a long
poem in Latin inspired by Gray's odes and Malet's "Northern Antiquities."
In 1802 [aetate 18] he published a volume of these _juvenilia_--odes
after Collins and Gray, blank verse after Thomson and Akenside, and a
"Palace of Pleasure" after Spenser's "Bower of Bliss." [20] It was in
this same year that on a visit to Oxford, he was introduced to Kett, the
professor of poetry, who expressed a hope that the youthful bard might be
inspired by "the muse of Warton," whom Hunt had never read. There had
fallen in Hunt's way when he was a young man, Bell's edition of the
poets, which included Chaucer and Spenser. "The omission of these in
Cooke's edition," he says, "was as unpoetical a sign of the times as the
present familiarity with their names is the reverse. It was thought a
mark of good sense; as if good sense, in matters of literature, did not
consist as much in knowing what was poetical poetry, as brilliant wit."
Of his "Feast of the Poets" (1814) he writes:[21] "I offended all the
critics of the old or French school, by objecting to the monotony of
Pope's versification, and all the critics of the new or German school by
laughing at Wordsworth." In the preface to his collected poems [1832]
occurs the following interesting testimony to the recentness of the new
criticism. "So long does fashion succeed in palming its petty instincts
upon the world for those of a nation and of nature, that it is only of
late years that the French have ceased to think some of the most
affecting passages in Shakespeare ridiculous. . . . Yet the English
themselves, no great while since, half blushed at these criticisms, and
were content if the epithet 'bizarre' ('_votre bizarre Shakespeare_') was
allowed to be translated into 'a wild, irregular genius.' Everything was
wild and irregular except rhymesters in toupees. A petty conspiracy of
decorums took the place of what was becoming to humanity." In the summer
of 1822 Hunt went by sailing vessel through the Mediterranean to Italy.
The books which he read chiefly on board ship were "Don Quixote,"
Ariosto, and Berni; and his diary records the emotion with which he
coasted the western shores of Spain, the ground of Italian romance, where
the Paynim chivalry used to land to go against Charlemagne: the scene of
Boiardo's "Orlando Inamorato" and Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso." "I
confess I looked at these shores with a human interest, and could not
help feeling that the keel of our vessel w