with some reflex of his own nature. Still, by an inscrutable destiny, the soul thus yearning for approbation from its fellowmen, received at their hands little else than contumely and loathing during its earthly career, since the close of that career obtaining from posterity little more than total neglect and absolute indifference. The neglect and the indifference, as formerly the loathing and the contumely, we believe to have been unmerited; for that Eustace Budgell is one of the purest prose writers in our language, is very readily demonstrable, as it appears to us, from his writings themselves: those writings that might yet with advantage be collected into a volume entitled " Budgell's Works"—a volume not unworthy of assuming its place in the minor treasury of our English Miscellanies.

LEIGH HUNT-THE TOWN POET.

A HAPPY circumstance brought me into brief but intimate communication with Leigh Hunt shortly before the close of those seventy-five years, the abundant fruits of which have secured for him the reputation of one of the most charming writers, whether of prose or verse, in English literature. Our intercourse, though narrowed in point of time by his tranquil death, at Putney, on the 28th of August, 1859, had already ripened, as I have said, into nothing less than intimacy. His regard had rapidly become, as indeed the ending of every letter to me cordially intimated in so many words, that of an affectionate friendship. In one of these, penned as recently as the first day of the very month of which he was fated never to see the termination, he wrote in my regard thus delightfully-"It is like one of the friendships of former days come back to me in my old age, as if in reward for my fidelity to their memory."

A communication from the dear old Poet-Essayist, penned on Monday, the 8th of August-(it was the last scrap of our correspondence I was ever to receive)-closing, strangely it seemed to me at the time, with a solemn benison that sounds even now almost like an unconscious farewell" All blessings attend you, prays your affectionate friend, Leigh Hunt," began with a pleasant summons to him on the following evening at his house in what he had characteristically mentioned in a previous note, as "the not very attractive suburbanity" of Hammersmith. "Tomorrow (Tuesday), by all means," he now wrote: adding whimsically, as will be seen immediately, "and the (that?) evening will suit me better than any other, for a very curious extemporaneous reason, as you shall hear." The reason proving simply that after that evening, had I called, I should have found him to have already then taken his departure, bent upon a temporary removal, in search of health, to the opposite bank of the Thames, sojourning there as

the cherished guest of the valued friend under whose sheltering roof-beams he so soon afterwards expired.

On Tuesday evening, then, the 9th of August, 1859, I am with Leigh Hunt for the last time in our earthly meeting. It is (so wholly unimagined by himself!) his own last evening in his last home-residence, one that having been subsequently deserted by his family, may now, without any breach of delicacy, be indicated for the satisfaction of those curious as to the last abode of the author of "The Town," as the little villa, No. 7, Cornwall Road, Hammersmith.

As I enter the inner sitting-room, I find my host seated in his easy-chair, in his accustomed corner, musing sadly in solitude. Although to the very close of his life he retained undimmed the most vivid appreciation alike of the beautiful and the whimsical -and I know not which, indeed, if either, of those two seemingly incongruous faculties held in his nature anything like a distinct predominance-I could not but especially note his eager solicitude at this time, upon every possible opportunity, to discuss the more solemn themes of time and eternity, above all the dread and holy mysteries of the hereafter. A few evenings previously, when left alone together, we had talked on thus late into the night; and now, again, his thoughts reverted, evidently with an awful joy, to the same "high argument." It is manifest enough to me now, that these were but the instinctive flutterings of his spirit, as it felt the jarring back of the bolts of life, towards what Edward Young has finely termed in his "Night Thoughts," Death, that

"Dark Lattice letting in Eternal Day."

Leigh Hunt, though now nearly five years beyond the allotted age of man, still evidenced the same insatiable appetite as of yore for all the sugar-plums of life, "lumps of flowers," and snatches of melody. A primrose was ever yet, for him, something more than a primrose, even though it had been the one whose delicate stalk was held between the brutal lips-whose pale, exquisite blossom gleamed between the black whiskers-of the vulgar ruffian, Blastus, in Douglas Jerrold's story of "St. Giles and St. James." Yet, strange to say, Leigh Hunt-like Wordsworth himself, who thus first philosophised poetically over the infinite suggestiveness of beauty latent in the primrose-Leigh Hunt, like William Wordsworth, was totally deficient, as he assured me, in the sense of smell, detecting no perfume whatever, even in petals the most odoriferous. He, whose verses are actually fragrant with flowers! Instance this, his delicious apostrophe

to the vernal month, that month of love and verdure, of cowslip and daffodil. Instance, this floral fragrance peculiar to Leigh Hunt's poetic effusions, his metrical apostrophe to the youngling month of the twelve, an apostrophe ending with that mellifluous couplet, the conclusion of which is as a very breath wafted from the hedgerows

"May, thou merry month complete;
May, thy very name is sweet!"

His imaginative sense of perfume, however, must have borne some analogy to the faintly adumbrated sense of colour prevailing among the colour-blind: among those who, wandering through a garden, recognise only by a difference of outline the distinction between the roses and the green leaves clothing the bush upon which they are blooming; who can there discover no diversity of hue, even, later on in the season, between the autumnal verdure and the scarlet rose-berries.

It was a distinguishing peculiarity with Leigh Hunt, that in regard to whatever of the beautiful his fancy touched, one might say of it, as he himself has said of Paganini's affection for his violin, that "he loved it like a cheek.” Nay, if ever in his colloquial criticisms he had to note some fault or blemish in the thing he loved, it was always with that gentle apology, with that courtly extenuation of Torquato Tasso, not pale but fair

"Non era pallidezza, ma candore !"

So, likewise, when he was writing, particularly in verse, upon anything whatever possessing the divine grace and crowning merit of the Beautiful, it was perpetually with him, as it once upon a time actually chanced with Keats, while scrawling a letter to one of his familiar correspondents when he suddenly broke off with, "Talking of pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my mouth a nectarine. Good God!-how fine! It went down soft, pulpy, slushy, oozy, all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large beatified strawberry." Leigh Hunt-when writing—always, one might say, held in his other hand the nectarine.

And the fruits loved most by this poetic gourmand, were they not the choicest glories of what he has himself daintily termed the "Human Orchard ?" Where-it is in his charming little poem on "Sudden Fine Weather" that the phrase occurshe cries out deliciously—

"Your finest fruit to some two months may reach :
I've known a cheek of forty like a peach!"

As he wrote, so likewise did he read, with a hand and an eye of tenderest appreciation. Those volumes indeed, the leaves of which he had turned in any way attentively, bore upon their pages abundant evidence of this, in numberless little pencilled ticks of applause or of objection, no less than in the quaintest marginal annotations, penned in his elegant Italian caligraphy. Any such jotted lines and notes upon the margin, he himself compared to loving pinches upon the cheek, touches, he would say, that left, each of them, an impress like a dimple; giving the future reader, he argued, the added charm of a direct companionship in this kind of sympathetic appreciation.

One of these well-fingered books-a very wall of fruit, with á bee-made cicatrice here and there upon the riper greengages and apricots-a volume he dearly loved, and which he had actually read through four times-he has notified it, "with increasing admiration" (it is M. Abel Remusat's translation of the veritable Chinese Novel, "Iu-kiao-li; or, the Two Fair Cousins")-Leigh Hunt lent me, upon this last night of our meeting, shortly before we parted, bidding me, as he did so, preserve it tenderly for him, as one among the many million atoms of the apple of my eye. I have it still a posthumous gift from him, proffered to me from his deathbed-if I cared to keep it in his remembrance. It illustrates, by a two-fold attraction, what has here been said about those dimpling touches; touches here imparted to the cheek of the old Chinese Chronicler, by Leigh Hunt's own hand, and by that of his loved and honoured friend, Thomas Carlyle. Such fantastic touches, some of them! As, where a personage in the text called "Old Touchi" is spoken of incidentally. Whereupon, quoth Leigh Hunt in the margin, "Head of the genus irritabile!" Again, where mention is made, in connection with the Imperial College, of one "Examiner Li-" the once editor of the journal of that ilk, as the Scotch would have it, cries out, with mingled exultation and surprise, upon the margin, "Myself! by title and name!"

He

More thickly, however, than the margins of his books, were the pleasant hours of his converse sown with whimsicalities. could not speak of even one of his own infirmities, without rendering it the theme of a joke and the provocation to an explosion of laughter. The loss of his teeth, for example, casually mentioned by him, caused him to exult at having made that additional advance towards being etherialised.

Who does not remember his sudden bursts of fun, even át moments when he must have been most thoroughly in earnest ? Instance this, where, in his discursive metrical thoughts "On