is descended and
to that which protects him."

Isaac Hunt, the father of the author of "The Story of Rimini," and
Benjamin West married sisters, daughters of Stephen Shewell, merchant,
in Philadelphia. Leigh Hunt, in 1810, writing in the _Monthly Mirror_,
gave an eloquent and tender description of his mother, Mary Shewell,
which was reprinted in the _Analectic Magazine_ of Philadelphia, in
1814. "Here, indeed," he exclaimed, "I could enlarge both seriously and
proudly; for if any one circumstance of my life could give me cause for
boasting, it would be that of having had such a mother. She was indeed a
mother in every exalted sense of the word, in piety, in sound teaching,
in patient care, in spotless example." The father, Isaac Hunt, came to
Philadelphia from the Barbadoes, was graduated at the College of
Philadelphia, read law in the city, and was admitted to the bar in 1765.
He was an uncompromising Tory. It is said that on one occasion he
pointed out to a bookseller a volume of reports of trials for high
treason as a proper book for John Adams to read. Alexander Graydon, one
of the faithful contributors to the _Port Folio_, in his "Memoirs of a
Life Chiefly Passed in Pennsylvania," relates the following incident
which, no doubt, led to the accident of Leigh Hunt's birth in England,
and to the loss of "Abou ben Adhem" to America: "A few days after the
carting of Mr. Kearsley, Mr. Isaac Hunt, the attorney, was treated in
the same manner, but he managed the matter much better than his
precursor. Instead of braving his conductors, like the Doctor, Mr. Hunt
was a pattern of meekness and humility; and at every halt that was made
he rose and expressed his acknowledgments to the crowd for their
forbearance and civility. After a parade of an hour or two, he was set
down at his own door, as uninjured in body as in mind. He soon after
removed to one of the islands, if I mistake not, to Barbadoes, where, it
is understood, he took orders."

Leigh Hunt was not the only English poet of far-shining fame who was of
American origin. Percy Bysshe Shelley was the grandson of a quack doctor
in Newark, N. J., who, according to a local tradition, married the widow
of a New York miller. Fitz-Greene Halleck lived and died in an old house
in Guilford, Connecticut, built upon ground that had belonged to Bysshe
Shelley, before he went to England and became master of Castle Goring.
Many another great life in England was bound with strands of i