HUNT, HENRY (1773-1835), English politician, commonly called “Orator Hunt,” was born at Widdington Farm, Upavon, Wiltshire, on the 6th of November 1773. While following the vocation of a farmer he made the acquaintance of John Horne Tooke, with whose advanced views he soon began to sympathize. At the general election of 1806 he came to the front in Wiltshire; he soon associated himself with William Cobbett, and in 1812 he was an unsuccessful candidate for Bristol. He was one of the speakers at the meeting held in Spa Fields, London, in November 1816; in 1818 he tried in vain to become member of parliament for Westminster, and in 1820 for Preston. In August 1819 Hunt presided over the great meeting in St Peter’s Field, Manchester, which developed into a riot and was called the “Peterloo massacre.” He was arrested and was tried for conspiracy, being sentenced to imprisonment for two years and a half. In August 1830 he was elected member of parliament for Preston, but he lost his seat in 1833. While in parliament Hunt presented a petition in favour of women’s rights, probably the first of this kind, and he moved for a repeal of the corn laws. He died on the 15th of February 1835. During his imprisonment Hunt wrote his Memoirs which were published in 1820.
See R. Huish, Life of Hunt (1836); and S. Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical (2nd ed., 1893).
HUNT, HENRY JACKSON (1819-1889), American soldier, was born in Detroit, Michigan, on the 14th of September 1819, and graduated at the U.S. military academy in 1839. He served in the Mexican War under Scott, and was breveted for gallantry at Contreras and Churubusco and at Chapultepec. He became captain in 1852 and major in 1861. His professional attainments were great, and in 1856 he was a member of a board entrusted with the revision of light artillery drill and tactics. He took part in the first battle of Bull Run in 1861, and soon afterwards became chief of artillery in the Washington defences. As a colonel on the staff of General M’Clellan he organized and trained the artillery reserve of the Army of the Potomac. Throughout the Civil War he contributed more than any officer to the effective employment of the artillery arm. With the artillery reserve he rendered the greatest assistance at the battle of Malvern Hill, and soon afterwards he became chief of artillery in the Army of the Potomac. On the day after the battle of South Mountain he was made brigadier-general of volunteers. At the Antietam, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, he rendered further good service, and at Gettysburg his handling of the artillery was conspicuous in the repulse of Pickett’s charge, and he was rewarded with the brevet of colonel. He served in Virginia to the end of the war, attaining the brevet ranks of major-general of volunteers and brigadier-general of regulars. When the U.S. army was reorganized in 1866 he became colonel of the 5th artillery and president of the permanent Artillery Board. He held various commands until 1883, when he retired to become governor of the Soldiers’ Home, Washington, D.C. He died on the 11th of February 1889. He was the author of Instructions for Field Artillery (1860), and of papers on Gettysburg in the “Battles and Leaders” series.
His brother, Lewis Cass Hunt (1824-1886), served throughout the Civil War in the infantry arm, becoming brigadier-general of volunteers in 1862, and brevet brigadier-general U.S.A. in 1865.
HUNT, JAMES HENRY LEIGH (1784-1859), English essayist and miscellaneous writer, was born at Southgate, Middlesex, on the 19th of October 1784, His father, the son of a West Indian clergyman, had settled as a lawyer in Philadelphia, and his mother was the daughter of a merchant there. Having embraced the loyalist side, Leigh Hunt’s father was compelled to fly to England, where he took orders, and acquired some reputation as a popular preacher, but want of steadiness, want of orthodoxy, and want of interest conspired to prevent his obtaining any preferment. He was engaged by James Brydges, 3rd duke of Chandos, to act as tutor to his nephew, James Henry Leigh, after whom Leigh Hunt was called. The boy was educated at Christ’s Hospital, of which school he has left a lively account in his autobiography. As a boy at school he was an ardent admirer of Gray and Collins, writing many verses in imitation of them. An impediment in his speech, afterwards removed, prevented his being sent to the university. “For some time after I left school,” he says, “I did nothing but visit my school-fellows, haunt the book-stalls and write verses.” These latter were published in 1801 under the title of Juvenilia, and contributed to introduce him into literary and theatrical society. He began to write for the newspapers, and published in 1807 a volume of theatrical criticisms, and a series of Classic Tales with critical essays on the authors.
In 1808 he quitted the War Office, where he had for some time been a clerk, to become editor of the Examiner newspaper, a speculation of his brother John. The new journal with which Leigh Hunt was connected for thirteen years soon acquired a high reputation. It was perhaps the only newspaper of the time which owed no allegiance to any political party, but assailed whatever seemed amiss, “from a principle of taste,” as Keats happily expressed it. The taste of the attack itself, indeed, was not always unexceptionable; and one upon the Prince Regent, the chief sting of which lay in its substantial truth, occasioned (1813) a prosecution and a sentence of two years’ imprisonment for each of the brothers. The effect was to give a political direction to what should have been the career of a man of letters. But the cheerfulness and gaiety with which Leigh Hunt bore his imprisonment attracted general attention and sympathy, and brought him visits from Byron, Moore, Brougham and others, whose acquaintance exerted much influence on his future destiny.
In 1810-1811 he edited for his brother John a quarterly magazine, the Reflector, for which he wrote “The Feast of the Poets,” a satire which gave offence to many contemporary poets, and particularly offended William Gifford of the Quarterly. The essays afterwards published under the title of the Round Table (2 vols., 1816-1817), conjointly with William Hazlitt, appeared in the Examiner. In 1816 he made a permanent mark in English literature by the publication of his Story of Rimini. There is perhaps no other instance of a poem short of the highest excellence having produced so important and durable an effect in modifying the accepted standards of literary composition. The secret of Hunt’s success consists less in superiority of genius than of taste. His refined critical perception had detected the superiority of Chaucer’s versification, as adapted to the present state of the language by Dryden, over the sententious epigrammatic couplet of Pope which had superseded it. By a simple return to the old manner he effected for English poetry in the comparatively restricted domain of metrical art what Wordsworth had already effected in the domain of nature; his is an achievement of the same class, though not of the same calibre. His poem is also a triumph in the art of poetical narrative, abounds with verbal felicities, and is pervaded throughout by a free, cheerful and animated spirit, notwithstanding the tragic nature of the subject. It has been remarked that it does not contain one hackneyed or conventional rhyme. But the writer’s occasional flippancy and familiarity, not seldom degenerating into the ludicrous, made him a mark for ridicule and parody on the part of his opponents, whose animosity, however, was rather political than literary.