house, Murray, &c.) told him it was a discreditable one, and partly because the business did not turn out lucrative. "It is a mistake to suppose, that he was not mainly influenced by the expectation of profit. He expected very large returns from The Liberal.' Readers in these days need not be told, that periodical works which have a large sale are a mine of wealth: Lord Byron had calculated that matter well.'- Lord Byron and his Contemporaries, p. 50. "The failure of the large profits- the non-appearance of the golden visions he had looked for, of the Edinburgh or Quarterly returns of the solid and splendid proofs of this new country, which he should conquer in the regions of notoriety, to the dazzling of all men's eyes and his ownthis it was this was the bitter disappointment which made him determine to give way.'- Ibid. p. 51. "Now let us hear Lord Byron himself: "Genoa, 9bre 18th, 1822. They will, of course, attribute motives of all kinds; but I shall not abandon a man like Hunt because he is unfortunate. Why, I could have no pecuniary motives, and, least of all, in connection with Hunt.' 666 Genoa, 10bre 25th, 1822. - Now do you see what you and your friends do by your injudicious rudeness? actually cement a sort of connection which you strove to prevent, and which, had the Hunts prospered, would not, in all probability, have continued. As it is, I will not quit them in their adversity, though it should cost me character, fame, money, and the usual et cetera. My original motives I already explained; (in the letter which you thought proper to show ;) they are the true ones, and I abide by them, as I tell you, and I told Leigh Hunt, when he questioned me on the subject of that letter. He was violently hurt, and never will forgive me at the bottom; but I cannot help that. I never meant to make a parade of it; but if he chose to question me, I could only answer the plain truth, and I confess, I did not see any thing in the letter to hurt him, unless I said he was "a bore," which I don't remember. Had this Journal gone on well, and I could have aided to make it better for them, I should then have left them after a safe pilotage off a lee shore to make a prosperous voyage by themselves. As it is, I can't, and would not if I could, leave them among the breakers. As to any community of feeling, thought, or opinion, between Leigh Hunt and me, there is little or none. We meet rarely, hardly ever; but I think him a good-principled and able man, and must do as I would be done by. I do not know what world he has lived in; but I have lived in three or four, but none of them like his Keatsand-Kangaroo terra incognita. Alas! poor Shelley! how we would have laughed had he lived! and how we used to laugh now and then at various things which are grave in the suburbs." " The Reviewer proceeds to comment on Mr. Hunt's general abuse of Lord Byron's manners, habits, and conversation, in these terms: "The witness is, in our opinion, disqualified to give evidence upon any such subjects: his book proves him to be equally ignorant of what manners are, and incompetent to judge what manners ought to be: his elaborate portraiture of his own habits is from beginning to end a very caricature of absurdity; and the man who wrote this book, studiously cast, as the whole language of it is, in a free-and-easy, conversational tone, has no more right to decide about the conversation of such a man as Lord Byron, than has a pert apprentice to pronounce ex cathedrâ—from his one shilling gallery, to wit on the dialogue of a polite comedy. We can easily believe, that Lord Byron never talked his best when this was his Companion. We can also believe that Lord Byron's serious conversation, even in its lowest tone, was often unintelligible to Mr. Leigh Hunt. We are morally certain, that in such company Lord Byron talked, very often indeed, for the mere purpose of amusing himself at the expense of his ignorant, fantastic, lack-a-daisical guest; that he considered the Magnus Apollo of Paradise Row as a precious butt, and acted accordingly. We therefore consider Mr. Hunt's evidence as absolutely inadmissible, on strong preliminary grounds. But what are we to say to it, when we find it, as we do, totally and diametrically at variance both with the substance and complexion of Lord Byron's epistolary correspondence; and with the oral testimonies of men whose talents, originally superior beyond all possibility of measurement to Mr. Hunt's, have been matured and perfected by study, both of books and men, such as Mr. Hunt never even dreamed of; who had the advan tage of meeting Lord Byron on terms of perfect equality to all intents and purposes; and who, qualified, as they probably were, above any of their contemporaries, to appreciate Lord Byron, whether as a poet, or as a man of high rank and pre-eminent fame, mingling in the world in society such as he ought never to have sunk below, all with one voice pronounce an opinion exactly and in every particular, as well as looking to things broadly and to the general effect, the reverse of that which this unworthy and ungrateful dependant has thought himself justified in promulgating, on the plea of a penury which no Lord Byron survives to relieve? It is too bad, that he who has, in his own personal conduct, as well as in his writings, so much to answer for-who abused great opportunities and great talents so lamentably who sinned so deeply, both against the society to which he belonged and the literature in which his name will ever hold a splendid place it is really too bad, that Lord Byron, in addition to the grave condemnation of men able to appreciate both his merits and his demerits, and well disposed to think more in sorrow than in anger of the worst errors that existed along with so much that was excellent and noble-it is by much too bad that this great man's glorious though melancholy memory 'Must also bear the vile attacks whom he fed ; - that his bones must be scraped up from their bed of repose to be at once grinned and howled over by creatures who, even in the least hyena-like of their moods, can touch nothing that mankind would wish to respect without polluting it." Mr. Moore's Verses on Mr. Hunt's work must not be omitted here. Next week will be published (as "Lives" are the rage) Though the dog is a dog of the kind they call " sad," Of knowing how lions behave among friends. How that animal eats, how he moves, how he drinks, And 'tis plain, from each sentence, the puppy-dog thinks Though he roar'd pretty well-this the puppy allows - To the loftiest war-note the lion could pour. 'Tis, indeed, as good fun as a Cynic could ask, Nay, fed as he was (and this makes it a dark case) However, the book's a good book, being rich in Examples and warnings to lions high-bred, How they suffer small mongrelly curs in their kitchen, Who'll feed on them living, and foul them when dead.-E.] APPENDIX. NOTE A. MR. WILLIAM SMITH'S SPEECH IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, MARCH 14. 1817. See antè p. 245. "The honourable member then adverted to that tergiversation of principle which the career of political individuals so often presented. He was far from supposing, that a man who set out in life with the profession of certain sentiments, was bound to conclude life with them. He thought there might be many occasions in which a change of opinion, when that change was unattended by any personal advantages, when it appeared entirely disinterested, might be the result of sincere conviction. But what he most detested, what most filled him with disgust, was the settled, determined malignity of a renegado. He had read in a publication (The Quar. terly Review), certainly entitled to much respect from its general literary excellences, though he differed from it in its principles, a passage alluding to the recent disturbances, which passage was as follows: — "When the man of free opinions commences professor of moral and political philosophy for the benefit of the public-the fables of old credulity are then verified his very breath becomes venomous, and every page which he sends abroad carries with it poison to the unsuspicious reader. We have shown, on a former occasion, how men of this description are acting upon the public, and have explained in what manner a large part of the people have been prepared for the virus with which they inoculate them. The dangers arising from such a state of things are now fully apparent, and the designs of the incendiaries, which have for some years been proclaimed so plainly, that they ought, long ere this, to have been prevented, are now manifested by over tacts.' With the permission of the House, he would read an extract from a poem recently published, to which, he supposed, the above writer alluded (or at least to productions) of a similar kind), as constituting a part of the virus with which the public mind had been infected : |