One of the most delightful books of the season will be The Autobiography of LEIGH HUNT, which is being reprinted by Harper & Brothers, and will very soon be given to the American public in an edition of suitable elegance.  The last great race of poets and literary men, observes a writer in the London Standard, is now rapidly vanishing from the scene:  of the splendid constellation, in the midst of which Campbell, Scott, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Southey, Crabbe, and Byron, were conspicuous, how few remain!  Moore (rapidly declining), Rogers (upward of eighty), Professor Wilson, Montgomery, and Leigh Hunt, are nearly all.  It is fitting that we prize these few, as the remnants of a magnificent group, which cannot be expected very soon to be repeated.

Leigh Hunt has, for nearly half a century, occupied a prominent place in the public eye, as a politician of a peculiarly bold and decided stamp, when boldness was necessary for the utterance of the truth; and as a poet and prose-writer of a singularly-genial and amiable character.  As the chief founder and critic of the Examiner, he would doubtless occupy a high place in literary history, but as the author of “Rimini” he is entitled to a more enduring and enviable fame.  This will always stand at the head of his works:  but his “Indicator,” his “London Journal,” his “Jar of Honey,” and others, abound with the illustrations of a most imaginative and cordial spirit.

We are glad to possess a good autobiography of Leigh Hunt.  It is the first we have from a long list of celebrated men; and no one could give us such correct, discerning, and delightful insights into their usual life and true characters.  Hazlitt, Lamb, Shelley, Keats, Byron, and a crowd of others become familiar to us in these pages.  It was in the Examiner that the first compositions of Shelley and Keats were introduced to the British public; and the friendship which Mr. Hunt maintained with those poets, till their deaths, casts a sunshine over that portion of his life, which is peculiarly charming.

Perhaps the two points of this Autobiography which will most attract the attention of the reader are the author’s imprisonment for a libel on the Prince Regent, and his visit to Italy.  In that imprisonment of two years, he was visited by Byron, Moore, Brougham, Bentham, and several other eminent men.  In the journey to Italy, which was undertaken in order to cooeperate with Byron and Shelley in bringing out of the “Liberal,” Hunt had the misfortune to be deprived of Shelley’s friendship, by death, immediately on his arrival; and of the friendship of Byron, through incompatibilities of taste, and the jealous officiousness of Byron’s friends, amongst whom Moore bore a prominent part.  Mr. Hunt published a volume on the subject soon after his return to England, which occasioned him a great deal of ill-will.  To this publication he now refers with expressions of much regret, and with the calmness which has been produced by time.  But it cannot be denied that he endured most mortifying and irritating provocations, which never could have taken place had Shelley lived.  We are glad that he has had an opportunity of leaving a generous and forgiving record of this remarkable portion of his life; and certainly nothing can be more delightful than his present account of it:—­