Tales by Leigh Hunt. Now first Collected, with a Prefatory
Memoir, by William Knight, LL.D. (Paterson and Co.)— Leigh Hunt was an accomplished essayist and poet, great in neither department but pleasant in both. Keats, whom he be- friended when a helping hand was needed, spoke of him after- wards with bitterness, and no doubt felt that his own early work had been infected by Hunt's mannerisms. As a critic, what was sweet and musical in verse had more charm for Hunt than what was great ; and as a man, his foibles and virtues displayed a nature swayed by feeling far more than by high thinking. He wrote immensely, and there is a measure of charm even in his slightest essays. On the other hand, his prose stories have little to com- mend them, and are unworthy of the handsome form in which they appear in this volume. Some of them are so feeble that they must have been written, one would think, when Hunt was in urgent want of "copy" for his numerous periodicals. It is a pity they should be issued in book form, and we observe that Professor Knight very wisely passes no judgment upon them. Although somewhat of a Sybarite, Hunt was a laborious workman, and in this respect, as the editor observes, he almost rivalled Southey. About twenty years ago, Mr. Ireland published an elaborate catalogue of Leigh Hunt's works, and of his papers in periodicals, with the comments of contemporary and subsequent critics. How much the poet achieved, often under a stress of diffi- culties, may be seen in that remarkable " List." Leigh Hunt is not much read nowadays. Yet there are some of his works that deserve to be remembered, and his Autobiography, as Carlyle said truly, is an excellent good book ;—" by far the best," he adds, " of the auto- biographic kind I remember to have seen in the English language."
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