dium for the poetic tale which was as poetical as Crabbe's
was prosaic; thirdly, because of all persons perhaps who have ever
attempted English verse on their own account, he had the most genuine
affection for, and the most intimate and extensive acquaintance with,
the triumphs of his predecessors in poetry. Of prose he was a much less
trustworthy judge, as may be instanced once for all by his pronouncing
Gibbon's style to be bad; but of poetry he could tell with an
extraordinary mixture of sympathy and discretion. And this will
introduce us to his second faculty, the faculty of literary criticism,
in which he is, with all his drawbacks, on a level with Coleridge, with
Lamb, and with Hazlitt, his defects as compared with them being in each
case made up by compensatory, or more than compensatory, merits.

How considerable a critic Leigh Hunt was, may be judged from the fact
that he himself confesses the great critical fault of his principal
poem--the selection, for amplification and paraphrase, of a subject
which has once for all been treated with imperial and immortal brevity
by a great poet. With equal ingenuousness and equal truth he further
confesses that, at the time, he not only did not see this fault, but was
critically incapable of seeing it. For there is that one comfort about
this discomfortable and discredited art of ours, that age at any rate
does not impair it. The first sprightly runnings of criticism are never
the best; and in the case of all really great critics, from Dryden to
Sainte-Beuve, the critical faculty has gone on constantly increasing.
The chief examples of Leigh Hunt's critical accomplishment are to be
found in the two books called respectively, _Wit and Humour_, and
_Imagination and Fancy_, both being selections from the English poets,
with critical remarks interspersed as a sort of running commentary. But
hardly any book of his is quite barren of such examples; for he neither
would, nor indeed apparently could, restrain his desultory fancy from
this as from other indulgences. His criticism is very distinct in kind.
It is almost purely and in the strict and proper sense aesthetic--that is
to say, it does hardly anything but reproduce the sensations produced
upon Hunt himself by the reading of his favourite passages. As his sense
of poetry was extraordinarily keen and accurate, there is perhaps no
body of "beauties" of English poetry to be found anywhere in the
language which is selected with s