The abridgements of the _Spectator_, set Hunt as a school task, instilled a dislike of prose-writing that may account for his preference through life for verse composition, although he was by nature less a poet than an essayist. From Cooke's edition of the _British Poets_ he learned to love Gray, Collins, Thomson, Blair and Spenser--influences responsible in part for his dislike of eighteenth century convention and for his historical prominence in the romantic movement. Spenser later became the literary passion of his life. Other books which he read at this period were Tooke's _Pantheon_, Lempriere's _Classical Dictionary_, and Spence's _Polymetis_, three favorites with Keats; _Peter Wilkins_, _Thalaba_ and _German Romances_, three favorites with Shelley. Later Hunt and Shelley's reading was closely paralleled in Godwin's _Political Justice_, _Lucretius_, _Pliny_, _Plato_, _Aristotle_, _Voltaire_, _Condorcet_ and the _Dictionnaire Philosophique_. With the years Hunt's list swelled to an almost incredible degree. It was through books that he knew life. He left Christ Hospital in 1799. The eight years spent there were his only formal preparation for a literary profession. He greatly regretted his lack of a university education, but he consoled himself by quoting with true Cockney spirit Goldsmith's saying: "London is the first of Universities."[5] Through his father's connections he met many prominent men in London and was made much of. This premature association accounts for some of the arrogance so conspicuous in his early journalistic work, which, in middle life, sobered down into a harmless vanity. In 1808 Hunt started a Sunday newspaper, _The Examiner_. The letter tendering his resignation[6] of a position in the office of the Secretary of War, coming from an inexperienced man of twenty-four is pompous in tone and heavy with the weight of his duty to the English nation. His subsequent assurance and boldness resulted in 1812 in his being indicted for a libel of the Prince Regent, afterwards George IV, and in an imprisonment for two years dating from February 15, 1813. His elder brother John, the publisher of the paper, served the same sentence in a separate prison. They shared between them a fine of L1,000. By special dispensation Hunt's family was allowed to reside with him in prison and, stranger still, he was allowed to continue his work on the libellous journal. At the same time he wrote in jail the _Descent of Liberty_ and part of the _Story of Rimini_. He transformed his prison yard into a garden and his prison room into a bower by papering the walls with trellises of roses and by coloring his ceiling like the sky. His books and piano-forte, his flowers and plaster casts surrounded him as at home. Old friends gathered about and new ones sought him as a martyr to the liberal cause.