heat of the day for Liberalism. But he was
one of those reckless people who, without meaning to offend anybody in
particular, offend friends as well as foes; the days of sinecures were
even then passing or passed; and it is very difficult to conceive any
office, even with the lightest duties, in which Leigh Hunt would not
have come to grief. As for his writing, his son's earnest plea as to his
not being an idle man is no doubt true enough, but he never seems to
have reconciled himself to the regular drudgery of miscellaneous
article writing for newspapers which is almost the only kind of
journalism that really pays, and his books did not sell very largely. In
his latter days, however, things became easier for him. The unfailing
kindness of the Shelley family gave him (in 1844 when Sir Percy Shelley
came into his property) a regular annuity of L120; two royal gifts of
L200 each and in 1847 a pension of the same amount were added; and two
benefit nights of Dickens's famous amateur company brought him in
something like a cool thousand, as Dickens himself would have said. Of
his last years Mr. Kent, who was intimate with him, gives much the
pleasantest account known to me. He died on 28th August 1859, surviving
his wife only two years.

I can imagine some one, at the name of Dickens in the preceding
paragraph, thinking or saying, that if the author of _Bleak House_
raised a thousand pounds for his old friend, he took the value of it and
infinitely more out of him. It is impossible to shirk the Skimpole
affair in any really critical notice of Leigh Hunt. To put unpleasant
things briefly, that famous character was at once recognised by every
one as a caricature, perhaps ill-natured but certainly brilliant, of
what an enemy might have said of the author of "Rimini." Thornton Hunt,
the eldest of Leigh Hunt's children, and a writer of no small power,
took the matter up and forced from Dickens a contradiction, or
disavowal, with which I am afraid the recording angel must have had
some little difficulty. Strangely enough the last words of Macaulay's
that we have concern this affair; and they may be quoted as Sir George
Trevelyan gives them, written by his uncle in those days at Holly Lodge
when the shadow of death was heavy on him.

_December 23, 1859._ An odd declaration by Dickens that he did
not mean Leigh Hunt by Harold Skimpole. Yet he owns that he took
the light externals of the character from Leigh Hunt, and s