Very early in life Hunt had been received into a family called Kent at the instance of an elder daughter who greatly admired him. Not long afterwards he engaged himself to her younger sister, then almost a child, and married her soon after the _Examiner_ was started. She proved a prolific, thriftless woman and ill housekeeper, but through all the rubs and pinches of his after years he was ever an affectionate husband and father. His wife was allowed to be with him in prison, and there they received the visits of many friends old and new. Liberal statesmen, philosophers, and writers, including characters so divers as Bentham and Byron, Brougham and Hazlitt, James Mill and Miss Edgeworth, Tom Moore and Wilkie the painter, pressed to offer this victim of political persecution their sympathy and society. Charles Lamb and his sister were the most constant of all his visitors. Tom Moore, who both before and after the sentence on the brothers Hunt managed in his series of verse skits, _The Twopenny Post Bag_, to go on playing with impunity the game of Prince-Regent-baiting,--the light-hearted Tom Moore joined in deepest earnest the chorus of sympathy with the prisoners:--
Yet go--for thoughts as blessed as the air Of Spring or Summer flowers await you there: Thoughts such as He, who feasts his courtly crew In rich conservatories, _never_ knew; Pure self-esteem--the smiles that light within-- The Zeal, whose circling charities begin With the few lov'd ones Heaven has plac'd it near, And spread, till all Mankind are in its sphere; The Pride, that suffers without vaunt or plea, And the fresh Spirit, that can warble free, Through prison-bars, its hymn to Liberty!
Among ardent young men who brought their tributes was Cowden Clarke with a basket of fruit and flowers from his father's garden; and this was followed up by a weekly offering in the same kind. 'Libertas, the loved Libertas,' was the name found for Hunt by such fond young spirits and adopted by Keats.