It has been told me by one who knew Leigh Hunt long subsequent to his return from Italy, that no one who came within the charm of his kindly nature and delightful fancy could refrain from loving him. He was full of friendliness and human sympathy, and ready to render kindness to all who needed it, virtues that made men overlook other short-comings in his character—his vanity and want of a proper feeling of self-dependence: he was too apt to throw himself and his difficulties upon his friends. Mrs. Barbauld could see no beauty in his ‘Rimini’; it is, according to her ideas, ‘most fantastic’; she was without the power of feeling the natural simplicity and picturesqueness of Hunt; to her he was an author, who, ‘in exaggeration of all the slovenliness of the new school, has thought proper to come into public with his neckcloth untied and his stockings about his heels.’ She could not comprehend his originality, or the half-antiquated but expressive phraseology that gave such piquancy to his prose writings, and has made his Essays, as a recent writer has observed, worthy to have a place on the same shelf with those of ‘Elia.’ Long after Leigh Hunt had vacated the little cottage in the Vale of Health another charming reminiscence attaches to the locality. [Illustration: _Leigh Hunt._] Lord Dufferin, in his delightful memoir of his lovely and talented mother, Helen, Lady Dufferin (then Mrs. Blackwood), the writer of many sweet lyrics, tells us that she tenanted one of those _toy_ cottages in the Vale of Health,[193] Hampstead, where she sought health, and found it—so much so that the next summer she took a larger cottage in the same neighbourhood, probably Pavilion Cottage, a rather odd association, which Mr. Baines mentions as having been her ladyship’s abode at one time. He does not name her having lived in one of the smaller cottages previously. Some time between 1855-60 the Lovells removed from their house in Mornington Crescent, where they had been the near neighbours of George Cruikshank, the Westland Marstons, Mrs. Oliphant, and many other literary and artistic friends, to Vale Lodge, in the Vale of Health, which, as I have elsewhere said, they fully believed to have been the Hampstead home of Leigh Hunt—a representation that, perhaps, the agent, or some other interested person, found useful in letting the house. Though of very modest proportions, it by no means tallied with Leigh Hunt’s description of his ‘little packing-case,’ nor did the parlours (there were more than one) resemble an old mansion’s closets, which the single one in the toy cottage did very closely. Mr. Lovell’s residence here was not a very long one, and the family subsequently removed to Lyndhurst Road.