Dickens
wrote: "I hope you will not now think it necessary to renew that painful
subject with me. There is nothing to remove from my mind--I hope,
nothing to remove from yours. I thought of the little notice which has
given you (I rejoice most heartily to find) so much pleasure--as the
best means that could possibly present themselves of enabling me to
express myself publicly about you as you would desire. In that better
and unmistakable association with you by name, let all end."

Shortly after the death of Hunt Dickens made it a point to say in his
_All the Year Round_ that it was the graces and charms of manner of
Hunt, "which had many a time delighted him, and impressed him as being
unspeakably whimsical and attractive," that were recalled when the
character in question was drawn, and that he had no thought "that the
admired original would ever be charged with the imaginary vices of the
fictitious creature"--an explanation that does not clear the great
novelist.

Dickens also bears tribute to Hunt's cheerfulness despite the reasons
he had for sadness. "His life was, in several respects, a life of
trouble, though his cheerfulness was such that he was, upon the whole,
happier than some men who have had fewer griefs to wrestle with." In
Hunt's correspondence, Dickens saw evidence that he was "sometimes
over-clouded with the shadow of affliction, but more often bright and
hopeful, and at all times sympathetic: taking a keen delight in all
beautiful things--in the exhaustless world of books and art, in the
rising genius of young authors, in the immortal language of music, in
trees and flowers, and old memorial nooks of London and its suburbs; in
the sunlight which came, as he used to say, like a visitor out of
heaven, glorifying humble places."

"The very philosophy of cheerfulness," says R. H. Horne, in _A New
Spirit of the Age_, "and the good humour of genius imbue all his prose
papers from end to end."

Says Thornton, his eldest son: "Leigh Hunt's whole teaching of himself
as well as others, inculcated the promotion of cheerfulness as a duty,
not for the selfish gain of the one man himself, but for the sake of
making the happier atmosphere for others and rendering the more perfect
homage to the Author of all good and happiness."

Here is another picture of the cheerful situation, taken from "Our
Cottage," which appeared in _The New Monthly Magazine_ for September,
1836:

Autumn, the princely season, purple-r