nded
questions of religion, philosophy, and politics; a keen appetite for
humour condescending to thin and repeated jests; a reviler of kings
going out of his way laboriously to beslaver royalty; a man of letters,
of talent almost touching genius, who seldom writes a dozen consecutive
good pages:--these are only some of the inconsistencies that meet us in
Leigh Hunt.

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 an