But in regard to the veritable British Parnassus, he had solid work to do, and he did it. Poetry amongst us had sunk to the lowest grade. Leigh Hunt found the mild Hayley, and the mechanical Darwin, occupying the field, Pope the accredited model, and he revolted against the copybook versification, the complacent subserviency and mean moralities of the muse in possession. He had read earnestly and extensively in the classics, ancient and English; he carried with him to prison the _Parnaso Italiano_, a fine collection of Italian poetical writers, in fifty-two volumes; and he was deeply imbued with the spirit which he found common to the poetical republic of all ages. He selected the episode of Paolo and Francesca, whom Dante places in the _Inferno_, and whose history was diligently hunted up to tell in the _Story of Rimini_. In it Leigh Hunt insisted on breaking the set cadence for which Pope was the professed authority, as he broke through the set morals which had followed in reaction upon the licence of many reigns. He shocked the world with colloquialisms in the heroic measure, and with extenuations of the fault committed by the two lovers against the law matrimonial. The offence, too, was perpetrated by a writer condemned to prison for bearding the constituted authorities. The poem and its fate were characteristic of the man and his position in poetical literature. The work was designed as a picture of Italy, and a tale of the natural affections rebelling against a tyranny more corrupt than the licence which it claimed to check. But when he wrote it, the poet had not been in Italy; and afterwards, with habitual anxiety to be “right,” he corrected many mistakes in the scenery--such as “the smoke goes dancing from the cottage trees,” where there are no such cottages as he imagined, and smoke is no feature in the landscape. He also restored the true historical conclusion, and instead of a gentlemanly duel, _comme il faut_, made the tale end in the fierce double murder by the husband. In its original shape, the _Story of Rimini_ touched many a heart, and created more sensation for its bolder verse and nature than others which followed it; in its amended form it gained in truth to art and fact, and in force of verse and colouring. Leigh Hunt had not the sustained melody and pulpit morals of the Lake School; but he gave the example and encouragement to writers of still greater force and beauty. He vindicated human right against official wrong, and suffered imprisonment, and denunciation more bitter than that poured on Shelley, whose political vindications burst forth with such a torrent of eloquence and imagination in the _Revolt of Islam_. Leigh Hunt asserted the beauty of natural passion,--but he did it tenderly and obliquely, himself returning from the slightest taste of passion to “the domesticities,” half begging pardon for his hardihood, and thus by implication confessing his naughtiness; and all the while hinting at