stood the test, and is now quoted nowhere but in the footnotes to Keats; but it is full of those suggestions which lesser men are often at the pains of making for the benefit of their betters. All its 'leafy' and rejoicing quality, its woodlands and painted 'luxuries,' were to have their influence, direct or reflected, on much of the romantic poetry of the century.

Before writing 'The Story of Rimini,' Hunt had published a satire in verse, called 'The Feast of the Poets,' which he was to rewrite and republish at intervals during his life. It was the first of what was to be a series of bookish poems, in which he expressed the most personal part of himself, but that part which was best fitted perhaps for poetry. Few men have loved literature more passionately and more humbly than Leigh Hunt, or with a generosity more disinterested. Books were nearer to him than men, though he sought in books chiefly their human or pleasing qualities. But his poetry about books never passes from criticism to creation, as when Drayton writes his letter to H. Reynolds, and Shelley his letter to Maria Gisborne. We shall find no 'brave translunary things' and no 'hooded eagle among blinking owls.' He tells us that what the public approved of in 'The Feast of the Poets' was a 'mixture of fancy and familiarity'; but the savour has wholly gone out of it. The criticism in the twenty-five pages of the poem is superficial and obvious, and the verse jingles like the bells on a fool's bauble. The criticism in the one hundred and twentyfive pages of the notes has still interest for us, if not value. There is always in Leigh Hunt's criticism something of haste and temporariness, and it is generally revised in every new edition. Here, the recognition, on second thoughts, that Wordsworth is the chief poet of the age, together with the good-natured, superior, and impertinent advice which he gives him for the bettering of his poetry, has something more than curiosity as coming from Leigh Hunt, and in 1814. The scorn of Southey, who 'naturally borrows his language from those who have thought for him,' remains good criticism, and there

are phrases in a somewhat unjust estimate of Scott which are not without relevance; as when we are told that 'he talks the language of no times and of no feelings, for his style is too flowing to be ancient, too antique to be modern, and too artificial in every respect to be the result of his own first impressions.' He is reasonably fair to Crabbe, though with evident effort, and sees through Rogers without effort. But the accidental qualities of his taste betray themselves in the sympathetic praise of Moore, in the preference for 'Gertrude of Wyoming' as 'the finest narrative poem that has been produced in the present day,' in the contemptuous reference to Landor as 'a very worthy person,' and to 'Gebir' as 'an epic piece of gossiping,' and in the uncertainty and apparent distaste of what is meant to be said not unfavourably of Coleridge. In the final edition, nearly fifty years later, Coleridge, 'whose poetry's poetry's self,' is promoted to the place of Wordsworth.

Hunt's miscellaneous mind was active, sympathetic, foraging; he made discoveries by some ready instinct which had none of the certainty of the divining rod; he was a freebooter, who captured various tracts of the enemy, but could not guard or retain them. He was among the first to help in breaking down the eighteenth-century formalism in verse, in letting loose a free and natural speech; but his influence was not always a safe one. In 1829 Shelley writes to him, in sending the manuscript of 'Julian and Maddalo': 'You will find the little piece, I think, in some degree consistent with your own ideas of the manner in which poetry ought to be written. I have employed a certain familiar style of language to express the actual way in which people talk with each other, whom education and a certain refinement of sentiment have placed above the use of vulgar idioms.'

It was just that proviso that Leigh Hunt neglected. What he really brings into poetry is a tone of chatty colloquialism, meant to give ease, from which, however, the vulgar idioms

are not excluded. He introduces a new manner, smooth, free, and easy, a melting cadence, which he may have thought he found in Spenser, whom he chooses among poets 'for luxury.' The least lofty of English poets, he went to the loftiest among them only for his sensitiveness to physical delight. His own verse is always feminine, luscious, with a luxury which is Creole, and was perhaps in his blood. He would go back to such dainty Elizabethans as Lodge, but his languid pleasures have no edge of rapture; the lines trot and amble, never fly.

Hunt mastered many separate tricks and even felicities in verse, and acquired a certain lightness and deftness which is occasionally almost wholly successful, as in an actual masterpiece of the trifling, like 'Jenny kissed me.' But he did not realise that lightness cannot be employed in dealing with tragic material, unless it is sharpened to so deadly a point as Byron and Heine could give to it. It is difficult to realise that it is the same hand which writes the line that delighted Keats,

'Places of nestling green for poets made,' and, not far off, these dreadful lines,

LI

'The two divinest things the world has got,
A lovely woman in a rural spot.'

The ignoble quality of jauntiness mars almost the whole of Hunt's work, in which liberty cannot withhold itself from license. The man who can wish a beloved woman

'To haunt his eye, like taste personified,'

cannot be aware of what taste really is; and, with a power of rendering sensation, external delicacies of sight and hearing, which is to be envied and outdone by Keats, he is never quite certain in his choice between beauty and prettiness, sentiment and sentimentality.

In his later works Hunt learned something of restraint, and

when he came to attempt the drama, though he tried to be at the same time realistic and romantic, was more able to suit his manner to his material. The 'Legend of Florence? has his ripest feeling and his most chastened style, and more than anything else he did in verse reflects him to us as, in Shelley's phrase, 'one of those happy souls

"Which are the salt of the earth."'

The gentle Elizabethan manner is caught up and revived for a moment, and there is a human tenderness which may well remind us of such more masterly work as 'A Woman Killed with Kindness."

Hunt was convinced that 'we are more likely to get at a real poetical taste through the Italian than through the French school,' and he names together Spenser, Milton, and Ariosto, thinking that these in common would 'teach us to vary our music and to address ourselves more directly to nature.' Naming his favourite poets, he begins with 'Pulci, for spirits and a fine free way.' To acquaint English taste with Italian models he did many brilliant translations, Dante being less perfectly within his means than Ariosto or Tasso. He was best and most at his ease in rendering the irregular lines of Redi, whose 'Bacchus in Tuscany' he translated in full. In this, and in the version from the Latin of Walter de Mapes, there is a blithe skill which few translators have attained. It was through his fancy for Italian burlesque that Hunt came to do a number of his characteristic and least English things, like the laughing and lilting verses which sometimes, as in 'The Fairy Concert,' attain a kind of glittering gaiety, hardly mere paste, though with no hardness of the diamond. There is some relationship between this verse and what we call vers de société ; but it is more critical, and has something of the epigram set to a jig. So far as it is meant for political satire, it is only necessary to compare even so brilliant a squib as the 'Coronation Soliloquy of George IV with Coleridge's 'Fire, Famine,

and Slaughter,' to realise how what in Hunt remains buffoonery and perhaps argument can be carried to a point of imagination at which it becomes poetry.

Hunt has a special talent, connected with his feeling for whatever approached the form of the epigram, for the writing of brief narrative poems. Can it be denied that so masterly an anecdote as 'Abou ben Adhem' has in it some of the qualities, as it seems to have some of the results, of poetry? Read the same story in the French prose of the original: nothing is changed, nothing added; only the form of the verse, barely existent as it is, has given a certain point and finish to the prose matter. Here and in the two or three other stories there is a very precise and ingenious grasp on story-telling, worthy of Maupassant; and there is a kernel of just, at times of profound, thought, which suggests something of the quality of an Eastern apologue. Was it the more than half prose talent of Hunt that gave him, when he concentrated so tightly his generally diffuse and wandering verse, this particular, unusual kind of success? When, as in blank verse pieces such as 'Paganini,' he tried to get a purely emotional effect, not by narrative but in the form of confession, his failure was complete; all is restlessness and perturbation. But, once at least, in a little piece called 'Ariadne Walking,' there is something of the same happy concentration, the same clean outlines; and the poem may be paralleled with a lovely poem of Alfred de Vigny. The technique, as in almost, or, perhaps, everything of Hunt, is not perfect; and there are words of mere prose, like 'the feel of sleep.' How was it that a man, really poetically minded, and with so much knowledge of all the forms of verse, was never quite safe when he wrote in metre? A stanza in a poem on poppies may be compared, almost in detail, with a corresponding sentence in prose, which occurs in a rambling essay. They both say the same thing, but the