The leading article of the _Port Folio_ of May 28, 1803, is devoted to young Leigh Hunt, and treats him as an American poet, and assures the public that he "is a deserving object of patronage." Again, in June 11, 1803, some sonnets and odes are quoted from Hunt's _Juvenilia_, Hunt being then a lad of 19 years, and the author is said to be a "blossom from our own garden." Although the editor lays claim to Leigh Hunt as a Philadelphian and to his works as American, he is advised to abide in London: "Let him remain in London, 'the metropolis of the civilized world,' and remember with the judicious Sancho that St. Peter is very well at Rome.... It affords the editor the purest pleasure to have it in his power to advance the claims of a child of genius, a nephew of Sir Benjamin West, an honor to that country from which he is descended and to that which protects him."
Isaac Hunt, the father of the author of "The Story of Rimini," and Benjamin West married sisters, daughters of Stephen Shewell, merchant, in Philadelphia. Leigh Hunt, in 1810, writing in the _Monthly Mirror_, gave an eloquent and tender description of his mother, Mary Shewell, which was reprinted in the _Analectic Magazine_ of Philadelphia, in 1814. "Here, indeed," he exclaimed, "I could enlarge both seriously and proudly; for if any one circumstance of my life could give me cause for boasting, it would be that of having had such a mother. She was indeed a mother in every exalted sense of the word, in piety, in sound teaching, in patient care, in spotless example." The father, Isaac Hunt, came to Philadelphia from the Barbadoes, was graduated at the College of Philadelphia, read law in the city, and was admitted to the bar in 1765. He was an uncompromising Tory. It is said that on one occasion he pointed out to a bookseller a volume of reports of trials for high treason as a proper book for John Adams to read. Alexander Graydon, one of the faithful contributors to the _Port Folio_, in his "Memoirs of a Life Chiefly Passed in Pennsylvania," relates the following incident which, no doubt, led to the accident of Leigh Hunt's birth in England, and to the loss of "Abou ben Adhem" to America: "A few days after the carting of Mr. Kearsley, Mr. Isaac Hunt, the attorney, was treated in the same manner, but he managed the matter much better than his precursor. Instead of braving his conductors, like the Doctor, Mr. Hunt was a pattern of meekness and humility; and at every halt that was made he rose and expressed his acknowledgments to the crowd for their forbearance and civility. After a parade of an hour or two, he was set down at his own door, as uninjured in body as in mind. He soon after removed to one of the islands, if I mistake not, to Barbadoes, where, it is understood, he took orders."