LEIGH HUNT'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY"

THESE volumes contain a personal recollection of the literature and politics as well as of some of the most remarkable literary men and politicians of the last fifty years. The reminiscences are varied by sketches of manners during the same period, and by cri- tical remarks on various topics that such a long review turns up. They are also extended by boyish recollection, family tradition, and contemporary reading; so that we have a sort of social picture of almost a century, with its fluctuations of public fortune, and its changes of fashions, manners, and opinions. With family charac- teristics and tradition, as well as with politics and literature, the events of the author's life are connected; the biography of Mr. Hunt, as may well be supposed, not sufficing for three volumes in its mere incidents.

The book begins with a pleasant though not altogether new sketch of the author's ancestors, who had settled in Barbados. Leigh Hunt's father was sent over to the American continent for his educa- tion ; there he went into the Jaw ; married there ; and was thence expelled vi et armis for his loyalty after the. breaking out of the troubles -which ended in American independence. The prejudice against him was so great that he was obliged to escape from Phil- adelphia as he could; and his wife was unable for many months to join him in England. When she did, she found him a popular preacher!—he had taken orders on discovering that the bar was too crowded, being too proud to go upon the stage as an actor ad- vised him. With his voice and delivery, his repute as one who had suffered for loyalty, and a subsequent tutorship to a nephew of the Duke of Chandos, high in courtly office, he seemed on the road to preferment, and visions of a mitre might rationally have been en- tertained. But a West Indian conviviality, with some imprudent frankness of heterodoxy, not only marred his preferment but eventually reduced him to the shifts of an unsettled life of poverty, save for some years during which he was helped by a Barbadian relation. He appears to have been a man whom everybody liked, but whom nobody chose to run the responsibility of assisting in the church; and perhaps the only mode of assisting him was by keeping him. He latterly became an Unitarian, with the catholic views of the new school of mingled Rationalism and Sentimen- talism. He died in 1809, before old age, but not before he had seen the commencement of his son's celebrity.

The subject of the present work was born at Southgate, in 1784 ; and, as all the world 'mows, was educated at the Blue Coat School. He rose to the place of first Deputy Grecian, and might have become Grecian and gone to college, but for an impediment in his speech. He was fifteen years ald when he put off the blue tunic and yellow stockings ; and did nothing for some time but write the poems that

• .44.atoylogra*.of Leigh Hunt; with Reminiscences of Friends and Corneas- polar-Mg: -In 'three wises. Published by Smith and Elder. formed his Juvenilia. These were published by subscription ; and Leigh Hunt became a notoriety in his teens ; which his father, with the good-nature of his character, seems to have encouraged. For some time young Mr. Hunt appears to have enjoyed his ce- lebrity and himself. The chronology of the work is not very full or always specific ; but before 1803 he had written for the Globe newspaper, then just commenced, a series of essays in imitation of the Connoisseur; had got a place in the War Office, given to his fa- ther by Lord Sidmouth ; had written various things retained in manuscript, amongst them a comedy, a tragedy, and a farce; and hadjoined a corps of Volunteers. In 1805 his brother John Hunt set up the News Sunday paper, and Leigh Hunt wrote the theatrical cri- ticisms. In 1808 the News was quitted to start the Examiner ; which, with the reputation of its editor, his peculiar style, and the ostentatious boldness of its attacks, attained great success for a time. The next ten or twelve years were, all things considered, the blazing meridian of Leigh Hunt's career. The novelty of the Examiner, the personal manner in which the editor put himself forward, (contrary to English custom ) and the literary notoriety he had otherwise attained, gave him a supposititious kind of influence ; and even Moore condescended to flatter my dear Hunt," in hopes to mollify the hebdomodal critic. He started the Reflector, a quar- terlyjournal ; which, though not successful in a pecunimy. sense, brought him still more before the public, and served for the publi- cation of longer pieces than the Examiner could contain, amongst them his Feast of the Poets. He was prosecuted by Attorney- General Gibbs, and reached the honours of martyrdom in a rose- papered room with clouded ceiling in Horsemonger Lane. He pub- lished Rimini ; he acted as a half-patron half-obstetrician to small poets and one or two larger ones—as Barry Cornwall and Keats. His friendship with them, and with Shelley, Resat, and Lamb, threw an adventitious glare upon him ; which was increased by their herding together and praising one another. Political animosity and old Tory insolence, probably (as Mr. Hunt inti- mates) some remembrance of old scores, and quite as likely some genuine aversion to the maudlin affectation of his morality or immorality and his sentimental scepticism, rendered his tastes, his poetry, his politics, and his morals, a theme for attack and ridi- cule ; and he was dubbed head of a " Cockney." school,—perhaps without much reason ; for his apparent disciples in verse were as likely to have drawn their love for sample nature from Wordsworth, missing his strength, and in prose we do not know that Leigh Hunt has had an imitator of any mark. Those days did not last. The old Tory party gave signs of de- cay ; influential political opinions began more to approximate, poli- ticians to become less violent. Leigh Hunt, no longer an object of attack, would no longer have been so conspicuous. Ere this, how- ever, an internal enemy was at work, before which empires have fallen—diminished supplies. Whether owing, as Mr. Hunt seems to think, to the hostility of Tory enemies and the shillyshalliness of pretended Whig friends, or whether, as is quite as likely, the editor continued to harp upon old notions in an old style when the taste and opinion of the world had changed, the sale of the Ex- aminer declined, and would continue declining. The Indicator was started ; but, though successful, was not sufficiently successful. Some other source of income had to be looked to ; and, at Shelley's

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suggestion and with his assistance, Mr. Hunt went to Italy, in 1822, to commence the Liberal. This project ended as everybody who knew anything about such undertakings could have predicted from the first; for even had Shelley lived, he could not have supplied the business experience, the necessary information, the uniformity of character, or the editorial control. How it went on and ended, is already well known from the quarto which Mr. Hunt published on the subject, and the counter story in Moore's Life of Byron. On his return to England, Mr. Hunt appears to have led the life of the old author ; "toiling for the day passing over him," and, if we rightly interpret his excuses for writing this book, rather fore- stalling the future. He published the Companion, a sort of succes- sor to the Indicator. Besides the'quarto about Byron, he wrote Sir Ralph Esher for Colburn ; and he attempted a variety of other things, without success in the point where success was chiefly de- sirable ; though it must be said that the public, critics, and we be- lieve political " organs " of every class, welcomed his efforts in the kindest spirit. How badly things I.ave gone with him for these last twenty years, the following extracis will indicate.

"We left Epsom to return to the neighbourhood of London, which was over the natural abiding-place of men of letters, till railroads enlarged their bounds. We found a house in a sequestered corner of Old Brompton, and a landlord in the person of my friend Charles Knight ; with whom an inter- course commenced, which I believe has been a pleasure on both sides. I am sure it has been a good to myself. If I had not a reverence of a peculiar sort for the inevitable past, I could wish that I had begun writing for Mr. Knight immediately, instead of attempting to set up another periodical work of my own, without either means to promulgate it or health to render the failure of little consequence. I speak of a literary and theatrical paper called the Tatter. It was a very little work, consisting but of four folio pages ; but it was a daily publication : I did it all myself, except when too and illness seldom hindered me either from supplying the review of a book, going every night to the play, or writing the notice of the play the same night at the printing-office. The consequence was, that the work, slight as it looked, nearly killed me ; for it never prospered beyond the coterie of playgoing readers, to whom it was almost exclusively, known ; and I was sensible of becoming weaker and poorer every day. When I came home at night, often at morning, I used to feel as if I could hardly speak ; and for a year and a half afterwards a certain grain of fatigue seemed to pervade my limbs, which I thought would never go off. Such, nevertheless, is a habit of the mind, if it be but cultivated, that my spirits never seemed better, nor did I ever write theatricals so well as in the juges of this moat unremunerating speculation. " I had attemptedjest before to set up a little work called Chat of the Week; which was to talk, without scandal, of anything worth public notice.

The Government put a stop to this speculalion, by insisting that it should have a stamp. •

" Tam a year or two after the cessation of the littler, my collected verses wan published by subseriptinn (not of coarse solicited) ; and, as a reaction lay this time had taken place in favour of political and other progress, and the honest portion of its opponents had not been unwilling to discover the honesty of those with whom they &tiered, a very handsome list of subscribers appeared in the Times newspaper, comprising names of all shades of opinion, some of my sharpest personal antagonists not excepted. It was by mere ac- cident that the list was omitted at the volume. I was gratified to hear that the first person who went and put down his name at the bookseller's was the present Belgian Ambassador, M. Van de Weyer. I fancied that I saw in this proceeding the combined manifestation of a willing personal reader and a corroborator of the good-will entertained towards me by the illustrious house which he served. For, in my desire to be loyal whenever I could, I had written some verses on the death of the Princess Charlotte, not without eapressiona due to the merits of the Prince her husband ; and it was only from a doubt of their being worthy of the subject that they were net repub- lished in the volume.

a a " Poems of the kind just mentioned (Ctrpterio Sword and Captain Pen) were great solaces to care ; but the care was great notwithstanding. I felt age coming on me, and difficulties not lessened by fading projects : nor was I able, had I been never so inerined, to render my faeultiem psetitable in the market.' It is easy to say to a man, Write such and such a thing, and it is sure to sell. Watch the public taste, and act acconlingly. Care not for original composition, for inventions or theories of your own, for :esthetics, which the many will be slow to apprehend. Stick to the works of others. Write only in inaguaines and reviews : or if you must write things of your own, compile. Tell anecdotes. Reproduce histories and biographies. Do

anythanything but write to the few, and you may get rich. ing is a great deal of truth in all this. But a man can only do what he can, or as others will let him. Suppose he has a conscience that will not suffer him to reproduce the works of other people, or even to speak what he thinks commonplace enough to have become common property. Suppose this conscience will nut allow him to accommodate himself to the opinion of editors and reviewers. Suppose the editors and reviewers themselves will not encourage him to write on the subjects he understands best, perhaps do not understand the subjects themselves, or at best play with him and delay him, and keep him only as a rename° when they own circle fails them. Suppose he has had to work his way up through animosities, political and religious, and through suck clouds of adversity as, even when they have passed away, leave a chill of misfortune round his repute, and make prosperity ' slow to en- courage him. Suppose, in addition to all this, he is in bad health, and of ffuetuating as well as peculiar powers ; of a temperament easily solaced in mind, and as easily drowsed in body ; quick to enjoy every object in creation, everything in nature and in art, every sight, every sound, every hook, pic- ture, and flower, and at the same time really qualified to do nothing, but either to preach the enjoyment of those objects in modes derived from his awn particular nature and breeding, or to suffer with mingled cheerfulness and poverty the consequences of advocating some theory on the side of hu- man progress. Great may sometimes be the misery of that man under the necessity of requesting forbearance or undergoing obligation; and terrible will be his doubts whether some of his friends may not think he had better have had a conscience less nice, or an activity less at the mercy of his physique. He will be forced to seek his consolation in what can be the only final consolation of any one who needs a charitable construction, namely, that he has given what he would receive.

"I did not understand markets ; I could. net command editors and re- viewers ; I therefore obeyed a propensity which had never forsaken me, and wrote a play. Plays are delightful things to write, and tempting things in the contemplation of their profits. They seem to combine the agreeable and the advantageous beyond any other mode of recruiting an author's finances.

" Little knows he of Cslista.' No man, I believe, at least in England, ever delivered himself from difficulties by writing plays. He may live by the stage as actor, or as manager, or as author of all work,—that is to say, as one who writes entirely for the actors, and who takes every advantage of times and seasons and the inventions of other men. But if his heroes are real heroes, and not Ames, or real heroines, and not Mrs. Smith or Mrs. Thomson—in other words, if he thinks only of nature while he draws them sad not of the wishes and self-loves of the reigning performers, the latter will have nothing to say to him. He must either concoct his plays under their direction and for their sole personal display, (for in other respects the advice of the actor is desirable,) or he must wait for the appearance of some manager who is at once literary and independent, and no actor himself; and that is a thing. which does not occur perhaps twice in a century. "BM I ann.4 ate. I wrote the Legend of Florence; and though it was rejected at one theanwI had reason to congratulate myself on its fortune at another. Not that it aid for me what I was told it might have done, had I let the husband retain his wife, or had less money perhaps been laid out in its getting up ' ; but it produced me two hundred pounds, which was a great refreshment to my sorry purse ; it gave me exquisite pleasure in the writing; it received the approbation of the entire weekly and monthly press, (at least I believe so, and I sin sure Christopher North graced it with a whole article) ; and astly, it received crown upon crown, in the presence, twice over, (a rare movement in royalty,) of her Majesty and Prince Albert, the former of whom was pleased to express her satisfaction with it to the manager, and the latter to a great statesman, who was so kind as to let me know it "I owe the performance of this play, first to a late excellent actress and woman, Mrs. Orger, whom I had the pleasure of knowing, and who obtained it a hearing from Mr. and Mrs. Matthews (Madame Vestris) ; secondly, to the zealous interest taken in it by those two cordial persons ; and lastly, to the talents and sympathy of Wm Ellen Tree (Mrs. Kean), the tears down whose glowing. cheeks encouraged me while it was read, and who has since told me that she regarded my heroine as her best performance.

"I have since written four more dramatic pieces of which the public know nothing ; one, a blank verse play in five acts ; another, also blank verse, in three acts; the third, a mixed piece of verse and prose, in two acts; and the fourth, a farm or petty comedy, also in two acts. In one of these pieces Mrs. Keen has taken voluntary and repeated interest ; of another she has spoken in the highest terms; a third is in the hands of Mrs. Mowatt, whose good-will to it was rendered of no avail by the closing of the theatre which she graced; and the fourth has been nearly two years in the hands of an applauding manager. Taking the pieces all together, I have been nine years attempting in vain to get them acted- * a a •

"About a dozen years ago, in consequence of disappointments of this kind, and of those before mentioned, some friends renewed an. application to Lord Melbourne, which they had made in the reign previous. It was thought that my sufferings in the cause of reform, and any career as a man of letters, rendered me not undeserving a yensmn. His lordship received both the applications with a courtesy which he does not appear to have shown in critters where the interest might have been thought greater; but the pen-

tium was not granted. Perhaps the was on that acconnt. , Perhaps he gave my friends these and other evidence of his good-will towards me knowing that he should advise nothing further ; for I had twice during his administration received grants from the Royal Bounty Fund, of two hun- dred pounds each, once during the reign of King William, and the second after the accession of her Majesty. It subsequently turned out, that Lord Melbourne considered it proper for no man to have a pension given him by one Sovereign who had been condemned in a court of law for opposing another. I will not say libelling,' for Lord Melbourne's friends, and per- haps himself when a young wit, IA plentifully libelled sovereign people. Had I been acquitted by the Carlton House judge's grand jury, the libel' would have gone for nothing. The reason, in fact., was so futile, and indeed so dangerous to royalty itself and its hold upon the affections, considering that a man may oppose one Sovereign out of the very feelings which render him the devoted subject of another, (which was the case in this very in- stance,) that a more reflecting Minister did not choose to abide by it, and the pension, as the reader has seen, was subsequently given me."

The style of the present work is in Mr. Hunt's "later manner " ; closer and soberer than it was in his "hot youth, when George the Third was King," without losing the pleasantness of the writing. Some of the old leaven still remains, however: there are digressions that stop the narrative without answering any other end than to insert opinions which are, scarcely worth recording, with fre- quent bits of parenthetical egotism, that remind one too much of the old lackadaisical mannerism, and of that vanity which parades a plea of guilty to weaknesses in order to win admiration for prettiness and candour. The attraction of the book is in its narrative, which carries the reader connectedly and pleasantly over old times, and calls up before him some of the principal persons and events from the American war to these times. The most interesting facts are remi- niscences of the men and manners and players of the author's earlier days ; which are done with his best discrimination and his wonted ease. The work, however, will rather disappoint the public; for there is little in it that is new, except what relates to the present reign. Those who are familiar with Mr. Hunt's writings will r nine nearly the whole of what is now given again to the war] , though mostly rewritten. A new light, too, has come over the author. He wishes a truce of compliment, if not a peace, with his enemi at all events. The Byron business is melted down to harmleames Mr. Moore is forgiven his sins, and even Castlereagh comes within the pale : but, as a set-off, Wordsworth is damned with faint False, and not too much of that ; Carlyle is taken to task for strong speaking; and poor Mr. Monckton Mikes was evidently guilty of a crime in writing the Life of Keats,—though the ostensible charge is the absurd one of giving Mr. Hunt " extreme pain " by stating a truth. Changes of opinion are not, however, peculiar to Mr. Hunt ; the world itself has changed. The thing which will be most distasteful to the reader, werfeacnz, is the unrefined honey- water style of the change, which Aristotle's observation as to the propinquity of the demagogue and the court favourite. It is a mistake, it seems, to suppose that Mr. Hunt was ever a man of extreme opinions : he set the present fashion forty years ago, though it was not generally followed till now. At the time when Gibbs was prosecuting him, his views were exactly those of her pre- sent Majesty and her present Minister, with a difference in the ex- pression. We tells us—" The opinions of the _Bran/4**er, in fact, both as to State and Church Government, allowing, of course, for dif- ference of position in the parties and tone in their manifsstation, were those now swaying the destinies of the country in the per- sons of Queen Victoria and her Minister Lord John Russell." (Vol_ ii. page 77.) Thanks to this pair of Fates, we have reached a. reli- gious and political optimism.. We need not trouble ourselves to ask Pilate's question, " What is truth ? " it is practically resolved for our understanding now and henceforth. " Sirs, if Ctesar writ, I ask no more."