A third principle was the employment of unusual words; examples are found in the _Story of Rimini_ in the first edition and in other poems produced about this same time. In the _Poetical Works_, 1832, most of them have been discarded. The preface states that the "occasional quaintnesses and neologisms" which "formerly disfigured the poems did not arise from affectation but from the sheer license of animal spirits"; that they are not worth defending and that he has left only two in the _Story of Rimini_, "swirl" and "cored." "Swaling" had been the most famous one in the poem because of the ridicule heaped upon it by the enemies of the Cockney School.
To use ordinary words in an extraordinary sense was a fourth principle. The effect was often extremely awkward. Core passes as a synonym for heart; fry occurs in _Rimini_ in a strange sense; hip and tiptoe are employed with a special Huntian significance. Nouns and adjectives are used as verbs and verbs as nouns and adjectives with an unpoetical effect: cored (verb); drag (noun); frets (noun); feel (noun); patting (adjective); spanning (adjective); lull'd (adjective); smearings; measuring; doings.[72]
The use of compounds is a fifth distinguishing feature. Such combinations are found as bathing-air, house-warm lips, side-long pillowed meekness, fore-thoughted chess, pin-drop silence, tear-dipped feeling.
The sixth and last peculiarity is the preference for adjectives in _y_ and _ing_, many of them of his own coinage; for adverbs in _ly_; and for unauthorized or awkward comparatives: examples are plumpy (cheeks), knify, perky, sweepy, farmy, bosomy, pillowy, arrowy, liny, leafy, scattery, winy, globy; hasting, silvering, doling, blubbing, firming, thickening, quickening, differing, perking; lightsomely, refreshfully, thrillingly, kneadingly, lumpishly, smilingly, preparingly, crushingly,[73] finelier, martialler, tastefuller, apter.
The colloquial vocabulary, the familiar tone, and the expansion of thought into phrases and clauses where it would have gained by condensed expression, give to the _Story of Rimini_ a prosaic and eccentric style. Yet Hunt declared he held in horror eccentricity and prosiness.[74]
In a discussion of the influence of Leigh Hunt upon the versification of his contemporaries and successors it is necessary to consider not only his theory but also the active part played by him as a conscious reviver of the older heroic couplet. In this reaction against the school of Pope, as also in the use of blank verse, he showed great independence in discarding approved models. The notes added to the _Feast of the Poets_ in 1814, when it was republished from the _Reflector_ of 1812, are important in this connection. They show a wide familiarity with modern poetry. He writes: