The weakness of Leigh Hunt's style is of an opposite kind. 'Matchless,' according to Lamb's well-known phrase, 'as a fire-side companion,' it was his misfortune to carry too much of a fire-side or parlour tone, and sometimes, it must be owned, a very second-rate parlour tone, into literature. He could not walk by the advice of Polonius, and in aiming at the familiar was apt, rarely in prose but sadly often in verse, to slip into an underbred strain of airy and genteel vulgarity, hard to reconcile with what we are told of his acceptable social qualities in real life.[8] He was as enthusiastic a student of our sixteenth and seventeenth century literature as Coleridge or Lamb, and though he had more appreciation than they of the characteristic excellencies of what he always persists in calling the 'French school,' the school of polished artifice and convention which came in after Dryden and swore by the precepts of Boileau, he was not less bent on seeing it overthrown. In English poetry his predilection was for the older writers from Chaucer to Dryden, and above all others for Spenser: in Italian for Boiardo, Ariosto, Pulci and the later writers of the chivalrous-fanciful epic style. He insisted that such writers were much better models for English poets to follow than the French, and fought as hard as anyone for the return of English poetry from the urbane conventions of the eighteenth century to the paths of nature and of freedom. But he had his own conception of the manner in which this return should be effected. He did not admit that Wordsworth with his rustic simplicities and his recluse philosophy had solved the problem. 'It was his intention,' he wrote in prison, 'by the beginning of next year to bring out a piece of some length ... in which he would attempt to reduce to practice his own ideas of what is natural in style, and of the various and legitimate harmony of the English heroic.' The result of this intention was the _Story of Rimini_, begun before his prosecution and published a year after his release, in February or March, 1816. 'With the endeavour,' so he repeated himself in the preface, 'to recur to a freer spirit of versification, I have joined one of still greater importance,--that of having a free and idiomatic cast of language.' We shall have to consider Hunt's effort to revive the old freedom of the English heroic metre when we come to the study of Keats's first volume, written much under Hunt's influence. As to his success with his 'ideas of what is natural in style,' and his free and idiomatic--or as he elsewhere says 'unaffected, contemporaneous'--cast of language to supersede the styles alike of Pope and Wordsworth, let us take a sample of _Rimini_ at its best and worst. Relating the gradual obsession of Paolo's thoughts by the charm of his sister-in-law,--