Volume 52, Number 20 · December 15, 2005
The Romantic Survivor
By Anne Barton
Fiery Heart: The First Life of Leigh Hunt
by Nicholas Roe
London: Pimlico, 428 pp., £14.99 (paper)
The Wit in the Dungeon: The Remarkable Life of Leigh Hunt—Poet, Revolutionary, and the Last of the Romantics
by Anthony Holden
Little, Brown, 430 pp., $29.95
The Rebellion of the Beasts, or, The Ass Is Dead! Long Live the Ass!!!
by Leigh Hunt, with an introduction by Douglas A. Anderson
Wicker Park Press, 151 pp., $21.95
Lord Byron's Life in Italy (Vie de Lord Byron en Italie)
by Teresa Guiccioli, translated from the French by Michael Rees and edited by Peter Cochran
University of Delaware Press, 700 pp., $95.00
On March 22, 1812, Leigh Hunt (1784– 1859) and his elder brother, John, finally went too far. In the Examiner, 'A New Sunday Paper Upon Politics, Domestic Economy and Theatricals,' which both brothers had launched in 1808 but to which Leigh was the chief contributor, an article by him appeared under the title 'The Prince on St. Patrick's Day.' A scathing reaction to the fulsome eulogy of the Prince Regent (the future George IV) just published in the Tory press, it pointed out that this so-called patron of learning and the arts, eloquent recipient of universal trust and adoration, personally (moreover) 'an Adonis in loveliness,' was actually a 'corpulent gentleman of fifty' who not only did nothing for deserving British writers and painters and could not string together even a few extempore sentences of his own, but was
Review, 4652 words
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