In 1809 Hunt married Marianne Kent. She was an invalid the greater part of her life; consequently, the "hugger-mugger" condition of domestic affairs which so greatly distressed the Carlyles. Curiously enough, Hunt was allowed to continue The Examiner while in prison. During that time he republished from The Re flector his 'Feast of the Poets,' a wholesale satire on contemporary poets in the manner of Suckling's ''Session of the Poets.' It an tagonized the literary world, as The Examiner had done the political, and played a large part in creating the antagonism of Blackwood's and the Quarterly toward Hunt, which resulted in the creation and the long and bitter persecu tion of the so-called Cockney School. The 'Descent of Liberty) appeared in 1815. The 'Story of Rimini' (1816), also written in prison, was the most important of Hunt's poems up to that time, and brought him into immediate notoriety. For its influence on his contemporaries, particularly Keats, in the use of idiomatic language, and in the revival of the free, heroic couplet, it is the most import ant of Hunt's poems. It was at once denounced as most pernicious and immoral by the Quar terly and Blackwood's. 'Foliage' (1818) con tains some of Hunt's best epistles and sonnets. 'Hero and Leander' and 'Bacchus and Ariadne' appeared jointly in 1819, and a trans lation of Tasso's 'Amyntas) in 1820. His prose style of this period reached its best ex pression in The Indicator, in essays of the occasional and personal type. They are dis tmguished by a unique charm and tenderness, by delicate humor and keen observation.
During Hunt's imprisonment he had made the acquaintance of Byron, Shelley, Moore and Lamb. The friendship with Keats probably did not begin until the winter of 1816. In the case of Shelley it was the beginning of a wonderful friendship that involved personal sympathy and public defense with his pen on the part of Hunt, and much financial aid on the part of Shelley. It was through the latter that Byron, in 1821, invited Hunt to Italy to undertake the management of The Liberal, an ultra-political-literary journal, suddenly aban doned after a few months of unsuccessful run ning. The failure of the project led to Byron's desertion of Hunt and his family in a foreign land, and Hunt's revenge in 1828 in the shape of 'Lord Byron and Some of his Contempo raries,' an error which Hunt later greatly de plored. During the stay in Italy he edited the Literary Examiner, wrote 'Ultra Crepidarius,' a satire on William Gifford, translated the .!Baochus in Tuscany' of Redi, and contributed the
to The Examiner. He returned to England in 1825 in great poverty. From this time on his work consisted of edit ing numerous magazines: The Companion
Chat of the Week (1830), The Toiler 1830-32), Lesgh Hunt's London Magazine 1834-35), Monthly Repository (1837-38)
Hunt's Journal (1850-51),
because of the great impracticability of the schemes and the monotony of one chief con tributor; of contributing to an incredible num ber of other magazines; of publishing reprints from previously edited journals and collected editions of his "poetical works"; of selections from other writers made with running com ment or introductory essays, as
(Sir Ralph Esher,' appeared in 1832. (The Legend of Florence' was produced at Covent Garden in 1840. His
was pub lished in 1850, and in a revised form in 1859; the 'Correspondence posthumously in 1862.
Htmt's best prose work is to be found in his
and in his essays of the kind already mentioned as having appeared first in The Indicator. Carlyle said of the former, "except it be Boswell's of Johnson, I do not know where we have such a picture drawn of a human life as in these volumes." Though less of a poet than an essayist, some of his shbrt .poems are exquisite, notably the famous
Ben Adhem,'
The best edition of the former is that edited by S. Adams Lee (Boston 1857); of the latter The Indicator and Companion (2 vols., London 1834). Scribner publishes in a uniform edition some of the most popular of his works. Con sult also Johnson, R. B., (Leigh Hunt' (1896); Monkhouse, Cosmo, 'Life of Leigh Hunt' (1893) ; Clarke, 'Recollections of Writers' (1878); Trelawney,
of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron' (1858). Frequent references to Hunt are to be found in the writ-, ings of Byron, Shelley, Keats, Carlyle, Dickens, Lamb, William Hazlitt and Alexander Ireland. Excellent bibliographies of Hunt's works are to be found in Ireland's
of the Writings of William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt' (1868); Monkhouse's