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.

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"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 paintingroom 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