Hawthorne, in _Our Old Home_, I think, tells us that even to extreme age, the boyishness of the man’s nature shone through and made Hunt’s speech like the chirp of a bird; he never tired of gathering his pretty roses of words. It is hard to think of such a man doing serious service in the role of radical journalist--as if he _could_ speak dangerous things! And yet, who can tell? They say Robespierre delighted in satin facings to his coat, and was never without his _boutonnière_. We all know the figure of Harold Skimpole, in Dickens’s _Bleak House_, with traits so true to Leigh Hunt’s, that the latter’s friends held up a warning finger, and said: “For shame!” to the novelist. Indeed, I think Dickens felt relentings in his later years, and would have retouched the portrait; but a man who paints with flesh and blood pigments cannot retouch. Certain it is that the household of Hunt was of a ram-shackle sort, and he and his always very much out at ends. Even Carlyle, who was a neighbor at Chelsea, was taken aback at the easy way in which Hunt confronted the butcher-and-baker side of life; and the kindly Mrs. Carlyle drops a half-querulous mention of her shortened larder and the periodic borrowings of the excellent Mrs. Hunt. _Hunt’s Verse._ But over all this we stretch a veil now, woven out of the little poems that he has left. He wrote no great poems, to be sure; for here, as in his prose, he is earnestly bent on carving little baskets out of cherry-stones--little figures on cherry-stones--dainty hieroglyphics, but always on cherry-stones! His “Rimini,” embodying that old Dantesque story about Giovanni and Paolo and Francesca, is his longest poem. There are exceedingly pretty and delicate passages in it; I quote one or two: “For leafy was the road with tall array On either side of mulberry and bay, And distant snatches of blue hills between; And there the alder was, with its bright green, And the broad chestnut, and the poplar’s shoot That, like a feather, waves from head to foot; With ever and anon majestic pines; And still, from tree to tree, the early vines Hung, garlanding the way in amber lines. … And then perhaps you entered upon shades, Pillowed with dells and uplands ’twixt the glades Through which the distant palace, now and then, Looked forth with many windowed ken-- A land of trees which, reaching round about, In shady blessing stretched their old arms out With spots of sunny opening, and with nooks To lie and read in--sloping into brooks, Where at her drink you started the slim deer, Retreating lightly with a lovely fear. And all about the birds kept leafy house, And sung and sparkled in and out the boughs, And all about a lovely sky of blue Clearly was felt, or down the leaves laughed through.”