This peculiar moralist had certainly very loose notions about money, debt, and all manner of pecuniary obligations.
A good many years ago, while that other very peculiar moralist, philosopher, and poet, Walter Savage Landor, was living on the Fiesole hill behind Florence, Knight said: “I understand that Landor has got over his difficulties, and is coming to live in his own country.” “No,” said C., “that can hardly be, for, poor fellow! he still owes nearly £20,000.” “Poor fellow!” said Hunt; “why call him a poor fellow? I should rather call him a very lucky fellow, to have been able to get so much credit!”
Hunt rarely engaged to do any kind of work without asking for advances, and when he got the money, it was not always easy to get the work out of him. Old A. used to quote the proverb about “working the dead horse,” and to say that, next to his friend Hazlitt, Hunt was in this sense the worst of dead horses.
Also, like Hazlitt, Hunt never seemed to consider that he had been paid for an
article until he had sold it to three or four of the Trade. He greatly injured himself by
these manoeuvres, which he would explain and justify with a logic all his own, and with the
greatest composure and most perfect bonhomie. Even when he applied
steadily to it, which was seldom the case, he was very slow at his work. I have known him
occupy a whole week in writing six
| CHAP. X] | AT OLD BROMPTON | 103 |
Hunt and his family stayed there, without ever paying a sixpence of rent, for nearly two years, when K. got rid of them by sending them a receipt in full of all demands, and then he had the additional satisfaction of finding that they had ruined nearly all the furniture. Yet I have heard the poet, in moments of anger, call the publisher an unfeeling, stingy fellow.
But Hunt had his good qualities, and a great many of them. We all believed he would have had many more but for his mismanaging, unthrifty wife, the most barefaced, persevering, pertinacious of mendicants. She held as an undeviating principle that everybody was bound to do homage to her husband’s genius, and to administer to his wants and to those of herself and children, and that all literary men, whether rich or poor, were in especial manner under these obligations. She would never take a refusal; after asking for five pounds, she would go away with five shillings or a smaller sum. I believe it was my friend W. who first gave her the name of “Old Mother D——ble.” Whenever she made a good collection she was sure to be seen the next day, with her daughters and a son or two, driving about London in what the French call a voiture de rémise, and what we used to designate a “glass coach.”
I believe that Hunt, who remained at home
tag-
| 104 | LEIGH HUNT | [CHAP. X |
Thomas Carlyle, who had not more money than he knew what to do with, was frequently visited by Mrs. H. She began by borrowing five pounds, promising most faithfully to return the money by a given time. To Carlyle’s astonishment, she did return it; but it was only to borrow it again in a week or two. Again she surprised the philosopher by repayment; but again, in the course of a few days, she reborrowed it. This went on for a long time. When the five sovereigns were at home, Mrs. Carlyle always put them in a corner of her escritoire; and the coin, done up in paper, was called “Hunt money.”
At last the philosopher grew tired of this constant ebb and flow of capital, and the last time that Mrs. H. sent one of her children, he demurred. Mrs. C. thought that he might as well lend again; and the philosopher was divided between the opinion of whether he should or should not. To get out of his indecision and settle the matter, he took a shilling out of his pocket and said: “Well, if this comes down ‘heads,’ Mrs. H. shall have the sovereigns.” He tossed; it came down “tails,” and so old Mother D., like old Mother Hubbard’s dog, had none.
When poor Hunt happened to have money, he was most generous with it; but the occurrence, or accident, was rare. I believe that at any time he would have divided his last shilling with a friend.
He was nothing of a sensualist; he could eat the plainest food, and cared
little for wine, if he had to pay for it. I believe that at one time he had been rather
particular about his dress, but when I began to know him intimately, in 1829-30, he had no
expensive tastes or habits. By this time he had pretty well got rid of all the affectations
and all the cox-
| CHAP. X] | HOOD AS PUNSTER | 105 |
Hood was a small, rather saturnine-looking man, with very weak and watery eyes.
Though so very witty upon paper, he was by no means happy in spoken, impromptu puns or other jokes. His puns required time, long thought, and elaboration. Those which he elaborated were innumerable, and about the best that were ever made. In conversation, I have heard him make very bad ones. One evening, at Horace Smith’s—himself a pitiless punster—Colonel Cradock, now Lord Howden, was quietly relating how he had been attacked and wounded by an Arab while travelling to the ruins of Baalbec in the desert. “Colonel,” said Tommy, “if you were a Scotsman, you might say that you were spiering your way.” “No,” said Cradock, “I was not spearing, I was speared.”
Most people know that the Scottish verb, “to spier,” means to ask, or to inquire. If a Scotsman does not know his way, he “spiers.”
Cradock, though not much given to punning, could keep
his own with most men; and, in conversation, was far too much for either Hood or Smith. I
confess that I have always felt two puns in an evening—both taken after dinner—to be a
dose. Horace had no discretion, and would give you twenty, one after
the other, rat-tat-tat, like the shots of a
| 106 | THOMAS HOOD | [CHAP. X |
The house was seldom devoid of guests, the distance was so convenient, and
Tommy’s cockney friends liked to breathe
country air, and took up quite a romantic passion for the scenery of the Forest. His
household expenses were treble what they had been in the snug, pretty little cottage at
Winchmore Hill; and then the farm ran away with a world of money. It may be imagined how a
thorough cockney, one born and bred in the Poultry, Cheapside, a poet and a punster, would
farm! What with his hospitalities, and what with his agricultural expenditure, he became
seriously embarrassed, and not having nerve to face his creditors, he quitted the
| CHAP. X] | HOOD AS FARMER | 107 |
Some arrangements were made with his creditors, by means of his brother-in-law, Reynolds, himself a poet and a debtor, and by some other friends, and Tommy returned to London with his wife and children. It was kind, it was noble, in Sir Robert Peel, to grant Hood the pension the moment he knew his sad condition.
Poor Kenney, who wrote so many merry comedies and farces, and made so many thousands of playgoers laugh till their sides ached, was a sickly, sallow-looking man, much given to despondency and hypochondriasis. No wonder! for he was in poverty, and getting on in years. At a Brighton dinner-party given by Horace Smith, at which were present Charles Mathews, senior, three or four literary men, and three or four ladies, who had no pretension to the bas bleu, Kenney suddenly gave way to a violent fit of coughing, started up from table, walked across the room, coughing all the time, and getting almost black in the face. At last, with a violent effort, he ejected from his throat a big bit of cork, which he had not noticed in his glass, and which he had swallowed with his last gulp of wine. “Ah!” said Horace, “that was not the road for Cork, but it was the way to Kill Kenney!” I really believe that if the dramatist had been choked outright, Smith would have had his pun. He was not a cynical or unfeeling man; very far from that, but the opportunity of punning was a temptation he could never resist.
| 108 | HORACE SMITH | [CHAP. X |
The worst of him was that he punned with a serious face. Though rather a good-looking man, there was no play or mobility on his features; his face and eyes did not “pun” with him. Rose used to say that he would just as soon hear his puns from an automaton, or through the open cherry lips of a perruquier’s wax bust, as from Horace.
For some considerable time Kemp Town, Brighton, promised to be an unprofitable speculation to its founder and proprietor. Though the situation was good and the houses of a superior order, they did not let. I can remember when there were only one or two occupied by families. But the gas was laid on, and the whole place brilliantly lighted at night. Somebody said to Smith that he was afraid Kemp Town was not thriving. “How can you expect it to thrive, when it’s all lights, and no liver?” punned Horace.
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