he wrote, though he did not publish it
till his liberation, the "Story of Rimini," by far his most important
poem, both for intrinsic character and for influence on others. He had
known Lamb from boyhood, and Shelley some years; he now made the
acquaintance of Keats, Hazlitt, and Byron.

In the next five years after his liberation he did a great deal of work,
the best by far being the periodical called the _Indicator_, a weekly
paper which ran for sixty-six numbers. The _Indicator_ was the first
thing that I ever read of Hunt's, and, by no means for that reason only,
I think it the best. Its buttonholing papers, of a kind since widely
imitated, were the most popular; but there are romantic things in it,
such as "The Daughter of Hippocrates" (paraphrased and expanded from Sir
John Mandeville with Hunt's peculiar skill), which seem to me better. It
was at the end of these five years that Leigh Hunt resolved upon the
second adventure (his imprisonment being the first and involuntary) of
his otherwise easy-going life--an adventure the immediate consequences
of which were unfortunate in many ways, but which supplied him with a
good deal of literary material. This was his visit to Italy as a kind of
literary _attache_ to Lord Byron, and editor of a quarterly magazine,
the _Liberal_. The idea was Shelley's, and if Shelley had lived, it
might not have resulted quite so disastrously, for Shelley was
absolutely untiring as a helper of lame dogs over stiles. As it was, the
excursion distinctly contradicted the saying (condemned by some as
immoral) that a bad beginning makes a good ending. The Hunt family,
which now included several children, embarked, in November of all months
in the year, on a small ship bound for Italy. They were something like a
month getting down the Channel in tremendous weather, and at last when
their ship had to turn tail from near Scilly and run into Dartmouth,
Hunt, whose wife was extremely ill of lung-disease, made up his mind to
stay for the winter in Devonshire. He passed the time pleasantly enough
at Plymouth, which they left once more in May 1822, reaching Leghorn at
the end of June. Shelley's death happened within ten days of their
arrival, and Byron and Leigh Hunt were left to get on together. How
badly they got on is pretty generally known, might have been foreseen
from the beginning, and is not very profitable to dwell on. Leigh Hunt's
mixture of familiarity and "airs" could not have been worse m