I mention this because I think it is to this circumstance he alludes when he writes in his Autobiography that ‘early in the spring of 1816 he went to reside _again_ in Hampstead.’ His friend Charles Cowden Clarke tells us that soon after his release from Horsemonger Lane Gaol[184] Leigh Hunt ‘occupied a pretty little cottage in the Vale of Health.’ And Leigh Hunt himself, in a letter to a friend in 1821, observes, ‘I came to get well in our little packing-case here, dignified with the name of house.’ Again, in later years, in answer to a letter from his friend Mr. Dalby, he says: ‘I defy you to have _lived in a smaller cottage than I have done_. Yet it has held Shelley and Keats and half a dozen friends in it at once; and they have made worlds of their own within the rooms. Keats’ “Sleep and Poetry” is a description of a parlour that was mine, no larger than an old mansion’s closet.’ Cowden Clarke tells us that when Keats slept there a bed was improvised for him on a couch in Leigh Hunt’s library, a room at the back, rather larger, if I remember, than the parlour.[185] Keats himself writes of it in the poem Leigh Hunt alludes to: ‘For I am brimful of the friendliness That in a little cottage I have found!’[186] Whilst Shelley, writing from Italy, tells how Mrs. Williams’ singing of ‘Dorme l’amour’ transports him back to the little parlour at Hampstead. ‘I can see the piano, the prints, the casts, and hear Mary’s [Mrs. Hunt] “Ah! ah! ah!”’ Whenever Leigh Hunt or his friends refer to the Vale of Health cottage, the smallness of the place is, as it were, insisted on, and accentuated by the diminutive ‘little.’ [Illustration: _Shelley._] With such evidence as this as to the size and position of the poet’s habitation, it appears a work of superfluity to seek after the site of a dwelling that has never existed except in the generous imagination of those who think talent receives honour from exterior surroundings to which it never made pretence. Leigh Hunt in his pretty little Vale of Health cottage (which, by the way, appears to have been as largely receptive as the kindly heart of its proprietor) was as interesting, as regarded, and as much sought by his friends—and what a cluster of bright names they make!—as if he had inhabited a mansion. The same refined taste that had given grace to his prison room reigned here, and we may depend the roses were not wanting in the little garden-plot that had given living, as well as pictured, beauty to those gloomy walls.[187] [Illustration: _W. Hazlitt._]