COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY STUDIES IN ENGLISH

LEIGH HUNT’S RELATIONS WITH
BYRON, SHELLEY AND KEATS

LEIGH HUNT’S RELATIONS WITH
BYRON, SHELLEY AND KEATS

BY
BARNETTE MILLER, Ph.D.

New York
THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
1910

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1910
By The Columbia University Press
Printed from type April, 1910

Press of
The New Era Printing Company
Lancaster, Pa.

PREFACE

The relations of Leigh Hunt to Byron, Shelley and Keats have been treated in a fragmentary way in various works of biography and criticism, and from many points of view. Yet hitherto there has been no attempt to construct a whole out of the parts. This led Professor Trent to suggest the subject to me about five years ago. The publication of the results of my investigation has been unfortunately delayed for nearly four years after the work was finished.

I am indebted to Mr. S. L. Wolff for reading the first and second chapters; to Professors G. R. Krapp, W. W. Lawrence, A. H. Thorndike, of Columbia University, and Professor William Alan Nielson, now of Harvard, for suggestions throughout. I am especially glad to have this opportunity to record my gratitude to Prof. Trent, whose inspiration and guidance and kindness from beginning to end have alone made completion of the study possible.

B. M.
Constantinople, Turkey.
March 21, 1910.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

Revolutionary tendencies of the age—The Reaction—Counter Reform movement—Leigh Hunt—His Ancestry—School days—Career as a Journalist—Imprisonment—Finances—Politics—Religion—Poetry.

Since contemporary social conditions played an important part in the relations of Leigh Hunt with Byron, Shelley, and Keats, a brief survey of the period in question is necessary to an understanding of the forces at play on their intellect and conduct. The English mind had been admirably prepared for the principles of the French Revolution by the progressive tendency since the Revolution of 1688. The new order promised by France was acclaimed in England as one destined to right the wrongs of humanity; through unending progress mankind was to attain unlimited perfection. Upon such a prospect both parties were agreed, and the warnings of Burke were vain when Pitt, rationalizing, led the Tories, and Fox, rhapsodizing, led the Whigs. In 1793, Godwin’s Political Justice, with its anarchistic doctrines of individual perfectibility and of individual self-reliance, rallied more recruits to the standard of liberty, though his theories of community of property and annulment of the marriage bond were somewhat charily received. The early writings of Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge were colored with enthusiasm for the new movement. The agitation and the enactment of reform measures made actual advances towards the expected millennium.

But the excesses of the Revolutionary régime in France bred in England, ever inclined to order, an opposition in many conservative minds that resulted in positive panic at the menace to state and church and property. The reaction swung the pendulum far in the opposite direction from justice and philanthropy. The first two decades of the new century continued to suffer from a counter-reform movement when the actual fright had subsided. During that period, anything which savored of reform was labelled as seditious. At the very beginning of this reaction William Pitt’s efforts for the extension of the franchise were summarily put an end to, and the House of Commons remained as little representative of the English people as formerly. Catholics and Non-Conformists were denied, from the period of the union of Ireland with England in 1800 until 1829, the right to vote and to hold office. Pitt’s efforts to frustrate such discrimination in Ireland were as unavailing as in his own country, for the prejudices and obstinacy of George III, in both instances, neutralized the good intentions of the liberal Ministry. The corrupt influence of the Crown in Parliament was undiminished except by the disfranchisement of persons holding contracts from the crown and of incumbents