the
stoniest readers. He can gravely call Dante's Hell "geologically
speaking a most fantastical formation" (which it certainly is), and
joke clumsily about the poet's putting Cunizza and Rahab in Paradise. He
can write, in the true spirit of vulgarising, that "the Florentine is
thought to have been less strict in his conduct in regard to the sex
than might be supposed from his platonical aspirations," heedless of the
great confessions implied in the swoon at Francesca's story, and the
passage through the fire at the end of the seventh circle of Purgatory.
But when he comes to things like "Dolce color d'oriental zaffiro," and
"Era gia l'ora," it is hardly possible to do more justice to the
subject. The whole description of his Italian sojourn in the
Autobiography is an example of the best kind of such writing. Again, of
all the people who have rejoiced in Samuel Pepys, Leigh Hunt "does it
most natural," being indeed a kind of nineteenth-century Pepys himself,
whom the gods had made less comfortable in worldly circumstances and no
man of business, but to whom as a compensation they had given the
feeling for poetry which Samuel lacked. At different times Dryden,
Spenser, and Chaucer were respectively his favourite English poets; and
as there was nothing faithless in his inconstancy, he took up his new
loves without ceasing to love the old. It is perhaps rather more
surprising that he should have liked Spenser than that he should have
liked the other two; and we must suppose that the profusion of beautiful
pictures in the "Faerie Queen" enabled him, not to appreciate (for he
never could have done that), but to tolerate or pass over the deep
melancholy and the occasional philosophisings of the poet. But the
attraction of Dryden and Chaucer for him is very easily understood. Both
are eminently cheerful poets, Dryden with the cheerfulness born of manly
sense, Chaucer with that of youth and abounding animal spirits. Leigh
Hunt seems to have found this cheerfulness as akin to his own, as the
vigour of both was complementary and satisfactory to his own, I shall
not say weakness, but fragility. Add yet again to this that Hunt
seems--a thing very rarely to be said of critics--never to have disliked
a thing simply because he could not understand it. If he sometimes
abused Dante, it was not merely because he could not understand him,
though he certainly could not, but because Dante trod (and when Dante
treads he treads heavily) on h