Of his one novel, Sir Ralph Esher, suffice it to say, that he had desired to make it a sort of historical literary essay,—a species of unconcealed forgery, after the manner of a more cultivated and critical Pepys; and that the bookseller persuaded him to make it a novel:—of his dramatic works,—although he had an ambition to be counted among British dramatists, and had a discriminating dramatic taste,—that he combined, with the imperfect grasp of the tangible, a positive indifference to dramatic literature. The dramatic work which is reputed to be the most interesting of his compositions in this style, the Prince's Marriage, is still unacted and unpublished.
But in regard to the veritable British Parnassus, he had solid work to do, and he did it. Poetry amongst us had sunk to the lowest grade. Leigh Hunt found the mild Hayley, and the mechanical Darwin, occupying the field, Pope the accredited model, and he revolted against the copybook versification, the complacent subserviency and mean moralities of the muse in possession. He had read earnestly and extensively in the classics, ancient and English; he carried with him to prison the Parnaso Italiano, a fine collection of Italian poetical writers, in fifty-two volumes; and he was deeply imbued with the spirit which he found common to the poetical republic of all ages. He selected the episode of Paolo and Francesca, whom Dante places in the Inferno, and whose history was diligently hunted up to tell in the Story of Rimini. In it Leigh Hunt insisted on breaking the set cadence for which Pope was the professed authority, as he broke through the set morals which had followed in reaction upon the licence of many reigns. He shocked the world with colloquialisms in the heroic measure, and with extenuations of the fault committed by the two lovers against the law matrimonial. The offence, too, was perpetrated by a writer condemned to prison for bearding the constituted authorities. The poem and its fate were characteristic of the man and his position in poetical literature. The work was designed as a picture of Italy, and a tale of the natural affections rebelling against a tyranny more corrupt than the licence which it claimed to check. But when he wrote it, the poet had not been in Italy; and afterwards, with habitual anxiety to be "right," he corrected many mistakes in the scenery—such as "the smoke goes dancing from the cottage trees," where there are no such cottages as he imagined, and smoke is no feature in the landscape. He also restored the true historical conclusion, and instead of a gentlemanly duel, comme il faut, made the tale end in the fierce double murder by the husband. In its original shape, the Story of Rimini touched many a heart, and created more sensation for its bolder verse and nature than others which followed it; in its amended form it gained in truth to art and fact, and in force of verse and colouring. Leigh Hunt had not the sustained melody and pulpit morals of the Lake School; but he gave the example and encouragement to writers of still greater force and beauty. He vindicated human right against official wrong, and suffered imprisonment, and denunciation more bitter than that poured on Shelley, whose political vindications burst forth with such a torrent of eloquence and imagination in the Revolt of Islam. Leigh Hunt
