Page:The Cornhill magazine (Volume 1).djvu/97



There are fashions in books, as there are in the cut of clothes, or the building of houses; and if from the great library of our race we take down the representative volumes, we shall find that successive ages differ almost as much as the several countries of the world. The one half of the century scarcely knows what the other half has done, save through its lasting works, among which books alone possess the gift of speech. Yet the guild of literature properly knows no bounds of space or time. If the tricks of craft like those of society belong to the passing day, literature has been, beyond all other human influences, enduring and continuous in the main current of its spirit; and each period has been the stronger if it has recognized so much of its possessions as was inherited from its predecessor, including the power to conquer more. A powerful sense of brotherhood clings to all the veritable members of the fraternity, whose highest diploma is posthumous; and we cannot see the lingering representatives of a past day depart, without feeling that one of the great family has gone. A writer whom we have lost in the year just closed peculiarly associated past and present, by his own hopeful work for "progress" towards the future, and his affectionate lingering with the past, and above all by the strong personal feeling which he brought to his work. belonged essentially to the earlier portion of the nineteenth century; but, born in the year when Samuel Johnson died, living among the old poets, and labouring to draw forth the spirit which the first half has breathed into the latter half of the century, he may be said to have been one of those true servitors of the library who unite all ages with the one we live in. The representative man of a school gone by, in his history we read the introduction to our own.

Isaac, the father of Leigh Hunt, was the descendant of one of the oldest settlers in luxurious Barbadoes. He was sent to develop better fortunes by studying at college in Philadelphia, where he unsettled in life; for, having obtained some repute as an advocate, and married the daughter of the stern merchant, Stephen Shewell, against her father's pleasure, Isaac contumaciously opposed the sovereign people by espousing the side of royalty, and fled with broken fortunes to England. Here he found not much royal gratitude, much popularity as a preacher in holy orders—taken as a refuge from want,—but no preferment. With tutorships, and help from relatives, he managed to rub on; he sent Leigh, the first of his sons born in England, to the school of Christ Hospital, and he lived long enough to see him an established writer. Isaac was a man rather under than above the middle stature, fair in complexion, smoothly handsome, so engaging in address as to be readily and undeservedly suspected of insincerity, and in most things utterly unlike his son. His wife, Mary Shewell, a tall, slender woman, with Quaker breeding, a dark thoughtful complexion, a heart tender beyond the wont of the world, and a conscience