Some thirty years ago, three youths went forth, one fine summer's day,
from the quiet town of Mansfield, to enjoy a long, luxurious ramble in
Sherwood forest. Their limbs were full of youth--their hearts of the
ardor of life--their heads of dreams of beauty. The future lay before
them, full of brilliant, but undefined achievements in the land of
poetry and romance. The world lay around them, fair and musical as a
new paradise. They traversed long dales, dark with heather--gazed from
hill-tops over still and immense landscapes--tracked the margins of
the shining waters that hurry over the clear gravel of that ancient
ground, and drank in the freshness of the air, the odors of the
forest, the distant cry of the curlew, and the music of a whole choir
of larks high above their heads. Beneath the hanging boughs of a
wood-side they threw themselves down to lunch, and from their pockets
came forth, with other good things, a book. It was a new book. A hasty
peep into it had led them to believe that it would blend well in the
perusal with the spirit of the region of Robin Hood and Maid Marian,
and with the more tragical tale of that Scottish queen, the gray and
distant towers of one whose prison-houses could be descried from their
resting-place, clad as with the solemn spirit of a sad antiquity. The
book was _The Story of Rimini_. The author's name was to them little
known; but they were not of a temperament that needed names--their
souls were athirst for poetry, and there they found it. The reading of
that day was an epoch in their lives. There was a life, a freshness, a
buoyant charm of subject and of style, that carried them away from the
somber heaths and wastes around them to the sunshine of Italy--to gay
cavalcades and sad palaces. Hours went on, the sun declined, the book
and the story closed, and up rose the three friends drunk with beauty,
and with the sentiment of a great sorrow, and strode homeward with the
proud and happy feeling that England was enriched with a new poet. Two
of these three friends have for more than five-and-twenty years been
in their graves; the third survives to write this article.
For thirty years and more from that time the author of Rimini has gone
on adding to the wealth of English literature, and to the claims on
his countrymen to gratitude and affection. The bold politician, when
it required moral bravery to be honest; the charming essayist; the
poet, seeming to grow with every new effort only more young in fancy
and vigorous in style--he has enriched his country's fame, but his
country has not enriched him. It is still time to think of it, and it
might save many future regrets, if a government becoming daily more
liberal, were to show that it knows the wishes of the public, and is
glad to fulfill them.
We have the authority of Mr. Leigh Hunt himself, in a memoir written
six-and-thirty years ago, for the fact that he was born in 1784, at
Southgate. His parents were the Rev. J. Hunt, at that time tutor in
the family of the Duke of Chandos, and Mary, daughter of Stephen
Shewell, merchant of Philadelphia, whose sister was the lady of Mr.
President West. Thus the poet was by his mother's marriage nearly
related to the great American painter; and here, he says, he could
enlarge seriously and proudly; but this boasting, it turns out very
characteristically, is not of any adventitious alliance with
celebrated names, but of a truer and more happy cause of
gratulation:--"If any one circumstance of my life could give me cause
for boasting, it would be that of having had such a mother. She was,
indeed, a mother in every exalted sense of the word--in piety, in
sound teaching, in patient care, in spotless example. Married at an
early age, and commencing from that time a life of sorrow, the world
afflicted, but it could not change her: no rigid economy could hide
the native generosity of her heart, no sophistical skulking injure her
fine sense, or her contempt of worldly-mindedness, no unmerited sorrow
convert her resignation into bitterness. But let me not hurt the noble
simplicity of her character by a declamation, however involuntary. At
the time when she died, the recollection of her sufferings and virtues
tended to imbitter her loss; but knowing what she was, and believing
where she is, I now feel her memory as a serene and inspiring
influence, that comes over my social moments only to temper
cheerfulness, and over my reflecting ones to animate me in the love of
truth."
That is a fine filial eulogy; but still finer and more eloquent has
been the practical one of the life and writings of the son. Whoever
knows any thing of these, perceives how the qualities of the mother
have lived on, not only in the grateful admiration of the poet, but in
his character and works. This is another proud testimony added to the
numerous ones revealed in the biographies of illustrious men, of the
vital and all-prevailing influence of mothers. What does not the world
owe to noble-minded women in this respect? and what do not women owe
to the world and themselves in the consciousness of the possession of
this authority? To stamp, to mold, to animate to good the generation
that succeeds them, is their delegated office. They are admitted to
the co-workmanship with God; his actors in the after-age are placed in
their hands at the outset of their career, when they are plastic as
wax, and pliant as the green withe. It is they who can shape and bend
as they please. It is they--as the young beings advance into the world
of life, as passions kindle, as eager desires seize them one after
another, as they are alive with ardor, and a thirst for knowledge and
experience of the great scene of existence into which they are
thrown--it is they who can guide, warn, inspire with the upward or the
downward tendency, and cast through them on the future ages the
blessings or the curses of good or evil. They are the gods and
prophets of childhood. It is in them that confiding children hear the
Divinity speak; it is on them that they depend in fullest faith; and
the maternal nature, ingrafted on the original, grows in them stronger
than all other powers of life. The mother in the child lives and acts
anew; and numberless generations feel unconsciously the pressure of
her hand. Happy are they who make that enduring pressure a beneficent
one; and, though themselves unknown to the world, send forth from the
heaven of their hearts poets and benefactors to all future time.
It is what we could hardly have expected, that Leigh Hunt is descended
of a high Church and Tory stock. On his father's side his ancestors
were Tories and Cavaliers who fled from the tyranny of Cromwell and
settled in Barbadoes. For several generations they were clergymen. His
grandfather was rector of St. Michael's, in Bridgetown, Barbadoes. His
father was intended for the same profession, but, being sent to
college at Philadelphia, he there commenced, on the completion of his
studies, as a lawyer, and married. It was, again, curious that, the
Revolution breaking out, the conservative propensities of the family
broke out so strong in him as to cause him to flee for safety to
England, as his ancestors had formerly fled from it. He had been
carted through Philadelphia by the infuriated mob, only escaped
tarring and feathering by a friend taking the opportunity of
overturning the tar-barrel set ready in the street, and, being
consigned to the prison, he escaped in the night by a bribe to the
keeper. On the arrival of his wife in England, some time afterward,
she found him who had left America a lawyer, now a clergyman,
preaching from the pulpit, tranquillity. Mr. Hunt seems to have been
one of those who are not made to succeed in the world. He did not
obtain preferment, and fell into much distress. At one time he was a
very popular preacher, and was invited by the Duke of Chandos, who had
a seat near Southgate, to become tutor to his nephew, Mr. Leigh. Here
he occupied a house at Southgate, called Eagle-hall; and here his son,
the poet, was born, and was named after Mr. Leigh, his father's pupil.
Mr. Hunt, in his autobiography, describes his mother as feeling the
distresses into which they afterward fell very keenly, yet bearing
them patiently. She is represented as a tall, lady-like person, a
brunette, with fine eyes, and hair blacker than is seen of English
growth. Her sons much resembled her.
At seven, Leigh Hunt was admitted into the grammar-school of Christ's
hospital, where he remained till he was fifteen, and received a good
foundation in the Greek and Latin languages. Mr. Hunt describes very
charmingly the two houses where, as a boy, he used to visit with his
mother; one of these being that of West, the painter, who had married
his mother's aunt; the aunt, however, being much of the same age as
herself: the other was that of Mr. Godfrey Thornton, of the great
mercantile house of that name. "How I loved," says Leigh Hunt, "the
graces in the one, and every thing in the other! Mr. West had bought
his house not long, I believe, after he came to England; and he had
added a gallery at the back of it, terminating in a couple of lofty
rooms. The gallery was a continuation of the hall passage, and,
together with the rooms, formed three sides of a garden, very small,
but elegant, with a grass-plot in the middle, and busts upon stands
under an arcade. In the interior, the gallery made an angle at a
little distance as you went up it; then a shorter one, and then took a
longer stretch into the two rooms; and it was hung with his sketches
and pictures all the way. In a corner between the two angles, and
looking down the lower part of the gallery, was a study, with casts of
Venus and Apollo on each side of the door. The two rooms contained the
largest of the pictures; and in the farther one, after stepping softly
down the gallery, as if respecting the dumb life on the walls, you
generally found the mild and quiet artist at his work; happy, for he
thought himself immortal." West, it is well known, was brought up a
Quaker, and had been so poorly educated that he could hardly read.
Leigh Hunt states his belief that West did a great deal of work for
George III. for very little profit; then, as since, the honor was
thought of itself nearly enough.
"As Mr. West," continues Leigh Hunt, "was almost sure to be found at
work in the farthest room, habited in his white woolen gown, so you
might have predicated, with equal certainty, that Mrs. West was
sitting in the parlor reading. I used to think that if I had such a
parlor to sit in, I should do just as she did. It was a good-sized
room, with two windows looking out on the little garden I spoke of,
and opening into it from one of them by a flight of steps. The garden,
with its busts in it, and the pictures which you knew were on the
other side of its wall, had an Italian look. The room was hung with
engravings and colored prints. Among them was the Lion's Hunt, by
Rubens; the Hierarchy, with the Godhead, by Raphael, which I hardly
thought it right to look at; and two screens by the fireside,
containing prints from Angelica Kauffman, of the Loves of Angelica and
Medoro, which I could have looked at from morning till night."
Here Mrs. West and Mrs. Hunt used to sit talking of old times and
Philadelphia. West never made his appearance, except at dinner and
tea-time, retiring again to his painting-room directly afterward; but
used to contrive to mystify the embryo poet with some such question
as, "Who was the father of Zebedee's children?" "The talk," he says,
"was quiet; the neighborhood quiet; the servants quiet; I thought the
very squirrel in the cage would have made a greater noise anywhere
else. James the porter, a fine athletic fellow, who figured in his
master's pictures as an apostle, was as quiet as he was strong. Even
the butler, with his little twinkling eyes, full of pleasant conceit,
vented his notions of himself in half-tones and whispers."
The house of the Thorntons was a different one, and a more socially
attractive place. "There was quiet in the one; there were beautiful
statues and pictures; and there was my Angelica for me, with her
intent eyes at the fireside. But, beside quiet in the other, there was
cordiality, and there was music, and a family brimful of hospitality
and good-nature; and dear Almeria T., now Mrs. P----e, who in vain
pretends that she is growing old. These were indeed holydays on which
I used to go to Austin Friars. The house, according to my boyish
recollections, was of the description I have been ever fondest of;
large, rambling, old-fashioned, solidly built; resembling the mansions
about Highgate and other old villages. It was furnished as became the
house of a rich merchant and a sensible man, the comfort predominating
over the costliness. At the back was a garden with a lawn; and a
private door opened into another garden, belonging to the Company of
Drapers; so that, what with the secluded nature of the street itself,
and these verdant places behind it, it was truly _rus in urbe_,
and a retreat. When I turned down the archway, I held my mother's hand
tighter with pleasure, and was full of expectation, and joy, and
respect. My first delight was in mounting the stair-case to the rooms
of the young ladies, setting my eyes on the comely and sparkling face
of my fair friend, with her romantic name, and turning over, for the
hundredth time, the books in her library."
The whole description of this charming and cordial family, is one of
those beautiful and sunny scenes in human life, to which the heart
never wearies of turning. It makes the rememberer exclaim:--"Blessed
house! May a blessing be upon your rooms, and your lawn, and your
neighboring garden, and the quiet, old monastic name of your street;
and may it never be a thoroughfare; and may all your inmates be happy!
Would to God one could renew, at a moment's notice, the happy hours we
have enjoyed in past times, with the same circles, in the same
houses!"
But a wealthy aunt, with handsome daughters, came from the West
Indies, and Great Ormond-street, and afterward Merton, in Surrey,
where this aunt went to live, became a new and happy resort for him.
After Leigh Hunt quitted Christchurch, of which, and of the life
there, he gives a very interesting description, at the age of sixteen
was published a volume of his school-boy verses. He then spent some
time in what he calls "that gloomiest of all '_darkness
palpable_'"--a lawyer's office; he became theatrical critic in a
newly established paper, the News; and his zeal, integrity, and talent
formed a striking contrast to the dishonest criticism and insufferable
dramatic nonsense then in public favor. In 1805, an amiable nobleman,
high in office, procured him a humble post under government; but this
was as little calculated for the public spirit of honest advocacy
which lived in him as the lawyer's office. He soon threw it up, having
engaged with his brother in the establishment of the well known
newspaper, the Examiner. The integrity of principle which
distinguished this paper, was as ill suited to the views of government
at that dark and despotic period, as such integrity and boldness for
constitutional reform were eminently needed by the public interests.
He was soon visited with the attentions of the attorney-general; who,
twice prosecuting him for libel, branded him "_a malicious and ill
disposed person_." It is now matter of astonishment for what causes
such epithets and prosecutions were bestowed by government at that
day. On one occasion, in quoting an account of some birthday or levee,
to the fulsome statement of the hireling court scribe, that the prince
regent "looked like an Adonis," he added the words "of fifty"--making
it stand "the prince looked like an Adonis of fifty!" This was cause
enough for prosecution, and an imprisonment of two years in
Horsemonger-lane jail. It was here, in 1813, that Lord Byron and Moore
dined with him. They found him just as gay, happy, and poetical, as if
his prison was a shepherd's cot in Arcadia, and there was no such
thing as "an Adonis of fifty" in the world. The "wit in the dungeon,"
as Lord Byron styled him in some verses of the moment, had his
trellised flower-garden without, and his books, busts, pictures, and
piano-forte within. Byron has recorded his opinion at that time of Mr.
Hunt, in his journal, thus:--"Hunt is an extraordinary character, and
not exactly of the present age. He reminds me more of the Pym and
Hampden times: much talent, great independence of spirit, and an
austere, yet not repulsive aspect. If he goes on _qualis ab
incepto_, I know few men who will deserve more praise, or obtain
it. He has been unshaken, and will continue so. I don't think him
deeply versed in life: he is the bigot of virtue (not religion), and
enamored of the beauty of that 'empty name,' as the last breath of
Brutus pronounced, and every day proves it."
What a different portrait is this to that of the affected, finicking,
artificial cockney, which the critics of that day would fain have made
the world accept for Leigh Hunt. Lord Byron was a man of the world as
well as a poet; he could see into character as well as any body when
there were no good-natured souls at his elbow to alarm his
aristocratic pride. He was right. Mr. Hunt has gone on _qualis ab
incepto_; and deserved and done great things. The critic-wolves
have long ceased to howl; the world knows and loves the man.
In process of time the Examiner was made over to other parties, and
Mr. Hunt devoted his pen more exclusively to literary subjects. His
connection with Byron and Shelley led him to Italy, where the Liberal,
a journal, the joint product of the pens of those three celebrated
writers, was started, but soon discontinued; and Leigh Hunt, before
his return, saw the cordiality of Lord Byron toward him shaken, and
witnessed one of the most singular and solemn spectacles of modern
times--the burning of the body of his friend Shelley on the sea-shore,
where he had been thrown up by the waves.
The occasion of Leigh Hunt's visit to Italy, and its results, have
been placed before the public, in consequence of their singular
nature, and of the high standing of the parties concerned, in a more
prominent position than any other portion of his life. There has been
much blame and recrimination thrown about on all sides. Mr. Hunt has
stated his own case, in his work on Lord Byron and his Cotemporaries.
The case of Lord Byron has been elaborately stated by Mr. Moore, in
his Life and Letters of the noble poet. It is not the place here to
discuss the question; but posterity will very easily settle it. My
simple opinion is, that Mr. Hunt had much seriously to complain of,
and, under the circumstances, has made his statement with great
candor. The great misfortune for him, as for the world, was, that
almost immediately on his arrival in Italy with his family, his true
and zealous friend, Mr. Shelley, perished. From that moment, any
indifferent spectator might have foreseen the end of the connection
with Lord Byron. He had numerous aristocratic friends, who would, and
who did spare no pains to alarm his pride at the union with men of the
determined character of Hunt and Hazlitt for progress and free
opinion. None worked more earnestly for this purpose, by his own
confession, than Moore. From that hour there could be nothing for Mr.
Hunt but disappointment and mortification. They came fast and fully.
With all the splendid qualities of Lord Byron, whether of disposition
or intellect, no man of sensibility would willingly have been placed
in any degree of dependence upon him; no man of genius could be so
without undergoing the deepest possible baptism of suffering. Through
that Leigh Hunt went, and every generous mind must sympathize with
him. Had Shelley lived, how different would have been the whole of
that affair, and the whole of his future life. He died--and all we
have to do is now simply to notice the residences of Leigh Hunt in
Italy, without further reference to these matters.
The chief places of Mr. Hunt's Italian sojourn were Pisa, Genoa, and
Florence. At Leghorn he and his family landed, and almost immediately
went on with Shelley to Pisa, where Byron joined them; but at Monte
Nero, near Leghorn, was at once introduced to a curious scene of mixed
English and Italian life. "In a day or two, I went to see Lord Byron,
who was in what the Italians call _villeggiatura_, at Monte Nero;
that is to say, enjoying a country house for the season. I there met
with a singular adventure, which seemed to make me free of Italy and
stilettos, before I had well set foot in the country. The day was very
hot; the road to Monte Nero was very hot, through dusty suburbs; and
when I got there, I found the hottest-looking house I ever saw. Not
content with having a red wash over it, the red was the most
unseasonable of all reds, a salmon color. Think of this flaming over
the country in a hot Italian sun.
"But the greatest of all the heats was within. Upon seeing Lord Byron,
I hardly knew him, he was grown so fat; and he was longer in
recognizing me, I was grown so thin. He was dressed in a loose nankeen
jacket and white trowsers, his neckcloth open, and his hair in thin
ringlets about his throat; altogether presenting a very different
aspect from the compact, energetic, and curly-headed person whom I had
known in England.
"He took me into an inner room, and introduced me to a young lady in a
state of great agitation. Her face was flushed, her eyes lit up, and
her hair, which she wore in that fashion, looked as if it streamed in
disorder. This was the Countess Guiccioli. The Conte Pietro, her
brother, came in presently, also in a state of agitation, and having
his arm in a sling. I then learned, that a quarrel having taken place
among the servants, the young count had interfered, and been stabbed.
He was very angry; Madame Guiccioli was more so, and would not hear of
the charitable comments of Lord Byron, who was for making light of the
matter. Indeed, there was a look in the business a little formidable;
for though the stab was not much, the inflictor of it threatened more,
and was at that minute keeping watch under the portico, with the
avowed intention of assaulting the first person that issued forth. I
looked out of the window, and met his eye glaring upward like a tiger.
The fellow had a red cap on like a _sans culotte_, and a most
sinister aspect, dreary and meager, a proper caitiff. Thus, it
appeared, the house was in a state of blockade; the nobility and
gentry of the interior all kept in a state of impassibility by a
rascally footman.
"How long things had continued in this state I can not say: but the
hour was come when Lord Byron and his friends took their evening ride,
and the thing was to be put an end to somehow. Fletcher, the valet,
had been dispatched for the police, and was not returned.... At length
we set out, Madame Guiccioli earnestly entreating 'Bairon' to keep
back, and all of us uniting to keep in advance of Conte Pietro, who
was exasperated. It was a curious moment for a stranger from England.
I fancied myself pitched into one of the scenes in the Mysteries of
Udolpho, with Montoni and his tumultuous companions. Every thing was
new, foreign, and violent. There was the lady, flushed and disheveled,
exclaiming against the '_scelerato_;' the young count, wounded
and threatening; the assassin waiting for us with his knife; and last,
not least in the novelty, my English friend metamorphosed,
round-looking, and jacketed, trying to damp all this fire with his
cool tones, and an air of voluptuous indolence. He had now, however,
put on his loose riding-coat of mazarine blue, and his velvet cap,
looking more lordly then, but hardly less foreign. It was an awkward
moment for him, not knowing what might happen; but he put a good face
on the matter; and as to myself, I was so occupied with the novelty of
the scene, that I had not time to be frightened. Forth we issued at
the door, all squeezing to have the honor of being the boldest, when a
termination is put to the tragedy by the vagabond throwing himself on
a bench, extending his arms, and bursting into tears. His cap was half
over his eyes; his face gaunt, ugly, and unshaven; his appearance
altogether more squalid and miserable than an Englishman could
conceive it possible to find in such an establishment. This blessed
figure reclined weeping and wailing, and asking pardon for his
offense, and to crown all, he requested Lord Byron to kiss him."
This was a curious introduction to Italian life. Leghorn, Mr. Hunt
says, is a polite Wapping, with a square and a theater. The country
around, though delightful to a first view, from its vines hanging from
the trees, and the sight of the Apennines, is uninteresting when you
become acquainted with it. They left here and proceeded to Pisa. There
they occupied the ground-floor of the Casa Lanfranchi, on the Lung'
Arno. The house is said to have been built by Michael Angelo, and is
worthy of him. It is, says Mr. Hunt, in a bold and broad style
throughout, with those harmonious graces of proportion which are sure
to be found in an Italian mansion. The outside is of rough marble.
Here poor Shelley saw his friends settled in their apartments, and
took his leave forever! Here they spent their time in the manner which
has been made so well known by the Life and Letters of Lord
Byron,--talking or reading till afternoon in the house; then riding
out to a wood or a vineyard, and firing pistols, after which they
would occasionally alight at a peasant's cottage, and eat figs in the
shade--returning to dinner. "In the evening," observes Mr. Hunt, "I
seldom saw Byron. He recreated himself in the balcony, or with a book;
and at night when I went to bed, he was just thinking of setting to
work with Don Juan."
In the autumn, they left Pisa for Genoa; and in their way visited the
deserted house of Shelley. Wild as the place is, it now seemed
additionally so. It was melancholy, its rooms empty, and its garden
neglected. "The sea fawned upon the shore, as though it could do no
harm."
Genoa now became, as it would appear, the residence of Leigh Hunt for
the greater part of the time that he continued in Italy, for he
describes himself as quitting it for Florence, three years afterward.
Mrs. Shelley had preceded them thither, and had furnished houses both
for herself and Lord Byron, in the village of Albaro. With her they
took up their residence in the Casa Negroto. There were forty rooms in
it, some of them such as would be considered splendid in England, and
all neat and new, with borders and arabesques. The balcony and
stair-case were of marble; and there was a little flower-garden. The
rent was twenty pounds a-year. Byron paid for his twenty-four pounds.
It was called the Casa Saluzzi, was older and more imposing, with
rooms in still greater plenty, and a good piece of ground. Mr. Hunt
describes himself as passing a melancholy time at Albaro, walking
about the stony alleys, and thinking of Shelley. Here the first number
of that unfortunate publication, The Liberal, reached them; here they
prepared the few numbers which succeeded it, and here the coldness
between Byron and Hunt grew to its height, and they parted.
We next, and lastly, find Mr. Hunt at Florence. "I hailed it," he
says, "as a good omen in Florence, that the two first words that
caught my ears were flowers and woman--_fiori_ and _donne_.
The night of our arrival, we put up at an hotel in a very public
street, and were kept awake by songs and guitars. It was one of the
pleasantest pieces of the south we had experienced; and for the
moment, we lived in the Italy of books. One performer to a jovial
accompaniment, sung a song about somebody's fair wife--_bianca
moglie_--which set the street in roars of laughter. From the hotel,
we went into a lodging in the street of beautiful women--Via delle
Belle Donne--a name which is a sort of tune to pronounce. We there
heard one night a concert in the street, and looking out, saw
music-stands, books, etc., in regular order, and amateurs performing
as in a room. Opposite our lodging was an inscription on a house,
purporting that it was the Hospital of the Monks of Vallombrosa.
Wherever you turned was music or a graceful memory. From the Via delle
Belle Donne, we went to live in the Piazza Santa Croce, next to the
church of that name, containing the ashes of Michael Angelo. On the
other side of it was the monastery in which Pope Sixtus V. went
stooping as if in decrepitude; 'looking,' as he said afterward, 'for
the keys of St. Peter.' We lodged in the house of a Greek, who came
from the island of Andros, and was called Dionysius; a name which has
existed there, perhaps, ever since the god who bore it."
"The church of Santa Croce," says Mr. Hunt, "would disappoint you as
much inside as out, if the presence of great men did not always cast a
mingled shadow of the awful and beautiful over our thoughts." He then
adds, "Agreeably to our old rustic propensities, we did not stop long
in the city. We left Santa Croce to live at Maiano, a village on the
slope of one of the Fiesolan hills, about two miles off. I passed
there a very disconsolate time; yet the greatest comfort I experienced
in Italy was from being in that neighborhood, and thinking, as I went
about, of Boccaccio. Boccaccio's father had a house at Maiano,
supposed to have been situate at the Fiesolan extremity of the hamlet.
That divine writer, whose sensibility outweighed his levity a
hundredfold--as a divine face is oftener serious than it is merry--was
so fond of the place, that he not only laid the two scenes of the
Decamerone on each side of it, with the valley his company resorted to
in the middle, but has made the two little streams that embrace
Maiano, the Affrico and the Mensola, the hero and heroine of his
Nimphale Fiesolano. A lover and his vestal mistress are changed into
them, after the fashion of Ovid. The scene of another of his works is
on the banks of the Mugnone, a river a little distant; and the
Decamerone is full of the neighboring villages. Out of the windows of
one side of our house, we saw the turret of the Villa Gherardi, to
which his 'joyous company' resorted in the first instance; a house
belonging to the Machiavelli was nearer, a little on the left; and
farther to the left, among the blue hills, was the white village of
Settignano, where Michael Angelo was born. The house is still
remaining in the possession of the family. From our windows on the
other side, we saw, close to us, the Fiesole of antiquity and of
Milton, the site of the Boccaccio house before mentioned still closer,
the valley of Ladies at our feet; and we looked toward the quarter of
the Mugnone, and of a house of Dante, and in the distance beheld the
mountains of Pistoia. Lastly, from the terrace in front, Florence lay
clear and cathedraled before us, with the scene of Redi's Bacchus
rising on the other side of it, and the villa of Arcetri, illustrious
for Galileo.
"But I stuck to my Boccaccio haunts, as to an old home. I lived with
the divine human being, with his friends of the Falcon and the Basil,
and my own not unworthy melancholy; and went about the flowery hills
and lanes, solitary, indeed, and sick to the heart, but not
unsustained. * * * My almost daily walk was to Fiesole, through a path
skirted with wild myrtle and cyclamen; and I stopped at the cloister
of the Doccia, and sat on the pretty melancholy platform behind it,
reading, or looking through the pines down to Florence. In the valley
of Ladies, I found some English trees,--trees not vine and olive,--and
even a bit of meadow; and these, while I made them furnish me with a
bit of my old home in the north, did no injury to the memory of
Boccaccio, who is of all countries, and finds his home wherever we do
ourselves, in love, in the grave, in a desert island."
In the twenty-third article of the Wishing Cap, Mr. Hunt gives us this
further description of Fiesole and the valley of Ladies:--
"Milton and Galileo give a glory to Fiesole beyond even its starry
antiquity; nor perhaps is there a name eminent in the best annals of
Florence, to which some connections can not be traced with this
favored spot. When it was full of wood, it must have been eminently
beautiful. It is at present, indeed, full of vines and olives, but
this is not wood _woody_: not arboraceous, and properly sylvan. A
few poplars and forest trees mark out the course of the Affrico; and
the convent ground contrived to retain a good slice of evergreens,
which make a handsome contrast on the hillside with its white
cloister. But agriculture, quarries, and wood-fires have destroyed the
rest. Nevertheless, I now found the whole valley beautiful. It is
sprinkled with white cottages; the cornfields presented agreeable
paths, leading among vines and fig-trees; and I discovered even a
meadow; a positive English meadow, with the hay cut, and adorned with
English trees. In a grassy lane, betwixt the corn, sat a fair rustic,
receiving the homage of three young fellows of her acquaintance. In
the time of Boccaccio, the Affrico formed a little crystal lake, in
which (the said lake behaving itself, and being properly sequestered)
the ladies of his company, one day, bathe themselves. The gentlemen,
being informed of it, follow their example in the afternoon; and the
next day the whole party dine, take their _siesta_ under the
trees, and recount their novels. This lake has now disappeared before
the husbandman, as if it were a fairy thing, of which a money-getting
age was unworthy. Part of the Affrico is also closed up from the
passenger by private grounds; but the rest of it runs as clearly as it
did; and under the convent, a remnant of the woodier part of the
valley, a delicious remnant, is still existing. The stream jumps into
it, as if with delight, and goes slipping down little banks. It is
embowered with olives and young chestnut-trees, and looks up to the
long, white cloister, which is a conspicuous object over the country.
"A white convent, a woody valley, chestnut-trees intensely green, a
sky intensely blue, a stream at which it is a pleasure to stop and
drink,--behold a subject fit for a day in August.
"This then is the 'Valle delle Donne.' If Boccaccio's spirit ever
visits his native country, here must it repose. It is a place for a
knight in romance to take his rest in, his head on his elbow, and the
sound of the water in his ear.
"I whisk to England in my Wishing Cap, and fetch the reader to enjoy
the place with me.
"How do you like it? Is it not a glen most glen-icular? a confronting
of two leafy banks, with a rivulet between? Shouldn't you like to live
in the house over the way, where the doves are? If you walk a little
way to the left, through the chestnut-trees, you see Florence. The
convent up above us on the right is the one I spoke of. There is
nobody in it now, but a peasant for housekeeper. Look at this lad
coming down the path with his olive complexion and black eyes. He is
bringing goats. I see them emerging from the trees; huge creatures,
that when they rise on their hind legs to nibble the boughs, almost
look formidable. There is Theocritus for you. And here is Theocritus
or Longus, which you will; for a peasant-girl is with him, one of the
pleasantest countenances in the world, with a forehead and eyes fit
for a poetess; as they all have. I wish the fellow were as neat as his
companion, but somehow these goatherds look of a piece with their
goats. They love a ragged picturesque."
From this charming and celebrated spot of earth, Leigh Hunt turned
northward and homeward through Switzerland and France. Every lover of
true poetry and of an excellent and high-hearted man, must regret that
his visit to Italy was dashed by such melancholy circumstances, for no
man was ever made more thoroughly to enjoy that fine climate and
classical land. Yet as the friend of Shelley, Keats, Charles Lamb, and
others of the first spirits of the age, Mr. Hunt must be allowed, in
this respect, to have been one of the happiest of men. It were no mean
boon of providence to have been permitted to live in the intimacy of
men like these; but, beside this, he had the honor to suffer, with
those beautiful and immortal spirits, calumny and persecution. They
have achieved justice through death--he has lived injustice down. As a
politician, there is a great debt of gratitude due to him from the
people, for he was their firm champion when reformers certainly did
not walk about in silken slippers. He fell on evil days, and he was
one of the first and foremost to mend them. In literature he has
distinguished himself in various walks; and in all he has manifested
the same genial, buoyant, hopeful, and happy spirit. His Sir Ralph
Esher, a novel of Charles II.'s time, is a work which is full of
thought and fine painting of men and nature. His Indicator and his
London Journal abound with papers which make us in love at once with
the writer and ourselves. There is a charm cast over everyday life,
that makes us congratulate ourselves that we live. All that is
beautiful and graceful in nature, and love-inspiring in our
fellow-men, is brought out and made part of our daily walk and
pleasure. His Months, a calendar of nature, bears testimony to his
intense love of nature, which breathes equally in every page of his
poetry. In these prose works, however, as well as in some of his
earlier poetry, we find certain artificialities of phrase, fanciful
expressions, and what are often termed conceits, which the critics
treated as cockneyisms, and led them to style him the head of the
Cockney school. There are certainly many indications, particularly in
The Months, of his regarding the country rather as a visitor than an
inhabitant. His _Standpunct_, as the Germans call it, his point
of standing, or in our phraseology, his point of view from which he
contemplates nature, is the town. He thus produces to a countryman a
curious inversion of illustration. For instance, he compares April to
a lady watering her flowers at a balcony; and we almost expect him, in
praising real flowers, to say that they are nearly equal to artificial
ones. But these are but the specks on a sun-disk, all glowing with the
most genuine love of nature. In no writer does the love of the
beautiful and the good more abound. And, after all, the fanciful
epithets in which he endeavors to clothe as fanciful notions, are, as
he himself has explained, nothing whatever belonging to London, or the
land of Cockayne, but to his having imbued his mind long and deeply
with the poetry, and, as a matter of course, with the poetic language
of our older writers. In a wider acquaintance with nature, the world,
and literature, these have vanished from his style; and I know of no
more manly, English, and chastely vigorous style than that of his
poems in general. In conformity with the strictures of various
critics, he has, moreover, rewritten his fine poem Rimini. It was
objected that the story was not very moral, and he has now, in the
smaller edition published by Moxon, altered the story so as to
palliate this objection as much as possible, and, as he says, to bring
it, in fact, nearer to the truth of the case. For my part, I know not
what moral the critics would have, if wretchedness and death, as the
consequences of sin, be not a solemn moral. If the selfish old father,
who deceives his daughter into a marriage by presenting to her the
proxy as the proposed spouse, is punished by finding his daughter and
this proxy prince, who went out from him with pomp and joy, soon come
back to him in a herse, and with all his ambitious projects thus
dashed to the ground, is not held as a solemn warning, where shall
such be found? However, the poet has shown his earnest desire to set
himself right with the public, and the public has now the poem in its
two shapes, and can accommodate its delicate self at its pleasure. I
regret that the space allowed for this notice does not permit me to
point out a number of those delightful passages which abound in his
beautiful and graceful poems. The graphic as well as dramatic power of
Rimini, the landscape and scene-painting of that poem, are only
exceeded by the force with which the progress of passion and evil is
delineated. The scene in the gardens and the pavilion, where the
lovers are reading Lancelot du Lac, is not surpassed by any thing of
the kind in the language. The sculptured scenes on the walls of this
pavilion are all pictures living in every line:--
"The sacrifice
By girls and shepherds brought, with reverend eyes,
Of sylvan drinks and foods, simple and sweet,
And goats with struggling horns and planted feet."