ck, and then they asked,
civilly still, if Leigh Hunt had not done for a great many poets just
what he was proposing to have done. What about the treatment of the
poets and the quotations from them in the volumes on _Wit and Humor,
Imagination and Fancy_, _A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla_, and the rest?
The talker owned that there was a great deal about these which was to
his purpose, but, upon the whole, the criticism was too desultory and
fragmentary, and the quotation was illustrative rather than
representative, and so far it was illusory. He had a notion that Hunt's
stories from the Italian poets were rather more in the line he would
have followed, but he had not read these since he was a boy, and he was
not prepared to answer for them.

One of the company said that she had read those Italian poets in Leigh
Hunt's version of them when she was a girl, and it had had the effect of
making her think she had read the poets themselves, and she had not
since read directly Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, or Tasso. She regarded
that as an irreparable injury, and she doubted whether, if the great
English poets could be introduced in that manner, very many people would
pursue their acquaintance for themselves. They would think they were
familiar with them already.

Yes, the talker assented, if that were the scheme, but it was not; or,
at least, it was only part of the scheme. The scheme was to give the
ever-increasing multitude of readers a chance to know something of the
best literature. If they chose to pursue the acquaintance, very good; if
they chose not to pursue the acquaintance, still very good; they could
not have made it at all without being somewhat refined and enlightened.
He felt very much about it as he felt about seeing Europe, which some
people left unseen because they could not give all the time to it they
would like. He always said to such people, Go if they could only be gone
a month. A day in Rome, or London, or Paris, was a treasure such as a
lifetime at home could not lay up; an hour of Venice or Florence was
precious; a moment of Milan or Verona, of Siena or Mantua, was beyond
price. So you could not know a great poet so little as not to be
enriched by him. A look from a beautiful woman, or a witty word from a
wise one, distinguished and embellished the life into which it fell, so
that it could never afterward be so common as it was before.

Why, it was asked from a silence in which all the ladies tried to th