“And, Paulo, thou wert the completest knight
  That ever rode with banner to the fight;
  And thou wert the most beautiful to see,
  That ever came in press of chivalry: 
  And of a sinful man thou wert the best
  That ever for his friend put spear in rest;
  And thou wert the most meek and cordial
  That ever among ladies eat in hall;
  And thou wert still, for all that bosom gored,
  The kindest man that ever struck with sword.”

Hunt makes the husband discover his wife’s infidelity by overhearing her talking in her sleep.  In many other particulars he enfeebles, dandifies, and sentimentalises Dante’s fierce, abrupt tragedy; holding the reader by the button while he prattles in his garrulous way of Paulo’s “taste”—­

  “The very nose, lightly yet firmly wrought,
  Showed taste”—­

and of

  “The two divinest things in earthly lot,
  A lovely woman in a rural spot!”

a couplet which irresistibly suggests suburban picnics.

Yet no one in his generation did more than Leigh Hunt to familiarise the English public with Italian romance.  He began the study of Italian when he was a schoolboy at Christ Hospital, being attracted to Ariosto by a picture of Angelica and Medoro, in West’s studio.  Like his friend Keats, on whose “Eve of St. Agnes” he wrote an enthusiastic commentary,[19] Hunt was eclectic in his choice of material, drawing inspiration impartially from the classics and the romantics; but, like Keats, he became early a declared rebel against eighteenth-century traditions and asserted impulse against rule.  “In antiquarian corners,” he says, in writing of the influences of his childish days, “Percy’s ‘Reliques’ were preparing a nobler age both in poetry and prose.”  At school he fell passionately in love with Collins and Gray, composed a “Winter” in imitation of Thomson, one hundred stanzas of a “Fairy King” in emulation of Spenser, and a long poem in Latin inspired by Gray’s odes and Malet’s “Northern Antiquities.”  In 1802 [aetate 18] he published a volume of these juvenilia—­odes after Collins and Gray, blank verse after Thomson and Akenside, and a “Palace of Pleasure” after Spenser’s “Bower of Bliss.” [20] It was in this same year that on a visit to Oxford, he was introduced to Kett, the professor of poetry, who expressed a hope that the youthful bard might be inspired by “the muse of Warton,” whom Hunt had never read.  There had fallen in Hunt’s way when he was a young man, Bell’s edition of the poets, which included Chaucer and Spenser.  “The omission of these in Cooke’s edition,” he says, “was as unpoetical a sign of the times as the present familiarity with their names is the reverse.  It was thought a mark of good sense; as if good sense, in matters of literature, did not consist as much in knowing what was poetical poetry, as brilliant wit.”  Of his “Feast of the Poets” (1814) he writes:[21] “I offended all the critics of the old or French school,