were discontinued for want of subscribers, although in the latter Leigh Hunt had able coadjutors, and it contained some of his best writing. His editorship (1837–1838) of the Monthly Repository, in which he succeeded W. J. Fox, was also unsuccessful. The adventitious circumstances which had for a time made the fortune of the Examiner no longer existed, and Hunt’s strong and weak points, his refinement and his affectations, were alike unsuited to the general body of readers.
In 1832 a collected edition of his poems was published by subscription, the list of subscribers including many of his opponents. In the same year was printed for private circulation Christianism, the work afterwards published (1853) as The Religion of the Heart. A copy sent to Carlyle secured his friendship, and Hunt went to live next door to him in Cheyne Row in 1833. Sir Ralph Esher, a romance of Charles II.’s period, had a success, and Captain Sword and Captain Pen (1835), a spirited contrast between the victories of peace and the victories of war, deserves to be ranked among his best poems. In 1840 his circumstances were improved by the successful representation at Covent Garden of his Legend of Florence, a play of considerable merit. Lover’s Amazements, a comedy, was acted several years afterwards, and was printed in Leigh Hunt’s Journal (1850–1851); and other plays remained in MS. In 1840 he wrote introductory notices to the work of R. B. Sheridan and to Moxon’s edition of the works of Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh and Farquhar, a work which furnished the occasion of Macaulay’s essay on the Dramatists of the Restoration. The pretty narrative poem of The Palfrey was published in 1842.
The time of Hunt’s greatest difficulties was between 1834 and 1840. He was at times in absolute want, and his distress was aggravated by domestic complications. By Macaulay’s recommendation he began to write for the Edinburgh Review. In 1844 he was further benefited by the generosity of Mrs Shelley and her son, who, on succeeding to the family estates, settled an annuity of £120 upon him; and in 1847 Lord John Russell procured him a civil list pension of £200. The fruits of the improved comfort and augmented leisure of these latter years were visible in the production of some charming volumes. Foremost among these are the companion books, Imagination and Fancy (1844), and Wit and Humour (1846), two volumes of selections from the English poets. In these Leigh Hunt shows himself within a certain range the most refined, appreciative and felicitous of critics. Homer and Milton may be upon the whole beyond his reach, though even here he is great in the detection of minor and unapprehended beauties; with Spenser and the old English dramatists he is perfectly at home, and his subtle and discriminating criticism upon them, as well as upon his own great contemporaries, is continually bringing to light unsuspected beauties. His companion volume on the pastoral poetry of Sicily, quaintly entitled A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla (1848), is almost equally delightful. The Town (2 vols., 1848) and Men, Women and Books (2 vols., 1847) are partly made up from former material. The Old Court Suburb (2 vols., 1855; ed. A. Dobson, 1902) is an anecdotic sketch of Kensington, where he long resided before his final removal to Hammersmith. In 1850 he published his Autobiography (3 vols.), a naïve and accurate piece of self-portraiture, full of affectations, but on that account free from the affectation of unreality. It contains very detailed accounts of some of the most interesting periods of the author’s life, his education at Christ’s Hospital, his imprisonment, and his residence in Italy. A Book for a Corner (2 vols.) was published in 1849, and his Table Talk appeared in 1851. In 1855 his narrative poems, original and translated, were collected under the title of Stories in Verse, with an interesting preface. He died at Putney on the 28th of August 1859.
Leigh Hunt’s virtues were charming rather than imposing or brilliant; he had no vices, but very many foibles. His great misfortune was that these foibles were for the most part of an undignified sort. His affectation is not comparable to Byron’s, nor his egotism to Wordsworth’s, but their very pettiness excites a sensation of the ludicrous. The very sincerity of his nature is detrimental to him; the whole man seems to be revealed in everything he ever wrote, and hence the most beautiful productions of his pen appear in a manner tainted by his really very pardonable weaknesses. Some of these, such as his helplessness in money matters, and his facility in accepting the obligations which he would have delighted to confer, involved him in painful and humiliating embarrassments, which seem to have been aggravated by the mismanagement of those around him. The notoriety of these things has deprived him of much of the honour due to him for his fortitude under the severest calamities, for his unremitting literary industry under the most discouraging circumstances, and for his uncompromising independence as a journalist and an author. It was his misfortune to be involved in politics, for he was as thorough a man of letters as ever existed, and most of his failings were more or less incidental to that character. But it is not every consummate man of letters of whom it can be unhesitatingly affirmed that he was brave, just and pious. When it was suggested that Leigh Hunt was the original of Harold Skimpole in Bleak House, Charles Dickens denied that any of the shadows in the portrait were suggested by Hunt, who was, he said, “the very soul of truth and honour.”
Leigh Hunt’s character as an author was the counterpart of his character as a man. In some respects his literary position is unique. Few men have effected so much by mere exquisiteness of taste in the absence of high creative power; fewer still, so richly endowed with taste, have so frequently and conspicuously betrayed the want of it; and he was incapable of discovering where familiarity became flippancy. But his poetry possesses a brightness, animation, artistic symmetry and metrical harmony, which lift the author out of the rank of minor poets, particularly when the influence of his example upon his contemporaries is taken into account. He excelled especially in narrative poetry, of which, upon a small scale, there are probably no better examples than “Abou ben Adhem” and “Solomon’s Ring.” He possessed every qualification for a translator; and as an appreciative critic, whether literary or dramatic, he has hardly been equalled.
Leigh Hunt’s other works include: Amyntas, A Tale of the Woods (1820), translated from Tasso; The Seer, or Common-Places refreshed (2 pts., 1840–1841); three of the Canterbury Tales in The Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer, modernized (1841); Stories from the Italian Poets (1846); compilations such as One Hundred Romances of Real Life (1843); selections from Beaumont and Fletcher (1855); and, with S. Adams Lee, The Book of the Sonnet (Boston, 1867). His Poetical Works (2 vols.), revised by himself and edited by Lee, were printed at Boston, U.S.A., in 1857, and an edition (London and New York) by his son, Thornton Hunt, appeared in 1860. Among volumes of selections are: Essays (1887), ed. A. Symons; Leigh Hunt as Poet and Essayist (1889), ed. C. Kent; Essays and Poems (1891), ed. R. B. Johnson for the “Temple Library.”
His Autobiography was revised by himself shortly before his death, and edited (1859) by his son Thornton Hunt, who also arranged his Correspondence (2 vols., 1862). Additional letters were printed by the Cowden Clarkes in their Recollections of Writers (1878). The Autobiography was edited (2 vols., 1903) with full bibliographical note by R. Ingpen. A bibliography of his works was compiled by Alexander Ireland (List of the Writings of William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt, 1868). There are short lives of Hunt by Cosmo Monkhouse (“Great Writers,” 1893) and by R. B. Johnson (1896).
HUNT, ROBERT (1807–1887), English natural philosopher,
was born at Devonport on the 6th of September 1807. His
father, a naval officer, was drowned while Robert was a youth.
He began to study in London for the medical profession, but
ill-health caused him to return to the west of England, and in
1840 he became secretary to the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic
Society at Falmouth. Here he was brought into contact with
Robert Were Fox, and carried on some physical and chemical
investigations with him. He took up photography with great
zeal, following Daguerre’s discovery, and introducing new
processes. His Manual of Photography (1841, ed. 5, 1857) was
the first English treatise on the subject. He also experimented
generally on the action of light, and published Researches on
Light (1844). In 1845 he accepted the invitation of Sir Henry
de la Beche to become keeper of mining records at the Museum
of Economic (afterwards “Practical”) Geology, and when the
school of mines was established in 1851 he lectured for two
years on mechanical science, and afterwards for a short time on
