Lady or capricious; as I am not a very rigid moralist and am Oxford. extremely open to kindness, "I could have better spared a better woman. Hunt. Leigh JAMES HENRY LEIGH HUNT (1784-1859) was imprisoned in Horsemonger Lane Gaol for that famous description (Examiner, 12th March 1813) of the Prince Regent as 'a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demi-reps,' and 'a man who has just closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of his country or the respect of posterity.' Hunt was a Radical, of course, and Moore a Whig; but to abuse the Regent was to go straight to the heart of the great Whig Party, among whose members, says Moore, there existed at this period a strong feeling of indignation at the late defection from themselves and their principles of the illustrious personage who had been so long looked up to as the friend and patron of both.' As a good and loyal Whig, Moore himself was 'warmly-perhaps intemperately-under the influence of this feeling'; he 'regarded the fate of Mr. Hunt with more than common interest'; so, 'immediately on my arrival in town (I) paid him a visit in his prison.' Byron heard of the experience and of the prisoner's circumstances his trelliced flower-garden without, and his books, busts, pictures, and pianoforte within'; and being, he also, of the Whig way of thinking, requested an introduction. The visit was repeated, there was a Hunt. dinner, there were presents of books; and, 'It Leigh strikes me,' Hunt wrote to his wife, with a truly amazing capacity for self-deception, that he and I shall become friends, literally and cordially speaking. There is something in the texture of his mind that seems to resemble mine to a thread; I think we are cut out of the same piece, only a different wear may have altered our respective naps a little.' Byron, on his part, thought the captive an extraordinary character... Much talent, great independence of spirit, and an austere yet not repulsive aspect,' at the same time that he was 'the bigot of virtue (not religion), and, perhaps, a trifle opinionated. But withal, a valuable man, and less vain than success, and even the consciousness of preferring the right to the expedient, might excuse.' The 'respective naps' are different, to be sure; but for some time the relations between the wearers were friendly enough. It was to Byron that Hunt dedicated that achievement in affected English and shabby-genteel heroics in which, by an immortal piece of bathos, Dante's lovers, at the very crisis of their fate, are turned into a suburban milliner and her 'young man': 'May I come in ? ' said he ;-it made her start,That smiling (!) voice-she coloured, pressed her heart A moment, as for breath, and then with free And usual tones said, 'Oh yes, certainly (!)':and Byron, though he despised the style, yet thought the poem a devilish good one,' recommended it to Murray, and would have liked Moore to give it a hand in The Edinburgh Review. Again, Hunt says that he was much with Byron in Leigh the pre-Exile days, and when the Exile came, he And so adieu, dear Byron,-dear to me But by 1818 Byron's mood had grown truly critical, 'He (Hunt) is a good man, with some poetical elements in his chaos, but spoiled by the Christ-Church Hospital and a Sunday newspaper, to say nothing of the Surrey gaol, which conceited him into a martyr. But he is a good man. . . . He believes his trash of vulgar phrases, tortured into compound barbarisms, to be old English.. He sent out his Foliage by Percy Shelley . . . and of all the ineffable Centaurs that was ever begotten by SelfLove upon a Nightmare, I think this monstrous Sagittary the most prodigious. He (Leigh H.) is an honest charlatan, who has persuaded himself into a belief in his own impostures, and talks Punch in pure simplicity of heart. Is that ** at the head of your profession in your eyes? I'll be cursed if he is of mine, or ever shall be... But Leigh Hunt is a good man; and a good father-see his Odes to all the Masters Hunt; a good husband-see his Sonnet to Mrs. Hunt; a good friend * -see his Epistles to different people; and a great coxcomb, and a very vulgar person in everything about him.' It is delightfully savage. But listen to Keats (4th Jan. 1819), who knew his Hunt like a book:'In reality he is vain, egotistical, and disgusting in taste and morals. . . . He does one harm by making fine things petty, and beautiful things hateful.' By contrast this character of Byron's conveys the impression that the writer must have had a real regard for Hunt, however dashed with scorn, to have countenanced the famous tour to Italy at all. Hunt. That tour was made at Shelley's suggestion, and Leigh on funds (200) which Shelley borrowed from Byron for the purpose. In the sequel it proved the worst day's work he ever did. Its objects were (1) rest and change for Hunt, and (2) the foundation of a magazine to be written by Hunt, Shelley, and Byron. It is absurd to suppose that such a venture could have prospered; but, as matter of fact, no such venture was ever made. Hunt (with his wife and six children) was bound for Pisa, where Shelley (then at Lerici) had furnished the ground-floor of the Palazzo Lanfranchi, Byron's house, for him. At Leghorn he was joined by Shelley and Williams in the Don Juan. The party went on to Pisa, whither Byron followed; and, a few days after, the Don Juan-built in the eclipse and rigged with curses dark'-put out to sea for the last time. The impossible combination disappeared; and Byron was left with Hunt (cum suis) on his hands, and the strong conviction in his mind that the whole position was a mistake. In effect, the results were disastrous all round. The host, to his discredit, was at no particular pains to make himself agreeable to his guest; the guest, who was at best a journalist of parts, but thought himself by far the better poet of the two-(he was very soon to show, and in The Liberal too, how Byron ought to write the ottava rima!) was not greatly concerned to conciliate his host, at the same time that he looked to that host to give lavishly and ask no questions. In this, however, the guest was disappointed. More: he had been all his life a sponge, and for the first time in his life (as Mr. Monkhouse has remarked in his excel Hunt. Leigh lent little monograph) he was made to feel like the sponge he was. He had, as Keats says, taken Haydon's 'silver,' and 'expostulated on the indelicacy of a demand for its return; and in less trying times he had had £1400 out of Shelley in a single year. Byron was not that stamp of treasurer. He was better versed in character and life than Shelley; and, whether or not he had contracted what he calls the 'good old-gentlemanly vice,' it is certain that Hunt, though he accepted some £500 of him, and lived 'for the best part of two years at his expense, was neither satisfied nor pleased. Thus the pike which tries to swallow what appears to him his natural prey, but has to give over the experience, ' distracted and amazed.' The starting of The Liberal made matters worse. It was founded with Byron's money, and fed with such Byronisms as Heaven and Hell, the Vision, the translation from Pulci, and the letter to 'My dear Roberts.' But it was a failure from the beginning, when John Hunt was fined and imprisoned for publishing the Vision; and as, though it was little or nothing to Byron, it was bread of life, and more, to Hunt, nobody need be surprised, though everybody should be distressed, to find that Hunt was presently disposed-(I quote again his able and humane apologist) to 'impute the meanest motives to everything Byron said or did.' If you lie down with dogs (in fact), you get up with fleas. Byron consorted with Hunt, and four years after Byron's death (1828) Hunt published his Lord Byron and His Contemporaries. He wrote this stuff because he wanted money, and he would not |