A day by the fire

Prefatory Note

JHE papers here first collected were originally published in "The Reflector," "The Examiner," "The Indicator,"* "The London Journal," " The Monthly Chronicle," and " The New Monthly Magazine ; " and were written at widely different periods of the author's life — in his early manhood, middle life, and old age.

If there is any intelligent person who professes not to like Leigh Hunt, it is probably for precisely the same reason that Charles Lamb professed not to like the W s,

— because he did not know them. For Leigh Hunt is one of the most delightful of authors, and all who read him admire him for his scholarly tastes and literary amenities, his nimble wit, bright fancy, and subtle perception of beauty ; and love him for his glad heart and sunny disposition, his large and generous sympathies, and noble, Christian faith in the innate goodness of man.

This volume of essays and sketches, — written in the author's pleasant, characteristic manner, and full of what Hawthorne happily calls "his unmeasured poetry," — will, I hope, be acceptable to the old admirers of Leigh Hunt, and introduce him to many new and appreciative readers.

J. E. B.

Chelsea, November 18, 1869.

* The little weekly periodical, from which the well-known delightful work of the same name is a selection.

Something not to be replaced would be struck out of the gentler literature of our century, could the mind of Leigh Hunt cease to speak to us in a book.

Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton.

Into whatever he has written he has put a living soul ; and much of what he has produced is brilliant either with wit and humor, or with tenderness and beauty. George L. Craik.

Leigh Hunt seems the very opposite of Hazlitt. He loves everything, he catches the sunny side of everything, and, excepting that he has a few polemical antipathies, finds everything beautiful.

Henry Crabb Robinson.

He is, in truth, one of the pleasantest writers of his time, — easy, colloquial, genial, human, full of fine fancies and verbal niceties, possessing a loving if not a " learned spirit,'* with hardly a spice of bitterness in his composition.

E. P. Whipple.

I have been reading some of Leigh Hunt's works lately, and am surprised at the freshness, and sweetness, and Christian, not lax, spirit of human benevolence and toleration which existed in the heart of one who was the contemporary, and even colleague, of Byron.

Frederick W. Robertson.

Contents

Prefatory Note 3

A Popular View of the Heathen Mythology ... 47 On the Genii of the Greeks and Romans, and the

Spirit that was said to have waited on Socrates . 59