impossible that he may do so, in himself, but, most | phor given above, we might truly say that his certainly, nothing that he has ever written would Hampstead lathe manufactures it all into Tunbridge tempt one for a moment to believe it. kitchen ware.

Take for instance the following passage from Homer. He says, in his preface, that his translations from the Iliad are an experiment to render the Mæonian with as much energy as possible. As usual, he makes his favorite mistake of adopting vulgarity for vigor.

His love of the fine imagination of the Greeks has led him to parody several idylls of Theocritus, some of the odes of Anacreon, &c., and we can only say that they are worthy of the passage above quoted. He then descends to the Latin, and favors us with some translations from Catullus, and we

Priam, in lamenting the death of Hector, ad- can see that he evidently thinks well of his powers dresses his surviving sons thus,

"Off with a plague, you scandalous multitude,
Convicted knaves, have you not groans enough
At home that thus you come oppressing me?
Or am I mocked, because Saturnian Jove
Has smitten me aud taken my best boy?
But ye shall feel yourselves, for ye will be
Much easier for the Greeks to rage among
Now he is gone but I, before I see

That time, and Troy laid waste and trampled on
Shall have gone down into the darksome house."
So saying, with his stick he drove them off
And they went out, the old man urged them so.

- Be quicker, do, and help me, evil children,
Down-looking set! Would ye had all been killed,
Instead of Hector at the ships! oh me!
Cursed creature that I am! I had brave sons,
Here in wide Troy, and now I can not say
That one is left me. Mestor like a God,
And Troilus my fine-hearted charioteer,
And Hector, who, for mortal, was a god,
For he seemed born, not of a mortal man,
But of a god; yet Mars has swept them all;
And none but these convicted knaves are left me,
Liars and dancers, excellent time-beaters,
Notorious pilferers of lambs and goats!

Why don't

ye get the chariot ready and set

The things upon it here, that we may go ?”*

It is really difficult to understand the mental obliquity which could so degrade this noble passage, and then flatter itself for its "vigor." Yet, after such an attempt he has the audacity to turn

round and remark that " Pope, in that elegant

as a translator, from his attempting the two most
difficult pieces in that not easy author-the "Atys"
and the inimitably beautiful Epithalamium of Julia
and Manlius (Hunt terms it "refreshing"!!!) As
might be expected, these are complete failures.
The opening lines of the latter will serve as an am-
ple specimen.

"O Divine Urania's son,
Haunter of Mount Helicon,
Thou that mak'st the virgin go

To the man, for all her no,

Hymen Hymenæus 0;

Slip thy snowy feet in socks," &c.

What would Catullus think of himself if he could see his most charming poem so vilified? If he and Hunt should happen to meet in the Elysian fields, we fear it may go hard with the latter. Certainly, in the whole range of English poetry, from Chaucer to Tennyson, there is no couplet any where which can be compared for mingled force and ele gance, to

"thou who mak'st the virgin go
To the man, for all her no,"

to say nothing of its melodiousness; or to the tavern direction of

"

"Slip thy snowy feet in socks."

Hunt must have imagined Manlius to have been an
of getting to bed.
inn-keeper, and that Hymen was a guest desirous

He is also a "trim sonnetteer." We have sonnets to his wife, and to his friends, to grasshoppers and other such small deer, and sonnets descriptive, and meditative, and two on being crowned with

mistake of his, in two volumes octavo, called Homer's Iliad, turns the Dodonean oak of his original into smooth little toys." We are no great admirers of Pope's Homer, yet we would not degrade it by naming it in the same day with Hunt's travesties of some of the finest passages in the ivy by Keats, and three on receiving a lock of

Iliad. If we were to follow out his elegant meta

* We suspect that while Mr. Hunt was cogitating upon this last couplet, during a rural walk near Hampstead, he overheard some retired cheesmonger, about to take a jaunt, rating his servants for laziness, and using the same words

"Why don't ye get the buggy ready and set
These here things upon it, that we may go?"

This being what "a fine understanding might utter in the
midst of its griefs and enjoyments," the happy inspiration
seized him, he added "musical modulation" to it, and the
couplet now stands out in bold relief,-a miracle of art hap-
pily combined with nature.

Milton's hair from "

M. D." We extract one of these to show how he succeeds in this most difficult of all species of writing.

"I felt my spirit leap, and look on thee,
Through my changed color with glad grateful stare,
When, after showing us this glorious hair,
Thou didst turn short, and bending pleasantly,
With gracious hand gav'st the great lock to me,
An honoring gift, indeed! which I will wear
About me, while I breathe this strenuous air,
Which nursed his Apollonian tresses free,
I'll wear it, not as my inherited due,
(For there is one, who, had he kept his art,
For freedom still, nor left her for the crew

Of lucky slaves, in his misgiving heart,

I would have begged thy leave to give it to,)
Yet not without some claims, though far apart."

Comment would but injure the effect of this delightfully anticlimactic effusion, which proves the author to be most blissfully ignorant of the laws which govern the true sonnet. The chief sentiment that it excites in us is that of wonder how the author's spirit could leap and look through his changed color, and how Southey could manage to survive the vital thrust aimed at him in that long parenthesis, even if he escaped the deleterious effects of having "a crew of lucky slaves in his misgiving heart."

In one of the early numbers of the "Noctes Ambrosianæ," Wilson has a most savage review of a poem which he states to be by Hunt, in imitation of Pomfret's "Choice." As we have never been able to meet with this in any of the collective editions of his poems, we presume that it must have appeared in some magazine or newspaper, and that the author felt afterwards very properly ashamed of it. If we recollect aright, it commenced somewhat after this fashion

"I have been reading Pomfret's Choice' this spring,
A pretty kind of sort of kind of thing,
And yet, I know not; there is skill in pies,
In raising crusts, as well as galleries," &c.

It may, however, very likely, be but an outrageous hoax of Wilson's, who had talent and impudence sufficient for any thing of that nature. Had it been attributed to any one else, we should reject it without hesitation, but there is really no knowing of what absurdity such a man as Hunt may not be guilty.

Since the date of the "Foliage" Hunt has published very little in verse. Some eight or ten years since he brought forth "The Legend of Florence," a drama, which was favorably reviewed at the time. It contains fewer faults of language and expression than his former pieces, but the characters are unnatural, and the plot devoid of interest. A year or two ago, he published some little metrical tales. These we have been unable to procure, but as far as we could judge from copious extracts given in a favorable critique of the time, he had retained his former style, and his "system" was still an incubus which weighed him down, and like Sinbad's old man of the sea, could not be shaken off.

In taking a general view of Leigh Hunt and his poems, we would say that he was a man with the materials for a moderately good poet, destroyed by attempting too much. He looked around and saw that all the chief poets of the age were forming schools for themselves, and writing each after his own genius, no longer recognizing any one as a model or as a master. There was Byron on one path, Shelley on another, Wordsworth on a third, Scott on a fourth, with Moore, Coleridge, Campbell

It there

and Southey, each after his own fashion.
fore naturally occurred to him that, in order to
rival these successfully, it was necessary for him
to form a separate track of his own, and having no
very decided genius to show him the way, he chose
that which he deemed would best suit the spirit of
criticism which was then arising. In this manner
he formed his "system," and instead of modestly
confining his genius to what it was suited for, he
has been ever since pushing it into ambitious
attempts, and aspiring to sit in the chair of the
master. Like the frog in the fable, he has been
aping the ox, and though his overstrained skin may
never have burst, still it has been in such a ludi-
crous state of distention, that its own small but not
inelegant proportions have been completely dis-
guised. It is only when he is least ambitious that
he is pleasing.

His talent lies principally in the delineation of common characters, such as he could see around him any day in London or in his dearly beloved Hampstead, but of any thing beyond the most every day walk of life he has not the most distant idea. If, however, he were satisfied with this, he might have acquired some real and lasting reputation by confining himself in poetry to subjects such as Miss Austin has treated in prose, or by descriptions of natural feeling, such as the lines to a Sick Son, quoted above; but this is too low a pursuit for his ambition. He is continually attempting) higher themes, but the cloven foot shows itself through all, and he can never divest himself of his cockney accent. Thus, in Rimini, a poem which gives opportunity for the highest and most exquisite delineation of character, there is not a personage who might not be found in nine houses out of ten throughout London. Were this intentional, it might be excused, though it would plead sadly against his taste, but he is evidently striving to render them more exalted, and, with such a mind as his,

"ceratis, ope Dodaleâ, Nititur pennis."

The mixture of finery and vulgarity produced by this is continually annoying.

In the Legend of Florence he takes a still bolder flight, and, resolved to shake off the trammels of the common-place, he soars into the impossible. The heroine is all goodness, self-devotion and meekness; the hero, one of those fiery, self-denying lovers, such as one meets with in sixth-rate novels and no where else; while the jealous husband, the necessary villain of the piece, is character such as the world ne'er saw; without loving his wife, he is ferociously and unaccountably jealous of her, ready to slaughter her, or to scold her on the slightest provocation, and yet mild and amiable to every one else. Altogether it is a tissue of absurdities.

With respect to his versification, nothing can be

said that will be too harsh, nor any thing that can lies in a nutshell. Byron's vanity, and Hunt's be harsher than it is itself. He is continually cen- intense self-esteem and egotism could not, of course, suring all the poets of the eighteenth century for coalesce, and Byron's powerful mind naturally bore their smoothness and harmony, and giving us to down the weak one of his companion. To such a understand that he alone understands the true man as Hunt, this would take the form of a posilaws of rhythm and melody, while, in the numerous tive injury, aggravated by his brooding over it, and and copious passages that we have quoted, the by the sense of real benefits received from the inreader can scarcely find half a dozen really melo- jurer. This feeling long rankled in his mind, dious lines; his ear, indeed, seems to have been growing stronger and stronger each day, until it singularly defective, and what he wanted in know- finally burst forth in mingled froth and venom in ledge he made up in assumption. He even seems the volume mentioned, after the removal by the ignorant of the fundamental law, that the further death of Byron of the barrier which kept it in. in the line that we place a misaccentuation the The chief curiosity in the book, however, is the more glaring it becomes, for, when he wishes to " Notices of the Author's Life," appended to it. relieve us from the pains of regular versification, Hunt seems to have felt the same reverence towards he usually substitutes a trochee for the iambus of himself that Boswell did for Johnson, and accordthe fourth foot, in the heroic line. In one place, ingly he, "Boswells" himself most completely, he compares Pope and the subsequent poets to a relating every little anecdote of his infancy, his boychurch-bell, where the Elizabethan men represent hood and his maturer years, and giving copious the organ. If this be the case, he may truly be portraits and anecdotes of his ancestors, relations, likened to a set of pan-pipes, emulating the latter, friends and schoolmates, with their acquaintances, but without the regular fulness and power of the servants and tutors. The English language may one, or the varying and spirit-moving harmony of challenge the world to produce such another biogthe other. raphy-the only one that has a chance of rivalling it is Goëthé's, with its tiresome portrait galleries. That of Hunt is interesting in one point of view, at least, as it enables the observer to trace out all the small passions and motives of his little soul; indeed, he frequently does this himself, and anatomizes and lays bare his petty feelings with a candor quite remarkable. Rather than have nothing to say of himself, he would say ill.

Another thing which militates strongly against Hunt's taking a high rank as a poet, is his want of imagination. He seems to be aware of this himself, and to have generally endeavored to get on without it. The only pieces of any length in which he has endeavored to exercise any play of imagination are the "Descent of Liberty," "Feast of the Poets," and "The Nymphs," and these, at least in our humble opinion, are utter failures. We suspect that, notwithstanding his unpleasant To this constitutional coldness we may also attri- literary course, Leigh Hunt has always been'a happy bute his inability to project himself into the cha- man. He is a good husband and father, (if we take racters of his story, a power so necessary to the his own word for it,) and a pleasant friend where success of a great poet. When we take up one of his vanity is not concerned. His views of life are Byron's poems, we see that he identified himself, singularly just and cheerful, much more so than we for the time being, with the character which he should expect in one with the bitter experience he was describing, and that he felt the same passions, has had. We can not resist quoting a few lines griefs and triumphs which he was depicting. This from the preface to "Foliage" as a good instance is the true secret of success, and without it, it is of his way of thinking, and of the execrable style impossible to awaken the interest and sympathies of his prose. For my part, though the world as of the reader. Shelley's Revolt of Islam, though I found it, and the circumstances which connected beautiful as a poem, and full of the most exquisite me with its habits have formerly given me no small passages, never thoroughly arrests the attention, portion of sorrow, some of it of no ordinary kind, while his unpretending Rosalina and Helen, or magnificent "Cenci" moves the deepest recesses of the spirit. The poet must feel, or seem to feel what he is writing, and he will then write in earnest. This is the art beyond all art of which Hunt was totally ignorant.

66

my creed, I confess, is not only hopeful, but cheerful; and I would pick the best parts out of other creeds too, sure that I was right in what I believed, or chose to fancy, in proportion as I did honor to the beauty of nature and spread cheerfulness and a sense of justice among my fellow creatures."

We began with the intention of only considering Hunt's poetical works, or we should certainly venture some remarks upon that miserable book, triply given utterance to such a sentiment! born of monstrous egotism, sickly vanity and envious hatred the "Notices of Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries." The true secret of Hunt's course in respect to this book, we think,

How few are there who, after the continual attacks which Leigh Hunt had borne, could have

Philadelphia, July, 1844.

HENRY C. LEA.

LINES, WRITTEN AFTER SICKNESS. officer and discharge of the hired men, when he

That sorrow's "long still work" hath drawn me to thy quarters in "a few weeks," the company of Artil