His father, if “socially” inclined, yet read eloquently and critically; his mother read earnestly, piously, and charitably; reading was the business of his school, reading was his recreation; and at the age of fifteen, he threw off his blue coat, a tall stripling, with West Indian blood, a Quaker conscience, and a fancy excited rather than disciplined by his scholastic studies, to put on the lax costume of the day, and be tried in the dubious ordeal of its laxer customs. His severest trial arose from the vanities, rather than the vices to which such a youth would be exposed. He had already been sufficiently “in love,”--now with the anonymous sister of a schoolfellow, next with his fair cousin Fanny, then with the enchanting Almeria,--to be shielded from the worst seductions that can beset a youth; and he was early engaged to the lady whom he married in 1809. But the vanities beset him in a shape of unwonted power. The stripling, whose essays the terrible Boyer, of the Blue-coat School, had crumpled up, became the popular young author of published poems, and not much later the stern critic of the _News_, whose castigations made actors wince and playwrights launch prologues at him. Thenceforward the vicissitudes of his life, save in the inevitable vicissitudes of mortality, were professional rather than personal; though he always threw his personality into his profession. He tried a clerkship under his brother Stephen, an attorney; and a clerkship in the War Office, under the patronage of the dignified Mr. Addington; but finally he left the desk, legal or official, for the desk literary, to devote himself to the _Examiner_, set up in 1808 with his brother John. He went to prison for two years in 1813, rather than forfeit his consistency as a political writer. It was as a vindicator of liberal principles in politics, sociology (word then unused), and art, that he attracted the friendship of Byron and Shelley; it was to accomplish the literary speculation of the _Liberal_ that he set out for Italy in 1821; it was to study Italy and the Italians, with a view to “improve” that and other “subjects,” that he stopped in Italy till the autumn of 1825. He returned to England to try his fortune with books in prose and verse, in periodicals of his own or others’; and it was in the midst of unrelinquished work that he placidly laid himself down to sleep in August, 1859,--his last words of anxiety being for Italy and her enlarging hopes, his latest breath uttering inquiries and messages of affection. This is essentially a literary life; but it is given to a literature in which there _is_ life,--for Leigh Hunt, although he dwelled and passed his days in the library, was no “book-worm,” divorced from human existence, its natural instincts and affections. On the contrary, he carried into his study a large heart and a strong pulse; to him the books spoke in the voice of his fellow-men, audible