the seventy-five years of his life in a region of
books; journeying from land to land in that
immortal territory, with all the enthusiasm and
ever-fresh wonder and delight of the old travellers
in the marvel-haunted East, and receiving
the very elements of his character from the
sources that fed his mind. His recently-
published Correspondence (to which we purpose to
devote a few columns) shows very clearly the
nature and habits of the man, and will remove a
world of misapprehension by simply presenting
facts in their right aspect. The book has come
out under the best of all auspices, for it is
edited by the poet's own son, Mr. Thornton
Hunt—a name not only known for many years
as that of one of the chief writers on the London
press, but specially and worthily associated with
the new edition of Leigh Hunt's Autobiography,
in which the work of the father was completed
by the son. The letters now given to the public
range from the year 1803 down to within
four days of the writer's death in August, 1859;
and they show the same general tendencies from
first to last, combined with remarkable variations
in specific matters of taste, and the gradual
emancipation of an original mind from the
conventionalities in which it had been trained in
youth, but which few have thrown off with such
complete success as he.

Though only the other day one of the working
world of authors, and though not of
extreme age at the time of his decease, Leigh
Hunt formed a direct link with a totally bygone
school of letters. Born in the same year that Dr.
Johnson died, his first ideas of literature were
formed while the Johnsonian style was still dominant,
before the French Revolution had had time
to rouse the mind of Europe (or at least of
England) out of its pseudo-scholastic lethargy,
before the war with Bonaparte had come to
confront the nation with the stern truths of a
new state of things, and while yet the great
inventions of our own day were unsuspected,
except by a few thoughtful brains. It was the
very worst period that our literature has ever
known. The great dictator of Fleet-street had
gone, leaving behind him a host of feeble
satellites, who made the vices of his style apparent
in their vapid and insincere imitations. Those
who did not mimic Johnson did what was
worse; for they wrote in a tone of maudlin
sentimentality that had not even the aspect of
strength. Burke, indeed, was still living; but
he stood almost alone. In poetry, the Delia
Cruscan manner prevailed, with its false simplicity
and real tinsel, its lachrymose tenderness
and sham romance. Wordsworth and Coleridge
had not yet risen above the horizon, and,
in the dearth of original genius, Headley himself
was looked upon as a prodigy. It is true that
Cowper kept alive the feeling of a better day;
but even his poems were to some extent
imbued with the faults of the time. It was in
the midst of these influences that Leigh Hunt's
earliest literary style was fashioned. The age
was one of pretence, and the young poet and
essayist suffered in the first instance from the
mistakes of others. He had "a good old aunt,"
who used to encourage him "to write fine
letters," and on whom he composed an elegy after
her death, in which he called her "a nymph!"
In our days, none but a boy could commit
such an absurdity; but at that time the boy
simply followed the example of his elders, who
in such affairs were probably in no respect his
betters. The old lady herself, who was so fond
of " fine letters," would doubtless have
considered that her translation into the nymphal
state was a perfectly proper thing—in poetry.
In the same artificial and sophisticated strain,
Leigh Hunt, when a boy, wrote "an ode in
praise of the Duke of York's victory at
Dunkirk, which," he relates, "I was afterwards
excessively mortified to find had been a defeat.
I compared him to Alexander, or rather
dismissed Alexander with contempt in the
exordium." In a letter to one of his daughters, he
says that he described the duke "as galloping
about through the field of battle, shooting the
Frenchmen in the eye!" When he had shaken
himself free of all this rubbish, Leigh Hunt
became one of the most truthful writers that
ever lived; but it was not until after some
years that he corrected the false literary education
of his youth.

His experiences at the Blue-coat School were
not of a character to set him in the right road.
The master, Boyer, seems to have been a pedant,
without any appreciation of the spirit of classical
learning, which he apparently regarded as an
affair of grammar and of mechanical forms. The
boy saw through and disliked the formalism;
and he fled for refuge to the poets of his own
country—but generally to the poorest and
weakest of them. He forsook one kind of
conventionality for another; he bathed his mind in
the poetry of the period immediately succeeding
Pope, and appears to have regarded the heroes
of Dodsley's Miscellany as the greatest masters
of verse. So true to him were the most sickly
insincerities of the so-called pastoral school of
poetry, that he and some of his school-fellows
would occasionally row up the river to Richmond,
that they might enact, literally and in
good faith, Collins's ridiculous lines about
Thomson's grave in his Ode on the Death of
that poet:

Remembrance oft shall haunt the shore
     When Thames in summer wreaths is dress'd,
And oft suspend the dashing oar,
     To bid his gentle spirit rest.

Such was the style which he then believed in
and reverenced; such was the style in which
his earliest volume of poems, called Juvenilia,
was composed. It was towards the close of
the year 1799 when he quitted the Blue-coat
School, and Juvenilia appeared some two years
afterwards. Six years later than that—namely,
in 1808—the Examiner commenced; but, in the
meanwhile, the young author had been trying
his wings in a variety of ways, though chiefly in
the direction of essay-writing and theatrical
criticism. The eighteenth century style was still in
the ascendant, and some of the men whom we