asserted the beauty of natural passion,—but he did it tenderly and obliquely, himself returning from the slightest taste of passion to "the domesticities," half begging pardon for his hardihood, and thus by implication confessing his naughtiness; and all the while hinting at the delicate subject of his tale by circumstance, rather than following it to its full inspirations. The greater part of the Story of Rimini is scene-painting, as if it were told by some bystander in the street, or some topographical visitor of the place. In the scene where the lovers so dangerously and fatally fall to reading "Launcelot of the Lake,"—"quel giorno non legemmo più avanti"—the larger portion of the canto is devoted to a description of the garden. Leigh Hunt does not, as Keats did, describe the sickening passion that gave the Lamia so ghastly a sense of her own hated form,—nor does he, as in the Lamia, pursue the couple to the place where Love
"Hover'd and buzz'd his wings with fearful roar
Above the lintel of their chamber door."
If pharisaical critics discovered objectionable "tendencies" in passages—almost in the omitted passages of his writings—they could find no such impetuous and sublime argument as that to which the Revolt of Islam rises in the canto where "the meteor to its far morass returned;" nor such lines as show that a fair authoress, whose book has been "the rage" at Mudie's, had been among the myriads of Shelley's readers. But although hesitating himself to plunge into the impetuous torrent of passion, like the fowl mistrustful of its own fitness for so stormy waters, Leigh Hunt was the friend, instigator, and encourager of that rebellion of letters which in the earlier half of our age produced Keats and Shelley, and the poetical literature of the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Others improved upon the example, no doubt, and bore away the "honores." At a late day, Lord John Russell obtained for Leigh Hunt a royal pension of £200 a year—a most welcome and gratefully acknowledged compensation of time and money torn from him in early years.
Leigh Hunt's miscellaneous poems extend over a great variety of subjects, from the classic legend of Hero and Leander, to the mediæval fabliau of the Gentle Armour, and the satirical critique of the Feast of the Poets. This last was published early in the author's maturer career; it is "in his second manner," and he afterwards revised many of the dicta on contemporary writers which he placed in the mouth of the chairman on that festive occasion, Apollo. But it helped to loosen the trammels of conventionalism in verse. The Gentle Armour, although true to a modern refinement, is also true to the spirit of the days of chivalry; it relates, in straightforward language, how a knight who had refused the bidding of his mistress to defend a falsehood—not her own—is punished by receiving the most feminine of garments as his cognizance at a tournament; and how, wearing that alone, he takes in his own person a bloody and reproving vengeance for the slight, in the end winning both fight and lady. The subject was thought "indelicate" by some who were less refined than the author—some descendants, perchance, of the proverbial Peeping Tom.
