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inventor. It is not Sir Harry, or old Dornton, or
Dubster, who said this or that; but Lewis,
Munden,' or ' Keeley.' They seem to think the wit
really originated with the man who uttered it so
delightfully.

Walpole's style is sufficiently demonstrated by his own. Fielding and Smollett, Voltaire, Charlotte Smith, Mrs. Radcliffe, and Augustus La Fontaine were among his favorite au"Critical play-going is very inferior in its en- thors, but especially Voltaire-"the greatest joyments to this. Never, after I had taken criti-writer of the eighteenth century, and, upon cal pen in hand, did I pass the thoroughly-delightful evenings at the playhouse which I had done when I went only to laugh or be moved.

the whole, the greatest France has ever produced;" but whose works, with the exception of Candide and Zadig, he thinks are scarcely known in England, even amongst those who talk most about them; these two novels, by no means his finest, serving as sufficient specimens of him, even among his admirers. of France, and excels in pathos; yet not one EngVoltaire is one of the three great tragic writers

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gedies, or would do anything but stare to hear of his pathos. Voltaire inducted his countrymen into a knowledge of English science and metaphysics, nay, even of English poetry; yet Englishmen have been told little about him in connection with them, except of his disagreements with Shakspeare. Voltaire created a fashion for English thinking, manner, and policy, and fell in love with the simplicity and truthfulness of their very Quakers; and yet, I will venture to say, the English know far with which he degraded his better nature in burless of all this, than they do of a licentious poem lesquing the history of Joan of Arc.

"I speak of my own feelings, and at a particular time of life; but forty or fifty years ago, people of all times of life were much greater play-goers than they are now. They dined earlier; they had not so may newspapers, clubs, and piano-fortes; the French Revolution only tended at first to endear the nation to its own habits; it had not yet opened a thousand new channels of thought and interest; nor had railroads conspired to carry people, bodily as well as mentally, into as many analogous direc-lishman in a thousand knows a syllable of his trations. Everything was more concentrated, and the various classes of society felt a greater concern in the same amusements. Nobility, gentry, citizens, princes, all were frequenters of theatres, and even more or less acquainted personally with the performers. Nobility intermarried with them; gentry, and citizens, too, wrote for them; princes conversed and lived with them. Sheridan, and other members of Parliament, were managers as well as dramatists. It was Lords Derby, Craven, and Thurlow that sought wives on the stage. Two of the most popular minor dramatists were Cobb, a clerk in the India House, and Birch, the pastry-cook. If Mrs. Jordan lived with the Duke of Clarence (William IV.) as his mistress, nobody doubts that she was as faithful to him as a wife, His brother, the Prince of Wales, (George the Fourth,) besides his intimacy with Sheridan and the younger Colman, and to say nothing of Mrs. Robinson, took a pleasure in conversing with Kemble, and was the personal patron of O'Keefe and of Kelly. The Kembles, indeed, as Garrick had been, were received everywhere, among the truly best circles; that is to say, where intelligence was combined with high breeding: and they deserved it; for whatever difference of opinion may be entertained as to the amount of genius in the family, nobody who recollects them will dispute that they were a remarkable race, dignified and elegant in manners, with intellectual tendencies, and in point of aspect very like what has been called God Almighty's nobility.''

The Spectator was the earliest model of Hunt's prose; and his earliest printed composition in prose was a series of papers under the signature of" Mr. Town, Jun.," which he gave to the Traveller, a new evening paper, and received in remuneration a perquisite of five or six copies of the paper, and the delight of beholding himself in long columns of print.

Hunt was early versed in the humor of Bonnel Thornton and Colman, but looks upon it now as mere caricature in comparison with Goldsmith's. His admiration of

"There are, it is admitted, two sides to the char

acter of Voltaire; one licentious, merely scoffing, saddening, defective in sentiment, and therefore wanting the inner clue of the beautiful to guide him out of the labyrinth of scorn and perplexity; all owing, be it observed, to the errors which he found prevailing in his youth, and to the impossible demands which they made on his acquiescence; but the other side of his character is moral, cheerful, beneficent, prepared to encounter peril, nay, actually encountering it in the only true Christian causes, those of toleration and charity, and raising

that voice of demand for the advancement of reawhole voice of Europe. He was the only man, son and justice which is now growing into the perhaps, that ever existed, who represented in his single person the entire character, with one honorable exception, (for he was never sanguinary,) of the nation in which he was born; nay, of its whole history, past, present, and to come. He had the licentiousness of the old monarchy under which he the science of the Consulate and the "savans," the was bred, the cosmopolite ardor of the Revolution, unphilosophic love of glory of the Empire, the worldly wisdom (without pushing it into folly) of Louis Philippe, and the changeful humors, the firmness, the weakness, the flourishing declamathe unbounded hopes, of the best actors in the extion, the sympathy with the poor, the bonhomie, traordinary scenes now acting before the eyes of Europe in this present year 1850. As he himself could not construct as well as he could pull down, so neither do his countrymen, with all the goodness and greatness among them, appear to be less truly represented by him in that particular than in others; but in pulling down he had the same vague desire of

the best that could be set up; and when he was most thought to oppose Christianity itself, he only did it out of an impatient desire to see the law of love triumphant, and was only thought to be the adversary of its spirit, because his revilers knew nothing of it themselves.

"Voltaire, in an essay written by himself in the English language, has said of Milton, in a passage which would do honor to our best writers, that when the poet saw the Adamo of Andreini at Florence, he pierced through the absurdity of the plot to the hidden majesty of the subject." It may be said of himself, that he pierced through the conventional majesty of a great many subjects, to the hidden absurdity of the plot. He laid the axe to a heap of savage abuses; pulled the corner-stones out of dungeons and inquisitions; bowed and mocked the most tyrannical absurdities out of countenance; and raised one prodigious peal of laughter at superstition from Naples to the Baltic. He was the first man who got the power of opinion and common sense openly recognized as a reigning authority, and who made the acknowledgment of it a point of wit and cunning, even with those who had hitherto thought they had the world to them

selves."

We have always thought the general feeling toward this "great organ of his age" too bitter and unrelenting. He came at a period when impurity pervaded the whole moral atmosphere, and superstition, with gibes and antics, sat like a night fiend on the prostrate heart of religion. Sense and sarcasm predominating in his mind with a natural impatience of restraint, his skepticism was the consequence; and introduced early to the elegant and profligate coteries of Ninon de l'Enclos, and to the half political, half literary soirées at Sceaux, he found even there an exciting stimulus. His earlier works were neither remarkable for boldness nor originality, and it has been observed that "it was not until success revealed to him the extent of his own powers that he became reckless and free." Voltaire accomplished great ends, but he was an instrument obedient to the power of a progress which moved, and moves for ever. He was not always stimulated by pure, high and noble aspirations, but often by an innate destructiveness and the passion of success. Our author most happily designates the manner of Voltaire as consisting in an artful intermixture of the conventional dignity and real absurdity of what he is exposing, the tone being as grave as the dignity seems to require, and the absurdity coming out as if unintentionally.

It was in a paper entitled the "News," set up by his brother John, that Hunt com

menced his theatrical criticisms, upon the perfectly novel ground of independence. He refused to know actors and to accept tickets. The first feat which he performed, and which admired Master Betty. Kemble, a Colossus in he now regrets, was the annihilation of the comparison, it was harder to overthrow, though repeated attacks were made upon his "majestic dryness and deliberate nothings." It was not until the rising of a far greater genius, who could by

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'One touch of nature make the whole world kin," that Kemble lost ground, and "faded before KEAN like a tragedy ghost." Of his criticisms at that time, of the living dramatists, Morton, Colman, Reynolds, etc., Hunt speaks now with a graceful candor, and acknowledges his mistake in condemning as the fault of the writers what was rather that of the age-its dearth of dramatic character and allows that without being excellent, there was more talent in their productions than he supposed.

;

The gay and confident spirit of the young critic received a sudden check from ill-health, which was increased to a long-continued state of nervous debility by super-abstinence, false regimen, and other mistaken methods of cure. Restored finally by exercise tending to enliven the blood, and amusements serving to raise the animal spirits, he fell in love, for the hundredth time, and married. The poet's heart, like that of his mother before him, was subdued by the fascination of elegant reading; and Mrs. Hunt still maintains her conquest by reciting her husband's verses, as he gaily acknowledges, "better than ever."

Toward the close of the reign of George III., and about three years before the Regency, Leigh Hunt and his brother John commenced the Examiner, in which were emulated the wit and fine writing of Addison and Steele. Encouraged by the success of his theatrical criticism, he "set up for an oracle in politics," with what he now conceives to have been assumption and a spirit of conceited foppery, which must have rendered him ridiculous in the eyes of the discerning. Yet we believe it to be true that he was never, at that, or any other time, other than "an honest man"; and that he set out with and continued to possess as good an amount of editorial qualification, not only as most writers "no older," but as many much older.

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How many editors can as honestly say, "I am fairly grounded in the history of my country, I have carefully read her laws,I am proprietor of my journal, and I have no mercenary views whatever"?

Hunt, to keep clear of "patronage," and in that spirit of martyrdom which had been singularly inculcated from his cradle, denied himself now all political, as he had before done all theatrical acquaintances, and was fully prepared to endure all the evil consequences that fell upon him.

Reform in Parliament, liberality of opinion in general, and a fusion of literary taste, were the alleged objects of the Examiner. Its politics were rather general sentiments than particular reflections. Hunt, himself, gave his best hours and his warmest feelings all the time to poetry, and then, at the last moment, made a rush at his editorial duties and sat up late at night to complete them. His miscellaneous criticisms did good service, and created a more general appreciation of pure and valuable literature.

energy, and being ostentatious with his limbs and muscles, in proportion as he could not draw them. He endeavored to bring Michael Angelo's apostles and prophets, with their superhuman ponderousness of intention, into the common places of life. A student reading in a garden is all over intensity of muscle." Of Bonnycastle, Fuseli's friend, we are told that

Bonnycastle was a good fellow; he was a tall, gaunt, long-headed man, with large features and spectacles, and a deep internal voice, with a twang of rusticity in it; and he goggled over his plate like a horse. I often thought that a bag of corn would have hung well on him. His laugh was equine, and showed his teeth upward at the sides. Wordsworth, who notices similar mysterious manifestations on the part of donkeys, would have thought it ominous. Bonnycastle was passionately and if the Edinburgh Review had just come out, fond of quoting Shakspeare, and telling stories; would give us all the jokes in it. Perhaps Bonnycastle thought more highly of his talents than the amount of them strictly warranted; a mistake to which scientific men appear to be more liable than others, the universe they work in being so large, and their universality (in Bacon's sense of the word) being often so small."

At the house of Mr. Hill, proprietor of the Monthly Mirror, Hunt fell in with a set of merry acquaintances, of whom he gives As a politician, Hunt was ardent even to such fine graphic sketches that we are sorry fierceness, but never ungenerous, and he has to refer our readers to his own volume rath- outlived most, if not all his political animoser than to repeat them here. These gentle-ities. The editors of the Examiner wished men were the wit, Dubois, with his infinite to see "the reins of restriction loosened in the quips and cranks; Theodore Hook, the hands of the individual, before the growing "merry jongleur," the extemporizer of verse strength and self-government of the many." and music, and Campbell, who in the rap- Mr. Hunt imagines he sees this in the presturous excitement of hearing himself paro-ent British government; but it must be redied, dashed his wig at him, exclaiming, "You dog! I'll throw my laurels at you;" Mathews, whose imitations in private were still more admirable than on the stage; and the two Smiths,-James, of whose prose and verse our author observes that they were too full of the ridicule of city pretension, and adds the truly Johnsonian remark, that "to be superior to anything it should not always be running in one's head ;" and Horace, who in the verse of Shelley was said to combine

"Wit and sense, Virtue and human knowledge, all that might Make this dull world a business of delight."

At the table of Hunter, the bookseller, assembled another set-Fuseli, Bonnycastle, Kinnaird, and Godwin. "Fuseli," Hunt says, "was an ingenious caricaturist of Michael Angelo, making great displays of mental

membered that he has retired from the "stir of the great Babel," and is probably better conversant with the reminiscences of his former literary course, than with the political movements of the present time, as his note in regard to Lord John Russell at the close of the second volume sufficiently testifies. He now speaks of George III. with as much independence of spirit as can be expected from a subject and admirer of his granddaughter Victoria, and moreover the receiver of a pension at her royal bounty. He is careful to suggest that the descendants of his Majesty are preserved from any inheritance of obstinacy, incompetency, etc., by "the infusion of colder and more judicious blood from another German stock."

Even literary criticism was in those days deeply colored with politics, and when the Examiner, after outliving a series of formidable persecutions, had been established

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about three years, Mr. John Hunt projected of the arts' had named a wretched foreigner a quarterly magazine of literature and poli- his historical painter, in disparagement or in ig tics called the Reflector, of which his broth-norance of the merits of his own countrymen! er became editor, and was aided by contri- single deserving writer! that this Breather of that this Mecenas of the age' patronized not a butions from Lamb, Dyer, Barnes, Dr. Aikin, eloquence' could not say a few decent extempore and others. In this periodical first appeared words-if we are to judge, at least, from what he the "Feast of the Poets," by which the said to his regiment on its embarkation for Portuauthor drew upon himself the enmity of appointer of hopes! that this Exciter of desire' gal! that this Conqueror of hearts' was the disalmost every living poet, and especially Gif- [bravo! Messieurs of the Post !]-this' Adonis in ford, of whom he still speaks in somewhat loveliness' was a corpulent man of fifty! in short, of his former tone, and with a bitter that this delightful, blissful, wise. pleasurable, ality equalling that for which the great satirist honorable, virtuous, true, and immortal Prince, has himself been censured. He now real- and ears in disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties, was a violator of his word, a libertine, over head ized the truth of Steele's remark, that "the the companion of gamblers and demireps, a man life of a wit is a warfare upon earth." who has just closed half a century without one the respect of posterity!" single claim on the gratitude of his country, or

person

At an annual dinner of the Irish upon St. Patrick's Day, the decline of the Prince of Wales's popularity was remarkably evinced. His broken engagements and his violated promises in regard to the Catholic claims caused his name, which used to be hailed with rapture at the dinner in question, to be now received with hisses. Apologizing for the necessity, in self-defence, of repeating anything against the Queen's kindred, and skilfully suggesting his excuse on the ground that the very feelings which would cause him to oppose one sovereign might render him the more devoted subject of another, our author gives at full length the article containing the "libel" which resulted in two years' imprisonment and a fine of five hundred pounds. It describes the speeches of Mr. Sheridan and others present at the celebration, after which it goes on to answer an attack from the Morning Post, and to remark severely upon some complimentary verses which are said, literally, to address the Prince in the following terms :—

"You are the Glory of the people'-' You are the Protector of the arts'-'You are the Macenas of the age-Wherever you appear you conquer all hearts, wipe away tears, excite desire and love, and win beauty toward you'- You breathe elo quence- You inspire the Graces '- You are an Adonis in loveliness!' 'Thus gifted,' it proceeds in English,

Thus gifted with each grace of mind,
Born to delight and bless mankind;
Wisdom, with Pleasure in her train,
Great Prince! shall signalize thy reign:
To Honor, Virtue, Truth allied;
The nation's safeguard and its pride;
With monarchs of immortal fame

Mr. Hunt thinks "the very sincere tone" Prince with a ground for pardoning it. of this libel might have furnished the Had the Prince pardoned him he would have overlooked all the Prince's faults. He the Prince in consideration of the circumconsiders himself "bound now to pardon stances which mould the character of every human being," and doubts whether he himself was warranted in his own person to being than nature and education had given." "demand more virtues from any human

acter of being frank and simple-minded. Everybody gives Leigh Hunt the charThe above is certainly naïve to the last degree. Or, is it not Punch in a new dress, the checkered legs of Harlequin Vanity a very flimsy disguise; and do we not see strutting below the over-sized mask of a longvisaged candor?

Although Hunt's liberal and cosmopolite politics were unpopular, they produced, to some extent, the effect he desired. Fearless, partly through an honesty of purpose, and partly through a most complete self-sufficiency, his greatest sin was, at the most, an indecorous warmth of expression, and the very injustice of his confinement caused many a true heart to "leap towards him in brotherly sympathy."

The sentence of imprisonment was received with manly courage. "My brother and I," he says, "instinctively pressed each Shall bright renown enroll thy name.' other's arm. "What person," says the Examiner, It was a heavy blow; but quainted with the true state of the case, would the resolution to bear it; and I do not beunac- the pressure that acknowledged it encouraged imagine, in reading these astounding eulogies, that this Glory of the people' was the subject of mil-lieve that either of us exchanged a word lions of shrugs and reproaches! that this Protector afterward upon the subject."

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The dreary horrors of the prison were] commenced in prison, and published in augmented at the outset by the insolence of 1816. It is a poem full of exquisite dethe jailor, who became, after a while, more scription, and scenery so perfectly Italian, civil through the mysterious influence of a it seems to glow as if warmed beneath Greek Pindar which he saw among his Italian skies. Like the rest of his poetry prisoner's books, the unintelligible character it degenerates often into the fantastic and of which gave him a notion of something trifling, but rises again to the direct and superior even to himself. Many of the forcible. The author regrets, and we think evils of the prison-life were, on the other with reason, the new casting of this beautihand, obviated, or at least ameliorated, by ful poem, which lost, by the alterations, Hunt's own cheerful and enduring spirit. much of its pathos and fidelity to nature. It was grossly censured by Southey and others, more in the spirit of party and politics than in just literary discrimination.

"To regions of his own his genius true Took happy flights.”

The Examiner continued, with its former fearlessness,

"Showing truth to flattered state," and treating the Prince Regent with anything but solemnity. It finally declined under the ascendency of the Tories and the desertion of Reform by the Whigs. Its failure was owing also, in a great measure, to Hunt's ignorance of the business part of the publication. He deeply regrets now those habits and accidents of education which led him to

And when, after some months, ill health occasioned his being removed to a part of the jail called the Infirmary, he was so fortunate as to occupy two rooms which had never been used. These he adorned according to his own fanciful and elegant taste, and converted a little yard, which belonged to them, into a garden. His wife and children being permitted to remain with him, he affected to feel at liberty, and would draw on his gloves, and put his book under his arm as he stepped out into his bounded pleasure-ground of a morning, re-take books for the only ends of life. Hunt was questing his wife not to wait dinner if he should be late; thus by the liveliness of imagination, and the beautiful adaptation of the will to the circumstance, cheating his hard fate of its wretchedness, converting ugliness into beauty, misfortune into playfulness, and enjoying what, in allusion to another, he calls "the poet's privilege of surmounting sorrow with joy."

Freedom came at last, but brought not, at least immediately, the relief of mind which was to be expected. "Partly from ill health," says our author, " and partly from habit, the day of my liberation brought a good deal of pain."

“An illness of a long standing, which required very different treatment, had by this time been burnt in upon me by the iron that enters into the soul of the captive, wrap it in flowers as he may; and I am ashamed to say, that after stopping a little at the house of my friend Alsager, I had not the courage to continue looking at the shoals of people passing to and fro, as the coach drove up the

Strand. The whole business of life seemed a hideous impertinence. The first pleasant sensation I experienced was when the coach turned into the New Road, and I beheld the old hills of my affection standing where they used to do, and breathing me a welcome."

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was designated the "cockney school," so among the most prominent of what, in ridicule, called from some of the leaders being Londoners, and engaged in the public press. "Their peculiarities," writes Mr. Milnes, "were a lavish importance given to things trivial and common. They drew their inspiration from books and from themselves, and gave, in imitation of some of the old arities which was ridiculous transferred from poets, a pre-eminence to individual peculithem to the habits and circumstances of our time." Hunt says:

"The jests about Londoners and cockneys did concerned. They might as well have said that not affect me in the least, as far as my faith was Hampstead was not beautiful, or Richmond lovely; or that Chaucer and Milton were cockneys when they went out of London to lie on the grass and is the most illustrious in England; for, to say look at the daisies. The cockney school of poetry nothing of Pope and Gray, who were both veritable cockneys, born within the sound of Bow Bell,' Milton was so too; and Chaucer and Spenser were both natives of the city. Of the four greatest English poets, Shakspeare only was not a Lon

doner."

The reviewers in Blackwood and the Quarterly were destitute of poetic perception, and directed an unrefined and un

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