urely
it is by those light externals that the bulk of mankind will
always recognise character. Besides, it is to be observed that
the vices of H. S. are vices to which L. H. had, to say the
least, some little leaning, and which the world generally
attributed to him most unsparingly. That he had loose notions of
_meum_ and _tuum_; that he had no high feeling of independence;
that he had no sense of obligation; that he took money wherever
he could get it; that he felt no gratitude for it; that he was
just as ready to defame a person who had relieved his distress
as a person who had refused him relief--these were things which,
as Dickens must have known, were said, truly or falsely, about
L. H., and had made a deep impression on the public mind.

Now Macaulay has not always been leniently judged; but I do not think
that, with the single exception of Croker's case, he can be accused of
having borne hardly on the moral character of any one of his
contemporaries. He had befriended Leigh Hunt in every way; he had got
him into the _Edinburgh_; he had lent (that is to say given) him money
freely, and I do not think that his fiercest enemy can seriously think
that he bore Hunt a grudge for having told him, as he himself records,
that the "Lays" were not so good as Spenser, whom Macaulay in one of the
rare lapses of his memory had unjustly blasphemed, and whom Leigh Hunt
adored. To my mind, if there were any doubt about Dickens's intention,
or about the fitting in a certain sense of the cap, this testimony of
Macaulay's would settle it. But I cannot conceive any doubt remaining in
the mind of any person who has read Leigh Hunt's works, who has even
read the Autobiography. Of the grossest faults in Skimpole's character,
such as the selling of Jo's secret, Leigh Hunt was indeed incapable, and
the insertion of these is at once a blot on Dickens's memory and a kind
of excuse for his disclaimer; but as regards the lighter touches the
likeness is unmistakable. Skimpole's most elaborate jests about "pounds"
are hardly an exaggeration of the man who gravely and more than once
tells us that his difficulties and irregularities with money came from a
congenital incapacity to appreciate arithmetic, and who admits that
Shelley (whose affairs he knew very well) once gave him no less than
fourteen hundred pounds (that is to say some sixteen months of Shelley's
income at his wealthiest) to clear him