Excerpt from Essays

After seven or eight frail years of early childhood, Leigh Hunt went to school at Christ Hospital, not many months after Coleridge had left it for Cambridge and Lamb for the South Sea House. Hunt's account of his school-days is the most charming episode in that delightful book, his Auto�iqgmplzy, Notwithstanding the fastidiousness which his mother's delicate training had fostered, and which, at first, brought him into some natural trouble with his comrades, he seems on the whole to have passed seven pleasant enough years in the Cloisters. It is true that the boys had not always quite enough to eat, and no holidays to speak of; true also that the headmaster, Boyer, a tyrannical pedant, drove learning into the heads of his scholars by Sheer force of muscle. But Leigh Hunt had resources of his own and though he came to regard Homer with horror, disliked Cicero, and cared for neither Horace nor Ovid, he devoured Tooke's Pan/item, text and plates, and doted on certain sixpenny numbers of Spenser, Gray and Collins. 'he wrote verses, in imitation or emulation of his favourite poets: one on Winter, inspired by Thomson, and a Fairy King, and odes after Gray. Prose essays, or themes, he wrote in common with the other boys; but with great reluctance, and to the special contempt of the master. He formed friendships, three in number, bordering on adoration; and at thirteen he fell in love with a lively cousin, two years older than himself, who called him pelz'tgargon. He visited the house and studio of West the painter, thus becoming at an early age familiar with art and still Oftener, and with yet greater delight, a large old-fashioned house, with a garden, in Austin Friars, -a Garden of Eden to the boy, and a House Beautiful. Best of all was the one holiday of three weeks spent in a country-house in Surrey, one divine August, among fields and books. I read, walked, had a garden and orchaid to run in and fields that I could have rolled in, to have my will of them.

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