The second of Mr. Hunt’s new principles he thus announces: 

With the endeavour to recur to a freer spirit of versification, I have joined one of still greater importance—­that of having a free and idiomatic cast of language.  There is a cant of art as well as of nature, though the former is not so unpleasant as the latter, which affects non-affectation.—­(What does all this mean?)—­But the proper language of poetry is in fact nothing different from that of real life, and depends for its dignity upon the strength and sentiment of what it speaks.  It is only adding musical modulation to what a fine understanding might actually utter in the midst of its griefs or enjoyments.  The poet therefore should do as Chaucer or Shakespeare did,—­not copy what is obsolete or peculiar in either, any more than they copied from their predecessors,—­but use as much as possible an actual, existing language,—­omitting of course mere vulgarisms and fugitive phrases, which are the cant of ordinary discourse, just as tragedy phrases, dead idioms, and exaggerations of dignity, are of the artificial style, and yeas, verilys, and exaggerations of simplicity, are of the natural.—­p. xvi.

This passage, compared with the verses to which it preludes, affords a more extraordinary instance of self-delusion than even Mr. Hunt’s notion of the merit of his versification; for if there be one fault more eminently conspicuous and ridiculous in Mr. Hunt’s work than another, it is,—­that it is full of mere vulgarisms and fugitive phrases, and that in every page the language is—­not only not the actual, existing language, but an ungrammatical, unauthorised, chaotic jargon, such as we believe was never before spoken, much less written.

In what vernacular tongue, for instance, does Mr. Hunt find a lady’s waist called clipsome (p. 10)—­or the shout of a mob “enormous” (p. 9)—­or a fit, lightsome;—­or that a hero’s nose is “lightsomely brought down from a forehead of clear-spirited thought” (p. 46)—­or that his back “drops” lightsomely in (p. 20).  Where has he heard of a quoit-like drop—­of swaling a jerked feather—­of unbedinned music (p. 11)—­of the death of leaping accents (p. 32)—­of the thick reckoning of a hoof (p. 33)—­of a pin-drop silence (p. 17)—­a readable look (p. 20)—­a half indifferent wonderment (p. 37)—­or of

  Boy-storied trees and passion-plighted spots,—­p. 38.

of

  Ships coming up with scattery light,—­p. 4.

or of self-knowledge being

  Cored, after all, in our complacencies?—­p. 38.

We shall now produce a few instances of what “a fine understanding might utter,” with “the addition of musical modulation,” and of the dignity and strength of Mr. Hunt’s sentiments and expressions.