"Genoa, February 20. 1823.
"My Dear Tom,
"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.[1]
[Footnote 1: I was never lucky enough to recover these two letters,
though frequent enquiries were made about them at the French
post-office.]
"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 weight![1] 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.
[Footnote 1: The passage in one of my letters to which he here refers
shall be given presently.]
"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[1], had more than
once disposed 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.
[Footnote 1: In one of his letters this poet says:--"Non posso negare
che io mi doglio oltramisura di esser stato tanto disprezzato dal
mondo quanto non e 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 proud prescience of his
future fame, "Laondé stimo di poter mene ragionevolmente richiamare
alla posterità."]
The chief inducements, 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[1], 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, a strong confidence in the
antidotal power of his own name to resist the ridicule of such an
association.
[Footnote 1: See Letter 317. p. 103.]
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.