cure pardon for worse faults. With no
one perhaps are those literary memories which transform and vivify life
so constantly present as with Leigh Hunt. Although the world was a
perfectly real thing to him, and not by any means seen only through the
windows of a library, he took everywhere with him the remembrances of
what he had read, and they helped him to clothe and colour what he saw
and what he wrote. Between him, therefore, and readers who themselves
have read a good deal, and loved what they have read not a little, there
is always something in common; and yet probably no bookish writer has
been less resented by his unbookish readers as a thruster of the
abominable things--superior knowledge and superior scholarship--upon
them. Some vices of the snob Leigh Hunt undoubtedly had, but he was
never in the least a pretentious snob. He quotes his books not in the
spirit of a man who is looking down on his fellows from a proper
elevation, but in the spirit of a kindly host who is anxious that his
guests should enjoy the good things on his table.

It is this sincere and unostentatious love of letters, and anxiety to
spread the love of letters, that is the redeeming point of Leigh Hunt
throughout: he is saved _quia multum amavit_. It was this which prompted
that rather grandiose but still admirable palinode of Christopher North,
in August 1834,--"the Animosities are mortal: but the Humanities live
for ever,"--an apology which naturally enough pleased Hunt very much. He
is one of those persons with whom it is impossible to be angry, or at
least to be angry long. "The bailiff who took him was fond of him," it
is recorded of Captain Costigan; and in milder moments the same may be
said of the critical bailiffs who are compelled to "take" Leigh Hunt.
Even in his least happy books (such as the "Jar of Honey from Mount
Hybla," where all sorts of matter, some of it by no means well known to
the writer, have been hastily cobbled together) this love, and for the
most part intelligent and animated love, for literature appears. If in
another of his least happy attempts, the critical parts of the already
mentioned _Stories from the Italian Poets_, he is miles below the great
argument of Dante, and if he is even guilty to some extent of
vulgarising the lesser but still great poets with whom he deals, he
never comes, even in Dante, to any passage he can understand without
exhibiting such a warmth of enthusiasm and enjoyment that it softens