Leigh Hunt’s Relations with Byron, Shelley and Keats

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Footnotes

1 Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, I, p. 34.

2 Correspondence of Leigh Hunt, I, p. 332.

3 Autobiography, I, p. 93. Compare the above quotation with Shelley’s description of his first friendship. (Hogg, Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, pp. 23-24.)

4 This early passion for friendship, which developed into a power of attracting men vastly more gifted than himself, brought about him besides Byron, Shelley and Keats, such men as Charles Lamb, Robert Browning, Carlyle, Dickens, Horace and James Smith, Charles Cowden Clarke, Vincent Novello, William Godwin, Macaulay, Thackeray, Lord Brougham, Bentham, Haydon, Hazlitt, R. H. Horne, Sir John Swinburne, Lord John Russell, Bulwer Lytton, Thomas Moore, Barry Cornwall, Theodore Hook, J. Egerton Webbe, Thomas Campbell, the Olliers, Joseph Severn, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs. Gaskell, Mrs. Browning and Macvey Napier. Hawthorne, Emerson, James Russel Lowell and William Story sought him out when they were in London.

5 Correspondence, I, p. 49.

6 Ibid., I, p. 44.

7 Memoirs and Correspondence of Coventry Patmore, ed. Basil Champney, I, p. 32.

8 Life, Letters and Table Talk of Benjamin Robert Haydon, ed. by Stoddard, p. 232.

9 Correspondence, I, p. 272.

10 On once being accused of speculation Hunt replied that he had never been “in a market of any kind but to buy an apple or a flower.” (Atlantic Monthly, LIV, p. 470.) Nor did Hunt admire money-getting propensities in others. He said of Americans: “they know nothing so beautiful as the ledger, no picture so lively as the national coin, no music so animating as the chink of a purse.” (The Examiner, 1808, p. 721.)

11 Dickens did Hunt an irreparable injury in caricaturing him as Harold Skimpole. The character bore such an unmistakable likeness to Hunt that it was recognized by every one who knew him, yet the weaknesses and vices were greatly multiplied and exaggerated. Before the appearance of Bleak House, Dickens wrote Hunt in a letter which accompanied the presentation copies of Oliver Twist and the New American edition of the Pickwick Papers: “You are an old stager in works, but a young one in faith—faith in all beautiful and excellent things. If you can only find in that green heart of yours to tell me one of these days, that you have met, in wading through the accompanying trifles, with anything that felt like a vibration of the old chord you have touched so often and sounded so well, you will confer the truest gratification on your old friend, Charles Dickens.” (Littell’s Living Age, CXCIV, p. 134.)

His apology after Hunt’s death was complete, but it could not destroy the lasting memory of an immortal portrait. He wrote: “a man who had the courage to take his stand against power on behalf of right—who in the midst of the sorest temptations, maintained his honesty unblemished by a single stain—who, in all public and private transactions, was the very soul of truth and honour—who never bartered his opinion or betrayed his friend—could not have been a weak man; for weakness is always treacherous and false, because it has not the power to resist.” (All The Year Round, April 12, 1862.)

12 Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Book VIII, Chap. I.

13 Prof. Saintsbury has very plausibly suggested that a similar attitude in Godwin, Coleridge and Southey in respect to financial assistance was a legacy from patronage days. (A History of Nineteenth Century Literature, p. 33.) The same might be said of Hunt.

14 S. C. Hall, A Book of Memories of Great Men and Women of the Age, from Personal Acquaintance, p. 247.

15 His feeling on the subject is set forth clearly in a letter where he is writing of the generosity of Dr. Brocklesby to Johnson and Burke: “The extension of obligations of this latter kind is, for many obvious reasons, not to be desired. The necessity on the one side must be of as peculiar, and, so to speak, of as noble a kind as the generosity on the other; and special care would be taken by a necessity of that kind, that the generosity should be equalled by the means. But where the circumstances have occurred, it is delightful to record them.” (Hunt, Men, Women and Books, p. 217.)

16 Correspondence, II, p. 11.

17 Ibid., II, p. 271.

18 Hunt’s work as a political journalist had begun in 1806 with The Statesman, a joint enterprise with his brother. It was very short-lived and is now very scarce. Perhaps it is due to this rarity that it is not usually mentioned in bibliographies of Hunt.

19 H. R. Fox-Bourne, English Newspapers, I, p. 376.

20 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, XL, p. 256.

21 Redding, Personal Reminiscences of Eminent Men, p. 184, ff.

22 Contemporary dailies were the Morning Chronicle, Morning Post, Morning Herald, Morning Advertiser, and the Times. In 1813 there were sixteen Sunday weeklies. Among the weeklies published on other days, the Observer and the News were conspicuous. In all, there were in the year 1813, fifty-six newspapers circulating in London. (Andrews, History of British Journalism, Vol. II, p. 76.)

23 The Examiner, January 3, 1808.

24 On the subject of military depravity The Examiner contained the following: “The presiding genius of army government has become a perfect Falstaff, a carcass of corruption, full of sottishness and selfishness, preying upon the hard labour of honest men, and never to be moved but by its lust for money; and the time has come when either the vices of one man must be sacrificed to the military honour of the country, or the military honour of the country must be sacrificed to the vices of one man.” (The Examiner, October 23, 1808.)

25 The Examiner, April 10, 1808.

26 Maj. Hogan, an Irishman in the English Army, unable to gain promotion by the customary method of purchase, after a personal appeal to the Duke of York, commander-in-chief of the army, gave an account of his grievences in a pamphlet entitled, Appeal to the Public and a Farewell Address to the Army. Before it appeared Mrs. Clarke, the mistress of the Duke of York, sent Maj. Hogan £500 to suppress it. He returned the money and made public the offer. The subsequent investigation showed that Mrs. Clarke was in the habit of securing through her influence with the commander-in-chief promotion for those who would pay her for it. After these disclosures, the Duke resigned. The Examiner sturdily supported Maj. Hogan as one who refused to owe promotion “to low intrigue or petticoat influence.” It likened Mrs. Clarke to Mme. Du Barry and called the Duke her tool.

27 The Examiner, October 8, 1809.

28 Ibid., March 31, 1811.

29 “Surely it is too gross to suppose that the Prince of Wales, the friend of Fox, can have been affecting habits of thinking, and indulging habits of intimacy, which he is to give up at a moment’s notice for nobody knows what:—surely it cannot be, that the Prince Regent, the Whig Prince, the friend of Ireland—the friend of Fox,—the liberal, the tolerant, experienced, large-minded Heir Apparent, can retain in power the very men, against whose opinions he has repeatedly declared himself, and whose retention in power hitherto he has explicitly stated to be owing solely to a feeling of delicacy with respect to his father.” (The Examiner, February 28, 1812.)

30 The Examiner, March 12, 1812. The contention between Canon Ainger and Mr. Gosse in respect to Charles Lamb’s supposed part in this libel is set forth in The Athenaeum of March 23, 1889. Mr. Gosse’s evidence came through Robert Browning from John Forster, who first told Browning as early as 1837 that Lamb was concerned in it.

31 Mr. Monkhouse says that it was then politically unjustifiable. (Life of Leigh Hunt, p. 88.)

32 Brougham wrote of his intended defense, “it will be a thousand times more unpleasant than the libel.” For a narration of his friendship for Hunt, see Temple Bar, June, 1876.

33 The Examiner, February 7, 1813.

34 The Examiner, December 10, 1809.

35 Correspondence, I, p. 179.

36 The Reflector, I, p. 5.

37 Monkhouse, Life of Leigh Hunt, p. 79.

38 Patmore, My Friends and Acquaintance, III, p. 101.

39 The Edinburgh Review of May, 1823, in an article entitled The Periodical Press ranked Hunt next to Cobbett in talent and The Examiner as the ablest and most respectable of weekly publications, when allowance had been made for the occasional twaddle and flippancy, the mawkishness about firesides and Bonaparte, and the sickly sonnet-writing.

40 Mazzini wrote Hunt: “Your name is known to many of my Countrymen; it would no doubt impart an additional value to the thoughts embodied in the League. [International League.] It is the name not only of a patriot, but of a high literary man and a poet. It would show at once that natural questions are questions not of merely political tendencies, but of feeling, eternal trust, and Godlike poetry. It would show that poets understand their active mission down here, and that they are also prophets and apostles of things to come. I was told only to-day that you had been asked to be a member of the League’s Council, and feel a want to express the joy I too would feel at your assent.” (Cornhill Magazine, LXV, p. 480 ff.)

41 The Reflector, I, p. 5.

42 Hunt accepted the Monthly Repository in 1837 as a gift from W. J. Fox in order to free it from Unitarian influence. Carlyle, Landor, Browning and Miss Martineau were contributors.

43 (1) “Besides, it is my firm belief—as firm as the absence of positive, tangible proof can let it be (and if we had that, we should all kill ourselves, like Plato’s scholars, and go and enjoy heaven at once), that whatsoever of just and affectionate the mind of man is made by nature to desire, is made by her to be realized, and that this is the special good, beauty and glory of that illimitable thing called space—in her there is room for everything.” Correspondence, II, p. 57.

(2) And Faith, some day, will all in love be shown. (“Abraham and the Fire-Worshipper,” Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt, 1857, p. 135.)

44 A New Spirit of the Age, II, p. 183.

45 Hunt wrote two religious books, Christianism and Religion of the Heart. The second, which is an expansion of the first, contains a ritual of daily and weekly service. For the most part it contains reflections on duty and service.

46 Correspondence, I, p. 130.

47 Bryan Waller Proctor (Barry Cornwall), An Autobiographical Fragment and Biographical Notes, p. 197.

48 Autobiography, I, p. 119-120.

49 A Morning Walk and View; Sonnet on the Sickness of Eliza.

50 It had appeared previously in The Reflector, No. 4, article 10. In the separate edition it was expanded and 126 pages of notes were added.

51 Poetical Works, 1832, preface, p. 48.

52 Byron, Letters and Journals, III, p. 28, February 9, 1814.

53 The same volume contained a preface on the origin and history of masques and an Ode for the Spring of 1814. Byron said of the latter that the “expressions were buckram except here and there.” The masque, he thought, contained “not only poetry and thought in the body, but much research and good old reading in your prefatory matter.” Byron, Letters and Journals, III, p. 200, June 1, 1815.

54 See chapter V, p. 19.

55 Nicoll and Wise, Literary Anecdotes of the Nineteenth Century, p. 330.

56 Who loves to peer up at the morning sun,
With half-shut eyes and comfortable cheek,
Let him, with this sweet tale, full often seek
For meadows where the little rivers run;
Who loves to linger with the brightest one
Of Heaven (Hesperus) let him lowly speak
These numbers to the night, and starlight meek,
Or moon, if that her hunting be begun.
He who knows these delights, and too is prone
To moralize upon a smile or tear,
Will find at once religion of his own,
A bower for his spirit, and will steer
To alleys where the fir-tree drops its cone,
Where robins hop, and fallen leaves are seer.
(Complete Works of John Keats, ed by Forman, II, p. 183.)

57 Lowell said of Hunt: “No man has ever understood the delicacies and luxuries of the language better than he.”

58 Byron, Letters and Journals, III, p. 226, October 22, 1815.

59 Ibid., III, p. 418.

60 Ibid., III, p. 242, October 30, 1815.

61 Ibid., III, p. 267, February 29, 1816.

62 Ibid., IV, p. 237, June 1, 1818.

63 Ibid., IV, pp. 486-487.

64 Medwin, Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron, p. 187.

65 In the preface to the Story of Rimini (London, 1819, p. 16), Hunt says that a poet should use an actual existing language, and quotes as authorities, Chaucer, Ariosto, Pulci, even Homer and Shakespeare. He thought simplicity of language of greater importance even than free versification in order to avoid the cant of art: “The proper language of poetry is in fact nothing different from that of real life, and depends for its dignity upon the strength and sentiment of what it speaks, omitting mere vulgarisms and fugitive phrases which are cant of ordinary discourse.”

66 Byron, Letters and Journals, III, p. 418.

67 Mr. A. T. Kent in the Fortnightly Review (vol. 36, p. 227), points out that Leigh Hunt in the preface to the Story of Rimini, avoided the mistake of Wordsworth in “looking to an unlettered peasantry for poetical language,” and quotes him as saying that one should “add a musical modulation to what a fine understanding might naturally utter in the midst of its griefs and enjoyments.” Kent says we have here “two vital points on which Wordsworth, in his capacity of critic, had failed to insist.”

68 Autobiography, II, p. 24.

69 To be found chiefly in the Feast of the Poets.

70 In 1855, in Stories in Verse, Hunt changed his acknowledged allegiance from Dryden to Chaucer.

71 Canto, II, ll. 433-440.

72 E. De Selincourt gives these three last as examples of Hunt’s derivation of the abstract noun from the present participle (Poems of John Keats, p. 577).

73 De Selincourt notes that these adverbs are usually formed from present participles. (Poems of John Keats, p. 577.)

74 Byron, Letters and Journals, III, p. 418.

75 “For ever since Pope spoiled the ears of the town
With his cuckoo-song verses, half up and half down,
There has been such a doling and sameness,—by Jove,
I’d as soon have gone down to see Kemble in love.”
(Feast of the Poets.)

Hunt calls Pope’s translation of the moonlight picture from Homer “a gorgeous misrepresentation” (Ibid., p. 35) and the whole translation “that elegant mistake of his in two volumes octavo.” (Foliage, p. 32.)

76 Feast of the Poets, p. 38. The same opinions are expressed in The Examiner of June 1, 1817; in the preface to Foliage, 1818.

77 Ibid., p. 56.

78 P. 23.

79 Saintsbury, Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860, p. 220.

80 Hunt, Story of Rimini, London, 1818, p. 11, 200 lines beginning with top of page. In the 1742 lines of the poem, there are 47 run-on couplets and 260 run-on lines. There are 7 Alexandrines and 21 triplets. In the edition of 1832 the number of triplets has been increased to 26. There are 46 double rhymes. In a study of the cæsura based on the first 200 lines there are 70 medial, 17 double cæsuras. The remaining 113 lines have irregular or double cæsura.

81 Keats, Lamia, Bk. I, ll. 1-200. In the 708 lines of Lamia, there are 98 run-on couplets, 144 run-on lines, 39 Alexandrines and 11 triplets. The cæsura is handled with greater freedom than in the Story of Rimini.

82 C. H. Herford, Age of Wordsworth, p. 83.

83 R. B. Johnson, Leigh Hunt, p. 94.

84 Leigh Hunt as a Poet, Fortnightly Review, XXXVI: 226.

85 Sidney Colvin, Keats, p. 30.

86 Garnett, Age of Dryden, p. 32.

87 From Homer, Theocritus, Bion, Moschus, Anacreon, and Catullus.

88 p. 13.

89 Hunt, Correspondence, I, p. 115.

90 Byron, Letters and Journals, IV, p. 238.

91 Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, Recollections of Writers, p. 132.

92 Ibid., p. 133.

93 Hunt, Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries; with Recollections of the Author’s Life and of his Visit to Italy, p. 247.

94 Ibid., p. 251.

95 Ibid., pp. 246-272.

96 Autobiography, II, pp. 27, 59.

97 Colvin, Keats, p. 222.

98 This refers to Keats’s first published poem, the sonnet O Solitude, if I must with thee dwell, published (without comment) in The Examiner of May 5, 1816.

99 Colvin, Keats, p. 34.

100 Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, p. 257.

101 Ibid., pp. 257-258.

102 Sharp, Life and Letters of Joseph Severn, p. 163.

103 Works, I, p. 30.

104 Mr. Forman, after a systematic search has been able to find no proof in either direction. (Works, III, p. 8.)

105 Works, I, p. 5.

106 Foliage, p. 125.

107 Colvin, Keats, p. 66.

108 A further account of the disastrous effects of his partisanship will be found in the discussion of the Cockney School, Ch. V.

109 The Century Magazine, XXIII, p. 706.

110 Palgrave, Poetical Works of John Keats, p. 269.

111 Autobiography, II, p. 266.

112 Works, IV, p. 16.

113 Haydon and Hunt had originally been very intimate, as is shown by the letters written by the former from Paris during 1814, and by his attentions to Hunt in Surrey Gaol. A letter to Wilkie, dated October 27, 1816, gives an attractive portrait of Hunt, and from this evidence it is inferred that the change in Haydon’s attitude came about in the early part of 1817, and that a small unpleasantness was allowed by him to outweigh a friendship of long standing. After two weeks spent with Hunt he had written of him as “one of the most delightful companions. Full of poetry and art, and amiable humour, we argue always with full hearts on everything but religion and Bonaparte.... Though Leigh Hunt is not deep in knowledge, moral metaphysical or classical, yet he is intense in feeling and has an intellect forever on the alert. He is like one of those instruments on three legs, which, throw it how you will, always pitches on two, and has a spike sticking for ever up and ever ready for you. He “sets” at a subject with a scent like a pointer. He is a remarkable man, and created a sensation by his independence, his disinterestedness in public matters; and by the truth, acuteness and taste of his dramatic criticisms, he raised the rank of newspapers, and gave by his example a literary feeling to the weekly ones more especially. As a poet, I think him full of the genuine feeling. His third canto in Rimini is equal to anything in any language of that sweet sort. Perhaps in his wishing to avoid the monotony of the Pope school, he may have shot into the other extreme; and his invention of obscene [sic] words to express obscene feelings borders sometimes on affectation. But these are trifles compared with the beauty of the poem, the intense painting of the scenery, and the deep burning in of the passion which trembles in every line. Thus far as a critic, an editor and a poet. As a man I know none with such an affectionate heart, if never opposed in his opinions. He has defects of course: one of his great defects is getting inferior people about him to listen, too fond of shining at any expense in society, and love of approbation from the darling sex bordering on weakness; though to women he is delightfully pleasant, yet they seem more to handle him as a delicate plant. I don’t know if they do not put a confidence in him which to me would be mortifying. He is a man of sensibility tinged with morbidity and of such sensitive organization of body that the plant is not more alive to touch than he.... He is a composition, as we all are, of defects and delightful qualities, indolently averse to worldly exertion, because it harasses the musings of his fancy, existing only by the common duties of life, yet ignorant of them, and often suffering from their neglect.” (Haydon, Life, Letters and Table Talk, ed. R. H. Stoddard, pp. 155-156.)

Haydon said that the rupture came about because Hunt insisted upon speaking of our Lord and his Apostles in a condescending manner, and that he rebelled against Hunt’s “audacious romancing over the Biblical conceptions of the Almighty.” (Haydon, Life, Letters and Table Talk, p. 65.) This view, in the light of Haydon’s general unreliability, may be mere romancing; for Keats, writing on January 13, 1818, gave the following explanation of the quarrel: “Mrs. H. (Hunt) was in the habit of borrowing silver from Haydon—the last time she did so, Haydon asked her to return it at a certain time—she did not—Haydon sent for it—Hunt went to expostulate on the indelicacy, etc.—they got to words and parted for ever.” (Keats, Works, IV, p. 58).

114 Works, IV, p. 20.

115 Milnes, Life, Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats, II, p. 44.

116 Works, IV, p. 114.

117 Ibid., V, p. 142.

118 Life, Letters and Table Talk, p. 208.

119 Works, IV, p. 31.

120 Ibid., IV, p. 60.

121 Ibid., IV, pp. 37-38.

122 Ibid., IV, p. 38, Keats gives his argument in favor of a long poem.

123 Ibid., IV, p. 38.

124 Ibid., IV, p. 49.

125 Ibid., IV, p. 193.

126 Ibid., IV, pp. 195-196.

127 Ibid., IV, p. 12.

128 Ibid., IV, p. 90.

129 Ibid., I, p. 34.

130 Ibid., V, p. 198.

131 Haydon attempted also to make trouble between Wordsworth and Hunt, by telling the former that Hunt’s admiration for him was only a “weather cock estimation” and by insinuations concerning his sincerity in friendships. (Haydon, Life, Letters and Table Talk, p. 197.)

132 J. Ashcroft Noble, The Sonnet in England, and Other Essays, p. 108.

133 Autobiography, II, p. 42.

134 Autobiography, II, p. 44.

135 Works, V, p. 203.

136 Keats wrote Haydon, “There are three things to rejoice at in this age The Excursion, Your Pictures, and Hazlitt’s depth of taste.” (Works, IV, p. 56.)

137 Works, II, p. 187.

138 Ibid., V, p. 116.

139 Ibid., V, p. 180.

140 Ibid., V, p. 175.

141 Ibid., V, p. 174.

142 That he needed better attention than he could receive in lodgings is seen from an account of Keats’s condition given in Maria Gisborne’s Journal (Ibid., V, p. 182), which says that when she drank tea there in July, Keats was under sentence of death from Dr. Lamb: “he never spoke and looks emaciated.”

143 Works, V, p. 183-184. The quotation follows Keats’s punctuation.

144 Ibid., V, p. 185.

145 Cornhill Magazine, 1892.

146 Works, V, p. 194.

147 Ibid., V, p. 193.

148 Correspondence, I, p. 107.

149 P. 248.

150 The Examiner, June 1st, July 6th, and 13th, 1817.

151 Lines 181-206.

152 Works, IV, p. 64.

153 Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries, p. 257.

154 May 10, 1820.

155 Cf. with Poe’s sonnet, Science, true daughter of Old Time thou art.

[156] Haydon, Life, Letters and Table Talk, p. 201.

157 In connection with Hyperion, it is interesting to note that the manuscript in Keats’s handwriting recently discovered, survived through the agency of Leigh Hunt. From him it passed into the ownership of his son Thornton, and later to the sister of Dr. George Bird. It has been purchased from her by the British Museum. (Athenæum, March 11, 1905.)

158 This is, of course, a mistake.

159 For other criticism of the 1820 poems by Hunt, see Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries, pp. 258-268.

160 I stood tiptoe, l. 16.

161 Ibid., l. 20.

162 Ibid., l. 81.

163 To some Ladies, l. 15.

164 Ibid., l. 117.

165 I stood tiptoe, l. 215.

166 Ibid., l. 61.

167 Calidore, l. 132. Also pointed out by Mr. Colvin, Keats, p. 53.

168 To my brother George, l. 7.

169 I stood tiptoe, l. 144.

170 Hunt quotes this with approbation, as showing a “human touch.” (Specimen of an Induction to a Poem, ll. 13-14.)

171 Specimen of an Induction to a Poem, l. 48.

172 Calidore, l. 66.

173 Ibid., l. 80 ff.

174 To..., l. 23 ff.

175 Mr. De Selincourt in Notes and Queries, Feb. 4, 1905, dates the Imitation of Spenser “1813.” He does not produce documentary evidence, however. The discovery of the hitherto unpublished poem, Fill for me a brimming bowl, in imitation of Milton’s early poems, dated in the Woodhouse transcript Aug. 1814, is of considerable interest in determining the date of Keats’s earliest composition of verse. A sonnet On Peace found in the same MS. is a second discovery of an unpublished poem of the same period.

176 Works, I, p. 26.

177 Ibid., I. p. 16. Mr. W. T. Arnold, Poetical Works of John Keats, London, 1884, has remarked upon the similar use of so by Hunt and Keats. He compares the “so elegantly” of this passage with the line from Rimini “leaves so finely suit.”

178 To Charles Cowden Clarke, l. 88.

179 Calidore, ll. 34-35.

180 Story of Rimini, p. 35.

181 Colvin, Keats, p. 31.

182 References to Hunt in the sonnets and other poems of 1817 are the following:

1. “He of the rose, the violet, the spring The social smile, the chain for Freedom’s sake:”

(Addressed to the Same [Haydon].) This sonnet did not appear in 1817, although it belongs to this period.

2. “... thy tender care
Thus startled unaware
Be jealous that the foot of other wight
Should madly follow that bright path of light
Trac’d by thy lov’d Libertas; he will speak,
And tell thee that my prayer is very meek
······
Him thou wilt hear.”

(Specimen of an Introduction, l. 57 ff.) Mrs. Clarke is the authority that “Libertas” was Hunt.

3. “With him who elegantly chats, and talks—
The wrong’d Libertas.”

(Epistle to Charles Cowden Clarke, l. 43-44.)

4. “I turn full-hearted to the friendly aids That smooth the path of honour; brotherhood, And friendliness the nurse of mutual good. The hearty grasp that sends a pleasant sonnet Into the brain ere one can think upon it; The silence when some rhymes are coming out; And when they’re come, the very pleasant rout: The message certain to be done tomorrow. ’Tis perhaps as well that it should be to borrow Some precious book from out its snug retreat, To cluster round it when we next shall meet.” (Sleep and Poetry.)

Lines 353-404 of the same, nearly one fifth of the entire poem, are a description of Hunt’s library. Mr. De Selincourt calls it “a glowing tribute to the sympathetic friendship which Keats had enjoyed at the Hampstead Cottage and an attempt to express in the style of the Story of Rimini something of the spirit which had informed the Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey.” (Poems of John Keats. Introduction p. 34.)

(a) Of this room Hunt wrote: “Keats’s Sleep and Poetry is a description of a parlour that was mine, no bigger than an old mansion’s closet.” Correspondence I, p. 289. See also Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries, p. 249.

(b) Further description of the same room is to be found in Shelley’s Letter to Maria Gisborne, ll. 212-217.

(c) Clarke refers to it in the Gentleman’s Magazine, February, 1874, and in Recollections of Writers, p. 134. In the letter he says that a bed was made up in the library for Keats and that he was installed as a member of the household. Here he composed the framework of the poem. Lines 325-404 are “an inventory of the art garniture of the room.”

(d) The most intresting record in regard to the room is that given by Mrs. J. T. Fields in a Shelf of old Books, who says that her husband saw the library treasures which had inspired Keats—Greek casts of Sappho, casts of Kosciusko and Alfred, with engravings, sketches and well-worn books. Among the books collected by Mr. Fields was a copy of Shelley, Coleridge and Keats bound together, with an autograph of all three men, formerly owned by Hunt. The fly leaf “at the back contained the sonnet written by Keats on the Story of Rimini.”

183 The two sonnets were published in The Examiner of September 21, 1817; Keats’s had been included previously in the Poems of 1817; Hunt’s appeared later in Foliage, 1818.

184 This did not appear in 1817, but belongs to this period. See Works, II, p. 257. For a comparison of these two sonnets with Shelley’s on the same Subject, see Rossetti’s Life of Keats, p. 110.

185 Works, II, p. 166.

186 Compare with A Dream, after Reading Dante’s Episode of Paolo and Francesca, 1819. (Works, III, p. 16.)

187 A pocket-book given Keats by Hunt and containing many of the first drafts of the sonnets belonged to Charles Wentworth Dilke. It is still in the possession of the Dilke family.

188 For instances of Keats’s interest in politics, see To Kosciusko, To Hope, ll. 33-36, and scattered references to Wallace, William Tell and similar characters. Most of these references have already been called attention to by others.

189 Works, IV, pp. 60-61. The poem follows.

190 Colvin, Keats, p. 107.

191 Endymion, Bk. II, ll. 129-130.

192 Ibid., Bk. IV, l. 863 ff.

193 Ibid., Bk. II, l. 756 ff.

194 Ibid., Bk. II, l. 938 ff.

195 Keats, p. 169.

196 Stanza 23, l. 7.

197 Hero and Leander and Bacchus and Ariadne, 1819, p. 45.

198 Mr. W. T. Arnold makes the mistake of thinking that Keats imitated Hunt’s Gentle Armour. Mr. Colvin corrects this statement. (Keats, Poetical Works, p. 59.)

199 (a) W. T. Arnold, Keats, Poetical Works, p. 128. (b) J. Hoops, Keats’s Jungend und Jugendgedichte, Englische Studien, XXI, 239. (c) W. A. Read, Keats and Spenser.

200 Works, V, p. 121.

201 This same expression occurs in Hero and Leander, 1819, in the phrase, “Half set in trees and leafy luxury.” Keats’s dedication sonnet in which it occurs was written in 1817. Therefore Mr. W. T. Arnold makes a mistake when he says (in his edition of Keats, p. 129) it was taken direct from Hunt’s poem, although the two separate words are among his favorites and Keats probably took them from him and combined them.

202 Mr. Arnold says “delicious” is used sixteen times by Keats. (Keats, Poetical Works, p. 129). He quotes a passage from one of Hunt’s prefaces in which the latter comments on Chaucer’s use of the word: “The word deliciously is a venture of animal spirits which in a modern writer some critics would pronounce to be too affected or too familiar; but the enjoyment, and even incidental appropriateness and relish of it, will be obvious to finer senses.” In Rimini this line occurs: “Distils the next note more deliciously.”

203 Palgrave, Poetical Works of John Keats, p. 261, notices Leigh Hunt’s misuse of this word in his review of I stood tiptoe, quoted on p. 107. See his use of the same on p. 76. In Bacchus and Ariadne it occurs in this passage “all luxuries that come from odorous gardens.”

204 This is used in Hyperion, II, l. 45. The expression “plashy pools” occurs in the Story of Rimini.

205 November 11, 1820.

206 Life of Percy Bysshe Shelly, II, p. 36.

207 Imagination and Fancy, p. 231.

208 Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, pp. 252-3.

209 Palgrave, Poetical Works of John Keats, p. 274.

210 Poetical Works, 1832, p. 36.

211 The poem is reported to have brought £100, more than any poem sold during his lifetime. It is now lost.

212 Mac-Carthay, who has fully treated this incident, thinks that the account Hunt gave of the matter many years later is so incoherent as to indicate that he did not receive the letter until after he met Shelley, or perhaps not at all. He also points out that two passages in the letter to Hunt of March 2, 1811, important in their bearing upon Shelley’s political theories at this time, are identical with passages in a letter of February 22 of the same year, addressed to the editor of The Statesman, presumably Finnerty. (Shelley’s Early Life, pp. 1-106.)

213 Hancock, The French Revolution and English Poets, pp. 50-77.

214 Letter to Miss Hitchener, June 25, 1811.

215 G. B. Smith, Shelley, A Critical Biography, p. 88.

216 See the Letter to Lord Ellenborough.

217 Smith, Shelley, A Critical Biography, p. 110.

218 For Shelley’s opinion on the coincidence of their political views, see the last paragraph of the dedication of The Cenci.

219 Hunt, Autobiography, II, p. 103.

220 Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, p. 176.

221 Autobiography, II, p. 36.

222 Pp. 122, 123.

223 December 27, 1812.

224 II, p. 13.

225 Autobiography, II, p. 27.

226 Atlantic Monthly, February, 1863.

227 December 8, 1816, Shelley wrote to Hunt: “I have not in all my intercourse with mankind experienced sympathy and kindness with which I have been so affected, or which my whole being has so sprung forward to meet and to return.... With you, and perhaps some others (though in a less degree, I fear) my gentleness and sincerity find favour, because they are themselves gentle and sincere: they believe in self-devotion and generosity because they are themselves generous and self-devoted.” (Nicoll and Wise, Literary Anecdotes of the Nineteenth Century, p. 328.)

228 December 15, 1816, Shelley wrote Mary Godwin: Hunt’s “delicate and tender attentions to me, his kind speeches of you, have sustained me against the weight of the horror of this event.” (Dowden, Life of Shelley, II, p. 68.)

229 (a) The Examiner, January 26, 1817. (b) Ibid., February 12, 1817. (c) Ibid., August 31, 1817. (d) Hunt, Correspondence, I, p. 114; August 27, 1817.

230 Shelley said of Horace Smith: “but is it not odd that the only truly generous person I ever knew, who had money to be generous with, should be a stockbroker.” (Hunt, Autobiography, I, p. 211.) See also Letter to Maria Gisborne, ll. 247-253; Forman, Works of Shelley, III, p. 225 ff.

231 Works of Shelley, VIII, p. 3; March 22, 1818.

232 Works of Shelley, VIII, p. 141; November 13, 1819.

233 Professor Masson says that one of Shelley’s first acts was to offer Hunt £100. It is probable he refers to the occasion already discussed. (Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Other Essays, p. 112.)

234 Dowden, Life of Shelley, II, p. 61.

235 Nicoll and Wise, Literary Anecdotes of the Nineteenth Century, p. 331; December 8, 1816.

236 Ibid., p. 336; August 16, 1817.

237 Rogers, Table Talk, p. 236.

238 Hunt, Correspondence, I, p. 146; September 12, 1819.

239 Hunt, Autobiography, II, p. 36; Correspondence, I, p. 126.

240 Medwin, Life of Shelley, II, p. 137.

241 Mitford, Life, I, p. 280. Jeaffreson, The Real Shelley, II, p. 357.

242 Nicoll and Wise, Literary Anecdotes, p. 348; April 5, 1820. He assumed the debt for Hunt’s piano as naturally as he did for his own. Prof. Dowden says that John Hunt expected Shelley to become responsible for all of his brother’s debts. (Life of Shelley, II, p. 458.)

243 Hunt, Correspondence, I, p. 158; November 11, 1820.

244 Nicoll and Wise, Literary Anecdotes of the Nineteenth Century, p. 342.

245 See Chapter IV, p. 89.

246 Dowden, Life of Shelley, II, p. 456; also Works of Shelley, VIII, p. 252.

247 (a) Nicoll and Wise, Literary Anecdotes, pp. 352, 356. (b) Byron, Letters and Journals, VI, p. 11.

248 Dowden, Life of Shelley, II, p. 489.

249 Hunt, Autobiography, II, pp. 36-37. In August, 1819, Hunt importunes Shelley to give no thought to his affairs (Correspondence, I, p. 136). Hunt wrote Mary Shelley on September 7, 1821: “Pray thank Shelley or rather do not, for that kind part of his offer relating to the expenses. I find I have omitted it; but the instinct that led me to do so is more honorable to him than thanks.” (Correspondence, I, p. 171.)

250 Jeaffreson, The Real Shelley, II, p. 355.

251 W. M. Rossetti, Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, I, p. 75.

252 Letters and Journals, VI, p. 96.

253 Kent, Leigh Hunt as Poet and Essayist, p. 28.

254 Autobiography, II, p. 60.

255 Atlantic Monthly, February, 1863.

256 Works of Shelley, VIII, p. 283. June 19, 1822.

257 Built by Michaelangelo and situated on the Arno.

258 The Liberal, I, p. 103.

259 Brandes attributes the inscription to Mary Shelley. (Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature, IV, p. 208.)

260 Correspondence, I, p. 269.

261 After Shelley’s death, Mary Shelley decided to remain in Italy in order to assist with The Liberal. She considered Hunt “expatriated at the request and desire of others,” and, in helping him, she thought to fulfil any obligation that Shelley might have assumed in the scheme. For her services she received thirty-three pounds. She lived for some time in the same house with the Hunts after they separated from Lord Byron, but the arrangement was an unhappy one. Disagreements, beginning with a misunderstanding concerning the possession of Shelley’s heart, dragged through the winter. Fortunately everything was adjusted before they separated. July, 1823, she wrote of Hunt: “he is all kindness, consideration and friendship—all feeling of alienation towards me has disappeared to its last dregs.” (Marshall, The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, London, 1889, II, p. 81.) And again: “But thank heaven we are now the best friends in the world.... It is a delightful thing, my dear Jane, to be able to express one’s affection upon an old and tried friend like Hunt, and one so passionately attached to my Shelley as he was, and is.... He was displeased with me for many just reasons, but he found me willing to expiate, as far as I could, the evil I had done; his heart again warmed, and if when I return you find me more amiable, and more willing to suffer with patience than I was, it is to him that I owe this benefit.” (Ibid., II, p. 85.)

262 Jeaffreson assigns the cause of Hunt’s neglect to his ignorance of the fact that he could suck money out of Shelley. The Real Shelley, II, p. 352.

263 Mac-Carthay in Literary Anecdotes of the Nineteenth Century, p. 302.

264 Shelley was deeply wounded by the attack. He wrote Hunt: “As to what relates to yourself and me, it makes me melancholy to consider the dreadful wickedness of the heart which would have prompted such expressions as those with which the anonymous writer gloats over my domestic calamities and the perversion of understanding with which he paints your character.” (Nicoll and Wise, Literary Anecdotes, p. 340; December 22, 1818.)

265 Shelley at first attributed the article in the Quarterly to Southey on the grounds of his enmity to The Examiner which, Shelley declared, had been the “crown of thorns worn by this unredeemed Redeemer for many years.” Southey denied the authorship. (Nicoll and Wise, Literary Anecdotes, p. 341; December 22, 1818.)

266 The Examiner, September 26, October 3 and 10, 1819. See also Correspondence, I, pp. 125-126.

267 Correspondence, I, p. 169.

268 Ibid., I, p. 166.

269 See Hunt, Correspondence, I, p. 130.

270 For Shelley’s desire for Hunt’s good opinion, see Works of Shelley, VIII, p. 167. Hunt’s collection of poems, published during 1818, under the title of Foliage was dedicated to Shelley: “Had I known a person more highly endowed than yourself with all the qualities that it becomes a man to possess, I had selected for this work the ornament of his name. One more gentle, honorable, innocent and brave; one of more exalted toleration of all who do and think evil; one who knows better how to receive, and how to confer a benefit though he must ever confer far more than he can receive; one of simpler, and in the highest sense of the word, of purer life and manners I never knew: and I had already been fortunate in friendships when your name was added to the list.”

271 Correspondence, I, p. 153.

272 Ibid., I, p. 154.

273 Ibid., I, p. 179; March 26, 1822.

274 In an article on the Suburbs of Genoa and the Country about London, pp. 118-119.

275 Dated August 4, 1823.

276 The second part of the sketch was in answer to the Quarterly Review’s attack on the Posthumous Poems, which Mrs. Shelley, aided by Hunt, had published in 1824. This account was reworked in 1850 for the Autobiography and was taken in part for the preface to an edition of Shelley’s works in 1871. Hunt wrote another biographical sketch of Shelley for S. C. Hall’s Book of Gems (p. 40). He gave a fine description of his physical appearance not often quoted.

277 It was considered by the Athaneum to be the best part of the book, and to be the “powerful portrait of a benevolent man.” (VI, p. 70.)

278 Letter to Ollier, February, 1858.

279 Atlantic Monthly, February, 1863.

280 Forman, Shelley Library, p. 113, says that the motto from Laon and Cythna was added by Hunt.

281 Pt. 2, p. 37.

282 P. 217.

283 A Shelf of Old Books, p. 291.

284 Hunt’s Book of the Sonnet, which appeared posthumously, contained a criticism of Shelley’s sonnet on Ozymandyas (I, p. 87).

285 August 13 and 20, 1859.

286 The Examiner, December 28, 1817.

287 Ibid., July 15, 1821.

288 Literary Pocket Book, London, 1819. Shelley’s signature was [Greek: D] and [Greek: S]. See Hunt, Correspondence, I, 125.

289 Literary Pocket Book, 1821. (Works of Shelley, III, p. 150.)

290 Literary Pocket Book, 1821. (Works of Shelley, III, p. 380.)

291 Literary Pocket Book, 1822. (Works of Shelley, IV, p. 32.)

292 Ibid., 1822. (Works of Shelley, IV, p. 49.)

293 Ibid., 1823. (Works of Shelley, IV, p. 63.)

294 Ibid., 1823. (Works of Shelley, IV, p. 41.)

295 Ibid., 1823. Mr. Forman thinks that the poem refers to Harriet Shelley’s death and that the date is a disguise. (Works of Shelley, III, p. 146.)

296 The Indicator, December 22, 1819.

297 Chapter IV.

298 Works of Shelley, VIII, p. 291; November 3, 1819.

299 Works of Shelley, IV, p. 359.

300 Six months later, December 6, 1812, Hunt addressed a letter to Lord Ellenborough on the same subject in regard to his own sentence.

301 June 11, 18, 25, July 2, 9, August 27, September 3, 10, October 1, 8, 15, 22, December 3, 10, 17; in 1821, February 4, August 12, 19, and September 9. The last three articles were written after the Queen’s death.

302 Keats’s The Cap and Bells deals with the same.

303 Shelley gave directions that the poem should be printed like Hunt’s Hero and Leander. Works of Shelley, III, p. 101.

304 Works of Shelley, VIII, p. 116; August 15, 1819. The letter instructs Hunt to throw the poem into the fire or not as he sees fit and requests him, in preference to Peacock, to correct the proofs. “Can you take it as a compliment that I prefer to trouble you?”

305 Forman wrongly attributes the review of Reynolds’ Peter Bell in The Examiner of April 25, 1819, to Hunt and says that this “flippant notice” by Hunt inspired Shelley’s poem. Ibid., II, p. 288. Reynolds asked Keats to request Hunt to review his poem. Keats did it himself. (Keats, Works, III, pp. 246-249.)

306 Works of Shelley, III, p. 235.

307 Hunt, Correspondence, I, p. 116, 141; April 24, 1818, and September 6, 1819. Cf. with Works of Shelley, VIII, p. 121; September 3, 1819. (Editor says dated wrongly.)

308 Works of Shelley, VIII, p. 127; September 27, 1819.

309 Correspondence, I, p. 123; August 4, 1818.

310 “You will see Hunt—one of those happy souls
Which are the salt of the earth, and without whom
This world would smell like what it is—a tomb;
Who is what others seem; his room no doubt
Is still adorned by many a cast from Shout,
With graceful flowers tastefully placed about,
And coronals of bay from ribbons hung,
And brighter wreaths in neat disorder flung,—
The gifts of the most learned among some dozens
Of female friends, sisters-in-law and cousins.
And there he is with his eternal puns,
Which beat the dullest brain for smiles, like duns
Thundering for money at a poet’s door;
Alas! it is no use to say ‘I’m poor!’”

311 Mr. Forman thinks that it may be part of the original draft of Rosalind and Helen; if so, it is still a very close approximation of Shelley’s opinion of Hunt (Works of Shelley, III, p. 403). William Rossetti and Felix Rabbe think that it was addressed to Hunt.

312 Wise’s edition of Adonais, p. 2. London, 1887.

313 To his wife. Works of Shelley, VIII, p. 288; July 4, 1822.

314 Nicoll and Wise, Literary Anecdotes, p. 350; April 5, 1820.

315 Hunt, Correspondence, I, p. 136. Professor George Edward Woodberry says that Shelley had the “kindest feeling of gratitude and respect... but nothing more” towards Hunt. (Studies in Letters and Life, p. 153.)

316 Ibid., I, p. 158. November 11, 1820. Works of Shelley, VIII, p. 150; November 23, 1819.

317 Sir Walter Scott has given a good estimate of them: “Our sentiments agreed a good deal, except on the subject of religion and politics, upon neither of which I was inclined to believe that Lord Byron entertained very fixed principles.... On Politics he used sometimes to express a high strain of what is now called Liberalism; but it appeared to me that the pleasure that it afforded him as a vehicle of displaying his wit and satire against individuals in office was at the bottom of his habit of thinking. At heart I would have termed Byron a patrician on principle.” (Moore, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, I, p. 616.)

318 Hancock, The French Revolution and English Poets, p. 84.

319 Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, p. 128.

320 Ibid., p. 1; Autobiography, II, p. 85.

321 The Real Lord Byron, I, p. 277.

322 Letters and Journals, III, pp. 29-31. The article was not published.

323 Nichol, Life of Bryon, p. 84, incorrectly gives 1812 as the date.

324 Correspondence, I, p. 88, May 25, 1813.

325 Autobiography, II, p. 85.

326 The Champion, April 7, 14, 21, 1816.

327 Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, p. 402.

328 Byron, Letters and Journals, II, p. 157, December 1, 1813.

329 Ibid., II, pp. 296-297.

330 Page 36.

331 The Examiner, April 21, 1816.

332 Letters and Journals, VI, pp. 2-3.

333 Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, p. 6.

334 Letters and Journals, III, p. 265.

335 In 1820 Byron translated the Rimini episode of the Divine Comedy.

336 Trelawney, Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron, p. 109.

337 Letters and Journals, V, pp. 590-591.

338 Letters and Journals, V, p. 217. This passage is omitted from the letter in which it occurs in Moore’s Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, II, p. 437.

339 Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, p. 8.

340 Hunt wrongly gives Byron’s date of birth as 1791. The article is accompanied with a woodcut.

341 See Blackwood’s, X, pp. 286, 730.

342 Letters and Journals, V, pp. 143-144.

343 Medwin, Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron, p. 186.

344 Jeaffreson, The Real Lord Byron, II, p. 186, says that Byron through Shelley’s mediation could secure Hunt as editor.

345 Ibid., Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, II, p. 626.

346 Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron, p. 157.

347 See p. 103.

348 The Real Lord Byron, II, p. 186.

349 Dictionary of National Biography.

350 Leigh Hunt as Poet and Essayist, p. 30.

351 Life of Byron, pp. 266-267.

352 Leigh Hunt, p. 37, note.

353 Life of Leigh Hunt, p. 154.

354 The Sonnet in England, pp. 118-119.

355 Works of Shelley, VIII, p. 255.

356 Correspondence, I, p. 161.

357 Autobiography, II, p. 59.

358 Autobiography, II, p. 59.

359 After Shelley’s meeting with Byron in Switzerland in 1816, before they met again in Venice, there had been a lapse of two years bridged only by a not always pleasant correspondence relating to Allegra, Byron’s natural daughter. Shelley occupied the unenviable position of mediator between him and Jane Clairmont, the child’s mother. Yet when the two men met again in August, 1818, it was at first on the terms recorded in Julian and Maddalo. Byron’s influence served as a stimulus to this and to other poems of the same period. By December of that year Shelley’s opinion of Byron had changed; on the 22d, he wrote to Peacock of Childe Harold in terms that show how quickly his views could alter: “The spirit in which it is written, is, if insane, the most wicked and mischievous insanity that was ever given forth. It is a kind of obstinate and self-willed folly, in which he hardens himself. I remonstrated with him in vain on the tone of mind from which such a view of things alone arises.... He (Byron) associates with wretches who seem to have lost the gait and physiognomy of man, and who do not scruple to avow practices, which are not only not named, but I believe seldom even conceived in England. He says he disapproves, but he endures. He is heartily and deeply discontented with himself; and contemplating in the distorted mirror of his own thoughts the nature and destiny of man, what can he behold but objects of contempt and despair? But that he is a great poet, I think the address to Ocean proves. And he has a certain degree of candour while you talk to him, but unfortunately it does not outlast your departure. No, I do not doubt, and for his own sake, I ought to hope, that his present career must soon end in some violent circumstance.” (Works of Shelley, VIII, pp. 80-81.)

From the close of 1818 until 1821, they were again separated. Their correspondence, as previously, related chiefly to Allegra and was of a still less agreeable nature. Byron had refused to deal directly with Jane Clairmont and all communications had to pass through Shelley’s hands. In the interval, as though in retaliation, Byron had believed the Shiloh story, a fabrication by a nurse of the Shelleys that Jane Clairmont was Shelley’s mistress, but he does not seem to have condemned such a state of affairs. (Letters and Journals, V, p. 86, October, 1820.) Yet he testified in his letters his great admiration of Shelley’s poetry (Ibid., VI, p. 387), and after his death he called him “The best and least selfish man I ever knew.” (Ibid., VI, p. 98; August 3, 1822.) But before 1821, a reversal of the opinion formed in Shelley’s mind at the time of Byron’s Venetian excesses, came about. November 11, 1820, he wrote to Mrs. Hunt: “His indecencies, too, both against sexual nature, and against human nature in general, sit very awkwardly upon him. He only affects the libertine; he is, really, a very amiable, friendly and agreeable man, I hear.” (Hunt, Correspondence, I, p. 139.) This corroborates Thornton Hunt’s statement that Byron had risen in Shelley’s estimation before 1821 and that otherwise The Liberal would never have been started. (Atlantic Monthly, February, 1863.)

At Byron’s invitation they met again in Ravenna. Shelley’s letters dated from there show unstinted admiration of Byron’s genius and of the man himself. He wrote in August, 1821, that he was living a “life totally the reverse of that which he led at Venice.... (Works of Shelley, VIII, p. 211, August 7, 1821.) L. B. is greatly improved in every respect. In genius, in temper, in moral views, in health, in happiness.... He has had mischievous passions, but these he seems to have subdued, and he is becoming what he should be, a virtuous man.... (Ibid., VIII, p. 217, August 10, 1821.) Lord Byron and I are excellent friends, and were I reduced to poverty, or were I a writer who had no claims to a higher station than I possess—or did I possess a higher than I deserve, we should appear in all things as such, and I would freely ask him any favour. Such is not now the case. The daemon of mistrust and pride lurks between two persons in our station, poisoning the freedom of our intercourse. This is a tax and a heavy one, which we must pay for being human.” Of Don Juan he wrote: “It sets him not only above, but far above, all the poets of the day—every word is stamped with immortality. I despair of rivalling Lord Byron, as well I may, and there is no other with whom it is worth contending. (Ibid., VIII, p. 219, August 10, 1821.) During the visit Shelley served as ambassador to the Countess Guiccioli in persuading her not to go to Switzerland, and in the same capacity to Byron in the arrangement of Allegra’s affairs. It was then settled that Byron should reside for the winter at Pisa. Shelley had misgivings about such an arrangement on his own and on Miss Clairmont’s account, for he had previously intended to settle in the same vicinity. He finally decided not to let it make any difference in his plans. In January, 1822, Shelley wrote from Pisa to Peacock: “Lord Byron is established here, and we are his constant companions. No small relief this, after the dreary solitude of the understanding and the imagination in which we passed the first years of our expatriation, yoked to all sorts of miseries and discomforts.... if you before thought him a great poet, what is your opinion now that you have read Cain?” (Works of Shelley, VIII, p. 249; January 11, 1822.) During the same month he wrote to John Gisborne: “What think you of Lord Byron now? Space wondered less at the swift and fair creations of God, when he grew weary of vacancy, than I at this spirit of an angel in the mortal paradise of a decaying body.” (Ibid., VIII, p. 251, January, 1822.)

A letter to Leigh Hunt gives the first intimation of the return of the ill-feeling toward Byron: “Past circumstances between Lord B. and me render it impossible that I should accept any supply from him for my own use, or that I should ask for yours if the contribution could be supposed in any manner to relieve me, or to do what I could otherwise have done.” (Works of Shelley, VIII, p. 253, January 25, 1822.) This referred to more entanglements with Byron about Allegra. Shelley wrote to Jane Clairmont: “It is of vital importance, both to me and yourself, to Allegra even, that I should put a period to my intimacy with Lord Byron, and that without éclat. No sentiments of honour and of justice restrain him (as I strongly suspect) from the basest suspicion, and the only mode in which I could effectually silence him I am reluctant (even if I had proof) to employ during my father’s life. But for your immediate feelings, I would suddenly and irrevocably leave the country which he inhabits, nor even enter it but as an enemy to determine our differences without words.” (The Nation, XLVIII, p. 116.)

360 Works of Shelley, VIII, p. 258.

361 Ibid., VIII, p. 235, August 26, 1821.

362 Correspondence, I, p. 172, September 21, 1821.

363 Ibid., I, p. 174, November 16, 1821.

364 Byron, Letters and Journals, IV, p. 129, June 4, 1817.

365 Ibid., VI, pp. 117, 122, 127, 129, 134, 138, 158.

366 Ibid., VI, p. 156.

367 In 1814 Moore showed considerable pride in being included as one of the four poets to sup with Apollo in the Feast of the Poets and said that he was “particularly flattered by praise from Hunt, because he is one of the most honest and candid men” that he knew. (Memoirs, Journal and Correspondence, II, p. 159.) In 1819 Hunt had urged upon Perry, the editor of the Morning Chronicle, the necessity of a public subscription for Moore. (Ibid., II, p. 340). An unfavorable review of Moore’s political principles in The Examiner during the same year may have done something to bring about the change in Moore’s feelings, though he was eulogized in a later issue of January 21, 1821.

368 B. W. Procter, An Autobiographical Fragment, p. 153.

369 Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, II, p. 583.

370 Ibid., II, p. 582.

371 Ibid., II, p. 584.

372 Jeaffreson, The Real Lord Byron, II, p. 188.

373 Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron, p. 111.

374 Nicoll, Literary Anecdotes of the Nineteenth Century, p. 353, March, 1822.

375 Ibid., p. 356.

376 Fortnightly, XXIX, p. 850.

377 Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron, p. 112.

378 Works of Shelley, VIII, p. 288-289.

379 Life of Shelley, II, p. 459.

380 Autobiography, II, p. 94.

381 Correspondence, I, p. 86.

382 Monkhouse, Life of Leigh Hunt, p. 156.

383 Hunt refuted the statement that Byron had walled off part of his dwelling and furnished it handsomely. (Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, p. 14 ff.)

384 Works of Shelley, VIII, pp. 242, 253.

385 Nicoll and Wise, Literary Anecdotes of the Nineteenth Century, p. 342, December 22, 1818.

386 Works of Shelley, VIII, p. 286.

387 Correspondence, I, p. 190.

388 Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, p. 18.

389 Ibid., p. 18.

390 “I could always procure what I wanted from Lord Byron, and living here is divinely cheap.” (Correspondence, I, p. 198, November 7, 1822.)

391 Life of Byron, p. 242.

392 Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, p. 6.

393 Works of Shelley, VIII, p. 257.

394 She used no tact in her dealings with Lord Byron. She let him see that she had no respect for rank or titles. She even went beyond the limits of courtesy in her remarks to him. On Byron’s saying, “What do you think, Mrs. Hunt? Trelawny had been speaking of my morals! What do you think of that?” “It is the first time,” said Mrs. Hunt, “I ever heard of them.” (Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, p. 27). Of his portrait by Harlowe she said “that it resembled a great schoolboy, who had had a plain bun given him, instead of a plum one,” a facetious speech indiscreetly repeated by Hunt to Byron.

395 Letters and Journals, VI, p. 124.

396 Ibid., VI, pp. 119-120. Hunt’s view was quite different. Byron was, he thought, intimidated “out of his reasoning” by his children and their principles. (Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, p. 28.)

397 Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, p. 32.

398 Ibid., p. 30.

399 Letters and Journals, VI, pp. 157, 167.

400 Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, p. 64.

401 Medwin, Conversations of Lord Byron, p. 58.

402 Monkhouse, Life of Leigh Hunt, pp. 64-65.

403 II, pp. 145-146.

404 Autobiography, II, p. 24.

405 Correspondence, I, p. 188, July 8, 1822. Letter to his sister-in-law.

406 Letters and Journals, VI, p. 97, July 12, 1822.

407 Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron, I, p. 174.

408 Correspondence, I, p. 192. October (?), 1822.

409 Letters and Journals, VI, p. 160. January 8, 1823.

410 Ibid., VI, pp. 171-173.

411 Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, pp. 50, 63.

412 Ibid., p. 48.

413 “Blackwood’s Magazine overflowed, as might be expected, with ten-fold gall and bitterness; the John Bull was outrageous; and Mr. Jerdan black in the face at this unheard-of and disgraceful union. But who would have supposed that Mr. Thomas Moore and Mr. Hobhouse, those staunch friends and partisans of the people, should also be thrown into almost hysterical agonies of well-bred horror at the coalition between their noble and ignoble acquaintance, between the Patrician and the ‘Newspaper-Man’? Mr. Moore darted backwards and forwards from Cold-Bath-Fields’ Prison to the Examiner-Office, from Mr. Longman’s to Mr. Murray’s shop, in a state of ridiculous trepidation, to see what was to be done to prevent this degradation of the aristocracy of letters, this indecent encroachment of plebeian pretensions, this undue extension of patronage and compromise of privilege. The Tories were shocked that Lord Byron should grace the popular side by his direct countenance and assistance—the Whigs were shocked that he should share his confidence and councils with any one who did not unite the double recommendations of birth and genius—but themselves!” (Hazlitt, The Plain Speaker, II, p. 437 ff.)

414 Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, p. 52.

415 Galt in his Life of Byron says: “Whether Mr. Hunt was or was not a fit co-partner for one of his Lordship’s rank and celebrity, I do not undertake to judge; but every individual was good enough for that vile prostitution of his genius, to which in an unguarded hour, he submitted for money.” (P. 244.)

416 The Literary Gazette of October 19, 1822, was one of the notable opponents.

417 Life of Byron, p. 239.

418 Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, p. 52.

419 Ibid., p. 53.

420 Byron, Letters and Journals, VI, p. 183.

421 Ibid., VI, p. 124.

422 Ibid., VI, p. 174, p. 182. (Letters to Mrs. Shelley.)

423 Ibid., VI, p. 124.

424 Ibid., V, p. 157, December 25, 1822.

425 Ibid., VI, pp. 167-168.

426 Ibid., V, p. 588.

427 Lady Blessington, Conversations of Lord Byron, p. 77.

428 Letters and Journals, VI, pp. 182-183, April 2, 1823.

429 Hunt’s only means of support were the income from his contributions to Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine, from the Wishing Cap Papers in The Examiner, and an annuity of £100. (Correspondence, I, p. 227.)

430 Correspondence, I, p. 233-234.

431 Correspondence, I, p. 228. See Hazlitt’s account of Hunt in Italy given in a letter from Haydon to Miss Mitford. (Haydon, Life, Letters and Table Talk, pp. 223-225.)

432 Moore, Memoirs, IV, p. 220; V, p. 182.

433 Letters and Journals, VI, p. 174, 1823.

434 Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, preface, p. 3.

435 Clarke, Recollection of Writers, p. 230.

436 But compare Hunt’s own remarks on p. 40.

437 The biographers of the two men have taken various attitudes toward the value of Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries. Galt says that the pains Hunt took to elaborate faults of Byron make one think Hunt was treated according to his deserts, and that the troubles he labored under may have caused him to misapprehend Byron’s jocularity for sarcasm, and caprice for insolence. (Life of Byron, p. 260.) Garnett considers the book a “corrective of merely idealized estimates of Lord Byron,” and its “reception more unfavorable than its deserts.” (Encyclopædia Britannica, “Byron,” Ninth Edition.) Nichol thinks that while the book was prompted by uncharitableness and egotism, Byron’s faults were only slightly magnified: that the poetic insight, the cosmopolitan sympathy and courage of Hunt have given a view that nothing else could have done. (Life of Byron, p. 165.) R. B. Johnson thinks that it was a correct estimate written in self-justification. Undoubtedly it should not have come from Hunt, yet if it had not been written Hunt would not have been defended nor Byron so well known. He says there is “no reason to regret any part of the affair but the heated and persistent abuse with which one of the most sensitive and humane of men has been loaded on account of it.” (Leigh Hunt, p. 50.) Noble says that “Byron’s friends met unpleasant truths by still more unpleasant falsehoods.” (The Sonnet in England, p. 115.) Alexander Ireland, says the book was the great blunder of Hunt’s life, “ought not to have been written, far less published.” (Dictionary of National Biography.)

438 Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, p. 89.

439 Ibid., pp. 20-21.

440 Byron, Letters and Journals, II, p. 208.

441 Ibid., II, p. 461.

442 Thornton Hunt, in his edition of his father’s Correspondence, 1862, in this connection defended Byron, and credited him with “a strong sympathy with all that was beautiful and generous, with a desire to do right,

443 P. 14. For an apology made six years earlier see a letter from Hunt to Thomas Moore. (Correspondence, II, p. 38.)

444 Hunt, A Jar of Honey from Mt. Hybia, p. 155.

445 II, pp. 90-93.

446 Charles Lamb and Some of His Companions in the Quarterly Review of January, 1867.

447 A New Spirit of the Age, p. 182.

448 Near the close of his life Hunt wrote: “The jests about London and the Cockneys did not affect me in the least, as far as my faith was concerned. They might as well have said that 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 look at the daisies. The Cockney School is the most illustrious in England; for, to say 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, Shakespeare only was not a Londoner.” (Autobiography, II, p. 197.)

449 Recollections of Writers, p. 19. Other accounts of these suppers are to be found in Hazlitt’s On the Conversations of Authors; in the works dealing with Charles Lamb; and in the Cornhill Magazine, November, 1900.

450 The Life of Mary Russell Mitford. Edited by A. J. K. L’Estrange, New York, 1870, I, p. 370, November 12, 1819.

451 Sharp, The Life and Letters of Joseph Severn, p. 33.

452 Notes, pp. 57-61.

453 Ibid., pp. 62-68.

454 Other controversies, such as the one with Antoine Dubost, show Hunt’s aggressiveness. Dubost had sold a painting of Damocles to his patron, a Mr. Hope. The latter became convinced that the author was an imposter and tore the signature from the picture. In retaliation Dubost painted and exhibited Beauty and the Beast, a caricature of the whole incident. The Examiner accused him of forgery and rank ingratitude. Hunt does not seem to have had any particular proof or knowledge on the subject, yet he employed scathing denunciation in writing of it. Dubost replied and asserted that Hunt was Hope’s hireling, and that he had “ransacked the whole calendar of scurrility, and hunted for nick-names through all the common places of blackguardism.” (Dubost, An Appeal to the Public against the Calumnies of the Examiner, London, n. d., p. 9.)

455 He undertook a vindication of the Cockney School in a series of four articles, in which he pointed out the “mean insincerity,” the “vulgar slander,” the “mouthing cant,” the “shabby spite,” the falsehoods and the recantations of Blackwood’s. The description of the conditions, under which Scott pictured the articles of his enemies to have been written, smacks of the mocking humor of Blackwood’s itself: “a redolency of Leith-ale, and tobacco smoke, which floats about all the pleasantry in question,—giving one the idea of its facetious articles having been written on the slopped table of a tavern parlour in the back-wynd, after the convives had retired, and left the author to solitude, pipe-ashes, and the dregs of black-strap.”

456 Published in Edinburgh in 1820 and signed by “An American Scotchman.”

457 Published in Newcastle in 1821.

458 The School was thus described in Blackwood’s: “The chief constellations, in this poetical firmament, consist of led captains, and clerical hangers-on, whose pleasure, and whose business, it is, to celebrate in tuneful verse, the virtues of some angelic patron, who keeps a good table, and has interest with the archbishop, or the India House. Verily they have their reward.” In other words this group was composed of diners-out or parasites, and sycophants for livings and military appointments.

459 Published in London, 1824.

460 Published in London also in 1824.

461 Keats, Works, IV, p. 66.

462 C. C. Clarke, Recollections of Writers, p. 147.

463 Keats, Works, IV, p. 66.

464 Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon, p. 349.

465 Dowden, Life of Shelley, II, p. 302.

466 I, p. 133.

467 Keats, p. 120.

468 Life in Poetry: Law in Taste, pp. 21-23.

469 Age of Wordsworth, p. 58.

470 Blackwood’s, November, 1820.

471 Ibid., May, 1821.

472 Quarterly, April, 1822.

473 Ibid., January, 1823.

474 Blackwood’s, April, 1819.

475 Life, Letters and Table Talk of Benjamin Robert Haydon, p. 69.

476 Blackwood’s, May, 1823, pp. 558-566.

477 Memoirs and Correspondence of Coventry Patmore, I, p. 23.

478 Letters and Journals, V, p. 588.

479 St. James Magazine, XXXV, p. 387 ff.

480 Blackwood’s, December, 1821.

481 Letters and Journals, V, pp. 587-590. March 25, 1821.

482 Ibid., V, pp. 362-363. September 12, 1821.

483 Letters of Timothy Tickler, Esq., July, 1823.

484 September, 1824.

485 Hunt, Correspondence, I, p. 136.

486 Daniel Maclise, A Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters (1830-1838). London, n. d., p. 132.

487 William Dorling, Memoirs of Dora Greenwell, London, 1885, p. 75.

488 Epistle to Barnes.

489 This accusation has been made still more recently by Mr. Palgrave, who speaks of the “slipshod morality of Rimini and Hero.” Poetical Works of John Keats, p. 263.

490 In 1844, however, he refashioned the whole poem, now representing Giovanni as deformed and as the murderer of his wife and brother, whereas in the version of 1816 Paolo had been slain in a duel and Francesca had died of grief. In 1855, he made a second change and went back to the 1816 version. The duel he preserved in the fragment, Corso and Emilia. Hunt’s translation of Dante’s episode appeared in Stories of Verse, 1855. In 1857 he made a third change and restored the version of 1844.

491 The editor of Blackwood’s in a letter dated April 20, 1818, offered space to P. G. Patmore for a favourable critique of Hunt’s poetry, reserving to himself the privilege of answering such an article. He stated further that if Hunt had employed less violent language towards the reviewer of Rimini he might have been given a friendly explanation. Memoirs and Correspondence of Coventry Patmore, II, p. 438.

492 This charge was renewed in a review of Hunt’s Autobiography in 1850 in the Eclectic Review, XCII, p. 416.

493 Byron greatly resented Southey’s article: “I am glad Mr. Southey owns that article on Foliage which excited my choler so much. But who else could have been the author? Who but Southey would have had the baseness, under the pretext of reviewing the work of one man, insidiously to make it nest work for hatching malicious calumnies against others?... I say nothing of the critique itself on Foliage; with the exception of a few sonnets, it was unworthy of Hunt. But what was the object of that article? I repeat, to villify and scatter his dark and devilish insinuation against me and others.” (Medwin, Conversations of Lord Byron, p. 102.) Again Byron wrote of Southey in 1820: “Hence his quarterly overflowings, political and literary, in what he has termed himself ‘the ungentle craft,’ and his special wrath against Mr. Leigh Hunt, not withstanding that Hunt has done more for Wordsworth’s reputation as a poet (such as it is), than all the Lakers could in their interchange of praises for the last twenty-five years.” (Letters and Journals, V, p. 84.)

494 London Magazine, October, 1823.

495 September, 1823.

496 Reprinted in the Museum of Foreign Literature, XII, p. 568.

497 August, 1834, XXVI, p. 273.

498 C. C. Clarke, Recollections of Writers, p. 244. The year in which the letter was written is not given, but it must fall within the years 1833-1840, the period of Hunt’s residence at Chelsea.

499 The Victorian Age, I, pp. 94-101.

500 Hunt, Autobiography, II, p. 267.

501 Critical, Historical and Miscellaneous Essays, New York and Boston, 1860, IV, p. 350.

502 The first preface to Endymion was rejected by Keats on the advice of his friends who thought that it was in the vain yet deprecating tone of Hunt’s prefaces. To this charge Keats replied: “I am not aware that there is anything like Hunt in it (and if there is, it is my natural way, and I have something in common with Hunt).” The second preface justifies the charge.

503 London Journal, January 21, 1835.

504 Of Southey’s attack on Hunt and others in May, 1818, Keats wrote: “I have more than a laurel from the Quarterly Reviewers, for they have smothered me in ‘Foliage.’” (Works, IV, p. 115.)

505 Shelley wrote also a letter to the Quarterly Review remonstrating against its treatment of Keats but the letter was never sent. (Milnes, Life, Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats, I, p. 208 ff.)

506 In Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, Hunt states that he informed Byron of his mistake and received a promise that it would be altered, but that the rhyme about article and particle was too good to throw away (p. 266).

507 Just before leaving England, Keats with Hunt visited the house where Tom had died. He told Hunt in this connection that he was “dying of a broken heart.” (Literary Examiner, 1823, p. 117.)

508 Works, IV, pp. 42-43, 169-171, 174, 177, 194; V, pp. 27, 29.

509 Atlantic Monthly, XI, p. 406.

510 October 11, 1818. It included two reprints from other papers. The first was a letter taken from the Morning Chronicle signed J. S. It predicted that if Keats would “apostatise his friendship, his principles, and his politics (if he have any) he may even command the approbation of the Quarterly Review.” This was followed by extracts from an article by John Hamilton Reynolds in the Alfred Exeter Paper praising Keats for his power of vitalizing heathen mythology and for his resemblance to Chapman and calling Gifford “a Lottery Commissioner and Government Pensioner” who persecuted Keats by “intrigue of literature and contrivance of political parties.”

511 Dante Gabriel Rossetti suggests this possibility in a letter to Mr. Hall Caine. (Caine, Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, p. 179.)

512 Cobwebs of Criticism, p. 137.

513 Autobiography, II, p. 43.

514 See p. 50 ff.

515 Imagination and Fancy, p. 230.

516 Dowden, Life of Shelley, II, p. 274.

517 Other hostile reviews of The Cenci appeared in the Literary Gazette of April 1, 1820; the Monthly Magazine of the same month; and the London Magazine of May of the same year.

518 Blackwood’s, January, 1822.

519 Alexander Ireland has pointed out curious correspondences in the lives and intrests of Hazlitt and Hunt. (Memoir of Hazlitt, pp. 474-476.)

520 Quarterly, May, 1818.

521 Ibid., December, 1818.

522 Ibid., July, 1819.

523 Ibid., October, 1821.

524 Birrell, William Hazlitt, New York, 1902, p. 147.

525 The Examiner of March 7 and 14, 1819, contained extracts from the Letter and comments by Hunt upon this “quint-essential salt of an epistle,” as he called it. Lamb’s Letter to Southey, already referred to, contained a defense of Hazlitt as well as of Hunt.

526 February, 1818-April, 1819.

527 August, 1822.

528 August, 1823; October, 1823.