"February 15. 1823.
"My dear Lord Byron.
"I enclose you a letter from Hunt, which annoys me on more than one
account. You will observe the postscript, and you know me well enough
to feel how painful a task is set me in commenting upon it. Hunt had
urged me more than once to ask you to lend him this money. My answer
consisted in sending him all I could spare, which I have now
literally done. Your kindness in fitting up a part of your own house
for his accommodation I sensibly felt, and willingly accepted from
you on his part, but, believe me, without the slightest intention of
imposing, or, if I could help it, allowing to be imposed, any heavier
task on your purse. As it has come to this in spite of my exertions,
I will not conceal from you the low ebb of my own money affairs in
the present moment,--that is, my absolute incapacity of assisting
Hunt farther.
"I do not think poor Hunt's promise to pay in a given time is worth
very much; but mine is less subject to uncertainty, and I should be
happy to be responsible for any engagement he may have proposed to
you. I am so much annoyed by this subject that I hardly know what to
write, and much less what to say; and I have need of all your
indulgence in judging both my feelings and expressions.
"I shall see you by and by. Believe me
"Yours most faithfully and sincerely,
"P.B. SHELLEY."
Of the book in which Mr. Hunt has thought it decent to revenge upon
the dead the pain of those obligations he had, in his hour of need,
accepted from the living, I am luckily saved from the distaste of
speaking at any length, by the utter and most deserved oblivion into
which his volume has fallen. Never, indeed, was the right feeling of
the world upon such subjects more creditably displayed than in the
reception given universally to that ungenerous book;--even those the
least disposed to think approvingly of Lord Byron having shrunk back
from such a corroboration of their own opinion as could be afforded
by one who did not blush to derive his authority, as an accuser, from
those facilities of observation which he had enjoyed by having been
sheltered and fed under the very roof of the man whom he maligned.
With respect to the hostile feeling manifested in Mr. Hunt's work
towards myself, the sole revenge I shall take is, to lay before my
readers the passage in one of my letters which provoked it; and which
may claim, at least, the merit of not being a covert attack, as
throughout the whole of my remonstrances to Lord Byron on the subject
of his new literary allies, not a line did I ever write respecting
either Mr. Shelley or Mr. Hunt which I was not fully prepared, from
long knowledge of my correspondent, to find that he had instantly,
and as a matter of course, communicated to them. That this want of
retention was a fault in my noble friend, I am not inclined to deny;
but, being undisguised, it was easily guarded against, and, when
guarded against, harmless. Besides, such is the penalty generally to
be paid for frankness of character; and they who could have flattered
themselves that one so open about his own affairs as Lord Byron would
be much more discreet where the confidences of others were concerned,
would have had their own imprudence, not his, to blame for any injury
that their dependence upon his secrecy had brought on them.
The following is the passage, which Lord Byron, as I take for
granted, showed to Mr. Hunt, and to which one of his letters to
myself (February 20.) refers:--
"I am most anxious to know that you mean to emerge out of the
Liberal. It grieves me to urge any thing so much against Hunt's
interest; but I should not hesitate to use the same language to
himself, were I near him. I would, if I were you, serve him in every
possible way but this--I would give him (if he would accept of it)
the profits of the same works, published separately--but I would
_not_ mix myself up in this way with others. I would _not_ become a
partner in this sort of miscellaneous '_pot au feu_,' where the bad
flavour of one ingredient is sure to taint all the rest. I would be,
if I were _you_, alone, single-handed, and, as such, invincible."
While on the subject of Mr. Hunt, I shall avail myself of the
opportunity it affords me of introducing some portions of a letter
addressed to a friend of that gentleman by Lord Byron, in consequence
of an appeal made to the feelings of the latter on the score of his
professed "friendship" for Mr. Hunt. The avowals he here makes are, I
own, startling, and must be taken with more than the usual allowance,
not only for the particular mood of temper or spirits in which the
letter was written, but for the influence also of such slight casual
piques and resentments as might have been, just then, in their
darkening transit through his mind,--indisposing him, for the moment,
to those among his friends whom, in a sunnier mood, he would have
proclaimed as his most chosen and dearest.