He then turned to one of the Grecians, and said, 'I have not time to flog all these boys: make them draw lots, and I'll punish one.' The lots were drawn, and C- -'s was favorable. 'Oh, oh! returned the master, when he saw them, you have escaped, have you, sir?' and pulling out his watch, and turning again to the Grecian observed, that he found he had time to punish the whole three; and, sir,' added he to C- with another slap, I'll begin with you. He then took the boy into the library and flogged him; and, on issuing forth again, had the face to say, with an air of indifference, 'I have 'not time, after all, to punish these two other boys."

The other was the case of an unfortunate lad who could not be broken of a habit of drawling his words and neglecting his stops in reading. He was to read on the occasion named, in a book called "Dialogue between a Missionary and an Indian."

"Master. Now, young man, have a care, or I will set you a swinging task. (A common phrase of his.) "Pupil. (Making a sort of heavy bolt at his

calamity, and never remembering his stop at the word Missionary.) Missionary Can you see the

wind?'

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Pupil. (Always forgetting the stop.) Mis sionary How then do you know that there is such a thing?

"(Here a terrible thump)

"

Because I feel it.'"

that he was oblivious of classical associations, and quite forgot to wander amid the haunts of Addison and Warton in Oxford, or those of Gray, Spenser, and Milton, in Cambridge. In relation to these Universities, he remarks that England's two greatest philosophers, Bacon and Newton, were bred at Cambridge, and three out of her four great poets; while Oxford, not always knowing "the goods the gods provided," repudiated Locke, alienated Gibbon, and had nothing but angry sullenness and hard expulsion to answer to the inquiries which its very ordinances encouraged in the sincere and loving spirit of Shelley."

Praised everywhere as a young Roscius in poetry, the vanity of our youth in his teens is not to be wondered at; but he met with some mortifications which were wholesome and served to steady his brain for a time. Taken by his father to visit Dr. Raine, master of the Charter House, this gentleman had the candor, instead of lauding the genius of the youthful aspirant, to warn him against the perils of authorship, and added that "the shelves were full." It was not till he came away, unluckily, that Hunt thought of the answer," Then, sir, we will make another," which he imagined would have annihilated the Doctor. mortification of having let slip the chance of such a repartee was, however, solaced soon after, when receiving a message from his grandfather that if he would come to

The

Pupil. (With a shout of agony.) 'Indian Philadelphia he would make a man of him, he had the felicity to send word in reply, that men grew in England as well as in America."

Immediately after leaving school, Hunt began to write verses, which his father in judiciously collected and published by subscription. The author acknowledges that they were chiefly imitative. "I wrote odes," he says, "because Collins and Gray had written them, blank verse,' because Akenside and Thomson had written blank verse, and a 'Palace of Pleasure,' because Spenser had written a Bower of Bliss.'"

Introduced to literati and shown about at parties, the young poet was "fooled" nearly tothe "top of his bent" with conceit; and a visit to some collegians at Cambridge and Oxford, where the repute of his volume had gone before him, filled up the measure of his self-complacency. Though visiting these Universities for the first time, he was so possessed with the presence of Mr. Leigh Hunt,

Hunt (excepting, on his mother's account, the women of Philadelphia) professes to have no great predilection towards Americans. In addition to his own individual "mote," he possesses, in this instance, an abundance of that national dim-sightedness which prevents the English in general from seeing any virtue equal to their own. Twice in the course of the Autobiography we meet with the remark (somewhat flattened by repetition) "that he cannot get out of his head the idea that there is a great counter built along the American coast, behind which all the people stand like linen drapers." Possibly among such knights of the cloth-yard might be found some able and willing to serve Mr. Hunt with good measure.

Our author's remarks upon Dr. Franklin, | title of Oh, thou wert born to please me, he sang a man as far removed from his appreciation with Mrs. Crouch to so much effect, that not only as the unaccustomed proportions of the ele- was it always called for three times, but no play was suffered to be performed without it. It should phant appear to the barking spaniel, are in be added that Mrs. Crouch was a lovely woman, the true spirit of dogged English prejudice, as well as a beautiful singer, and that the two and a most unfortunate exception to Hunt's performers were in love. I have heard them sing usual manly frankness and freedom from it myself, and do not wonder at the impression it made on the susceptible hearts of the Irish. political one-sidedness. While objecting to Twenty years afterward, when Mrs. Crouch was Dr. Franklin that he did not represent "all no more, and while Kelly was singing a duet in that our nature largely requires or may rea- the same country with Madame Catalini, a man in sonably hope to attain to," it would be well the gallery cried out, "Mr. Kelly, will you be good to consider who has. What individual, or enough to favor us with Oh, thou wert born to please me?" The audience laughed; but the call even what age, has, in clearing away the went to the heart of the singer, and probably came back settlements, (to use our author's own from that of the honest fellow who made it. The illustration,) been able to show fully its com- man may have gone to the play in his youth, with plexion? Franklin " did the duty next him," somebody whom he loved by his side, and heard and labored in his vocation, and for his own two lovers, as happy as himself, sing what he now wished to hear again." time, with a far-seeing reference to the future. The taste for extravagance which his countrymen had imbibed from the English needed to be repressed, and economy and even parsimony, in the spirit of patriotism, to be rendered respectable; to which end he wrote "Poor Richard's Almanac," adapting it to the occasion, and not intending it, as Leigh Hunt must well know, to represent his philosophy.

Hunt's attention became drawn toward the stage. He had written a tragedy, a comedy, and a farce: the latter he offered to Kelly of the Opera House, of whom he gives the following portrait and anecdote:

“He had a quick, snappish, but not ill-natured voice, and a flushed, handsome, and good-natured

face, with the hair about his ears. The look was a little rakish or so, but very agreeable.

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Our author's recollection of Madame Catalini is, that in her brilliant singing there was more force than feeling." He sketches several of the prominent performers of that day; among them De Camp, of whom it was said that "he failed in fops, but there was fire in his footmen;" the fat beauty, Mrs. Billington, who used to perform with Braham; the bass-singer, Lablache, "full of might and mirth ;" and the tragic actress and singer Pasta, the secret of whose greatness was "perfect truth, graced by idealism."

"All noble passions belonged to her; and her very scorn seemed equally noble, for it trampled When shemeasured her enemy from head to foot, in Tancredi, you reonly on what was mean. ally felt for the man, at seeing him sor educed into nothingness. When she made her entrance on the in front of the audience, midway between the side stage, in the same character-which she did right scenes-she waved forth her arms, and drew them

quietly together again over her bosom, as if she And when, in the part of Medea, she looked on the sweetly, yet modestly, embraced the whole house. 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."

"Mr. Kelly was extremely courteous to me; but what he said of the farce, or did with it, I utterly forget. Himself I shall never forget; for as he was the first actor I ever beheld anywhere, so he was one of the first whom I saw on the stage. Actor, indeed, he was none, except inasmuch as he was an acting singer, and not destitute of a certain spirit in everything he did. Neither had he any particular power as a singer, nor even a voice. He said it broke down while he was studying in Italy; where, indeed, he had sung with applause. The little snappish tones I spoke of, were very manifest on the stage: he had short arms, as if to The first actor Hunt remembers to have match them, and a hasty step; and yet, notwith-seen upon the English boards, was the celestanding these drawbacks, he was heard with brated Jack Bannister, who, "when he had pleasure, for he had taste and feeling. He was made you laugh heartily in a comedy, would delicate composer, as the music in Blue Beard evinces; and he selected so happily from other bring the tears into your eyes composers, as to give rise to his friend Sheridan's est sufferer in an afterpiece." banter, that he was an "importer of music and a brazen face and a voice like a knife-grindcomposer of wines," (for he once took to being aer's wheel. He was all pertness, coarseness wine-merchant.) While in Ireland, during the

a

hon

for some "Fawcett had

early part of his career, he adapted a charming and effrontery, but with a great deal of air of Martini's to English words, which, under the comic force; and whenever he came trotting

cated 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 disap

on the stage, and pouring forth his harsh rapid words, with his nose in the air, and a facetious grind in his throat, the audience were prepared for a merry evening." This description would answer for our Burton. Munden is described as famous for grimaces and "making something out of nothing;"pointment, and eat all the while a great thick slice and Lewis as combining whimsicality with elegance, and levity with heart," the type of airy genteel comedy." Elliston was, in his better days, the most genuine of lov"No man approached a woman as he did-with so flattering a mixture of reverence and passion-such closeness without insolence, and such trembling energy in his words. His utterance of the single word charming' was a volume of rapturous fervor."

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Then comes Liston, "who Listonized the whole piece in which he appeared;" and Mathews, still remembered on our own stage in his "At Homes," his "Monsieur Morbleau," and his "Sir Fretful Plagiary," in which characters, says Hunt, "it was a sight to see him looking wretchedly happy at his victimizers, and digging deeper and deeper into his mortification at every fresh button of his coat that he buttoned up."

Next follows Dowton, who was "the best Falstaff of his day," and Cooke, the hooknosed, malignantly smiling hypocrite and villain, whose Shylock and Sir Archy Mac Sarcasm are still remembered by some of the old play-goers among us.

as

Kemble our author admired not " it was the fashion to do," but considered that it was studied acquirement rather than genius which caused the critics to like him. He thinks Mrs. Siddons, though the mistress of lofty, queenly, and appalling tragic effect, failed in the highest points of refinement. "With the exception of Mrs. Siddons," (who, it must be remembered, was, in Hunt's day, declining,) "all the reigning school of tragedy," he says, "had retrograded towards the time that preceded Garrick; and the consequence was that when Kean brought back nature and impulse, he put an end to it at once, as Garrick had put an end to Quin." Of Mrs. Jordan, who "made even Methodists love her," he says, "she seemed to hold a patent from nature herself for our delight." Room or no room, we cannot get over the next two pages without quoting them :

"Mrs. Jordan was inimitable in exemplifying the consequences of too much restraint in ill-edu

of bread and butter, weeping, and moaning, and
munching, and eyeing at every bite the part she
meant to bite next, was a lesson against will and
appetite worth a hundred sermons of our friends
on board the hoy; and, on the other hand, they
could assuredly have done and said nothing at all
amiableness as she did, when she acted in gentle,
calculated to make such an impression in favor of
generous, and confiding characters. The way in
which she would take a friend by the cheek and
kiss her, or make up a quarrel with a lover, or
coax a guardian into good-humor, or sing (without
accompaniment) the song
of Since then I'm
doom'd, or In the Dead of the Night, trusting, as
she had a right to do, and as the house wished
her to do, to the sole effect of her sweet, mellow,
and loving voice-the reader will pardon me,
tears of pleasure and regret come into my eyes at
the recollection, as if she personified whatsoever
was happy at that period of life, and which has
gone like herself. The very sound of the little
familiar word bud from her lips, (the abbreviation of
husband,) as she packed it closer, as it were, in the
man's face, taking him at the same time by the
utterance, and pouted it up with fondness in the
chin, was a whole concentrated world of the power
of loving.

but

"That is a pleasant time of life, the play-going to the theatre, and brothers and sisters, parents time in youth, when the coach is packed full to go and lovers, (none of whom, perhaps, go very often,) are all wafted together in a flurry of expectation; when they only wish as they go (except with the lovers) is to go as fast as possible, and no sound when the smell of links in the darkest and mudis so delightful as the cry of Bill of the Play; diest winter's night is charming; and the steps of the coach are let down; and a roar of hoarse voices round the door, and mud-shine on the pavelooking lobby which is about to be entered; and ment, are accompanied with a sight of the warmthey enter, and pay, and ascend the pleasant stairs, and begin to hear the silence of the house, perhaps the first jingle of the music; and the box is entered their places and being looked at; and at length amidst some little awkwardness in descending to they sit, and are become used to by their neighbors, and shawls and smiles are adjusted, and the playbill is handed round or pinned to the cushion, and the gods are a little noisy, and the music veritably commences; and at length the curtain is drawn up, and the first delightful syllables are heard:

"Ah! my dear Charles, when did you see the lovely Olivia!'

"Oh! my dear Sir George, talk not to me of Olivia. The cruel guardian,' &c.

"Anon the favorite of the party makes his appearance, and then they are quite happy; and next day, besides his own merits, the points of the dialogue are attributed to him as if he was their

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