This intimacy was really the opening of a new chapter both in his intellectual and social life. At first it was a source of unmixed encouragement and pleasure, but seeing that it carried with it in the sequel disadvantages and penalties which gravely affected Keats's career, it is necessary that we should fix clearly in our mind Hunt's previous history and the place held by him in the literary and political life of the time. He was Keats's senior by eleven years: the son of an eloquent and elegant, self-indulgent and thriftless fashionable preacher, sprung from a family long settled in Barbadoes, who having married a lady from Philadelphia had migrated to England and exercised his vocation in the northern suburbs of London. Brought up at Christ's Hospital about a dozen years later than Lamb and Coleridge, Leigh Hunt gained at sixteen a measure of precocious literary reputation with a volume of juvenile poems which gave evidence of great fluency and, for a boy, of wide and eager reading. A few years later he came into notice as a theatrical critic, being then a clerk in the War Office: an occupation which he abandoned at twenty-four (in 1808) in order to take part in the conduct of the _Examiner_ newspaper, then just founded by his brother John Hunt. For nearly five years the brothers Hunt, as manager and editor of that journal, helped to fight the losing battle of liberalism, in those days of tense grapple with the Corsican ogre abroad and stiff re-action and repression at home, with a dexterous brisk audacity and an unflinching sincerity of conviction. So far they had escaped the usual penalty of such courage. Several prosecutions directed against them failed, but at last, late in 1812, they were caught tripping. To go as far as was safely possible in satire of the follies and vices of the Prince Regent was a tempting exercise to the reforming spirits of the time. Provoked by the grovelling excesses of some of the Prince's flatterers, the _Examiner_ at last broke bounds and denounced him as 'a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps, a man who had just closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of his country or the respect of posterity.' This attack followed within a few weeks of another almost as stinging contributed anonymously by Charles Lamb. Under the circumstances the result of a prosecution could not be doubtful: and the two Hunts were condemned to a fine of L500 each and two years imprisonment in separate jails. Leigh Hunt bore himself in his captivity with cheerful fortitude, suffering severely in health but flagging little in spirits or industry. He decorated his apartment in Horsemonger Lane Gaol with a rose-trellis paper and a ceiling to imitate a summer sky, so that it looked, said Charles Lamb, like a room in a fairy tale, and spent money which he had