Page:The poetical works of Leigh Hunt, containing many pieces now first collected 1849.djvu/10

 tion beyond the day, by giving them a careful revision, rejecting superfluities, and correcting mistakes of all kinds. To this end he has re-written a considerable portion of the "Story of Rimini," not because he would give up to wholesale objection what has had the good fortune to obtain the regard of the public, but because he wrote it before he visited Italy, had made it in some respects too English, and, above all, had told an imaginary story instead of the real one. The landscapes are now freed from northern inconsistencies; the moral is no longer endangered, as some thought it, by dwelling too much on the metaphysics of a case of conscience; and the story contains the real catastrophe and the spirit of the probable characters of all the parties, without contradicting the known truth by any of the circumstances invented. He is aware of the objections made to altered poems in general, and heartily agrees with them; but the case, as thus stated, becomes, he conceives, an exception to the rule. Dante, who though a very great poet, had a will still greater than his poetry, and was in all things a partisan, was a friend and public agent of the heroine's father, and he has not told the deception that was practised on her. He left it to transpire through the commentators. This point of the story was at no time omitted in the version which the Author, in a fit of youthful confidence, undertook to make from the inimitable original; but, on the other hand, the surprise and murder of the lovers by the husband were converted into a