In conclusion, Keats's early and late employment of the couplet was marked always by greater freedom in the use of run-on couplets and lines, and in the handling of the cæsura than Dryden's or Hunt's; he was at first slower than Hunt to employ the triplet and the Alexandrine, but he later adopted them in a larger measure; and he introduced the run-on paragraph and the hemistich independently of Hunt.
Finnerty Case--Correspondence of Hunt and Shelley--Their Political and Religious Sympathy--Hunt's Defense of Shelley--Hunt's Italian Journey--Shelley's Death--Hunt's Criticism--Literary Influence--Shelley's Estimate of Hunt.
The friendship of Shelley and Leigh Hunt is the simple story of an intimacy founded on a common endowment of independence of thought and of capacity for self-sacrifice. Although both were sensitive and shrinking by nature, and preferred to dwell in an isolated world of books and dreams, yet for the sake of abstract principles and for love of humanity, both expended much time and endured much pain in the arena of public strife.
In _The Examiners_ of February 18 and 24, 1811, appeared articles by Hunt on the Finnerty case. Peter Finnerty, Hunt's successor as editor of _The Statesman_, had been prosecuted and imprisoned on the charge of libelling Lord Castlereagh. Hunt's defense drew Shelley's attention to the case and may have inspired him, it has been suggested, to write his _Political Essay on the Existing State of Things_. The proceeds went to Finnerty.[211] On March 2 Shelley subscribed to the Finnerty fund and, on the same day, wrote Hunt, whom he had never met, a letter from Oxford, congratulating him on his acquittal from a third charge of libel and proposing that an association should be formed to establish "rational liberty," to resist the enemies of justice, and to protect each other.[212]
Shelley's political creed was, in the main, that of William Godwin, with an admixture of Holbach, Volney and Rousseau at first hand.[213] In English philosophic literature he knew Berkeley, Hume, Reid and Locke. His watchword was the cry of the French Revolution, liberty, equality and fraternity, to be gained, not by violence and bloodshed, but by a steady and unyielding resistance of the masses against the corrupt institutions of church and state. Like Godwin, he believed man capable of his own redemption and, with tradition and tyranny overthrown and reason and nature enthroned, he hoped for universal justice and ultimate perfectibility of mankind. His poetry and his prose represent a development from the impassioned and imaginative enthusiasm of an uncompromising youth, who would single-handed revolutionize the world in the twinkling of an eye, to the saner hope of a man who took somewhat into account the necessarily gradual nature of ethical evolution. His chief fallacy lay in the failure to recognize evil as an inherent force in human nature and to acknowledge sect and state, to which he attributed the origin of all error, as inventions of man's ingenuity. Neither did he perceive the necessity of certain restrictions on the individual for the preservation of law and order. He believed in no distinctions of rank except those based on individual talent and virtue. He wrote in 1811: "I am no aristocrat, nor '_crat_' at all, but vehemently long for the time when men may dare to live in accordance with Nature and Reason--in consequence with Virtue, to which I firmly believe that Religion and its establishments, Polity and its establishments, are the formidable though destructible barriers."[214] Shelley knew of Leigh Hunt first as a political writer of considerable importance. In this respect he never ceased to admire him or to be influenced by _The Examiner_ in the campaign against government corruption. Yet his own equipment of mind and training, visionary as his theories seem, gave him a power of speculation and grasp of situation that ignored the limitations of time and space, while Hunt, with his narrower view, never got beyond the petty and immediate details of one nation or of one age.