"the brave and enlightened man... to whom the public owes a debt as the champion of their liberties and virtues"
(Dowden,
Life of Shelley
, vol. i. p. 325). Keats wrote a sonnet to Hunt on the day he left his prison, beginning:
"What though for showing truth to flatter'd state, Kind Hunt was shut in prison."
A political alliance was thus cemented, which, for the time, was disastrous to the literary prospects of Shelley and Keats. To Hunt Shelley dedicated the
Cenci
, and Keats his first volume of
Poems
(1817). He is the "gentlest of the wise" in Shelley's