He was the centre of the Hampstead-based group that included William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, known as the "Hunt circle".

Hunt also introduced John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson to the public.

Hunt's presence at Shelley's funeral on the beach near Viareggio was immortalised in the painting by Louis Édouard Fournier.

Hunt inspired aspects of the Harold Skimpole character in Charles Dickens' novel Bleak House.

[1] James Henry Leigh Hunt was born on 19 October 1784, at Southgate, London, where his parents had settled after leaving the United States.

His father, Isaac, a lawyer from Philadelphia, and his mother, Mary Shewell, a merchant's daughter and a devout Quaker, had been forced to come to Britain because of their Loyalist sympathies during the American War of Independence.

As a boy, Hunt was an admirer of Thomas Gray and William Collins, writing many verses in imitation of them.

Hunt's first poems were published in 1801 under the title of Juvenilia, introducing him into British literary and theatrical society.

Robert Hunt's criticism earned the enmity of William Blake, who described the office of The Examiner as containing a "nest of villains".

[7] The Examiner soon acquired a reputation for unusual political independence; it would attack any worthy target "from a principle of taste", as John Keats expressed it.

In 1813 (or 1812), The Examiner attacked Prince Regent George, describing his physique as "corpulent"; the British government tried the three Hunt brothers and sentenced them to two years in prison.

His imprisonment allowed him many luxuries and access to friends and family, and Lamb described his decorations of the cell as something not found outside a fairy tale.

[2] From 1814 to 1817, Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt wrote a series of essays in The Examiner that they titled "The Round Table".

[15] Hunt's preference was decidedly for Geoffrey Chaucer's verse style, as adapted to Modern English by John Dryden.

Hunt's flippancy and familiarity, often degenerating into the ludicrous, subsequently made him a target for ridicule and parody.

Both Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley belonged to a literary group that gathered around Hunt at Hampstead.

The Hunt Circle also included Hazlitt, Lamb, Bryan Procter, Benjamin Haydon, Charles Cowden Clarke, C. W. Dilke, Walter Coulson and John Hamilton Reynolds.

Hunt left England for Italy in November 1821, but storm, sickness, and misadventure delayed his arrival until 1 July 1822.

The Liberal lived through four quarterly numbers, containing contributions no less memorable than Byron's "Vision of Judgment" and Shelley's translations from Faust.

Two journalistic ventures, the Tatler (1830–1832), a daily devoted to literary and dramatic criticism, and London Journal (1834–1835) failed even though the latter contained some of his best writing.

A copy sent to Thomas Carlyle secured his friendship, and Hunt went to live next door to him in Cheyne Row in 1833.

[16] In 1840, Hunt's play Legend of Florence had a successful engagement at Covent Garden, which helped him financially.

Lover's Amazements, a comedy, was acted several years afterwards and was printed in Journal (1850–1851); other plays remained in manuscript.

Today, a residential street in his birthplace of Southgate is named Leigh Hunt Drive in his honour.

In a letter of 25 September 1853, Charles Dickens stated that Hunt had inspired the character of Harold Skimpole in Bleak House; "I suppose he is the most exact portrait that was ever painted in words!

A contemporary critic commented, "I recognized Skimpole instantaneously; ... and so did every person whom I talked with about it who had ever had Leigh Hunt's acquaintance.

Elizabeth Kent also incorporated many of his suggestions into her anonymously published Flora Domestica, Or, The Portable Flower-garden: with Directions for the Treatment of Plants in Pots and Illustrations From the Works of the Poets.