, and that he was not cleared,
though apparently he gave Shelley to understand that he was.

There are many excuses for him which Skimpole had not. His own pleas of
tropical blood and so forth will not greatly avail. But the old
patron-theory and its more subtle transformation (the influence of
which is sometimes shown even by Thackeray in the act of denouncing it),
to the effect that the State or the public, or somebody, is bound to
look after your man of genius, had bitten deep into the being of the
literary man of our grandfathers' time. Anybody who has read _Thomas
Poole and his Friends_ must have seen how not merely Coleridge, of whose
known liability to the weakness the book furnished new proofs, but even,
to some extent and vicariously, the austere Wordsworth, cherished the
idea. But for the most part, men kept it to themselves. Leigh Hunt never
could keep anything to himself, and he has left record on record of the
easy manner in which he acted on his beliefs.

For this I own that I care little, especially since he never borrowed
money of me. There is a Statute of Limitations for all such things in
letters as well as in law. What is much harder to forgive is the
ill-bred pertness, often if not always innocent enough in intention, but
rather the worse than the better for that, which mars so much of his
actual literary work. When almost an old man he wrote--when a very old
man he quotes, with childlike surprise that any one should see anything
objectionable in them--the following lines:

Perhaps you have known what it is to feel longings,
To pat buxom shoulders at routs and mad throngings--
Well--think what it was at a vision like that!
A grace after dinner! a Venus grown fat!

It would be almost unbelievable of any man but Leigh Hunt that he
placidly remarks in reference to this impertinence that "he had not the
pleasure of Lady Blessington's acquaintance," as if that did not make
things ten times worse. He had laid the foundation of not a few of the
literary enmities he suffered from, by writing, thirty years earlier, a
"Feast of the Poets," on the pattern of Suckling, in which he took,
though much more excusably, the same kind of ill-bred liberties; and
similar things abound in his works. It is scarcely surprising that the
good Macvey Napier (rather awkwardly, and giving Macaulay much trouble
to patch things up) should have said that he would like a
"gentleman-like" article from Mr. Hunt for