The journal was thought dangerous to the régime--it was prosecuted, and its success was only the greater. The Court ceased to be what it had been, and the political system changed: the press of England became generally what the _Examiner_ was. The _Reflector_ was a quarterly journal, based on the _Examiner_ and its corps. Its more literary portion in its turn laid the basis for the _Indicator_, in which Leigh Hunt designed, with due deference, to revive the essays of the old _Spectator_ and _Tatler_. The grand distinction was, that in lieu of mere literary recreation, like the illustrious work of Addison, Steele, and Swift, it more directly proposed to _indicate_ the sources of pleasurable association and æsthetical improvement. In the _Reflector_, the _Indicator_, _Tatler_, and subsequent works of the same class, Leigh Hunt was assisted by Lamb, Barnes [afterwards editor of the _Times_], Aikin, Mitchell [Aristophanes], Keats, Shelley, Hazlitt, and Egerton Webbe,--the last cut short in a career rendered certain by his accomplishments, his music, his wit, and his extraordinary command of language as an instrument of thought. As in Robin Hood’s band, each man could beat his master at some one art, or perhaps more; but none excelled him in telling short stories, with a simplicity, a pathos, and a force that had their prototype less in the tales of Steele and Addison, than in the romantic poets of Italy. Few essayists have equalled, or approached, Leigh Hunt in the combined versatility, invention, and finish of his miscellaneous prose writings; and few, indeed, have brought such varied sympathies to call forth the sympathies of the reader--and always to good purpose,--in favour of kindness, of reflection, of natural pleasures, of culture, and of using the available resources of life. He used to boast that the _Indicator_ laid the foundation for the “two-penny trash” which assumed a more practical and widely popular form under Charles Knight’s enterprise. It has had a host of imitators, but is still special, and keeps its place in the library. Of his one novel, _Sir Ralph Esher_, suffice it to say, that he had desired to make it a sort of historical literary essay,--a species of unconcealed forgery, after the manner of a more cultivated and critical Pepys; and that the bookseller persuaded him to make it a novel:--of his dramatic works,--although he had an ambition to be counted among British dramatists, and had a discriminating dramatic taste,--that he combined, with the imperfect grasp of the tangible, a positive indifference to dramatic literature. The dramatic work which is reputed to be the most interesting of his compositions in this style, the _Prince’s Marriage_, is still unacted and unpublished.