"I must again refer you to those two letters addressed to you at Passy before I read your speech in Galignani, &c., and which you do not seem to have received. * "Of Hunt I see little-once a month or so, and then on his own business, generally. You may easily suppose that I know too little of Hampstead and his satellites to have much communion or community with him. My whole present relation to him arose from Shelley's unexpected wreck. You would not have had me leave him in the street with his family, would you? and as to the other plan you mention, you forget how it would humiliate him -that his writings should be supposed to be dead * I was never lucky enough to recover these two letters, though frequent enquiries were made about them at the French post-office. weight! * Think a moment-he is perhaps the vainest man on earth, at least his own friends say so pretty loudly; and if he were in other circumstances, I might be tempted to take him down a peg; but not now, it would be cruel. It is a cursed business; but neither the motive nor the means rest upon my conscience, and it happens that he and his brother have been so far benefited by the publication in a pecuniary point of view. His brother is a steady, bold fellow, such as Prynne, for example, and full of moral, and, I hear, physical courage. "And you are really recanting, or softening to the clergy! It will do little good for you-it is you, not the poem, they are at. They will say they frightened you-forbid it, Ireland ! "Yours ever, "N. B." Lord Byron had now, for some time, as may be collected from his letters, begun to fancy that his reputation in England was on the wane. The same thirst after fame, with the same sensitiveness to every passing change of popular favour, which led Tasso at last to look upon himself as the most despised of writers †, had more than once disposed * The passage in one of my letters to which he here refers shall be given presently. "Non posso negare + In one of his letters this poet says: che io mi doglio oltramisura di esser stato tanto disprezzato dal mondo quanto non è altro scrittore di questo secolo." In another letter, however, after complaining of being "perseguitato da molti più che non era convenevole,” he adds, with a Lord Byron, in the midst of all his triumphs, if not to doubt their reality, at least to distrust their continuance; and sometimes even, with that painful skill which sensibility supplies, to extract out of the brightest tributes of success some omen of future failure, or symptom of decline. New successes, however, still came to dissipate these bodings of diffidence; nor was it till after his unlucky coalition with Mr. Hunt in the Liberal, that any grounds for such a suspicion of his having declined in public favour showed themselves. The chief inducemerts, on the part of Lord Byron, to this unworthy alliance were, in the first place, a wish to second the kind views of his friend Shelley in inviting Mr. Hunt to join him in Italy; and, in the next, a desire to avail himself of the aid of one so experienced, as an editor, in the favourite project he had now so long contemplated, of a periodical work, in which all the various offspring of his genius might be received fast as they sprung to light. With such opinions, however, as he had long entertained of Mr. Hunt's character and talents *, the facility with which he now admitted him - not certainly to any degree of confidence or intimacy, but to a declared fellowship of fame and interest in the eyes of the world, is, I own, an inconsistency not easily to be accounted for, and argued, at all events, proud prescience of his future fame, "Laondé stimo di potermene ragionevolmente richiamare alla posterità.” * See Letter 317. p. 103. a strong confidence in the antidotal power of his own name to resist the ridicule of such an association. As long as Shelley lived, the regard which Lord Byron entertained for him extended its influence also over his relations with his friend; the suavity and good-breeding of Shelley interposing a sort of softening medium in the way of those unpleasant collisions which afterwards took place, and which, from what is known of both parties, may be easily conceived to have been alike trying to the patience of the patron and the vanity of the dependent. That even, however, during the lifetime of their common friend, there had occurred some of those humiliating misunderstandings which money engenders,-humiliating on both sides, as if from the very nature of the dross that gives rise to them,-will appear from the following letter of Shelley's which I find among the papers in my hands. 66 TO LORD BYRON. My dear Lord Byron. "February 15. 1823. "I enclose you a letter from Hunt, which annoys me on more than one account. You will observe the postscript, and you know me well enough to feel how painful a task is set me in commenting upon it. Hunt had urged me more than once to ask you to lend him this money. My answer consisted in sending him all I could spare, which I have now literally done. Your kindness in fitting up a part of your own house for his accommodation I sensibly felt, and willingly accepted from you on his part, but, believe me, without the slightest intention of imposing, or, if I could help it, allowing to be imposed, any heavier task on your purse. As it has come to this in spite of my exertions, I will not conceal from you the low ebb of my own money affairs in the present moment, that is, my absolute inca pacity of assisting Hunt farther. "I do not think poor Hunt's promise to pay in a given time is worth very much; but mine is less subject to uncertainty, and I should be happy to be responsible for any engagement he may have proposed to you. I am so much annoyed by this subject that I hardly know what to write, and much less what to say; and I have need of all your indulgence in judging both my feelings and expressions. "I shall see you by and by. Believe me "Yours most faithfully and sincerely, Of the book in which Mr. Hunt has thought it decent to revenge upon the dead the pain of those obligations he had, in his hour of need, accepted from the living, I am luckily saved from the distaste of speaking at any length, by the utter and most deserved oblivion into which his volume has fallen. Never, indeed, was the right feeling of the world upon such subjects more creditably displayed than in the reception given universally to that ungenerous book; -even those the least disposed to think approvingly of Lord Byron having shrunk back from such a corro |