ABSTRACT
Byron, Hours of Idleness (1807); review by John Higgs Hunt, Critical Review, 3rd Series, XII (Sept. 1807), 47–53. This John Hunt (not to be confused with Leigh Hunt’s brother John) had been a Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, since 1804 and would have known the young lord. Hunt had been appointed editor of the Critical Review in 1805 when J. Mawman had become publisher, but under Hunt’s direction the Critical had slipped in prestige, and by October 1807 Robert Fellowes was co-editor. Hunt’s praise of Byron’s poems seems a little excessive, but we cannot be certain that he had not recently reviewed a dozen much weaker volumes of miscellaneous poems.
