caulay alludes with rare commendation to his "catholic taste." Of all authors indeed, and probably of all readers, Leigh Hunt had the keenest eye for merit and the warmest appreciation of it wherever found. He was actively engaged in politics, yet was never blind to the genius of an adversary; blameless himself in morals, he could admire the wit of Wycherley; and, a freethinker in religion, he could see both wisdom and beauty in the divines. Moreover, it is immensely to his credit, that this universal knowledge, instead of puffing him up, only moved him to impart it, and that next to the pleasure he took in books was that he derived from teaching others to take pleasure in them. Witness his "Wit and Humor" and his "Imagination and Fancy," to my mind the greatest treasures in the way of handbooks that have ever been offered to students of English literature, and the completest antidotes to pretense in it. How many a time, as a boy, have I pondered over this or that passage in the originals, from Shakespeare to Suckling, and then compared it with the italicized lines in his two volumes, to see whether I had hit upon the beauties; and how often, alas! I hit upon the blots![1]
It is curious that Leigh Hunt, whose style has been so severely handled (and, it must be owned, not without some justice) for its affectations, should have been so genuine (although always generous) in his criticisms. It was nothing to him whether an author was old or new; nor did he shrink from any literary comparison between two writers when he thought it appropriate (and he was generally right), notwithstanding all the age and authority that might be at the back of one of them. Thackeray, by the way, a very different writer and thinker, had this same outspoken honesty in the expression of his literary taste. In speaking of the hero of Cooper's five good novels—Leather-Stocking, Hawkeye, etc.—he remarks with quite a noble simplicity, "I think he is better than any of Scott's lot."
It is a "far cry" from the "Faerie Queen" to "Childe Harold," which, reckoning by years, is still a modern poem; yet I wonder how many persons under thirty—even of those who term it "magnificent"—have ever read "Childe Harold"? At one time it was only people under thirty who had read it; for poetry to the ordinary reader is the poetry that was popular in his youth—"no other is genuine."
Written in a manner which is my aversion,"
- ↑ I remember (when "I was but a little tiny boy") I thought that "the fringed curtains of thine eye advance," addressed by Prospero to Miranda, must needs be a very fine line; imagine, then, my confusion, on referring for corroboration to my "guide, philosopher, and friend," as he truly was, to find this passage: "Why Shakespeare should have condescended to the elaborate nothingness, not to say nonsense, of this metaphor (for what is meant by 'advancing curtains'?) I can not conceive. That is to say, if he did condescend; for it looks very like the interpolation of some pompous declamatory player. Pope has put it into his 'Treatise on the Bathos.'"
