This
active and often admirable writer, during a busy professional life,
issued a long series of works in prose and verse which are of every
variety of commonness and scarcity, but which have never been, and
probably never will be, reprinted as a whole. Yet not to possess the
works of Leigh Hunt is to be ill-equipped for the minute study of
literary history at the beginning of the century. The original 1816
edition of _Rimini_, for instance, is of a desperate rarity, yet not
to be able to refer to it in the grotesqueness of this its earliest
form is to miss a most curious proof 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.
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