nt it need hardly ever
be said; for in the unlucky diatribes on Dante above cited, the most
unwary reader can see that his author has lost his temper and with it
his head. As a rule he avoids the things that he is not qualified to
judge, such as the rougher and sublimer parts of poetry. Of its
sweetness and its music, of its grace and its wit, of its tenderness and
its fancy, no better judge ever existed than Leigh Hunt. He jumped at
such things, when he came near them, almost as involuntarily as a needle
to a magnet.

He was, however, perhaps most popular in his own time, and certainly he
gained most of the not excessive share of pecuniary profit which fell to
his lot, as what I have called a miscellanist. One of the things which
have not yet been sufficiently done in the criticism of English literary
history, is a careful review of the successive steps by which the
periodical essay of Addison and his followers during the eighteenth
century passed into the magazine-paper of our own days. The later
examples of the eighteenth century, the "Observers" and "Connoisseurs,"
the "Loungers" and "Mirrors" and "Lookers-On," are fairly well worth
reading in themselves, especially as the little volumes of the "British
Essayists" go capitally in a travelling-bag; but the gap between them
and the productions of Leigh Hunt, of Lamb, and of the _Blackwood_ men,
with Praed's schoolboy attempts not left out, is a very considerable
one. Leigh Hunt is himself entitled to a high place in the new school so
far as mere priority goes, and to one not low in actual merit. He
relates himself, more than once, with the childishness which is the good
side of his Skimpolism, how not merely his literary friends but persons
of quality had special favourites among the miscellaneous papers of the
_Indicator_, like (he would certainly have used the parallel himself if
he had known it or thought of it) the Court of France with Marot's
Psalms. This miscellaneous work of his extends, as it ought to do, to
all manner of subjects. The pleasantest example to my fancy is the book
called _The Town_, a gossiping description of London from St. Paul's to
St. James's, which he afterwards followed up with books on the West End
and Kensington, and which, though of course second-hand as to its facts,
is by no means uncritical, and by far the best reading of any book of
its kind. Even the Autobiography might take rank in this class; and the
same kind of stuff made up th