Читать книгу International Weekly Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science — Volume 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 - Various - Страница 3

One of the most delightful books of the season will be The Autobiography of LEIGH HUNT, which is being reprinted by Harper & Brothers, and will very soon be given to the American public in an edition of suitable elegance. The last great race of poets and literary men, observes a writer in the London Standard, is now rapidly vanishing from the scene: of the splendid constellation, in the midst of which Campbell, Scott, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Southey, Crabbe, and Byron, were conspicuous, how few remain! Moore (rapidly declining), Rogers (upward of eighty), Professor Wilson, Montgomery, and Leigh Hunt, are nearly all. It is fitting that we prize these few, as the remnants of a magnificent group, which cannot be expected very soon to be repeated.

Leigh Hunt has, for nearly half a century, occupied a prominent place in the public eye, as a politician of a peculiarly bold and decided stamp, when boldness was necessary for the utterance of the truth; and as a poet and prose-writer of a singularly-genial and amiable character. As the chief founder and critic of the Examiner, he would doubtless occupy a high place in literary history, but as the author of "Rimini" he is entitled to a more enduring and enviable fame. This will always stand at the head of his works: but his "Indicator," his "London Journal," his "Jar of Honey," and others, abound with the illustrations of a most imaginative and cordial spirit.

We are glad to possess a good autobiography of Leigh Hunt. It is the first we have from a long list of celebrated men; and no one could give us such correct, discerning, and delightful insights into their usual life and true characters. Hazlitt, Lamb, Shelley, Keats, Byron, and a crowd of others become familiar to us in these pages. It was in the Examiner that the first compositions of Shelley and Keats were introduced to the British public; and the friendship which Mr. Hunt maintained with those poets, till their deaths, casts a sunshine over that portion of his life, which is peculiarly charming.

Perhaps the two points of this Autobiography which will most attract the attention of the reader are the author's imprisonment for a libel on the Prince Regent, and his visit to Italy. In that imprisonment of two years, he was visited by Byron, Moore, Brougham, Bentham, and several other eminent men. In the journey to Italy, which was undertaken in order to coöperate with Byron and Shelley in bringing out of the "Liberal," Hunt had the misfortune to be deprived of Shelley's friendship, by death, immediately on his arrival; and of the friendship of Byron, through incompatibilities of taste, and the jealous officiousness of Byron's friends, amongst whom Moore bore a prominent part. Mr. Hunt published a volume on the subject soon after his return to England, which occasioned him a great deal of ill-will. To this publication he now refers with expressions of much regret, and with the calmness which has been produced by time. But it cannot be denied that he endured most mortifying and irritating provocations, which never could have taken place had Shelley lived. We are glad that he has had an opportunity of leaving a generous and forgiving record of this remarkable portion of his life; and certainly nothing can be more delightful than his present account of it:—

"The greatest comfort I experienced," he says, "in Italy was living in the same neighborhood, and thinking, as I went about, of Boccaccio. Boccaccio's father had a house at Maiano, supposed to have been situated at the Fiesolan extremity of the hamlet. That merry-hearted writer was so fond of the place that he has not only laid the two scenes of the 'Decameron' on each side of it, with the valley which his company resorted to in the middle, but has made the two little streams which embrace Maiano, the Affrico and the Mensola, the hero and the heroine of his 'Nimphale Fiesolano.' The scene of another of his works is on the banks of the Margnone, a river a little distant; and the 'Decameron' 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, according to his biographers, his 'joyous company' resorted in the first instance. A house belonging to the Macchiavelli was near, a little to the left; and farther to the left, among the blue hills, was the white village, Settignano, where Michael Angelo was born. The house is still in 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 Decameron's Valley of Ladies at our feet; and we looked over toward the quarter of the Mignone and of a house of Dante, and in the distance beheld the mountains of Pistria. 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, famous for Galileo. Hazlitt, who came to see me there, beheld the scene around us with the admiration natural to a lover of old folios and great names, and confessed, in the language of Burns, that it was a sight to enrich the eyes.

"My daily walk was to Fiesole, through a path skirted with wild myrtle and cyclamen; and I stopped at the door of the Doccia, and sate on the pretty melancholy platform behind it, reading, or looking down to Florence."

This is all very charming, yet hear what the author says further:—

"Some people, when they return from Italy, say it has no wood, and some a great deal. The fact is, that many parts of it, Tuscany included, has no wood to speak of: it wants larger trees interspersed with the small ones, in the manner of our hedge-row elms. A tree of a reasonable height is a god-send. The olives are low and hazy-looking, like dry sallows. You have plenty of these; but to an Englishman, looking from a height, they appear little better than brushwood. Then there are no meadows, no proper green fields in June; nothing of that luxurious combination of green and russet, of grass, wild flowers, and woods, over which a lover of nature can stroll for hours, with a foot as fresh as the stag's; unmixed with chalk-dust, and an eternal public path, and able to lie down, if he will, and sleep in clover. In short—saving, alas! a finer sky and a drier atmosphere—we have the best part of Italy in books; and this we can enjoy in England. Give me Tuscany in Middlesex or Berkshire, and the Valley of Ladies between Jack Straw's Castle and Harrow.... To me, Italy had a certain hard taste in the mouth: its mountains were too bare, its outlines too sharp, its lanes too stony, its voices too loud, its long summer too dusty. I longed to bathe myself in the grassy balm of my native fields."

As a whole these volumes are full of interest and variety. They introduce us to numerous famous people, and leave us with a most agreeable impression of their author.