_Imagination and Fancy_ contained an essay and selections from his poems. Here Hunt makes the curious statement that little in the poems is purely poetical, but rather moral, political, and speculative. It is noteworthy that he predicts, probably for the first time, that, had Shelley lived, he would have been the greatest dramatic writer since the days of Elizabeth, if not, indeed, actually so, through what he did accomplish; a statement often repeated. He says: "If Coleridge is the sweetest of our poets, Shelley is at once the most ethereal and gorgeous, the one who has clothed his thought in draperies of the most evanescent and most magnificent words and imagery.... Shelley ... might well call himself Ariel."[282] In connection with Shelley's ethereal qualities, Mrs. James T. Fields quotes Hunt as having said on another occasion that Shelley always seemed to him as if he were "just alit from the planet Mercury, bearing a winged wand tipped with flame."[283] In _Imagination and Fancy_, Hunt continues: "Not Milton himself is more learned in Grecisms, or nicer in entomological propriety; and nobody, throughout, has a style so Orphic and primeval." It is a touching circumstance that Hunt's last letter bore reference to Shelley, and that his last effort as a public writer, made only a few days before his death, was in vindication of Shelley's character.[284] The publication of the _Shelley Memorials_, 1859, in which Hunt had a part, provoked an unfavorable review in _The Spectator_. Hunt replied in the next number[285] of the same paper. In particular he asserted Shelley's truthfulness, which had been assailed in respect to his story of the attempted assassination in Wales. He held that Shelley was not a man to be judged by ordinary rules, but that he was the highest possible exponent of humanity--an approach to divinity.