the Serpents, the more timid, because mortal, child, who is aghast at the horrid visitors sent by the relentless Juno, is called, as Leigh Hunt translated the oft-repeated quotation, “the extremely bilious Iphiclus;” and being bilious, Leigh Hunt set himself down as “timid.” He had probably felt his heart beat at the approach of danger, been startled by a sudden noise, or hesitated “to snuff a candle with his fingers,” which Charles the Fifth said would make any man know fear. Yet he had braved persecution in the refusal to fag at school; was an undaunted though not skilful rider; a swimmer not unacquainted with drowning risks; undismayed, except for others, when passing the roaring torrent at the broad ford,--when braving shipwreck in the British Channel, or the thunder-hurricane in the Mediterranean; he instantly confronted the rustic boors who challenged him on the Thames, or in the Apennines, and stood unmoved to face the sentence of a criminal court, though the sentence was to be the punishment he most dreaded--the prison. Such was the character of the man who came from school to be the critic, first of the drama, then of literature and politics; and then to be a workman in the schools where he had criticized. He brought to his labours great powers, often left latent, and used only in their superficial action; a defective perception of the tangible part of the subject; an imagination active, but overrating its own share in the business; an impulsive will, checked by an over-scrupulous, over-conscientious habit of “refining;” a nice taste, and an overwhelming sympathy with every form and aspect of human enjoyment, suffering, or aspiration. His public conduct, his devotion to “truth,” whether in politics or art, won him admiration and illustrious friendships. In a society of many severed circles he formed one centre, around which were gathered Lamb, Ollier, Barnes, Mitchell, Shelley, Keats, Byron, Hazlitt, Blanchard, Forster, Carlyle, and many more, departed or still living; some of them centres of circles in which Leigh Hunt was a wanderer, but all of them, in one degree or other, attesting their substantial value for his character. They influenced him, he influenced them, and through them the literature and politics of the century, more largely, perhaps, than any one of them alone. Let us see, then, what it was that he did. Even in the _News_ of 1805, when he was barely of age, and when he wrote with the dashing confidence of a youth wielding the combined ideas of Sam Johnson and Voltaire, the “damned boy,” as Kemble called him, established a repute for cultivation, consistency, taste, and independence; and he originated a style of contemporary criticism unknown to the newspaper press. In other words, he brought the standards of criticism which had before been confined to the lecture of academies or the library, into the daily literature which aids in shaping men’s judgments as they rise.