was not worthy to do it." He had seen in early life the sacred offices performed by his father and his brother with a solemnity which had sanctified them in his memory: how could he presume to undertake such functions? His religion has been called in question by Johnson and by Boswell; he certainly had not the gloomy hypochondriacal piety of the one, nor the babbling mouth piety of the other; but the spirit of Christian charity, breathed forth in his writings and illustrated in his conduct, give us reason to believe he had the indwelling religion of the soul.

We have made sufficient comments in the preceding chapters on his conduct in elevated circles of literature and fashion. The fairy gifts which took him there were not accompanied by the gifts and graces necessary to sustain him in that artificial sphere. He can neither play the learned sage with Johnson, nor the fine gentleman with Beauclerc; though he has a mind replete with wisdom and natural shrewdness, and a spirit free from vulgarity. The blunders of a fertile but hurried intellect, and the awkward display of the student assuming the man of fashion, fix on him a character for absurdity and vanity which, like the charge of lunacy, it is hard to disprove, however weak the grounds of the charge and strong the facts in opposition to it.

In truth, he is never truly in his place in these learned and fashionable circles, which talk and live for display. It is not the kind of society he craves. His heart yearns for domestic life; it craves familiar, confiding intercourse, family firesides, the guileless and happy company of children; these bring out the heartiest and sweetest sympathies of his nature.

"Had it been his fate," says the critic whom we have already quoted, "to meet a woman who could have loved him despite his faults, and respected him despite his foibles, we cannot but think that his life and his genius would have been much more harmonious; his desultory affections would have been concentred, his craving self-love appeased, his pursuits more settled, his character more solid. A nature like Goldsmith's, so affectionate, so confiding, so susceptible to simple innocent enjoyments, so dependent on others for the sunshine of existence, does not flower if deprived of the atmosphere of home.”

The cravings of his heart in this respect are evident, we think, throughout his career; and if we have dwelt with more significancy than others upon his intercourse with the beautiful Horneck family, it is because we fancied we could detect, amid his playful atten

tions to one of its members, a lurking sentiment of tenderness, kept down by conscious poverty and a humiliating idea of personal defects. A hopeless feeling of this kind, the last a man would communicate to his friends, might account for much of that fitfulness of conduct, and that gathering melancholy, remarked, but not comprehended by his associates, during the last year or two of his life; and may have been one of the troubles of the mind which aggravated his last illness, and only terminated with his death.

We shall conclude these desultory remarks with a few which have been used by us on a former occasion. From the general tone of Goldsmith's biography, it is evident that his faults at the worst were but negative, while his merits were great and decided. He was no one's enemy but his own; his errors in the main, inflicted evil on none but himself, and were so blended with humourous and even affecting circumstances, as to disarm anger and conciliate kindness. Where eminent talent is united to spotless virtue, we are awed and dazzled into admiration, but our admiration is apt to be cold and reverential; while there is something in the harmless infirmities of a good and great, but erring individual, that pleads touchingly to our nature; and we turn more kindly towards the object of our idolatry, when we find that, like ourselves, he is mortal and frail. The epithet so often heard, and in such kindly tones, of "Poor Goldsmith!" speaks volumes. Few who consider the real compound of admirable and whimsical qualities which form his character, would wish to prune away its eccentricities, trim its grotesque luxuriance, and clip it down to the decent formalities of rigid virtue. "Let not his frailties be remembered," said Johnson, “he was a very great man." But for our part, we rather say, "Let them be remembered," since their tendency is to endear; and we question whether he himself would not feel gratified in hearing his reader, after dwelling with admiration on the proofs of his greatness, close the volume with the kind-hearted phrase, so fondly and familiarly ejaculated, of "Poor Goldsmith!"

(From Life of Oliver Goldsmith.)

LEIGH HUNT

[James Henry Leigh Hunt (who during his literary life entirely dropped his first two Christian names) was the son of Isaac, latterly the Rev. Isaac Hunt, an Anglo-West-Indian, who was a lawyer till he took orders, and of Mary Shewell, a Philadelphian. His parents were loyalists and had to leave America, where Isaac Hunt had practised. Leigh, their youngest son, was born in London on 19th October 1784, was educated at Christ's Hospital, produced a book of verses at the age of sixteen, and, after holding a War Office clerkship for a short time, joined his brother John in starting the Examiner newspaper, and lived by literature, periodical and other, for the rest of his life. He married in 1809, and three years later came his imprisonment (for libelling the Prince Regent), during which he wrote his principal poem, the Story of Rimini, and made the acquaintance of the chief men of letters of the day, who sympathised with his politics. Being released, he did a great deal of miscellaneous work, his best being in The Indicator, a mainly single-handed periodical. In 1821-2, at Shelley's suggestion, he took his family to Italy, and edited The Liberal, a quarterly review under Byron's patronage. Shelley died, Byron and Hunt found it impossible to get on together, and Hunt, though he remained in Italy for some years after Byron's departure for Greece, had to come home, and took his revenge in the unlucky and discreditable Lord Byron and his Contemporaries (1828). He lived more than thirty years longer in different suburbs of London, doing a great deal of miscellaneous literary work, but suffering from chronic impecuniosity. For some time Shelley, and then the Shelley family, supplied his wants; and in 1847 he received a crown pension of £200 a year. He died on 28th August 1859. His character has been rather variously judged. Most people have admitted his amiability, but estimates in other respects have ranged from that of the critic who has pronounced him a "noble fellow" to that of those who think that the famous caricature of Skimpole in Bleak House, though a good deal blackened, was not quite unlike, and that there are in Hunt touches of vulgarity. His extremely voluminous works have never been collected; and some of them are not easy to obtain.]

THE fame of Leigh Hunt, like that of most writers of the second or lower ranks, who have not come to the period when their works are finally classed, has probably on the whole sunk a good Ideal since his death, though there has been a recent revival of

interest in him. But though, as has been said above, there is no complete collection of his works, certain parts of it appear to be kept steadily in print by the booksellers, while of others reprints in different forms still appear from time to time. With the exception of a novel of no great merit, of one or two religious or quasi-religious books, and of a little nondescript matter, the whole of his work in prose belongs to what is called occasional writing. Even where his books were issued with titles intimating a certain unity, such as The Town, The Old Court Suburb, A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla, and so forth, they are not in reality anything more than collections or strings of separate articles, and though an exception has been sought by some for the Autobiography, I am not myself much inclined to grant it.

Leigh Hunt was in fact a born article-writer, if not a born journalist. For the occupations of journalism proper, though he had a good deal of practice in them, he was, I suspect, both too orginal in fancy and too desultory in temper. He could write on an immense variety of subjects, but they must be subjects which hit his own taste and caprice at the moment, not subjects dictated by the events of the day or the needs of an editor. At the same time, he was not very capable of conceiving, or, having conceived, of working out any large and orderly scheme. Accordingly, the great mass of his work, though it has qualities which raise it far above ordinary journalism, still has some of the defects of journalism upon it. It consists of hundreds-it might hardly be an exaggeration to say thousands of articles, essays, sketches, reviews, short stories, sometimes mere paragraphs which touch on the widest diversity of subject. Hunt busied himself with literary history and criticism, art, politics, topography, social life, religion as he conceived it—a very vague and formless religion, which epithets will also apply to his politics-almost everything except the more serious subjects of science and scholarship. Even these, though with uniformly disastrous results, he now and then attempted to touch. To this multifarious and miscellaneous industry he brought a fair amount of rather desultory reading, a very fine taste in some departments (especially the poetical) of literary criticism, some knowledge of art, especially of the drama, a peculiar loving affection for the monuments and the memories of old London (which, with Italy, was almost his sole place of residence), a great deal of interest in the ordinary concerns of humanity, and above all a distinct style. This style,