ABSTRACT
When Leigh Hunt came to publish his autobiography in 1850, his life had changed greatly since the penurious and confused days of Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries. In the later years of Hunt's life, he brought out various congenial Christmas anthologies, such as the sweet-titled A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla, intended to comfort and cheer his readers. As a result, critics were reversing their previous judgments of Hunt as a writer. Hunt promoted Keats’s poetry in his new Leigh Hunt’s London Journal, and this time it solicited a very different reaction. Milnes’s book brought back all the uneasy feelings about Keats which Hunt had entertained in 1828, only with greater intensity. Despite the fact that he prefaced the autobiography with the promise to tone down his previous rather controversial portraits of his contemporaries, the account of Keats is more bitter and defensive than the one twenty years before.
