ABSTRACT
First published in Leigh Hunt’s London Journal, II, 7 January 1835, pp. 1–2; see headnote above, pp. 285–7. It was reprinted in The Seer, Part ii, pp. 31–4. The ‘Twelfth-Night’ referred to in the present essay was 6 January 1819, as Hunt makes clear in a letter to Mary Shelley of 9 March 1819: ‘We had a most glorious Twelfth-Night’, he tells her, ‘with tea in the study at half past six (in the morning), & the women all sparkling to the last’ (Shelley and his Circle, 1773–1822, eds. Kenneth Neill Cameron and Donald H. Reiman, 10 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1961– ), vol. vi, p. 791). Mary Sabilla Novello (1789–1854) almost certainly refers to the same party in an October 1823 letter to Hunt in which she describes birthday celebrations in his honour. The guest ‘declared unanimously that such an evening had never been spent before’, she reports. ‘Indeed, it only rates second to the Twelfth-Night, and much reminded us of that meeting’ (Correspondence, vol. i, p. 210).
