Isaac, the father of Leigh Hunt, was the descendant of one of the oldest settlers in luxurious Barbadoes. He was sent to develop better fortunes by studying at college in Philadelphia, where he _un_settled in life; for, having obtained some repute as an advocate, and married the daughter of the stern merchant, Stephen Shewell, against her father’s pleasure, Isaac contumaciously opposed the sovereign people by espousing the side of royalty, and fled with broken fortunes to England. Here he found not much royal gratitude, much popularity as a preacher in holy orders--taken as a refuge from want,--but no preferment. With tutorships, and help from relatives, he managed to rub on; he sent Leigh, the first of his sons born in England, to the school of Christ Hospital, and he lived long enough to see him an established writer. Isaac was a man rather under than above the middle stature, fair in complexion, smoothly handsome, so engaging in address as to be readily and undeservedly suspected of insincerity, and in most things utterly unlike his son. His wife, Mary Shewell, a tall, slender woman, with Quaker breeding, a dark thoughtful complexion, a heart tender beyond the wont of the world, and a conscience tenderer still, contributed more than the father to mould the habits and feelings of the son. School and books did the rest. His earlier days, save during the long semi-monastic confinement of the Blue-coat School, were passed in uncertain alternations between the care-stricken home and the more luxurious houses of wealthier relatives and friends. In his time Christ Hospital was the very nursery for a scholarly scholar. It was divided into the commercial, the nautical, and the grammar schools; in all, the scholars had hard fare, and much church service; and in the grammar school plenty of Greek and Latin. Leigh’s antecedents and school training destined him for the church; a habit of stammering, which disappeared as he grew up, was among the adverse accidents which reserved him for the vocation to which he was born--Literature. But before he left the unsettled roof of his parents, the youth had been to other schools besides Christ Hospital. His father had been a royalist flying from infuriated republicans, and doomed to learn in the metropolitan country the common mistrust of kings. He left America a lawyer, to become a clergyman here; and entered the pulpit a Church of England-man, to become, after the mild example of his wife, a Universalist. Born after his mother had suffered from the terrors of the revolution, and a severe attack of jaundice, Leigh inherited an anxious, speculative temperament; to be the sport of unimaginative brothers, who terrified him by personating the hideous “Mantichora,” about which he had tremblingly read and talked, and of schoolfellows, with their ghostly traditions and rough, summary, practical satire. He had been made acquainted with poverty, yet familiarized to the sight of ease and refined luxury.