deed, generally are enemies, but they never can be friends; because there must always be a spice of jealousy and a something of self in all their speculations.

"Indeed, I rather look upon love altogether as a sort of hostile transaction, very necessary to make or to break matches, and keep the world going, but by no means a sinecure to the parties concerned.

"Now, as my love perils are, I believe, pretty well over, and yours, by all accounts, are never to begin, we shall be the best friends imaginable, as far as both are concerned; and with this advantage, that we may both fall to loving right and left through all our acquaintance, without either sullenness or sorrow from that amiable passion, which are its inseparable attendants.

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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

"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 satellities 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

1 I was never lucky enough to recover these two letters, though frequent enquiries were made about them at the French post-office.

2 The passage in one of my letters to which he here refers shall be given presently.

3 In one of his letters this poet says:-"Non posso

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! 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.

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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! Believe me

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 3, 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 some times even, with that painful skill which sen sibility supplies, to extract out of the brightest tributes of success some omen of future failure, or symptom of decline. New suc cesses, however, still came to dissipate these bodings of diffidence; nor was it till after his unlucky coalition with Mr. Haut in the Liberal, that any grounds for such a suspi cion of his having declined in public favour showed themselves.

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

negare che io mi doglio oltramisura di esser stato tanto disprezzato dal mondo quanto non è altro scrittore di questo secolo." In another letter, however, after com plaining of being" perseguitato da molti più che non era convenevole," he adds, with a proud prescience of his future fame," Laondé stimo di potermene ragionevol mente richiamare alla posterità."

Ær. 35.

project he had now so long comtemplated, 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 talents1, 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.

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.

1 See Letter 317. antè, p. 379.

2 [Entitled "Lord Byron and his Contemporaries: by Leigh Hunt." "This," says the Quarterly Review, "is the miserable book of a miserable man: the little airy fopperies of its manner are like the fantastic trip and convulsive simpers of some poor worn-out wanton, struggling between famine and remorse, leering through her tears. I must confess,' says this unhappy man in his preface, that such is my dislike of these personal histories, that had I been rich enough, my first impulse would have been to put it into the fire.' With such a feeling running cold all the while at the bottom of his heart, does this unfortunate proceed to fill page after page, through a long quarto volume, with the meanest details of private gossip – dirty gabble about men's wives, and men's mistresses, -and men's lackeys, and even the mistresses of the lackeys and with anecdotes of the personal habits of an illustrious poet, such as could never have come to the knowledge of any man who was not treated by Lord Byron

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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. 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.

As

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

either as a friend or as a menial. It is really too bad that Lord Byron, in addition to the grave condemnation of men able to appreciate both his merits and his demerits, and well disposed to think more in sorrow than in anger of the worst errors that existed along with so much that was excellent and noble-it is by much too bad that this great man's glorious, though melancholy, memory

'Must also bear the vile attacks
Of ragged curs and vulgar hacks,'

whom he fed; that his bones must be scraped up from their bed of repose to be at once grinned and howled over by creatures, who, even in the least hyena-like of their moods, can touch nothing that mankind would wish to respect wthout polluting it. We hope and trust the public reception of this filthy gossip will be such as to discourage any more of these base assaults upon Lord Byron's memory."-Vol. xxxvii. p. 403. See BYRONIANA.]

"Mr. Hill is here: I dined with him on Saturday before last; and on leaving his house at S. P. d' Arena, my carriage broke down. I walked home, about three miles, -no very great feat of pedestrianism; but either the coming out of hot rooms into a bleak wind chilled me, or the walking up-hill to Albaro heated me, or something or other set me wrong, and next day I had an inflammatory attack in the face, to which I have been subject this winter for the first time, and I suffered a good deal of pain, but no peril. My health is now much as usual. Mr. Hill is, I believe, occupied with his diplomacy. I shall give him your message when see him again.

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My name, I see in the papers, has been dragged into the unhappy Portsmouth business, of which all that I know is very succinct. Mr. Hanson is my solicitor. I found him so when I was ten years old-at my uncle's death- and he was continued in the management of my legal business. He asked me, by a civil epistle, as an old acquaintance of his family, to be present at the marriage of Miss Hanson. I went very reluctantly, one misty morning (for I had been up at two balls all night), to witness the ceremony, which I could not very well refuse without affronting a man who had never offended me. I saw nothing particular in the marriage. Of course I could not know the preliminaries, except from what he said, not having been present at the wooing, nor after it; for I walked home, and they went into the country as soon as they had promised and vowed. Out of this simple fact I hear the Débats de Paris has quoted Miss H. as 'autrefois très liée avec le célèbre,' &c. &c. I am obliged to him for the celebrity, but beg leave to decline the liaison, which is quite untrue; my liaison was with the father, in the unsentimental shape of long lawyers' bills, through the medium of which I have had to pay him ten or twelve thousand pounds within these few years. She was

1 [See antè, p. 230.]

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not pretty, and I suspect that the indefatigable Mr. A was (like all her people) more attracted by her title than her charms. I regret very much that I was present at the prologue to the happy state of horse-whipping and black jobs, &c. &c. ; but I could not foresee that a man was to turn out mad, who had gone about the world for fifty years, as competent to vote, and walk at large; nor did he seem to me more insane than any other person going to be married.

"I have no objection to be acquainted with the Marquis Palavicini, if he wishes it. Lately I have gone little into society, English or foreign, for I had seen all that was worth seeing in the former before I left England, and at the time of life when I was more disposed to like it; and of the latter I had a sufficiency in the first few years of my residence in Switzerland, chiefly at Madame de Stael's, where I went sometimes, till I grew tired of conversazioni and carnivals, with their appendages; and the bore is, that if you go once, you are expected to be there daily, or rather nightly. I went the round of the most noted soirées at Venice or elsewhere (where I remained not any time) to the Benzona, and the Albrizzi, and the Michelli, &c. &c. and to the Cardinals and the various potentates of the Legation in Romagna, (that is, Ravenna,) and only receded for the sake of quiet, when I came into Tuscany. Besides, if I go into society, I generally get, in the long run, into some scrape of some kind or other, which don't occur in my solitude. However, I am pretty well settled now, by time and temper, which is so far lucky, as it prevents restlessness; but, as I said before, as an acquaintance of yours, I will be ready and willing to know your friends. He may be a sort of connection for aught I know; for a Palavicini, of Bologna, I believe, married a distant relative of mine half a century ago. I happen to know the fact, as he and his spouse had an annuity of five hundred pounds on my uncle's property, which ceased at his demise; though I recollect hearing they attempted, naturally enough, to make it survive him. If I can do any thing for you here or elsewhere, pray order, and be obeyed."