While surgery was waning with Keats, and finally dying out--an upshot for which the exact date is not assigned, nor perhaps assignable--he was making, at first through his intimacy with Cowden Clarke, some good literary acquaintances. The brothers John and Leigh Hunt were the centre of the circle to which Keats was thus admitted. John was the publisher, and Leigh the editor, of _The Examiner_. They had both been lately fined, and imprisoned for two years, for a libel on the Prince Regent, George IV.; it was perhaps legally a libel, and was certainly a castigation laid on with no indulgent hand. Leigh Hunt (born in 1784, and therefore Keats's senior by some eleven years) is known to us all as a fresh and airy essayist, a fresh and airy poet, a liberal thinker in the morals both of society and of politics (hardly a politician in the stricter sense of the term), a charming companion, a too-constant cracker of genial jocosities and of puns. He understood good literature both instinctively and critically; but was too full of tricksy mannerisms, and of petted byways in thought and style, to be an altogether safe associate for a youthful literary aspirant, whether as model or as Mentor. Leigh Hunt first saw Keats in the spring of 1816, not at his residence in Hampstead as has generally been supposed, but at No. 8 York Buildings, New Road.[2] The earliest meeting of Keats with Haydon was in November 1816, at Hunt's house; Haydon born in 1786, the zealous and impatient champion of high art, wide-minded and combative, too much absorbed in his love for art to be without a considerable measure of self-seeking for art's apostle, himself. He painted into his large picture of Christ's Entry into Jerusalem the head of Keats, along with those of Wordsworth and others. Another acquaintance was Mr. Charles Ollier, the publisher, who wrote verse and prose of his own. The Ollier firm in the early spring of 1817 became the publishers of Keats's first volume of poems, of which more anon. Still earlier than the Hunts, Haydon, and Ollier, Keats had known John Hamilton Reynolds, his junior by a year, a poetical writer of some mark, now too nearly forgotten, author of "The Garden of Florence," "The Fancy," and the prose tale, "Miserrimus"; he was the son of the writing-master at Christ Hospital, and Keats became intimate with the whole family, though not invariably well pleased with them all. One of the sisters married Thomas Hood. Through Reynolds Keats made acquaintance with Mr. Benjamin Bailey, born towards 1794, then a student at Oxford reading for the Church, afterwards Archdeacon of Colombo in Ceylon. Charles Wentworth Dilke, born in 1789, the critic, and eventually editor of _The Athenaeum_, was another intimate; and in course of time Keats knew Charles Wells, seven years younger than himself, the author of the dramatic poem "Joseph and his Brethren," and of the prose "Stories after Nature." Other friends will receive mention as we progress.