the delicate subject of his tale by circumstance, rather than following it to its full inspirations. The greater part of the _Story of Rimini_ is scene-painting, as if it were told by some bystander in the street, or some topographical visitor of the place. In the scene where the lovers so dangerously and fatally fall to reading “Launcelot of the Lake,”--“_quel giorno non legemmo più avanti_”--the larger portion of the canto is devoted to a description of the garden. Leigh Hunt does not, as Keats did, describe the sickening passion that gave the _Lamia_ so ghastly a sense of her own hated form,--nor does he, as in the _Lamia_, pursue the couple to the place where Love “Hover’d and buzz’d his wings with fearful roar Above the lintel of their chamber door.” If pharisaical critics discovered objectionable “tendencies” in passages--almost in the _omitted_ passages of his writings--they could find no such impetuous and sublime argument as that to which the _Revolt of Islam_ rises in the canto where “the meteor to its far morass returned;” nor such lines as show that a fair authoress, whose book has been “the rage” at Mudie’s, had been among the myriads of Shelley’s readers. But although hesitating himself to plunge into the impetuous torrent of passion, like the fowl mistrustful of its own fitness for so stormy waters, Leigh Hunt was the friend, instigator, and encourager of that rebellion of letters which in the earlier half of our age produced Keats and Shelley, and the poetical literature of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Others improved upon the example, no doubt, and bore away the “_honores_.” At a late day, Lord John Russell obtained for Leigh Hunt a royal pension of £200 a year--a most welcome and gratefully acknowledged compensation of time and money torn from him in early years.