ixed to
suit the taste of Byron. The "noble poet" too was not a person who liked
to be spunged upon; and his coolest admirers may sympathise with his
disgust when he found that he had upon his hands a man of letters with a
large family whom he was literally expected to keep, whose society was
disagreeable to him, who lampooned his friends, who differed with him on
every point of taste, and who did not think it necessary to be grateful.
For Leigh Hunt, somewhat on Lamb's system of compensation for coming
late by going away early, combined his readiness to receive favours with
a practice of not acknowledging the slightest obligation for them.
Byron's departure for Greece was in its way lucky, but it left Hunt
stranded. He remained in Italy for rather more than three years and then
returned home across the Continent. The _Liberal_, which contains work
of his, of Byron's, of Shelley's, and of Hazlitt's, is interesting
enough and worth buying in its original form, but it did not pay. Of the
unlucky book on his relations with Byron which followed--the worst act
by far of his life--I shall not say much. No one has attempted to defend
it, and he himself apologises for it frankly and fully in his
Autobiography. It is impossible, however, not to remark that the offence
was much aggravated by its deliberate character. For the book was not
published in the heat of the moment, but three years after Hunt's return
to England and four after Byron's death.

The remaining thirty years of Hunt's life were wholly literary. As for
residences, he hovered about London, living successively at Highgate,
Epsom, Brompton, Chelsea, Kensington, and divers other places. At
Chelsea he was very intimate with the Carlyles, and, while he was
perhaps of all living men of letters most leniently judged by those not
particularly lenient judges, we have nowhere such vivid glimpses of
Hunt's peculiar weaknesses as in the memoirs of Carlyle and his wife.
Why Leigh Hunt was always in such difficulties is not at first obvious,
for he was the reverse of an idle man; he seems, though thriftless, to
have been by no means very sumptuous in his way of living; everybody
helped him, and his writing was always popular. He appears to have felt
not a little sore that nothing was done for him when his political
friends came into power after the Reform Bill--and remained there for
almost the whole of the rest of his life. He had certainly in some
senses borne the burden and