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He has related the history of his immediate and remoter forbears with considerable minuteness–with more minuteness indeed by far than he has bestowed upon all but a few passages of his own life. For the general reader, however, it is quite sufficient to know that his father, the Reverend Isaac Hunt, who belonged to a clerical family in Barbados, went for his education to the still British Provinces of North America, married a Philadelphia girl, Mary Shewell, practised as a lawyer till the Revolution broke out, and then being driven from his adopted country as a loyalist, settled in England, took orders, drifted into Unitarianism or anythingarianism, and ended his days, after not infrequent visits to the King’s Bench, comfortably enough, but hanging rather loose on society, his friends, and a pension. Leigh Hunt (his godfathers and godmothers gave him also the names of James Henry, which he dropped) was the youngest son, and was born on 19th October 1784. His best youthful remembrance, and one of the most really humorous things he ever said, was that he used, after a childish indulgence in bad language, to think to himself with a shudder when he received any mark of favour, “Ah! they little suspect I’m the boy who said ‘d—-n.'” But at seven years old he went to Christ’s Hospital, and continued there for another seven. His reminiscences of that seminary, put down pretty early, and afterwards embodied in the “Autobiography,” are even better known from the fact that they served as a text, and as the occasion of a little gentle raillery, to Elia’s famous essay than in themselves. For some years after leaving school he did nothing definite but write verses, which his father (who seems to have been gifted with a plentiful lack of judgment in most incidents and relations of life) published when the boy was but sixteen. They are as nearly as possible valueless, but they went through three editions in a very short time. It ought to be remembered that except Cowper, who was just dead, and Crabbe, who had for years intermitted writing, the public had only Rogers and Southey for poets, for it would none of the “Lyrical Ballads,” and the “Lay of the Last Minstrel” had not yet been published. So that it did not make one of its worst mistakes in taking up Leigh Hunt, who certainly had poetry in him, if he did not put it forth quite so early as this. He was made a kind of lion, but, fortunately or unfortunately for him, only in middle-class circles where there were no patrons. He was quite an old man–nearly twenty–when he made regular entry into the periodical writing which kept him (with the aid of his friends) for nearly sixty years. “Mr. Town, Junior” (altered from an old signature of Colman’s) contributed theatrical criticisms, which do not seem to have been paid for, to an evening paper, the Traveller, now surviving as a second title to the Globe. His bent in this direction was assisted by the fact that his elder brother John had been apprenticed to a printer, and had desires to be a publisher. In January 1808 the two brothers started the Examiner, and Leigh Hunt edited it with a great deal of courage for fourteen years. He threw away for this the only piece of solid preferment that he ever had, a clerkship in the War Office which Addington gave him. The references to this act of recklessness or self-sacrifice in the Autobiography are rather enigmatical. His two functions were no doubt incompatible at best, especially considering the violent Opposition tone which the Examiner took. But Leigh Hunt, whatever faults he had, was not quite a hypocrite; and he hints pretty broadly that if he had not resigned he might have been asked to do so, not from any political reasons, but simply because he did his work very badly. He was much more at home in the Examiner (with which for a short time was joined the quarterly Reflector ), though his warmest admirers candidly admit that he knew nothing about politics. In 1809 he married a Miss Marianne Kent, whose station was not very exalted, and whose son admits with unusual frankness that she was “the reverse of handsome, and without accomplishments,” adding rather whimsically that this person, “the reverse of handsome,” had “a pretty figure, beautiful black hair and magnificent eyes,” and though “without accomplishments” had “a very strong natural turn for plastic art.” At any rate she seems to have suited Leigh Hunt admirably. The Examiner soon became ill-noted with Government, but it was not till the end of 1812 that a grip could be got of it. Leigh Hunt’s offence is in the ordinary books rather undervalued. That he (or his contributor) called the Prince Regent, as is commonly said, “a fat Adonis of fifty” (the exact words are, “this Adonis in loveliness is a corpulent man of fifty”) may have been the chief sting, but was certainly not the chief legal offence. Leigh Hunt called the ruler of his country “a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of demi-reps, a man who had just closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of his country or the respect of posterity.” It might be true or it might be false; but certainly there was then not a country in Europe where it would have been allowed to be said of the chief of the state. And I am not sure that it could be said now anywhere but in Ireland, where considerably worse things were said with impunity of Lord Spencer and Sir George Trevelyan. At any rate the brothers were prosecuted and fined five hundred pounds each, with two years’ imprisonment. The sentence was carried out; but Leigh Hunt’s imprisonment in Horsemonger Lane Gaol was the merest farce of incarceration. He could not indeed go beyond the prison walls. But he had a comfortable suite of rooms which he was permitted to furnish and decorate just as he liked; he was allowed to have his wife and family with him; he had a tiny garden of his own, and free access to that of the prison; there was no restriction on visitors, who brought him presents just as they chose; and he became a kind of fashion with the Opposition. Jeremy Bentham came and played at battledore and shuttlecock with him–an almost appalling idea, for it will not do to trust too implicitly to Leigh Hunt’s declaration that Jeremy’s object was to suggest “an improvement in the constitution of shuttlecocks.” The Examiner itself continued undisturbed, and except for the “I can’t get out” feeling, which even of itself cannot be compared for one moment to that of a modern prisoner condemned to his cell and the exercising-ground, it is rather difficult to see much reason for Leigh Hunt’s complaints. The imprisonment may have affected his health, but it certainly brought him troops of friends, and gave him leisure to do not only his journalist’s work, but things much more serious. Here he wrote and published his first poem since the Juvenilia, “A Feast of the Poets” (not much of a thing), and here he wrote, though he did not publish it till his liberation, the “Story of Rimini,” by far his most important poem, both for intrinsic character and for influence on others. He had known Lamb from boyhood, and Shelley some years; he now made the acquaintance of Keats, Hazlitt, and Byron.