of the crude taste of the young school out of which Shelley and Keats were to arise.  The scarcest of all Leigh Hunt’s poetical pamphlets, but by no means the least interesting, is that whose title stands at the head of this chapter.  Of Ultra-crepidarius, which was “printed for John Hunt” in 1823, it is believed that not half a dozen copies are in existence, and it has never been reprinted.  It is a rarity, then, to which the most austere despisers of first editions may allow a special interest.

From internal evidence we find that Ultra-crepidarius; a Satire on William Gifford, was sent to press in the summer of 1823, from Maiano, soon after the break-up of Hunt’s household in Genoa, and Byron’s departure for Greece.  The poem is the “stick” which had been recently mentioned in the third number of the Liberal: 

  Have I, these five years, spared the dog a stick,
  Cut for his special use, and reasonably thick?

It had been written in 1818, in consequence of the famous review in the Quarterly of Keats’s Endymion, a fact which the biographers of Keats do not seem to have observed.  Why did Hunt not immediately print it?  Perhaps because to have done so would have been worse than useless in the then condition of public taste and temper.  What led Hunt to break through his intention of suppressing the poem it might be difficult to discover.  At all events, in the summer of 1823 he suddenly sent it home for publication; whether it was actually published is doubtful, it was probably only circulated in private to a handful of sympathetic Tory-hating friends.

Ultra-crepidarius is written in the same anapaestic measure as The Feast of the Poets, but is somewhat longer.  As a satire on William Gifford it possessed the disadvantage of coming too late in the day to be of any service to anybody.  At the close of 1823 Gifford, in failing health, was resigning the editorial chair of the Quarterly, which he had made so formidable, and was retiring into private life, to die in 1826.  The poem probably explains, however, what has always seemed a little difficult to comprehend, the extreme personal bitterness with which Gifford, at the close of his career, regarded Hunt, since the slayer of the Della Cruscans was not the man to tolerate being treated as though he were a Della Cruscan himself.  However narrow the circulation of Ultra-crepidarius may have been, care was no doubt taken that the editor of the Quarterly Review should receive one copy at his private address, and Leigh Hunt returned from Italy in time for that odd incident to take place at the Roxburgh sale, when Barron Field called his attention to the fact that “a little man, with a warped frame, and a countenance between the querulous and the angry, was gazing at me with all his might.”  Hunt tells this story in the Autobiography, from which, however, he omits all allusion to his satire.