In 1816 the presence of Leigh Hunt, fresh from expiating, by a fine of £1,000 and three years’ confinement in Horsemonger Lane Gaol, the crime of libellously characterizing the Regent as ‘a fat Adonis of fifty,’ is felt as a social shock by some of the eminently loyal residents of Hampstead, especially when the magnetism of the man attracted Shelley to him—the disowned and denounced Shelley; then came Charles Lamb[285] and Keats, and robust Charles Cowden Clarke, with his voice and laugh as strong as the blast of the rams’ horns that levelled Jericho—in brief, the brotherhood who constituted what the critics of that day called the ‘Cockney School of Poets,’ a school whose works—those of three of them, at least—were destined to a worldwide reputation. The ‘Essays’ of Leigh Hunt are too delightful reading to be ever wholly laid aside. When Keats’ first book of poems appeared, one of these critics, more mannerly than most of them, admitted that the author had ‘a fine ear for the grand, elaborate, and abstracted music of Nature, and now and then catches a few notes from passages of that never-ending harmony which God made to retain in exaltation and purity the spirits of our first parents.’ A curious limitation to the power of an eternal harmony. At the same time, he accuses the poems of ‘savouring too much of the foppery and affectation of Leigh Hunt.’ When the tall, fragile figure and beautiful face of Shelley were no more seen on the Heath, when Keats had forsaken the ‘places of nestling green for poets made,’ and Elia and his sister were no longer met with in the vicinity of the Vale of Health, and Leigh Hunt himself—the slight, rather tall, straight gentleman with the wide low forehead, dark eyes, and foreign complexion, whom Godfrey Turner remembered and described to me, and to whom (except in height) his son Vincent, whom I knew, must have borne a strong resemblance—had all left Hampstead, there still remained Joanna Baillie and her literary home, which had, as time went on, become a pilgrimage and shrine, not only to the most celebrated men and women of England, but of those of other countries also. [Illustration: _Keats._] As we approach contemporary times, we find Hampstead as attractive to the Howitts, and the authors of ‘Festus ’ and ‘Orion,’ poets who almost ‘achieved greatness,’ and yet failed to grasp it; and Westland Marston, and William Allingham, and Ruskin, and Tennyson himself, and all the wits of the first _Punch_ period; and that bunch of novelists who bloomed almost simultaneously—Thackeray and Dickens, Ollier and Ainsworth, Lover and Lever, Anthony Trollope and Douglas Jerrold, and a host of other authors and artists; for, from the days of Addison and Sir Godfrey Kneller, no neighbourhood has proved more in sympathy with the pursuits of both brotherhoods, whether of pen or pencil.