[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 Magazineoverflowed, as might be expected, with ten-fold gall and bitterness; theJohn Bullwas 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 hisLife of Byronsays: “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 Gazetteof 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 toColburn’s New Monthly Magazine, from theWishing Cap PapersinThe 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 ofLord 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 nothingelsecould 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’sCorrespondence, 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 Companionsin theQuarterly Reviewof 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’sOn the Conversations of Authors; in the works dealing with Charles Lamb; and in theCornhill 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 exhibitedBeauty and the Beast, a caricature of the whole incident.The Examineraccused 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 ofBlackwood’sitself: “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 theconviveshad 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 ofRiminiandHero.”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 inStories of Verse, 1855. In 1857 he made a third change and restored the version of 1844.
[491]The editor ofBlackwood’sin 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 ofRiminihe 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’sAutobiographyin 1850 in theEclectic Review, XCII, p. 416.
[493]Byron greatly resented Southey’s article: “I am glad Mr. Southey owns that article onFoliagewhich 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 onFoliage; 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 theMuseum 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 toEndymionwas 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 theQuarterly Reviewremonstrating 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]InLord 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 aboutarticleandparticlewas 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 inthisconnection 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 theMorning Chroniclesigned 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 theQuarterly Review.” This was followed by extracts from an article by John Hamilton Reynolds in theAlfred Exeter Paperpraising 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 ofThe Cenciappeared in theLiterary Gazetteof April 1, 1820; theMonthly Magazineof the same month; and theLondon Magazineof 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 Examinerof March 7 and 14, 1819, contained extracts from theLetterand comments by Hunt upon this “quint-essential salt of an epistle,” as he called it. Lamb’sLetter 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.
Transcriber’s Notes:
Pages 118, 119, and 120 are numbered consecutively in the text, but there appears to be a page or more missing from the original.
Footnote 442 (on page 118) ends with a comma in the original.
Some quotes are opened with marks but are not closed. Obvious errors have been silently closed while those requiring interpretation have been left open.
Punctuation has been corrected without note.
Other than the corrections noted by hover information, inconsistencies in spelling and hyphenation have been retained from the original.