From Temple Bar.

LEIGH HUNT.

Leigh Hunt was one of the poets who have their portion of praise in this life. Such writers are not always unjustly treated; they had their day, and enjoyed their credit; they were listened to by their own generation, and pitched their voices for its hearing, but they have not Fame's speaking-trumpet to reach our ears too. It would be rash to say that Joanna Baillie, Hayley, Southey, Bailey (I name them at random), did not deserve the reputation which they once enjoyed because they are little read, or less read, now. The immortals will have their immortality, and those who have done some particular thing supremely well will sit at their feet. Readers will always be found for Cowper, Jane Austen, Sterne, Charles Lamb. But Charles Lamb's friends-Leigh Hunt among them-are beginning to be forgotten, rather because they have gone out of fashion than for any better cause.

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I remember some thirty years ago, in the pleasant suburb of Kensington, gay with elm-trees and hedgerows, where some of the streets had only one side, and in which you often passed from rows of new drab-colored houses to green fields and country lanes, a cottage facing the south, with a little gate in front of it, a bow window, a porch with creepers, a garden and trees at the back; and we were told that Jenny Lind once lived there. It has gone long ago; but whilst it stood it was the home of art and romance. It did not suit this spreading building age, but it served for beauty and use forty years ago. That cottage reminds me of the gentle suburban life of Leigh Hunt. He marked a moment in literature, the transition from the aristocracy to the democracy of letters. He was only a mortal, though he lived with the immortals; but he has his place near them, and does not deserve to be altogether lost in the crowd.

He was a vagabond of literature, a hack of genius. He wrote about everything: politics, economics, Shakespeare, Byron, Italy, scenery, art, the

Quattro Poeti, the modern writers, actors, and singers, the drama, the stage. He wrote so rapidly and indiscriminately, turning out his articles as the baker turns out his rolls, that the commonplace of the printer's boy, waiting below for copy, might have been invented for him.

Writing was as easy to him as talking-and how he talked, Carlyle and Hazlitt have told us. "He talked," says Carlyle, "like a singing-bird. His talk was often literary, biographical, autobiographical, wandering into criticism, reform of society, progress, etc., free, cheery, idly melodious

as bird on high."

Hazlitt writes:

He has a fine vinous spirit about him, and tropical blood in his veins; but he is better at his own table. He has a great flow of pleasantry and delightful animal spirits; but his hits do not tell like Lamb's -you cannot repeat them next day. He sits at the head of a party with great gaiety and grace; has an elegant manner and turn of features; is never at a loss-aliquando sufflaminandus erat . . . laughs with great glee and good humor understands the point of an equivoque or an observation immediately. . . If he have a fault, it is that he does not listen so well as he speaks, is impatient of interruption, and is fond of being looked up to, without considering by whom.

Leigh Hunt was not an immense talker like Coleridge and Carlyle, a wit like Rogers and Sydney Smith, an authority like Johnson and Hallam, a detailer of reminiscences, a chronicler, an accepted critic of art and letters, an asker of questions, an arguer for victory-all acknowledged species in the category of talkers, and good in their place but a talker who was never tedious, because he was always fluent and graceful, and talked with, not only to, his company. And when he sat down with his conversational pen to talk about his life, he was not in a hurry for the printer, and could call upon memory and imagination to reproduce the good company he had kept, and the memorable things which he had seen and heard. He gives us in his autobiography, not only his own