LORD BYRON
AND
SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES;
WITH
RECOLLECTIONS OF

THE AUTHOR’S LIFE,
AND OF HIS
VISIT TO ITALY.

BY LEIGH HUNT.

“It is for slaves to lie, and for freemen to speak truth.

“In the examples, which I here bring in, of what I have heard, read, done, or said, I have forbid myself to dare to alter even the most light and indifferent circumstances. My conscience does not falsify one tittle. What my ignorance may do, I cannot say.” Montaigne.

LONDON:
HENRY COLBURN, NEW BURLINGTON STREET.
1828.

An abridgment that I picked up of the Philosophical Dictionary (a translation) was for a long while my text-book, both for opinion and style. I was also a great admirer of L’Ingenu, or the Sincere Huron; and the Essay on the Philosophy of History. In the character of the Sincere Huron I thought I found a resemblance to my own, as most readers do in those of their favourites: and this piece of self-love helped me to discover as much good-heartedness in Voltaire as I discerned wit. Candide, I confess, I could not like. I enjoyed passages; but the laughter was not as good-humoured as usual; there was a view of things in it, which I never entertained then or afterwards, and into which the

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author had been led, rather in order to provoke Leibnitz, than because it was natural to him; and, to crown my unwilling dislike, the book had a coarseness, apart from graceful and pleasurable ideas, which I have never been able to endure. There were passages in the abridgment of the Philosophical Dictionary which I always passed over; but the rest delighted me beyond measure. I have not seen it for years till the other day, having used in the meantime a French copy of the work itself; but I can repeat passages out of it now, and will lay two or three short ones before the reader, as specimens of what made such an impression upon me. They are in Voltaire’s best manner; which consists in an artful intermixture of the conventional dignity and real absurdity of what he is exposing, the tone being as grave as the dignity seems to require, and the absurdity coming out as if unintentionally and by the by.

Dryden I read too, but not with that relish for his nobler versification which I afterwards acquired. Dramatic reading, with all my love of the play, I never was fond of; yet, in the interval of my departure from school, and my getting out of my teens, I wrote two farces, a comedy, and a tragedy; and the plots of all (such as they were) were inventions. The hero of my tragedy was the Earl of Surrey (Howard, the poet) who was put to death by Henry the Eighth. I forget what the comedy was upon. The title of one of the farces was the “Beau Miser,” which may explain the nature of it. The other was called “A Hundred a Year,” and turned upon a hater of the country, who upon having an annuity to that amount given him, on condition of his never going out of London, becomes a hater of the town. In the last scene, his annuity died a jovial death in a country-tavern; the bestower entering the room just as my hero had got on a table, with a glass in his hand, to drink confusion to the metropolis. All these pieces were, I doubt not, as bad as need be. About ten years ago, being sleepless one night with a fit of

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enthusiasm, in consequence of reading about the Spanish play of the Cid in Lord Holland’s “Life of Guillen de Castro,” I determined to write a tragedy on the same subject, which was accepted at Drury Lane. Perhaps the conduct of this piece was not without merit, the conclusion of each act throwing the interest into the succeeding one; but I had great doubts of all the rest of it; and on receiving it from Mr. Elliston to make an alteration in the third act, very judiciously proposed by him, I looked the whole of the play over again, and convinced myself it was unfit for the stage: I therefore withheld it. I had made my hero too much like the beau ideal of a modern reformer, instead of the half godlike, half-bigoted soldier that he was. I began afterwards to re-cast the play, but grew tired and gave it up. The Cid would make a delicious character for the stage, or in any work; not, indeed, as Corneille declaimed him, nor as inferior writers might adapt him to the reigning taste; but taken, I mean, as he was, with the noble impulses he received from nature, the drawbacks with which a bigoted age qualified them, and the social and open-hearted pleasantry (not the least evidence of his nobleness) that brings forth his heart, as it were, in flashes through the stern armour. But this would require a strong hand, and readers capable of grappling with it. In the meantime, they should read of him in Mr. Southey’s Chronicle of the Cid, (an admirable summary from the old Spanish writers,) and in the delightful verses at the end of it, translated from an old Spanish poem by Mr. Hookham Frere, with a triumphant force and fidelity, that you know to be true to the original at once. It seems to me, that if I could live my life over again, and command a proper quantity of health and muscles from my ancestors, or a gymnasium, I could write same such poem myself, and make a book of it. All that I pretend at present, when I think what

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a poem ought to be, is to be a reader not unworthy. As to the drama, I am persuaded I have no sort of talent for it; though I can paint a portrait or so in dialogue pretty well out of history, as in the imaginary conversations of Pope and Swift, that have appeared in the New Monthly Magazine.

At the period I am speaking of, circumstances introduced me to the acquaintance of Mr. Bell, the Proprietor of the “Weekly Messenger.” In his house in the Strand, I used to hear of politics and dramatic criticism, and of the persons who wrote them. Mr. Bell had been well known as a bookseller, and a speculator in elegant typography. It is to him the public are indebted for the small edition of the Poets that preceded Cooke’s, and which, with all my predilections for that work, was unquestionably superior to it. Besides, it included Chaucer and Spenser. The omission of these in Cooke’s edition was as unpoetical a sign of the times, as the existing familiarity with their names is the reverse. It was thought a mark of good sense! As if good sense, in matters of literature, did not consist as much in knowing what was poetical in poetry, as brilliant in wit. Mr. Bell was upon the whole a remarkable person. He was a plain man, with a red face, and a nose exaggerated by intemperance; and yet there was something not unpleasing in his countenance, especially when he spoke. He had sparkling black eyes, a good-natured smile, gentlemanly manners, and one of the most agreeable voices I ever heard. He had no acquirements, perhaps not even grammar; but his taste in putting forth a publication, and getting the best artists to adorn it, was new in those times, and may be admired in any; and the same taste was observable in his house. He knew nothing of poetry. He thought the Della Cruscans fine people, because they were

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known in the circles; and for Milton’s Paradise Lost he had the same epithet as for Mrs. Crouch’s face, or the phaeton of Major Topham: he thought it “pretty.” Yet a certain liberal instinct, and turn for large dealing, made him include Chaucer and Spenser in his edition; he got Stothard to adorn the one, and Mortimer the other; and in the midst, I suspect, of very equivocal returns, published a British Theatre with embellishments, and a similar edition of the plays of Shakspeare,—the incorrectest work, according to Mr. Chalmers, that ever issued from the press. Unfortunately for Mr. Bell, he had as great a taste for neat wines and ankles, as for pretty books; and, to crown his misfortunes, the Prince of Wales, to whom he was bookseller, once did him the honour to partake of an entertainment at his house. He afterwards became a bankrupt. He was one of those men whose temperament and turn for enjoyment throw a sort of grace over whatsoever they do, standing them in stead of every thing but prudence, and sometimes even supplying them with the consolations which imprudence itself has forfeited. After his bankruptcy he set up a newspaper, which became profitable to every body but himself. He had become so used to lawyers and bailiffs, that the more his concerns flourished, the more his debts flourished with them. It seemed as if he would have been too happy without them; too exempt from the cares that beset the prudent. The first time I saw him, he was standing in a chemist’s shop, waiting till the road was clear for him to issue forth. He had a toothache, for which he held a handkerchief over his mouth; and while he kept a sharp look-out with his bright eye, was alternately groaning in a most gentlemanly manner over his gums and addressing some polite words to the shopman. I had not then been introduced

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to him, and did not know his person; so that the effect of his voice upon me was unequivocal. I liked him for it, and wished the bailiff at the devil.

In the office of the “Weekly Messenger,” I saw one day a person who looked the epitome of squalid authorship. He was wretchedly dressed and dirty; and the rain, as he took his hat off, came away from it as from a spout. This was a man of the name of Badini, who had been poet at the Opera, and was then editor of the “Messenger.” He was afterwards sent out of the country under the Alien Act, and became reader of the English papers to Bonaparte. His intimacy with some of the first families in the country, among whom he had been a teacher, is supposed to have been of use to the French government. He wrote a good idiomatic English style, and was a man of abilities. I had never before seen a poor author, such as are described in books; and the spectacle of the reality startled me. Like other authors, however, who are at once very poor and very clever, his poverty was his own fault. When he received any money, he disappeared, and was understood to spend it in alehouses. We heard that in Paris he kept his carriage. I have since met with authors of the same squalid description; but they were destitute of ability, and had no more right to profess literature as a trade, than alchemy. It is from these that the common notions about the poverty of the profession are taken. One of them, poor fellow! might have cut a figure in Smollett. He was a proper ideal author, in rusty black, out at elbows, thin and pale. He brought me an ode about an eagle; for which the publisher of a magazine, he said, had had “the inhumanity” to offer him half-a-crown. His necessity for money he did not deny; but his great anxiety was to know whether, as a poetical composition, his ode was not worth more. “Is that poetry, Sir?” cried

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he: “that’s what I want to know—is that poetry?” rising from his chair, and staring and trembling in all the agony of contested excellence.

My brother John, at the beginning of the year 1805, set up a paper, called the “News,” and I went to live with him in Brydges-street, and write the theatricals in it. It was he that invented the round window in the office of that paper, to attract attention. I say, the paper was his own, but it is a singular instance of my incuriousness, that I do not know to this day, and most likely never did, whether he had any share in it or not. Upon reflection, my impression is, that he had not. At all events, he was the printer and publisher, and he occupied the house.

But if I was right about Mr. Kemble, whose admirers I plagued enough, I was not equally so about the living dramatists, whom I plagued more. I laid all the deficiencies of the modern drama to their account, and treated them like a parcel of mischievous boys, of whom I was the schoolmaster and whipper-in. I forgot that it was I who was the boy, and that they knew twenty times more of the world than I did. Not that I mean to say their comedies were excellent, or that my commonplaces about the superior merits of Congreve and Sheridan were not well founded: but there was more talent in their “five-act farces” than I supposed; and I mistook, in great measure, the defect of the age,—its dearth of dramatic character,—for that of the writers who were to draw upon it. It is true, a great wit, by a laborious process, and the help of his acquirements, might extract a play or two from it, as was Sheridan’s own case; but there was a great deal of imitation even in Sheridan, and he was fain to help himself to a little originality out of the characters of his less formalized countrymen, his own included. It is remarkable, that the three most amusing dramatists of the last age, Sheridan, Goldsmith, and O’Keeffe, were all Irishmen, and all had characters of their own. Sheridan, after all, was Swift’s Sheridan come to life again in the person of his grandson, with the oratory of Thomas Sheridan, the father, superadded and brought to bear. Goldsmith, at a disadvantage in his breeding, but full of address with his pen, drew upon his own absurdities and mistakes, and filled his dramas with ludicrous perplexity. O’Keeffe was all for whim and impulse, but not without a good deal of conscience; and, accordingly, in his plays we have a sort of young and pastoral taste of life in the very midst of its sophistications. Animal spirits, quips and cranks, credulity, and good intention, are triumphant throughout, and make a delicious mixture. It is a great credit

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to O’Keeffe, that he ran sometimes close upon the borders of the sentimental drama, and did it not only with impunity but advantage: but sprightliness and sincerity enable a man to do every thing with advantage. It is a pity that as much cannot be said of Mr. Colman, who, after taking more license in his writings than any body, has become a Licenser ex officio, and seems inclined to license nothing but cant. When this writer got into the sentimental, he made a sad business of it, for he had no faith in sentiment. He mouthed and overdid it, as a man does when he is telling a lie. At a farce he was admirable; and remains so, whether writing or licensing. Morton seemed to take a colour from the writers all round him, especially from O’Keeffe and the sentimentalists. His sentiment was more in earnest than Mr. Colman’s, yet somehow not happy either. There was a gloom in it, and a smack of the Old Bailey. It was best when he put it in a shape of humour, as in the paternal and inextinguishable tailorism of Old Rapid in a Cure for the Heart-Ache. Young Rapid, who complains that his father “sleeps so slow,” is also a pleasant fellow and worthy of O’Keeffe. He is one of the numerous crop that sprang up from Wild Oats, but not in so natural a soil. The character of the modern drama at that time was singularly commercial; nothing but gentlemen in distress, and hard landlords, and generous interferers, and fathers who got a great deal of money, and sons who spent it. I remember the whole wit of Mr. H——’s play ran upon prices, bonds, and post-obits. You might know what the pit thought of their pound-notes by the ostentatious indifference with which the heroes of the pieces gave them away, and the admiration and pretended approval with which the spectators observed it. To make a present of a hundred pounds was as if a man had uprooted and given away an Egyptian pyramid.

Mr. Reynolds was not behindhand with his brother dramatists, in drawing upon the taste of the day for gains and distresses. It appears, by his Memoirs, that he had too much reason for so doing. He was perhaps the least ambitious, and the least vain, (whatever charges to the contrary his animal spirits might have brought on him,) of all the writers of that period. In complexional vivacity he certainly did not yield to any of them; his comedies, if they were fugitive, were genuine representations of fugitive manners, and went merrily to their death; and there is one of them, the “Dramatist,” founded upon something more lasting, which promises to remain in the collections, and deserves it: which is not a little to say of any writer. I never wish for a heartier laugh than I have enjoyed, since I grew wiser, not only in seeing, but in reading the vagaries of his dramatic hero, and his mystifications of “Old Scratch.” When I read the good-humoured Memoirs of this writer the other day, I felt quite ashamed of the ignorant and boyish way in which I used to sit in judgment upon his faults, without being aware of what was good in him; and my repentance was increased by the very proper manner in which he speaks of his critics, neither denying the truth of their charges in letter, nor admitting them altogether in spirit; in fact, showing that he knew very well what he was about, and that they, whatsoever they fancied to the contrary, did not. Mr. Reynolds, agreeably to his sense and good-humour, never said a word to his critics at the time. Mr. Thomas Dibdin, not quite so wise, wrote me a letter, which Incledon, I am told, remonstrated with him for sending, saying, it would do him no good with the “d— boy.” And he was right. I published it, with an answer; and only thought that I made dramatists “come bow to me.” Mr. Colman attacked me in a prologue, which by a curious chance Fawcett spoke

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right in my teeth, the box I sat in happening to be directly opposite him. I laughed at the prologue; and only looked upon Mr. Colman as a great monkey, pelting me with nuts, which I ate. Attacks of this kind were little calculated to obtain their end with a youth who persuaded himself that he wrote for nothing but the public good; who mistook the impression which any body of moderate talents can make with a newspaper, for the result of something peculiarly his own; and who had just enough scholarship to despise the want of it, or what appeared to be the want of it, in others. I do not pretend to think that the criticisms in the “News” had no merit at all. They showed an acquaintance with the style of Voltaire, Johnson, and others; were not unagreeably sprinkled with quotation; and, above all, were written with more care and attention than was customary with newspapers at that time. The pains I took to round a period with nothing in it, or to invent a simile that should appear offhand, would have done honour to better stuff. On looking over the articles the other day, for the first time perhaps these twenty years, I found them less absurd than I had imagined; and began to fear that, with all their mistakes, my improvement since had not been free from miscalculation. If so, God knows how I should have to criticise myself twenty years hence! But there is a time of life, at which we cannot well experience more, at least so as to draw any healthy and useful deductions from our experience: and when a man has come to this, he is as wise, after his fashion, as he ever will be. The world require neither the ill-informed confidence of youth, nor the worse diffidence or obstinacy of old age, to teach them; but a comparison of mutual experiences; enough wisdom for acknowledging, that we are none of us as wise or as happy as we might be; and a little more (which is the great point to arrive at) for

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setting to work and trying if we cannot be otherwise. Methinks we have been beating blindly upon this point long enough, and might as well open our eyes to it.

Anonymous, “Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries” in New Monthly Magazine Vol. NS 22 (January 1828)

Gifted, too, like the subject of his Memoir, with very remarkable talents, he is much more to be relied on, both in his choice of points of view, and in his manner of handling his subject: he is not likely to spoil a bon-mot, an epigram, or a conversation and while he can seize all that was really piquant about his Lordship, he is infinitely above retailing the low gossip and garbage which same memoir-writers have done, in the true spirit of a waiting-maid or a lacquey. He possesses, moreover, one eminent qualification for the task which he has undertaken; he has a stern love of truth; and even his enemies will give him credit for being uniformly consistent and honest in the expression of his opinions on all subjects. In his present work he shows himself ready to be devoted as a martyr to Truth, (for that very word of the book is true, no reader can doubt,) and boldly exposes himself to all the vituperation of all the slaves who hated and attacked Lord Byron while living, but who will now come forward with a mock display of generosity, and sympathy with the illustrious departed, of whom they will represent Mr. Hunt as the ungrateful reviler. . . .

Anonymous, “Lord Byron and His Contemporaries [Part I]” in The Athenaeum Vol. 1 No. 4 (23 January 1828)

Mr. Hunt has done a bold deed by publishing this work. We are not ourselves quite clear that he was right; but, as he is doubtless well aware, he has at all events laid himself open to unmeasured misrepresentation by the literary ruffians from whom he has already suffered so much. The portion of the book which stands at the beginning, and which is alone particularly mentioned in the title-page, refers exclusively to Lord Byron. Mr. Hunt says, and we firmly believe him, that he has withheld much which might have been told; but he has also told much which many will think, or say, that he ought to have withheld. He has presented us with a totally different view of Lord Byron's character from any that has previously appeared in print, and this not only in general propositions, but by innumerable detailed anecdotes, which it seems to its quite impossible not to believe, and from which it is equally impossible not to draw very similar inferences to those which have occurred to Mr. Hunt. . . .

[William Jerden?], “Review of Hunt, Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries” in Literary Gazette No. 575 (26 January 1828)

In this quarto the author exhibits himself as a person of considerable talent, and of much literary conceit and affectation. But his deeper offence lies in the essence of the design itself, which appears to us to be one at which an honourable mind would have revolted. To have gone to enjoy the hospitality of a friend and taste the bounty of a patron, and after his death to have made that visit (for avowedly mercenary ends) the source of a long libel upon his memory,—does seem to be very base and unworthy. No resentment of real or fancied ill usage can excuse, far less justify, such a proceeding; and (without referring to this particular instance, but speaking generally of the practice, now too prevalent, of eaves-dropping and word-catching, and watching every minute action exposed in the confidence of private life, for the purpose of book-making,) we will say that these personal and posthumous injuries are a disgrace to their perpetrators and to the press of the country. . . .

[Henry Southern], “Leigh Hunt's Lord Byron” in London Magazine Vol. NS 10 (February 1828)

Mr. Leigh Hunt is so naturally prone to unbosom himself to the public, with whom he always in his writings strikes up a friendly confidential intercourse, that previous to the appearance of this work the world was well acquainted with the character of all his friends of public notoriety—with his opinions on all possible topics, and more particularly with his opinion of himself. We looked for, and we have found nothing new in this volume, save that which relates in some way or other to the author’s visit to Italy; for since that event in his life he has had little opportunity of communicating with his dear friend, his pensive public, or we should have as little to learn of the latter as of the former part of his life. It is thus that our attention is chiefly attracted to Mr. Hunt’s account of Lord Byron; for he, though not entirely a new acquaintance, only became thoroughly well known to him in Italy. . . .

Anonymous, “Review of Lord Byron and some of His Contemporaries” in Monthly Review Vol. S3 7 (March 1828)

But however we may respect the man for his acquirements, his candour, and his natural benevolence; however we may sympathise with him through the painful disappointments, of which he has already numbered too many, we may be allowed, perhaps, to claim for our literature, and for those who are engaged in supporting it, some portion of that spirit of dignity and independence, without which they would be deprived of all their gracefulness and of much of their utility. We are not insensible to the various proofs which we have lately seen, of a disposition that prevails among certain classes of literary men, to degrade their pursuits into a mere matter of trade; to produce a given number of words for a proposed reward; and to praise or to censure according to the interests and desires of those who employ them. But we own that we were not prepared for the extreme degree of literary servility—to call it by no severer name—which is stamped upon the principal pages of the work now before us. Nor does the author attempt to conceal his shame. It would not, perhaps, have been very difficult for him, by a little address, to make a better appearance in the eye of the public. It is certain, that if he had spoken less of his obligations to his publisher, and of his own original plan in the preparation of his volume be would have less exposed himself, to the censure of the world. He is, however, remarkably communicative upon both these points, imagining, most probably, that by appearing to have no reservations, his faults, such as they are, might be more easily forgiven. . . .

[John Gibson Lockhart], “[Hunt's Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries]” in Quarterly Review Vol. 37 No. 74 (March 1828)

Let us not, however, be unjust to Mr. Leigh Hunt, contemporary of Lord Byron. We find, on referring to his preface, that he disclaims, though not with indignation,—that, alas! he durst not—the catchpenny arrangement of the title-page now before us, and indeed of the contents of the book itself. Had the bookseller permitted the author to obey the dictates of his own taste and judgment, the newspapers, instead of announcing for six months, in every variety of puff direct and puff oblique, the approaching appearance of ‘Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries,’ would have told us in plain terms to expect the advent of Mr. Leigh Hunt and his following; the ‘pale face rescued from insignificance by thought’ which Mr. Hunt assures us he carries about with him would have fronted Mr. Hunt’s title-page; and Mr. Hunt’s recollections of Lord Byron would have been printed by way of modest appendix to the larger and more interesting part of the work, namely, the autobiography of Mr. Hunt. . . .

Anonymous, “Lord Byron and some of His Contemporaries” in Literary Chronicle No. 454 (26 January 1828)

We had given Mr. Hunt credit for a superiority to petty resentments and vindictive feelings, and here we find, as far at least as concerns Lord Byron, very little else. We, who have been refreshing our memories as to all that Mr. Hunt has, on various occasions, written of Lord Byron, in which his poetical genius, his liberal politics, his ‘rank worn simply,’ and his ‘total glorious want of vile hypocrisy,’ were earnestly applauded, cannot help persuading ourselves that the portrait now presented would have been more favorable, had the painter been freer from impulses, which it is very natural for him to possess, but which cannot tend to the interests of the public, or to the development of truth. . . .

[Henry Southern], “Leigh Hunt's Lord Byron” in London Magazine Vol. NS 10 (February 1828)

Cause of complaint seems to have existed between the parties, and the unfortunate death of Mr. Shelley rendered the situation of Mr. Hunt, in relation to Lord Byron, one of peculiar delicacy: we cannot allow that these circumstances could in the mind of Mr. Hunt lead to any wilful misrepresentation; but it is not improbable that they may have lent an unjust interpretation to circumstances meant to be taken otherwise, and it is therefore necessary to state in the outset this caution. Mr. Hunt, too, during their intercourse suffered all the pains of dependance: it is needless to remark how sensitive and captious such a situation is calculated to make a man, who if not proud in the ordinary sense of the word, is proud of the levelling claims of genius, and who saw with disgust that such claims were not allowed to constitute equality with rank and wealth. Mr. Leigh Hunt’s title to entire belief, when due allowance is made to the natural influence of these partly unconscious and secretly operating causes, no one will be hardy enough to deny; and when the denial is made, a look only upon the open, candid, blushing and animated face of the book itself will be sufficient to contradict it. If ever internal evidence was strong enough to quell the very thought of a suspicion, an instance is to be found here. . . .

[John Wilson], “Review of Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries” in Blackwood's Magazine Vol. 23 No. 136 (March 1828)

He drivels away in the same mawkish style for several sentences, and what is the upshot? That he would have written the book long ago, had he not preferred enjoying himself on the money, from time to time advanced to him by Mr Colburn. He afterwards acknowledges, “that, had I been rich enough, and could have repaid the handsome conduct of Mr Colburn, with its proper interest, my first impulse, on finishing the book, would have been to put it into the fire.” What mean and miserable contradictions and inconsistencies are crowded and huddled together here! It was for money that the book was written; he admits it, confesses it, hides it, emblazons it, palliates it, avows it, and denies it, all in one and the same breath; yet, in the midst of all this equivocating cowardice, in which he now fears to look the truth in the face, and then strives to stare her out of countenance, all that he has done is still, in his own ultimate belief, “wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best;” and a man of higher principle, more unimpeachable integrity, and loftier disdain of money, never, on a summer’s morning at Paddington, Lisson Grove, or Hampstead, pulled on a pair of yellow breeches! . . .

Anonymous, “Review of Lord Byron and some of His Contemporaries” in Monthly Review Vol. S3 7 (March 1828)

His readers will perceive that he doe not attempt to justify his account of Lord Byron upon any public grounds. There are those who will contend that a public man is public property, and that it is lawful even to corrupt his servants, in order to obtain disclosures as to his personal and domestic life; inasmuch as such disclosures may be rendered subservient to the general good. Mr. Hunt, however, uses no such argument as this; which, infamous though it be, has at least a specious and unselfish appearance about it, calculated to gain the assent of the unthinking part of the multitude. He openly avows that he borrowed money, which he could not repay, except by violating his native feelings of right and honour, by composing a work, which, otherwise, he would never have thought of, and which, when composed he would have put into the fire, if his pecuniary circumstances had enabled him to pursue the dictates of his heart. The wretched woman who, under the veil of night, offers her attractions to those who are disposed to pay for them, may tell a similar tale. It is not her love of vice that drives her into the streets; it is not her horror of virtue; for the human heart is not so radically vicious—particularly not in woman—as some philosopher have chosen to represent it: No—she must live—dire necessity urges her to barter, her person for money, and so she goes on in her career of heartless, ignominious depravity. Such a being we commonly call a prostitute. . . .

[John Gibson Lockhart], “[Hunt's Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries]” in Quarterly Review Vol. 37 No. 74 (March 1828)

Now the questions which we feel ourselves bound to ask of Mr. Hunt, are simply these:—Did the personal intercourse between him and Lord Byron terminate in an avowal on his (Mr. Hunt’s) part of hostility? And, Would he have written and published about Lord Byron in the tone and temper of this work had Lord Byron been alive? Except when vanity more egregious than ever perverted a human being’s thoughts and feelings interferes, we give Mr. Hunt some credit for fairness—and if he can answer these two questions in the affirmative, we frankly admit that we shall think more charitably, by a shade or two, of this performance than, in the present state of our information, we are able to do. . . .

[John Wilson], “Review of Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries” in Blackwood's Magazine Vol. 23 No. 136 (March 1828)

It appears from the Preface that he had painted a full-length portrait of that perfect gentleman, Mr Hazlitt—but partly to oblige Mr Colburn, if we do not mistake, and partly because he must have quarrelled—although he says not—with the amiable original, whom he now accuses of having “a most wayward and cruel temper,” “which has ploughed cuts and furrows in his face”—“and capable of being inhuman in some things”—he has not given the picture a place in the gallery. . . .

Anonymous, “Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries” in New Monthly Magazine Vol. NS 22 (January 1828)

From the charge of ingratitude, Mr. Leigh Hunt, in various passages of his book, successfully vindicates himself, and shows that the obligations which Lord Byron has been represented to have heaped on him, have been ludicrously exaggerated both in number and value. Into matters so delicate, however, we do not intend to enter. . . .

Anonymous, “Review of Lord Byron and some of His Contemporaries” in Monthly Review Vol. S3 7 (March 1828)

We own that we do not think that in this and other such passages, the publisher has been fairly dealt with by the author. The latter seems extremely anxious to shift upon the shoulders of the former, all the blame which can attach to a work of this description. It is obvious that Mr. Colburn wished, and very naturally, to obtain a book that would repay him for his advances and other risks; but it belonged to the author, if he really held any principles of honour sacred, to take his stand upon them. If he has abandoned them, and that for the sake of the reward which he was to get for so doing, it is clear that the taint of the transaction belongs, at least, as much to him who receives, as to him who gives, under circumstances so humiliating. . . .

[John Gibson Lockhart], “[Hunt's Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries]” in Quarterly Review Vol. 37 No. 74 (March 1828)

We are constrained to add, however, that on this occasion our ‘pensive hearts’ have withstood the influence both of Burgundy and Moselle. To our fancy, dropping metaphors, this is one of the most melancholy books that any man can take up. The coxcombries of Mr. Hunt’s style both of thought and language, were these things new, and were they all, might indeed furnish inextinguishable laughter to the most saturnine of readers. But we had supped full with these absurdities long ago, and have hardly been able to smile for more than a moment at the most egregious specimens of cockneyism which the quarto presents; and even those who have the advantage of meeting Mr. Leigh Hunt for the first time upon this occasion, will hardly, we are persuaded, after a little reflection, be able to draw any very large store of merriment from his pages. It 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. . . .

Anonymous, “Lord Byron and His Contemporaries [Part I]” in The Athenaeum Vol. 1 No. 4 (23 January 1828)

Mr. Hunt does not appear before the world to give them an account of events and connections of which they had previously no idea. We have all heard quite enough of Lord Byron's munificence in receiving into his house this distinguished gentleman and his family, to make it a prominent portion of our general idea of his Lordship's character; and after the many statements and insinuations, loud, long, and bitterly injurious to Mr. Hunt, which have been founded upon the universal knowledge of this transaction, it seems to its neither very wonderful nor very blameable, that he should at last come forward himself, and make public his own defence. It is evident, from the whole tone of the book, that Mr. Hunt has not stated in it a word which he does not believe. . . .

Anonymous, “Lord Byron and some of His Contemporaries” in Literary Chronicle No. 454 (26 January 1828)

How anxiously we have looked for a work of this kind, it would, we fear, be considered beneath the should be imperturbable dignity of a reviewer to confess. We had assigned to Leigh Hunt the office of Byron’s biographer, conceiving him on many accounts eminently calculated for the task. His acquaintance with Byron had been long and tolerably intimate, and, as a literary man, he was well qualified to draw forth and accurately estimate the essentially mental qualities of his subject. His style of composition too, seemed to us the more peculiarly adapted to the purpose, inasmuch as its very defects in this instance resolved themselves into positive advantages,—such, for example, as what is by many considered us over-fondness for minute details, his anatomy of the most trivial of circumstances. We expected him to give not a bold sketchy picture, ‘beslabbered o’er with haste,’ but an elaborate portrait in which ‘each particular hair’ should be apparent, which would he not merely pleasing to the eye, but in which the philosopher and the phrenologist might find ample materials for deep and correct speculation. We did not look for unqualified eulogium,—we were aware that truth would require anything but that,—but we imagined Mr. Hunt to possess too little ascerbity of disposition for the transmutation into vices worthy of record, what at most can be considered but insignificant overflowings of bile, and may frequently bear even an advantageous construction. We have been disappointed: in the present work, as far as it treats of Lord Byron, we trace nothing of that vein of genuine and warm-hearted philanthropy by which the writings of Leigh Hunt have been distinguished even more than by their fancy and originality. . . .

[Henry Southern], “Leigh Hunt's Lord Byron” in London Magazine Vol. NS 10 (February 1828)

Of Moore, Lamb, Campbell, &c., we are familiar with all that the author has said or would repeat for the last or next twenty years. It is a novelty at any rate for one man of genius honestly to give a minute and apparently honest account of the real private character of another: but the privileges of the order to which both parties in fact belong, may excuse the hardihood and the singularity of the scheme. Posterity invariably attempts to rake up every peculiarity or characteristic trait from the memory of every great man; and it is always loudly lamented when neither the investigations of antiquaries nor the researches of ardent admirers can bring to light all that it is wished to discover. Mr. Leigh Hunt has saved posterity any trouble in the case of Lord Byron. We have his portrait here drawn by an acute observer and a shrewd metaphysician, who had the advantage of living with him on terms of intimacy—under the same roof. . . .

[John Wilson], “Review of Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries” in Blackwood's Magazine Vol. 23 No. 136 (March 1828)

Is not the tone of this passage insolent, unfeeling, and unmanly? The writer, with flippant impatience to be insulting to the memory of a dead man, vainly tries, by a poor perversion of the very ordinary, harmless, and pleasant circumstances, in which he first saw the “Noble Childe,” to throw over him an air of ridicule, and to make him and his pastime, to a certain degree, an object of contempt. But the ridicule recoils on the Cockney. The “latter,” that is “Mr Jackson’s pupil,” that is, Lord Byron, was swimming with somebody for a wager, and that our classic calls “rehearsing the part of Leander!” To what passage in the life of Leander does the witling refer? “I had been bathing, and was standing on the floating machine adjusting my clothes!” Ay, and a pretty fellow, no doubt, you thought yourself, as you were jauntily buttoning your yellow breeches. You are pleased to say, “so contenting myself with seeing his lordship’s head bob up and down in the water, like a buoy, I came away.” Now do you know, sir, that while you were doing so, a whole young ladies’ ambulating boarding school were splitting their sides with laughter at the truly laughable style in which you were jerking out first the right leg and then the left, to get into the yellow breeches; for your legs and thighs had not been sufficiently dried with the pillow-slip, and for the while a man with moderate haste might count a hundred, in they could not be persuaded to go, but ever and anon were exhibited, below the draggled shirt-tails, in most ludicrous exposure? . . .

[John Wilson], “Review of Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries” in Blackwood's Magazine Vol. 23 No. 136 (March 1828)

Mr Hunt, however, fears he has gone too far in calling himself a young man who had written a bad volume of poems; and he mentions that Lord Byron, who soon afterwards called upon him in prison, thought it a good volume of poems; “to my astonishment he quoted some of the lines, and would not hear me speak ill of them.” We daresay Mr Hunt was very easily prevented from speaking ill of them; nor is there much magnanimity in now announcing how little they were thought of by himself, and how much by Lord Byron. This is mock-modesty; and, indeed, the would-be careless, but most careful introduction of himself and his versifying at all, on such an occasion, must, out of Cockaigne, be felt to be not a little disgusting and characteristic. . . .

[John Wilson], “Review of Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries” in Blackwood's Magazine Vol. 23 No. 136 (March 1828)

We remember once hearing a midshipman giving an account of the death of Lord Nelson, which consisted almost entirely of a description of a musket ball that had lodged in his own buttocks, and been extracted skilfully, but painfully, some months afterwards, as he lay on a sofa in his father’s house at Lymington,—an account of the whole domestic economy of which followed a complimentary character of himself and the surgeon. So is it with Mr Hunt. He keeps perpetually poking and perking his own face into yours, when you are desirous of looking only at Lord Byron’s, nor for a single moment ever seems to have the sense to suspect that the company are all too much disgusted to laugh at the absurdities of his egotism. . . .

Anonymous, “Review of Lord Byron and some of His Contemporaries” in Monthly Review Vol. S3 7 (March 1828)

Under these circumstances it was, that the author obtained the information which gives a tainted zest to his work. He did not, be it remembered, meet with Lord Byron on the high road of life, in the general intercourse of society; had that been the case, he might have been justified in recording his impressions of a character, that is likely to be enquired into with some degree of curiosity by posterity. But he never would have enjoyed the opportunity of seeing Lord Byron in Italy, had it not been for the noble lord’s kind intentions towards him in the first instance, and in the next place, for an actual advance of money, sufficient to defray his travelling expences from England to that country; so that while Mr. Hunt resided in Italy, he could have been considered in no other light than as a dependant on Lord Byron. For such a person therefore, to take advantage of his situation, in order to betray to the world all his noble protector’s errors and foibles, seems to us nothing short of a domestic treason. But to publish those foibles for the sake of gain, and to publish nothing but those, for the sake of spleen, indicate a dereliction of principle, and a destitution of honourable feeling, which we shall not venture to characterize. . . .

William Howitt, “Leigh Hunt” in Homes and Haunts of the most eminent British Poets (London: Richard Bentley, 1847) 2 Vols

The occasion of Leigh Hunt’s visit to Italy, and its results, have been placed before the public, in consequence of their singular nature, and of the high standing of the parties concerned, in a more prominent position than any other portion of his life. There has been much blame and recrimination thrown about on all sides. Mr. Hunt has stated his own case, in his work on Lord Byron and his Contemporaries. The case of Lord Byron has been elaborately stated by Mr. Moore, in his Life and Letters of the noble poet. It is not the place here to discuss the question; but posterity will very easily settle it. My simple opinion is, that Mr. Hunt had much seriously to complain of, and, under the circumstances, has made his statement with great candour. The great misfortune for him, as for the world, was, that almost immediately on his arrival in Italy with his family, his true and zealous friend, Mr. Shelley, perished From that moment, any indifferent spectator might have foreseen the end of the connexion with Lord Byron. He had numerous aristocratic friends, who would, and who did spare no pains to alarm his pride at the union with men of the determined character of Hunt and Hazlitt for progress and free opinion. . . .

[John Wilson], “Review of Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries” in Blackwood's Magazine Vol. 23 No. 136 (March 1828)

What playful fancy—what airy eloquence—what graceful badinage—what pure mirth—what nice perception—what fine emotion—what apt expression of the humorous, and even the facete! Oh! rare Leigh Hunt! . . .

Anonymous, “Lord Byron and His Contemporaries [Part I]” in The Athenaeum Vol. 1 No. 4 (23 January 1828)

But we confess that we have a good deal of doubt whether Mr. Hunt has judged rightly as to the wisdom of speaking about Lord Byron in the tone which he has assumed, considering the importance attached by the world to the kind of favours received by our author from the aristocratic poet. We do not question for a moment, that Lord Byron's kindnesses or ostentations were done after a fashion, which very much tended to merge the sense of obligation in a feeling of insulted self-respect. We are sure, from all we have ever read or heard of Mr. Hunt, that he is really accustomed to consider his own money as of much less consequence than money is commonly held to deserve; and that no man would think less of the inconvenience of giving away any portion of his worldly goods by which he could benefit a friend. But he would do well to remember that men will judge him by their rules, and not by his; and that it is mere folly to afford new weapons against an honourable reputation to those who have uniformly made so malignant a use of previous opportunities. . . .

[William Jerden?], “Review of Hunt, Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries” in Literary Gazette No. 575 (26 January 1828)

In the career of social life where civilised well depend so much on their fellow men, it must be that the noblest and proudest natures must often bend (we will not say stoop) to receive benefits: from the king to the beggar, no one ever got through the world without being obliged to others; and the receiver is as much to be esteemed and honoured as the giver. But having once accepted the kindness of a friend, there is no after act on his part, and far less any slight offence, or the mere cessation of bestowing favours, which can form an apology for turning about to sting and wound your benefactor. Silence is imposed, even if gratitude should be forgotten. . . .

Anonymous, “Lord Byron and some of His Contemporaries [Concluded]” in Literary Chronicle No. 455 (2 February 1828)

Of all the grave charges brought against Lord Byron by Mr. Hunt, the only one of real and unquestionable importance, the only one which can at all account for or justify the soreness of feeling by which the writer is evidently actuated, is contained in the following passage:—‘The public have been given to understand that Lord Byron's purse was at my command, and that I used it according to the spirit with which it was offered. I did so. Stern necessity, and a large family, compelled me; and, during our residence at Pisa, I had from him, or rather from his steward, to whom he always sent me for the money, and who doled it me out as if my disgraces were being counted, the sum of seventy pounds!’ There is a meanness and an indelicacy about this, which tends more to lessen Lord Byron, in our estimation, than any of the peculiarities, strange and wayward as they were, upon which Mr. Hunt dwells with such minute severity. . . .

Anonymous, “Review of Lord Byron and some of His Contemporaries” in Monthly Review Vol. S3 7 (March 1828)

If we rightly understand the drift of this argument, it means that Mr. Hunt would have received as much of Lord Byron’s money as his lordship might have thought proper to give, without feeling himself under the slightest obligation; but that he has since changed his mind on the subject, ‘in practice at least,’ of which we presume the memoir of his lordship is a sufficient example. There is much in this passage that savours of Cobbett’s defence of his non-payment of a loan advanced to him by Sir Francis Burdett. The upshot of their common doctrine is this; that, whereas Messrs Cobbett and Hunt have a high opinion of their own talents; and whereas one is a political, and the other a miscellaneous writer, and they have not as yet amassed fortunes by their publications—therefore, considering ‘the present state of society,’ they need never think of refunding to any person who favours them with pecuniary assistance! Mr. Hunt would, indeed, have us to believe, that ‘in practice at least,’ he has altered those notions of late, thereby affording a ray of encouragement to those who might be inclined to imitate Lord Byron’s generosity. But is he certain that if such persons were to be found, he would not recur to his favourite doctrine? . . .

Anonymous, “Review of Lord Byron and some of His Contemporaries” in Monthly Review Vol. S3 7 (March 1828)

He had been given to understand, forsooth! that ‘the attachment was real; that it was rescuing Lord Byron from worse connexions; and that the lady’s family approved of it.’ Supposing all this to be true, does it follow that their conduct was the less criminal in the sight of God—or less reprehensible in the opinion of good men?—But we correct ourselves; it seems that Mr. Hunt has also a peculiar theory on this subject, as on that of money. He tells us that he differs, very considerably, ‘with the notions entertained respecting the intercourse of the sexes, in more countries than one;’ by which, we suspect, he means that such intercourse ought to be subject to no laws, human or divine. Truly, we have here a philosopher of the most agreeable description! . . .

[Henry Southern], “Leigh Hunt's Lord Byron” in London Magazine Vol. NS 10 (February 1828)

The portrait will be acknowledged to be one of those which all who do not know the original subject, from the reality of its look, and the force and nature of its impression, will pronounce to be a perfect likeness; and they who did know it would place the question beyond suspicion, unless indeed the picture is too close a resemblance to be flattering, unless, contrary to the usage of artists, it represents deformities as well as beauties. The ravages of the small-pox are never copied in a portrait. Biographies are generally all so much alike, that the changes of a few names and circumstances would make one pass for another. Eulogies deal in generals, and if a foible is confessed, it is commonly one possessed by all mankind. Characters are seldom attempted, except by historians and novelists; in both cases the original dwells only in the author’s fancy. Viewed in this light, the character of Lord Byron is perhaps the very first that was ever drawn from life with fidelity and skill; we have him here as his intimate friends knew him—as those who lived with him felt him to be by hourly experience. . . .

[John Wilson], “Review of Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries” in Blackwood's Magazine Vol. 23 No. 136 (March 1828)

Dignified historian! Sublime studies! What peering, and prying, what whisper-listening, what look-eying, what note-jotting, and journalizing must have been there! What sudden leave-taking of bower, arbour, and parlour, at nod or wink of the master, whom he served! This was being something worse than a lick-spittle. . . .

[John Gibson Lockhart], “[Hunt's Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries]” in Quarterly Review Vol. 37 No. 74 (March 1828)

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 meatiest 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 (p. 13)—and, inter alia, with anecdotes of the personal habits of an illustrious poet now no more, such as could never have come to the knowledge of any man who was not treated by Lord Byron either as a friend or as a menial. Such is the result of ‘the handsome conduct’ of Mr. Hunt’s publisher—who, we should not forget, appears to have exercised throughout* the concoction of this work, a species of authority somewhat new in the annals of his calling: . . .

[William Jerden?], “Review of Hunt, Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries” in Literary Gazette No. 575 (26 January 1828)

The connexion between Lord Byron and persons in rank, in intellect, and in every high quality of soul, so inferior to himself as the coterie which gathered round him in Italy— and the consequences of that assemblage, may, we think, be very readily accounted for. Lord Byron, with the fervour of a young poet, imagined Leigh Hunt—in prison for libelling his King—a sort of political martyr, and thus prepossessed in his favour was led to estimate his writings by a fictitious standard. But this fit of fancy must almost instantly have been dispelled, as the author shews it to have been, when his lordship came into direct and constant contact with the pert vulgarity and miserable low-mindedness of Cockney-land. We can picture him (the haughty aristocrat and impatient bard) with Mrs. Hunt, as painted by her partial husband, with the whole family of bold brats, as described by their proud papa, and with that papa himself and the rest of the accompanying annoyances; and we no longer wonder that the Pisan establishment of congenial spirits, brought together from various parts of the world, should have turned into a den of disagreeable, envious, bickering, hating, slandering, contemptible, drivelling, and be-devilling wretches. The elements of such an association were discord; and the result was, most naturally, spleen and secret enmity in life, and hate and public contumely after death. . . .

Anonymous, “Lord Byron and some of His Contemporaries” in Literary Chronicle No. 454 (26 January 1828)

Few people, we believe, will discover either delicacy or good taste in the conduct thus complacently described. In the lady we perceive a very unamiable penchant for saying disagreeable things, not quite so smart as her affectionate husband fancies them, and which could have lost none of their deformity when repeated by Mr. Hunt to his lordship. Then again, does it tell against Byron that he was vexed because the children were kept out of the way? We suspect not, and really cannot help thinking that many of the causes of difference must have originated with the party now complaining. . . .

[John Wilson], “Review of Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries” in Blackwood's Magazine Vol. 23 No. 136 (March 1828)

Mr Hunt, too, had had his midriff tickled by it out of all measure,—had treasured it up among other bright and original sallies in the store-house of his memory, and suddenly, and without warning, brought it out to annihilate the Noble who had dared to criticise the personal appearance of “some friends of mine.” Poor Byron, how easily wert thou abashed! Disgust and scorn must have tied his tongue; just as they sicken the very eyes that run over the low and loath- some recital by a chuckling Cockney, of his wife’s unmannerly and unwomanly stupidities, mixed up with the poisonous slaver of his own impotent malice, rendering page 27 of “Lord Byron and his Contemporaries, by Leigh Hunt,” the most impertinent piece of printed paper that ever issued from the press. . . .

Anonymous, “Review of Lord Byron and some of His Contemporaries” in Monthly Review Vol. S3 7 (March 1828)

There is another subject upon which we must touch, though with unfeigned reluctance, and with as much delicacy as we can. It is well known that an intimacy of an improper description took place between Lord Byron and a Signora Guiccoli, soon after his lordship’s arrival in Italy, and that that intimacy continued for a considerable length of time. Mr. Hunt was aware of this; he knew, therefore, that the parties were living in a state of double adultery, openly violating the most sacred duties. Yet he never seems to have hesitated an instant, about introducing Mrs. Hunt and his children to a family thus tainted in all its relations. He complains of having been treated by Lord Byron, on some oc-casions, with disrespect; we ask, what better treatment did he deserve, after degrading himself and his children, by such mean compliances? . . .

[John Wilson], “Review of Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries” in Blackwood's Magazine Vol. 23 No. 136 (March 1828)

During this period Lord Byron wrote occasional letters to Mr Hunt, some of which are highly complimentary, but they soon wax somewhat cool—“My dear Hunt,” changes into “Dear Hunt,” “Yours, most affectionately,” drops off—and it is plain enough that his Lordship is getting sick and ashamed of the connexion. No wonder. The tone and temper of Mr Hunt’s character, manners, and pursuits, as given by himself, must have been most offensive to a man of high breeding and elevated sentiments like Lord Byron; and his Lordship’s admiration of “Rimini,” was not such as to stand against the public disgrace of having it dedicated to “My dear Byron.” The pride of the peer revolted, as was natural and right, from such an unwarrantable freedom—and with his own pen, it has since appeared, he erased the nauseous familiarity,—for Leigh Hunt very properly substituting “impudent varlet.” . . .

[John Wilson], “Review of Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries” in Blackwood's Magazine Vol. 23 No. 136 (March 1828)

Mr Hunt had been a despicable abuser of all lords, before he had ever sat in company with one; and even now, he is embued with the rancorous dislike of high-birth, that is the glory and the shame of the lord-hating gang to which he yet appertains. But how quickly quailed his paltry heart, and cringed his servile shoulders, and bent his Cockney knees, and sought the floor the pertness of his radical-looking eyes, at the very first condescending visit from a lord! The Examiner died within him,—all his principles slipt out of being like rain-drops on a window-pane, at the first smiting of the sun—and, oh! the self-glorification that must have illuminated his face, “saved only by thought from insignificance,” when, as he even now exults to record it, Lady Byron continued sitting impatiently in her carriage at his door at Paddington, and sending message after message, to the number of Two, to her lord, fascinated by the glitter of mean eyes, and preferring, to the gentle side of his young and newly-wedded wife, the company of a Cockney, whose best bits were distributed through the taverns for tenpence every Sunday! . . .

[John Gibson Lockhart], “[Hunt's Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries]” in Quarterly Review Vol. 37 No. 74 (March 1828)

Mr. Hunt tells his readers that Lord Byron threw him back his Spenser, saying ‘he could make nothing of him’: but whether are we to believe that the noble lord, sickened (as all Mr. Hunt’s readers have been for twenty years past) with Mr. Hunt’s endless and meaningless chatter about the half dozen poets, good, bad, and indifferent, whom he patronizes, was willing to annoy Mr. Hunt by the cavalier treatment of one of his principal protegés, or that the author of one of the noblest poems that have been written in the Spenserian stanza was both ignorant of the Faëry Queen, and incapable of comprehending anything of its merits? No man who knew anything of Lord Byron can hesitate for a moment about the answer. Lord Byron, we have no sort of doubt, indulged his passion for mystifying, at the expense of this gentleman, to an improper and unjustifiable extent. His delight was at all times in the study of man. . . .

[John Gibson Lockhart], “[Hunt's Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries]” in Quarterly Review Vol. 37 No. 74 (March 1828)

It is equally certain, that we have now before us a voluminous collection of Lord Byron’s private correspondence, addressed, for the most part, to persons whom Mr. Hunt, however ridiculously, describes as his own personal enemies—letters written before, during, and after the period of Mr. Hunt’s intercourse with Lord Byron in Italy; and although there occur many jokes upon Mr. Hunt, many ludicrous and quizzical notices of him, yet we have sought in vain for a single passage indicative of spleen or resentment of any shape or degree. On the contrary, he always upholds Mr. Hunt, as a man able, honest, and well-intentioned, and therefore, in spite of all his absurdities, entitled to a certain measure of respect as well as kindness. The language is uniformly kind. We shall illustrate what we have said by a few extracts. Mr. Hunt will perceive that Lord Byron’s account of his connexion with The Liberal is rather different from that given in the book on our table. Mr. Hunt describes himself as pressed by Lord Byron into the undertaking of that hapless magazine: Lord Byron, on the contrary, represents himself as urged to the service by the Messrs. Hunt themselves. . . .

[John Gibson Lockhart], “[Hunt's Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries]” in Quarterly Review Vol. 37 No. 74 (March 1828)

‘Genoa, 10bre 25th, 1822.—Now do you see what you, and your friends do by your injudicious rudeness? actually cement a sort of connexion which you strove to prevent, and which, had the Hunts prospered, would not, in all probability, have continued. As it is, I will not quit them in their adversity, though it should cost me character, fame, money, and the usual et cetera. My original motives I already explained; (in the letter which you thought proper to show;) they are the true ones, and I abide by them, as I tell you, and I told Leigh Hunt, when he questioned me on the subject of that letter. He was violently hurt, and never will forgive me at the bottom; but I cannot help that. I never meant to make a parade of it; but if he chose to question me, I could only answer the plain truth, and I confess, I did not see any thing in the letter to hurt him, unless I said he was “a bore,” which I don’t remember. Had this Journal gone on well, and I could have aided to make it better for them, I should then have left them after a safe pilotage off a lee shore to make a prosperous voyage by themselves. As it is, I can’t, and would not if I could, leave them among the breakers. As to any community of feeling, thought, or opinion, between Leigh Hunt and me, there is little or none. . . .

[John Wilson], “Review of Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries” in Blackwood's Magazine Vol. 23 No. 136 (March 1828)

Before the First Number of this poorest of all Periodicals had left the anvil, Lord Byron had grown sick and ashamed of the Editor, and he “only made use of it for the publication of some things which his Tory bookseller was afraid to put forth.” Hunt attributes its downfall almost entirely to Lord Byron’s want of spirit and independence. But Hunt himself, he acknowledges, grew daily stupider and weaker in mind and body, and could indite nothing but drivel. Poor Shelley was dead—Hazlitt worse than dead—how then could the Liberal live even with “The Vision of Judgement, in which my brother saw nothing but Byron, and a judicious hit at the Tories, and he prepared his machine accordingly, for sending forward the blow unmitigated. Unfortunately it recoiled, and played the devil with all of us.” Mr Hunt then tries to attribute the death of the monster—which at its birth was little better than an abortion—to the sneers of Mr Moore and Mr Hobhouse. Poor blind bat, does he not know that all Britain loathed it? That it was damned, not by acclamation, but by one hiss and hoot? That every man who was betrayed by the name of Byron to take it into his hands, whether in private house, bookseller’s shop, or coffee-room, called instantly and impatiently for a basin of water, soap and towels. . . .

Anonymous, “Review of Lord Byron and some of His Contemporaries” in Monthly Review Vol. S3 7 (March 1828)

We remember to have seen some numbers of the “Liberal,” the periodical publication in the management of which, Mr. Hunt assisted Lord Byron; and although it is written, that of the dead nothing that is not good should be said, yet we must declare, that a more silly, a more vulgar, a more unentertaining, or at the same time, a more ostentatious work never dishonoured our literature. In matters of morality, it was at least of a very questionable charac-ter; in matters of religion it was offensively conceited and profane. It perished in the disgrace it deserved, and let it therefore rest in contempt. . . .

[John Gibson Lockhart], “[Hunt's Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries]” in Quarterly Review Vol. 37 No. 74 (March 1828)

He thought, no doubt, that his own compositions would be easily distinguished from those of Messrs. Hunt and Co.; and that, therefore, he might benefit these needy people without materially injuring his own reputation. Humble as was his estimate of the talents of all his coadjutors, except Mr. Shelley, he had not foreseen that, instead of his genius floating their dulness, an exactly opposite consequence would attend that unnatural coalition. In spite of some of the ablest pieces that ever came from Lord Byron’s pen,—in spite of the magnificent poetry of heaven and Earth,—the eternal laws of gravitation held their course: Messrs. Hunt, Hazlitt, and Co. furnished the principal part of the cargo; and the ‘Liberal’ sunk to the bottom of the waters of oblivion almost as rapidly as the Table-Talk, or the Foliage, or the Endymion. . . .

[John Wilson], “Review of Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries” in Blackwood's Magazine Vol. 23 No. 136 (March 1828)

Among the other causes of the death of the Liberal, Mr Hunt refers to one bitterly spoken of by Hazlitt, in a note quoted from some manuscripts—the attacks on it in Blackwood’s Magazine. So infamous, it appears, had Hazlitt been rendered by some able articles in this work, that he had been excommunicated from all decent society, and nobody would touch a dead book of his, any more than they would the body of a man who had died of the plague. This is an incredible instance of the power of the press. What! a man of such pure morals, delightful manners, high intellects, and true religion, as Mr Hazlitt, to be ruined in soul, body, and estate, pen, pencil, and pallet, by a work which Mr Hunt himself declared in the Examiner had no sale—almost the entire impression of every number lying in cellars, in the capacity of dead stock? . . .

[William Jerden?], “Review of Hunt, Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries” in Literary Gazette No. 575 (26 January 1828)

We are not inclined to press this matter beyond its just bounds, nor, to set a higher value upon pecuniary obligations than they deserve; but surely, in spite of the cant and wire-drawing distinctions of the author, it must be felt by every well-constituted and upright mind, that the acceptance of such favours ought, at least, to prevent their acceptor from violating the grave of his friend; for, as the world goes, money is the greatest test of friendship; find the man who gives it liberally and generously, as Lord Byron did to Mr. Hunt, affords the surest criterion of his regard and affection. Yet, writhing under a recollection of bounties ill-bestowed, thus does the quondam worshipper of that noble lord, and of his rank and title, profane his character, when death has sealed the lips which (if utter scorn did not close them) might have punished the perfidy with immortal ignominy. . . .

[William Jerden?], “Review of Hunt, Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries” in Literary Gazette No. 575 (26 January 1828)

Upon these petty attempts to reduce Lord Byron to a level with himself, in order to get rid of a sense of gratitude, we offer no compliments; their littleness and baseness rendering comment supererogatory. . . .

Anonymous, “Review of Lord Byron and some of His Contemporaries” in Monthly Review Vol. S3 7 (March 1828)

It is not our province to defend Lord Byron’s character from the imputations which are here made against it. They may be all well founded, for aught that we know; but that they are set forth in a vindictive, not to say a malignant spirit, no man can doubt, who understands that it is the duty of a biographer to give the lights as well as shades to his portrait, which properly belong to it. If Mr. Hunt is to be believed, Lord Byron had not a single virtue, to redeem or palliate the above formidable list of vices and infirmities; whereas it is notorious, that his lordship had done many kind and generous acts towards literary friends; that he was never niggardly of his praise where he thought it deserved; that throughout his too brief existence, he had been animated by an unquenchable love of liberty, and had essentially served it by his writings, and that finally he sacrificed his life upon its altar. These things alone, not to say a word of his transcendant genius, ought to shed a brightness on his history, which should cast many of his infirmities into the shade. It cannot be denied, that his great poetical talents were sullied by many impurities, but these will of themselves decay in time, and leave his name in that fine splendour, in which it was invested when it first obtained its ascendant in our horizon. . . .

Anonymous, “Review of Lord Byron and some of His Contemporaries” in Monthly Review Vol. S3 7 (March 1828)

Much of what Mr. Hunt is pleased to call his account of Lord Byron, is rather a dissertation upon his character, than a history of his life. He takes a verse from the noble lord’s poems, or a confession of an idle moment, and makes it the theme of half a dozen tiresome prosing pages. There is little that is new in his narrative, and of that little, there is still less that is important. . . .

Anonymous, “Lord Byron and His Contemporaries [Part I]” in The Athenaeum Vol. 1 No. 4 (23 January 1828)

But the great value of this portion of the work undoubtedly is, that it gives us a far clearer and more consistent view of the character of the singular man and celebrated writer of whom it treats, than any other book that has hitherto appeared. We see him in these pages living and moving before us, not merely with his wings and scars, with the power and desperation, of his poetry, but with the circumstances and attributes of ordinary humanity. And it is now, indeed, time that we should begin to judge him calmly and fairly; for the renown, and the all but disgrace which alike filled the air as with an immeasurable cloud, have shrunk, as did the gigantic genius of the Arabian Tale, into a narrow urn. It is not more than his errors deserve to say, that they were the rank produce of a noble soil, the weeds which grow among Asphodel and Amaranth, on the summit of Olympus, and around the footsteps of the glorified immortals. It is good for us that books exist which display the union of poetic ability with a scorn and a selfishness of which literature scarce afforded us any previous example; for the works of Byron may be a warning to every mind, the mightiest or the meanest, that there are failings and vices which will even break the sceptre and scatter to the winds the omnipotence of genius . . .

[Henry Southern], “Leigh Hunt's Lord Byron” in London Magazine Vol. NS 10 (February 1828)

Shall, then, the public be informed of that which does not concern it; or shall we accuse the publisher of such information of a breach of faith—of a treacherous betrayal of that which is only revealed under the sacred confidence of domestic intercourse? We confess that these fine words fall dead upon our ears. We see no reason that men should not be known as they really are, but many for it; it is the first step to amendment. Had all the published lives and characters been written in their true colours, the world would have been much further advanced in virtue. This hypocrisy in glossing over vice—in smoothing down the roughness and defects of character, is a kind of premium upon the indulgence of evil passion. Though the world may have little to do with the private virtues directly; inasmuch as these constitute by far the greater portion of its aggregate of happiness; there is no more important subject can be discussed before it than the excellencies and failings of eminent individuals. . . .

Anonymous, “Lord Byron and some of His Contemporaries [Concluded]” in Literary Chronicle No. 455 (2 February 1828)

Mr. Hunt asserts, on more than one occasion, that Lord Byron had ‘no address,’ no conversational powers, none, in short, of those little, pleasant, companionable qualities, for which, we believe, Mr. Hunt himself is so deservedly celebrated. Any deficiency of this sort, we should set down as no very culpable matter; but it happens that there are many testimonies on this subject opposed to that of Mr. Hunt. Some of these, we confess, may not appear either to him or to ourselves, of a very conclusive order; but what will he say to that of Mr. Shelley? It is known, that in Julian and Maddalo, Mr. Shelley introduces us to himself and Lord Byron; and thus favorably, both in prose and verse, does he describe the latter: ‘I say that Maddalo is proud, because I can find no other word to express the concentered and impatient feelings which consume him; but it is on his own hopes and affections only that he seems to trample, for, in social life no human being can be more gentle, patient, and unassuming than Maddalo. He is cheerful, frank, and witty. His more serious conversation is a sort of intoxication; men are held by it as by a spell. He has travelled much; and there is an inexpressible charm in his relation of his adventures in different countries.’ The whole portrait is worthy of quotation . . .

[John Gibson Lockhart], “[Hunt's Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries]” in Quarterly Review Vol. 37 No. 74 (March 1828)

We should, indeed, have reason to blush, could we think for a moment of entering into the details given by Mr. Leigh Hunt, concerning the manners, habits, and conversation of Lord Byron. The witness is, in our opinion, disqualified to give evidence upon any such subjects; his book proves him to be equally ignorant of what manners are, and incompetent to judge what manners ought to be: his elaborate portraiture of his own habits is from beginning to end a very caricatura of absurdity; and the man who wrote this book, studiously cast, as the whole language of it is, in a free-and-easy, conversational tone, has no more right to decide about the conversation of such a man as Lord Byron, than has a pert apprentice to pronounce ex cathedrá —from his one shilling gallery, to wit—on the dialogue of a polite comedy. We can easily believe, that Lord Byron never talked his best when this was his companion. We can also believe that Lord Byron’s serious conversation, even in its lowest tone, was often unintelligible to Mr. Leigh Hunt. . . .

[John Wilson], “Review of Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries” in Blackwood's Magazine Vol. 23 No. 136 (March 1828)

How insidiously the serpent slides through the folds of these passages, leaving his slime behind him as he wriggles out of sight! There is a Sporus-like effeminacy in the loose and languid language in which he drawls out his sentence into what he thinks the fine-sounding word, Sardanapalus. What if the Grand Signior did take the youthful Byron for a woman in disguise? The mistake of that barbarian no more proved that his lordship had an effeminate appearance, than a somewhat similar mistake of the Sandwich Islanders proved the jolly crew of the Endeavour, sailing round the world with Cook, to be like Gosport-girls. . . .

[Henry Southern], “Leigh Hunt's Lord Byron” in London Magazine Vol. NS 10 (February 1828)

Mr. Hunt enters into an examination of the various publications which have been broached on the subject of Lord Byron’s life and character; and as he condescends to criticise some very paltry performances, we are surprised that he did not bestow some attention on a paper which formerly appeared in this magazine (for October, 1824). It is the only sketch that has been written in the same spirit as his own; and since it remarkably coincides in all leading points with the view above given, may be considered a confirmation of its truth. This sketch appeared soon after Lord Byron’s death, and attracted much attention at the time, it having been copied from our pages into almost every other journal of the day. It was thought much too true, much too unceremonious, and the very reverse of sentimental, the tone into which the nation struck after the death of this remarkable person. . . .

Go to: Thomas Medwin, Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron (London: Henry Colburn, 1824)

Anonymous, “Review of Lord Byron and some of His Contemporaries” in Monthly Review Vol. S3 7 (March 1828)

There are upwards of forty pages out of one hundred and fifty, devoted solely to a dull criticism on a work, entitled, “The Life, Writings, Opinions, and Times, of Lord Byron,”—a spurious compilation, known to be such by any man who has the slightest judgment. Yet does Mr. Hunt set about refuting the numberless fabrications of this precious publication, with as much solemnity as if it had proceeded from a respectable quarter. But his motive is evident enough. He wished merely to eke out his memoir, and give it as imposing an appearance as possible. . . .

[John Wilson], “Review of Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries” in Blackwood's Magazine Vol. 23 No. 136 (March 1828)

In another part of the book, Hunt quotes a few sentences, which seem very good ones, from an old article in the Magazine on Lord Byron,—and adds, “there follows something about charity, and clay-idols, and brutal outrages of all the best feelings; and Mr Blackwood, having finished his sermon, retires to count his money, his ribaldry, and his kicks.” Here Hunt considers Mr Blackwood as the writer of the Critique, or Sermon in question, and indeed he often speaks of that gentleman as the author of the articles that have kicked up such a “stoure” in Cockney-land. On other occasions, when it suits his purpose, he gives himself the lie direct,—but probably all this passes for wit behind the counter. Mr Colburn, however, cannot like it: nor would it be fair, notwithstanding the judicious erasures which he has made on the MS. in its progress through the press, to consider that gentleman the author of “Lord Byron and his Contemporaries,” any more than of those very entertaining but somewhat personal articles in the Magazine of which he is proprietor, entitled “Sketches of the Irish Bar.” That Mr Blackwood should occasionally retire to count his money, seems not at all unreasonable in a publisher carrying on a somewhat complicated, extensive, and flourishing trade. It is absolutely necessary that he should so retire into the Sanctum, at which times even we do not think of disturbing him . . .

Anonymous, “Lord Byron and some of His Contemporaries [Concluded]” in Literary Chronicle No. 455 (2 February 1828)

With respect to Mr. Hunt's opinion of Lord Byron's poetical ability, little need be said. Whatever may be our respect for his general criticisms, in this particular instance we entertain but little; nor need we stay to consider what he himself would say of a critic who should acknowledge that he had read only a portion of certain works which he has no hesitation in condemning, almost unqualifiedly, as a whole. ‘To the best of my recollection I never even read Parisina, nor is this the only one of his lordship's works of which I can say as much, acquainted as I am with the others.’ There is an unpleasant assumption in this passage, which comes very gracelessly from Mr. Hunt; at all events, it is a question whether our dislike of the effrontery does not exceed our gratitude for the candour of the acknowledgment. . . .

[John Gibson Lockhart], “[Hunt's Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries]” in Quarterly Review Vol. 37 No. 74 (March 1828)

Even as to the more solemn subject of religion, we ought to take shame to ourselves for even for a moment considering Lord Byron and Mr. Leigh Hunt as brother infidels. The dark doubts which disturbed to its depths the noble intellect of the one had little, indeed, in common with the coxcombical phantasies which floated and float on the surface of the other’s shallowness. Humility,—a most absurd delusion of humility, be it allowed, made the one majestic creature unhappy: the most ludicrous conceit, grafted on the most deplorable incapacity, has filled the paltry mind of the gentleman-of the-press now before us, with a chaos of crude, pert dogmas, which defy all analysis, and which it is just possible to pity more than despise. . . .

[William Jerden?], “Review of Hunt, Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries” in Literary Gazette No. 575 (26 January 1828)

The confessions in this passage betray some symptoms of grace, and prove that the writer could not entirely reconcile his mind to the despicable course of doing wrong to the memory of his benefactor for the sake of paltry lucre, if not also for the gratification of still baser passions. Indeed the struggle between a sense of rectitude in this respect, and the dishonour of publishing these memoirs, is obvious in many places. . . .

[John Gibson Lockhart], “[Hunt's Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries]” in Quarterly Review Vol. 37 No. 74 (March 1828)

Now a question suggests itself to us, which we are sure Mr. Hunt, with the high feelings thus entertained and expressed by him, will thank us for asking. It is well known, that Lord Byron took leave finally of Mr. Leigh Hunt by letter. The letter in question we never saw, but we have conversed with those who read it; and from their account of its contents—they describe it as a document of considerable length, and as containing a full narrative of the whole circumstances under which Lord Byron and Mr. Hunt met and parted, according to his lordship’s view of the case—we confess we have been rather surprized to find it altogether omitted in Mr. Leigh Hunt’s quarto. Mr. Hunt prints very carefully various letters, in which Lord Byron treats of matters nowise bearing on the differences which occurred between these two distinguished contemporaries: and our question is, was it from humanity to the dead, or from humanity to the living, that Mr. Leigh Hunt judged it proper to omit in this work the apparently rather important letter to which we refer? If Mr. Hunt has had the misfortune to mislay the document, and sought in vain for it amongst his collections, he ought, we rather think, to have stated that fact, and stated also, in so far as his memory might serve him, his impression of the character and tendency of this valedictory epistle. But in case he has both lost the document and totally forgotten what it contained, we are happy in having this opportunity of informing him, that a copy of it exists in very safe keeping. . . .

Anonymous, “Lord Byron and His Contemporaries [Part II]” in The Athenaeum Vol. 1 No. 5 (29 January 1828)

Of Mr. Moore there is a very lively, pleasant, and characteristic description. Mr. Hunt’s anecdotes about the writer of ‘Lalla Rookh’ are, in general, good-humoured enough; and we scarcely understand why Mr. Hunt should have quarrelled with so distinguished and amiable a person, for saying that there was ‘a taint in the Liberal,’ especially as he himself expresses the same thing in other words, when he talks of his objections to the publication of the parody on ‘The Vision of Judgment.’ . . .

[John Wilson], “Review of Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries” in Blackwood's Magazine Vol. 23 No. 136 (March 1828)

Of Mr Moore he begins with drawing a favourable likeness—but having something of the spleen towards him too, he puts on not a few touches, meant to dash its pleasantness, and leaves it in a very unfinished state—for no other or better reason that we can discover, than that Mr Moore most justly had said to Lord Byron that “the Liberal had a taint in it,” had, at a public dinner in Paris, spoken highly of England, and in some verses written rather disparagingly of that very indulgent person, Madame Warrens. On one occasion, he designates him by the geographic designation of “a Derbyshire poet”—Mr Moore, we believe, having had a cottage in that county—admitting in a note, that at the time he had been too angry with Mr Moore to honour him so highly as to call him by his name—and on many occasions he sneers at him for living so much it in that high society, from which all Cockneys are of course excluded—and saw, as has been mentioned, he threatens him with the posthumous satire of Lord Byron. . . .

Anonymous, “Review of Lord Byron and some of His Contemporaries” in Monthly Review Vol. S3 7 (March 1828)

The author’s memoir of Mr. Moore is too scanty, and, we may add, too prejudiced to deserve any particular notice from us. . . .

Anonymous, “Lord Byron and His Contemporaries [Part II]” in The Athenaeum Vol. 1 No. 5 (29 January 1828)

Moreover, his reasoning as to Mr. Moore’s conduct with regard to Lord Byron’s Memoirs, seems to us to be at once vague and inapplicable. What Mr. Hunt seems to aim at, is to make out an inconsistency in Mr. Moore’s conduct, because he accepted 2000 guineas’ worth from Lord Byron, but would not accept the same sum in money from Lord Byron’s family. The difference is obvious. In the one case the present was a mark of friendship; in the other it was a payment, and might have been thought and called a bribe. Suppose Mr. Shelley, when he dedicated ‘The Cenci’ to Mr. Hunt, had given him the copyright; and that, if the Tragedy had not been already published, our author had seen fit, after his friend’s death, to throw it into the fire, would he have accepted 200l. or 200 pence from the Society for the Suppression of Vice as a reward for his conduct? Mr. Hunt almost always makes blunders when he talks about money-matters. He says himself that he has no head for them; and he really ought to leave the discussion of them to calculating stockbrokers or cool reviewers, while he writes (we hope) another ‘Rimini.’ . . .

Go to: Robert Charles Dallas, Recollections of the Life of Lord Byron (London: Charles Knight, 1824)

Anonymous, “Lord Byron and His Contemporaries [Part II]” in The Athenaeum Vol. 1 No. 5 (29 January 1828)

On Shelley there is a long and most interesting article. He was the greatest man of all those who are mentioned by Mr. Hunt; he was also his most intimate friend; and the notices we have of him are proportionally valuable. Mr. Hunt’s book, from bearing the name of Lord Byron on its title-page, will probably go into the hands of many persons who know nothing of Shelley but the name. We trust that the delightful, and we are sure, most accurate portrait drawn by our author in the book before us, and the exquisite specimens of poetry which he has extracted from Mr. Shelley’s works, will induce a more detailed acquaintance with the writings of one of the most benevolent men and powerful poets that have lived in any age or country. Of the errors of some of his opinions, taken in their broad and obvious import, few men have had the boldness to profess themselves apologists, and fewer still have had the charity to seek among those errors for precious, though sometimes latent, germs of truth. We will venture to assert, that those of his doctrines which are at first sight the most awfully pernicious, are uniformly objectionable for the form rather than the spirit, the phrase more than the feeling. It is, on the other hand, undeniable, that his sympathies are the fondest and the best, his aspirations the purest and most lofty. . . .

[John Wilson], “Review of Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries” in Blackwood's Magazine Vol. 23 No. 136 (March 1828)

We took a deep interest in Mr Shelley. Full of admiration of his genius, and pity for his misconduct and misfortunes, we spoke of him at all times with an earnestness of feeling, which we know he felt, and for which we received written expressions of gratitude from some by whom he was, in spite of all his unhappy errors, most tenderly beloved. Mr Hunt must know this; but he is one of those “lovers of truth,” who will not, if he can help it, suffer any one single spark of it to spunk out, unless it shine in his own face, and display its pretty features to the public, “rescued only by thought from insignificance.” Moreover, he hates this Magazine, not altogether, perhaps, without some little reason of a personal kind—and, therefore, as a “lover of truth,” is bound never to see any good in it, even if that good be the cordial praise of the genius of his dearest friend, and, when it was most needed, a fearless vindication of all that could be vindicated in his opinions, and conduct. . . .

Anonymous, “Lord Byron and His Contemporaries [Part II]” in The Athenaeum Vol. 1 No. 5 (29 January 1828)

Judging of his mind as displayed in his poetry, his hopes are fierce and rushing longings; his dislike, a curse; his sympathies, an absorbing passion; the habitual pulses of his frame are the shocks of an earthquake. Such was the spirit, clothing in the most glorious forms of beauty the one purpose of purifying and ennobling its kind, on which were poured out all the vials of muddy wrath in the power of the ‘Quarterly Review.’ Such was the spirit which, in all but its productions, is absolutely unknown to us, except through the short notice, at the beginning of a volume of posthumous poems, and a part of the book with which Mr. Hunt has just enlivened society and enriched literature. His information is full and consolatory, and we find in every line the authoritative verification of those conclusions, as to Mr. Shelley’s reverence and practice of all excellence, and habitual belief in the goodness of the Great Spirit that pervades the universe, which are at once a triumph of candour and charity, and an utter confusion and prostration to the whole herd of selfish bigots. . . .

Anonymous, “Lord Byron and some of His Contemporaries [Concluded]” in Literary Chronicle No. 455 (2 February 1828)

The articles descriptive of Shelley, Keats, Charles Lamb, &c. are worthy of them and of the writer. They are correct and beautiful sketches, and will do much towards giving popular opinion a right direction respecting the two first. The portraits of Keats and Lamb are welcome ornaments to the volume; we regret that they were not accompanied by one of Shelley. . . .

Anonymous, “Review of Lord Byron and some of His Contemporaries” in Monthly Review Vol. S3 7 (March 1828)

The author’s memoir of Mr. Moore is too scanty, and, we may add, too prejudiced to deserve any particular notice from us. That of Mr. Shelley, on the contrary, is nothing but a panegyric. Of the genius of that ill-starred and eccentric man, we have always thought very highly; his private life offers little worthy of our admiration, and his religious principles still less. His end was tragical, and contains a lesson that should appal the most thoughtless of his disciples. . . .

[John Gibson Lockhart], “[Hunt's Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries]” in Quarterly Review Vol. 37 No. 74 (March 1828)

So much for Mr. Leigh Hunt versus Lord Byron: the other contemporaries that figure in this volume are, with two or three exceptions, persons whose insignificance equals that of the author himself; and as they have had no hand, that we know of, in this absurd exposure of themselves, we should be sorry either to waste our time or to wound their feelings by any remarks on Mr. Hunt’s delineations of them. Mr. Shelley’s portrait appears to be the most elaborate of these minor efforts of Mr. Hunt’s pencil. Why does Mr. Hunt conceal (if he be aware of the fact) that this unfortunate man of genius was bitterly sensible ere he died of the madness and profligacy of the early career which drew upon his head so much indignation, reproach, and contumely—that he confessed with tears ‘that he well knew he had been all in the wrong’? . . .

William Howitt, “Leigh Hunt” in Homes and Haunts of the most eminent British Poets (London: Richard Bentley, 1847) 2 Vols

Every lover of true poetry and of an excellent and high-hearted man, must regret that his visit to Italy was dashed by such melancholy circumstances, for no man was ever made more thoroughly to enjoy that fine climate and classical land. Yet as the friend of Shelley, Keats, Charles Lamb, and others of the first spirits of the age, Mr. Hunt must be allowed, in this respect, to have been one of the happiest of men. It were no mean boon of providence to have been permitted to live in the intimacy of men like these; but, besides this, he had the honour to suffer, with those beautiful and immortal spirits, calumny and persecution. They have achieved justice through death—he has lived injustice down. As a politician, there is a great debt of gratitude due to him from the people, for he was their firm champion when reformers certainly did not walk about in silken slippers. He fell on evil days, and he was one of the first and foremost to mend them. . . .

Anonymous, “Review of Lord Byron and some of His Contemporaries” in Monthly Review Vol. S3 7 (March 1828)

In the memoir which Mr. Hunt has given of him, we frequently observe the phrase ‘conventional,’ and ‘unconventional.’ It seems, that he imagines the community divisible into these two classes, the former including those who acknowledge an allegiance to the general rules of society, the latter consisting of those who would like to live according to regulations of their own. Mr. Shelley has a conspicuous place among the unconventional, and, if we mistake not, Mr. Hunt aspires to a similar honour;—par nobile-fratres. The author indulges us with a long and tedious review of his friend’s different poetical works, of course exalting them to the highest pitch of reputation. It will avail them little. The tendency to corruption and decay, which in a signal manner is engendered in all obscene things, pervades them to the core, and has already bowed them to the dust, with which they will soon be covered. . . .

[John Wilson], “Review of Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries” in Blackwood's Magazine Vol. 23 No. 136 (March 1828)

Gentle Reader—Let us so arouse your imagination, that you see a Lion sleeping in the shade, or rather couched an a conscious slumber, his magnificent mane spread abroad in the forest gloom, and the growling thunder hushed beneath it as in a lowering cloud. Suppose him Sir Walter. Among the branches of a tree, a little way off, sits a monkey, and did you ever hear such a chatter? The blear-eyed abomination makes his very ugliest mouths at the monarch of the wood; and shrieking in his rage, not altogether unlike something human, dangles first from one twig, and then from another, still higher and higher up the tree, with an instinctive though unnecessary regard for the preservation of his nudities, clinging at once by paw and by tail, making assurance doubly sure that he shall not lose his hold, and drop down within range of Sir Leoline. Suppose him Leigh Hunt. The sweet little cherub that sits up aloft fondly and idly imagines, that the Lion is lying there meditating his destruction,—that those claws, whose terrors are now tamed in glossy velvet, and which, if suddenly unsheathed, would be seen blushing perhaps with the blood of pard or panther, were given him by nature for the express purpose of waging high warfare with the genus Simia! . . .

Anonymous, “Lord Byron and His Contemporaries [Part II]” in The Athenaeum Vol. 1 No. 5 (29 January 1828)

Of the remaining notices, we are most obliged to the author for that on Mr. Keats. The names of Coleridge and of Lamb call up to us so much more vivid ideas of the persons in question, that we learn comparatively little about them even from Mr. Hunt’s very pleasant sketches. But Mr. Keats’s reputation is at present but the shadow of a glory,—and it is also plain enough to be seen that his works, beautiful as they are, are yet but the faint shadow of his mind. His friend has commemorated his high genius, melancholy fate, and unmerited contumelies, in a fitting tone of feeling. . . .

Anonymous, “Lord Byron and His Contemporaries [Part II]” in The Athenaeum Vol. 1 No. 5 (29 January 1828)

His was another of the bright minds at which a part of the public looked, for a time, only through the smoky glass of the Quarterly Reviewers. But by a just and necessary retribution, the abuse of power has destroyed itself, and we doubt whether two hundred persons in the kingdom would now attach the slightest importance to the most violent lucubrations of Mr. Murray’s critics. In the case of poor Keats, the mischief was irreparable; for it is clear, that whatever predisposition to disease may have existed, the brutality of the extra-orthodox Reviewers was the proximate cause of the death of an amiable man and a great poet, at an age when most of his contemporaries were thinking of nothing but pounds and shillings, or the excitements of ballrooms and burgundy, or the pleasure of covering the world with floods of anonymous calumny. . . .

[John Gibson Lockhart], “[Hunt's Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries]” in Quarterly Review Vol. 37 No. 74 (March 1828)

We believe we could not illustrate our view of the whole of this business more effectually than by simply presenting a few extracts from Lord Byron’s private letters in which this Mr. Keats is alluded to. Our readers have probably, forgotten all about ‘Endymion, a poem,’ and the other works of this young man, the all but universal roar of laughter with which they were received some ten or twelve years ago, and the ridiculous story (which Mr. Hunt denies) of the author’s death being caused by the reviewers. Mr. Hunt was the great patron, the ‘guide, philosopher, and friend’ of Mr. Keats; it was he who first puffed the youth into notice in his newspaper. The youth returned the compliment in sonnets and canzonets, and presented his patron with a lock of Milton’s hair, and wrote a poem on the occasion. . . .

[John Wilson], “Review of Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries” in Blackwood's Magazine Vol. 23 No. 136 (March 1828)

This sounds all mighty valiant—and no one can read the words, without believing that “Hunt sent a challenge to Dunbar, saying, Charlie meet me if you daur,” and that his challenge struck a cold terror into the heart of “rough old General Izzard.” But Mr Hunt has waxed tea-pot valiant, when recording in old age the bold achievements of his youth. All that he did was, to ask the General’s name, that he might bring an action against him for libel. Half a syllable, with any other import, would have brought the General, without an hour’s delay, before the eyes of the astonished Cockney. Hunt then kept fiddle-faddling with attorneys, and solicitors, and barristers, for months together, till finding fees troublesome, and that there had been no libel, but in his own diseased imagination, or guilty conscience, he “retreated into his contempt,” and in contempt he has, we believe, ever since remained. . . .

[John Gibson Lockhart], “[Hunt's Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries]” in Quarterly Review Vol. 37 No. 74 (March 1828)

‘Ravenna, 8bre 21, 1820.—No more Keats, I entreat, flay him alive; if some of you don’t, I must skin him myself. There is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the maukin.’ . . .

Anonymous, “Review of Lord Byron and some of His Contemporaries” in Monthly Review Vol. S3 7 (March 1828)

There are hundreds of others who lived in the time of Lord Byron, and had just as much title to notice as of those, with perhaps one or two exceptions, who are here enumerated. Keats died at the age of twenty-four, in a state little short of madness. Campbell still lives to adorn his country, and promote the welfare of his race. Dubois is scarcely known; Theodore Hook, too well known for his, at least presumed, connexion with the basest system of calumny that ever disgraced the public press; Mathews still delights the town, and one of the Smiths, at least, has retired to Tor Hill, to die with one Reuben Apsley. Coleridge has grown fat and idle; Charles Lamb has outgrown his visions; and as to the rest, and even as to most of these, what had they particularly to do with Lord Byron, that they should be denominated his contemporaries? . . .

[John Wilson], “Review of Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries” in Blackwood's Magazine Vol. 23 No. 136 (March 1828)

To Mr Campbell he is exceedingly complimentary—and has, he thinks, hit off the character of that delightful poet in two words; he is a “French Virgil.” What that means, we do not presume even to conjecture; but be its intents wicked or charitable, it is a mere parody on Mr Charles Lamb’s not very prudent or defensible remark about Voltaire,—of which, a word by and by. In the midst even of his admiration, he cannot help being impertinent; and he tells the world that Mr Campbell gladly relaxes from the loftiness of poetry, and delights in Cotton’s Travestie of Virgil, (a most beastly book) and that his conversation “is as far as may be from any thing like a Puritan.” In short, he insinuates, that Mr Campbell’s conversation is what some might call free and. easy, and others indecent,—a compliment, we believe, as awkward as untrue. He pretends to be enraptured with the beautiful love and marriage scenes in Gertrude of Wyoming; but we know better, and beg to assure him that he is not. In confirmation of the correctness of our opinion, we refer him to the Story of Rimini. . . .

[John Wilson], “Review of Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries” in Blackwood's Magazine Vol. 23 No. 136 (March 1828)

Mr Theodore Hook he also attempts to characterise; and to us, who know a thing or two, this is about one of the basest bits of his book. Not a syllable of censure does he pass upon that gentleman, but a wish “that he had stuck to his humours and farces, for which he had real talent, instead of writing politics.” Now, there is no term of contumely and abuse allowable in low society, which Mr Hunt and his brothers, and the rest of the gang, have not heaped upon Mr Hook’s head, in the Examiner, as if he were excommunicated and outcast from the company of all honest men. But Mr Colburn is Mr Hook’s publisher, and he is now also Mr Hunt’s; and therefore he, who takes for motto, “It is for slaves to lie, and freemen to speak truth,” thus compromises, we must not say his conscience, but that which, with him, stands instead of it, party and personal spite, and winds up a most flattering account of Mr Hook’s delightful, companionable qualities, with the slightest and faintest expression of dissent,—if it even amount to that,—from his politics, that, his breath, which is “sweet air,” can be made to murmur. . . .

[John Gibson Lockhart], “[Hunt's Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries]” in Quarterly Review Vol. 37 No. 74 (March 1828)

And, by the way, why did Mr. Hunt inflict on Mr. Horatio Smith so great an injury as to say, after describing his acts of generous friendship to the unfortunate Mr. Shelley, that he (Mr. Smith) differed with Mr. Shelley ‘on some points,’ without stating distinctly what those points were—namely, every point, whether of religious belief or of moral opinion, on which Mr. Shelley differed, at the time of his acquaintance with Mr. Smith, from all the respectable part of the English community? We are happy to have this opportunity of doing justice, on competent authority, to a person whom, judging merely from the gentleman-like and moral tone of all his writings, we certainly should never have expected to meet with in the sort of company with which this, no doubt, unwelcome eulogist has thought fit to associate his name. . . .

Anonymous, “Review of Lord Byron and some of His Contemporaries” in Monthly Review Vol. S3 7 (March 1828)

Availing himself of the comprehensiveness of his title-page, Mr. Hunt has given us memoirs of Keats, Campbell, Dubois, Theodore Hook, Mathews, Messrs. James and Horace Smith, Fuseli, Bonnycastle, Kinnaird, Charles Lamb, and Mr. Coleridge, many of them it must be owned, respectable names, to whose merits we offer no objection. But, why they should be set down as the contemporaries of Lord Byron, we are rather at a loss to conjecture. . . .

[John Wilson], “Review of Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries” in Blackwood's Magazine Vol. 23 No. 136 (March 1828)

All this proves, that Mr Lamb has a head worthy of Aristotle, and that he ought to have a face like that of Bacon. The saying about Voltaire is most repulsively narrated; and Mr Lamb, who took such offence with Mr Southey for regretting that Elia’s essays had not a sounder religious feeling, what will he say—or feel, at least—about the sad jumble of offensive and childish nonsense, which, without having the capacity of re-creating the circumstances in which the words were uttered, or imparting the slightest feeling of the spirit in which they were conceived, Hunt has palmed off upon the public as characteristic specimens of the conversation of Charles Lamb? . . .

Anonymous, “Lord Byron and His Contemporaries [Part II]” in The Athenaeum Vol. 1 No. 5 (29 January 1828)

The 200 concluding pages are devoted by the author to his own memoirs. These are sparkling and interesting, and exhibit no falling off of talent, or lack of matter. But the entertainment to be drawn from them is of so different a kind from that of the previous notices, and so much less concentrated and engrossing, that Mr. Hunt certainly judged rightly in his original plan of opening the volume with that which is personal to himself; and thus giving us a ‘diapason ending full’ in Byron and Shelley. Indeed, we would advise the readers of the book to proceed after this fashion; and, beginning with the last division of work, to travel regularly backwards. . . .

Anonymous, “Review of Lord Byron and some of His Contemporaries” in Monthly Review Vol. S3 7 (March 1828)

We come now to Mr. Hunt’s recollections of his own life, to which we find a portrait prefixed, calculated to do any thing but conciliate our confidence. We have not the honour of knowing the original; but if this portrait be at all like him we must confess, that we should have no great fancy for his company. We understand that he is rather displeased with his painter, or at least, his engraver, who, he thinks, has made him look like a thief. The picture certainly does warrant the idea, for we could almost imagine, that he had something under his cloak which he had purloined, and was making the best of his way home with it. . . .

[John Gibson Lockhart], “[Hunt's Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries]” in Quarterly Review Vol. 37 No. 74 (March 1828)

Mr. Hunt received from the hand of nature talents which, if properly cultivated and employed, might have raised him to distinction; and, we really believe, feelings calculated to procure him a kind reception from the world. His vanity, a vanity to which it is needless to look for any parallel even among the vain race of rhymers, has destroyed all. Under the influence of that disease—for it deserves no other name—he has set himself up as the standard in every thing. While yet a stripling, most imperfectly educated, and lamentably ignorant of men as they are, and have been, he dared to set his own crude fancies in direct opposition to all that is received among sane men, either as to the moral government of the world, or the political government of this nation, or the purposes and conduct of literary enterprise. This was ‘the Moloch of absurdity’ of which Lord Byron has spoken so justly. The consequences—we believe we may safely say the last consequences—of all this rash and wicked nonsense are now before us. The last wriggle of expiring imbecility appears in these days to be a volume of personal Reminiscences; and we have now heard the feeble death-rattle of the once loud-tongued as well as brazen-faced Examiner. . . .

Leigh Hunt, “Memoir of Mr. James Henry Leigh Hunt. Written by Himself” in Monthly Magazine Vol. NS 7 (April 1810)

Of birth, &c. you tell me it is absolutely necessary to say something. Well:—I was born at Southgate, in October, 1784. . . .

[Henry Southern], “Leigh Hunt's Lord Byron” in London Magazine Vol. NS 10 (February 1828)

One of the cleverest sketches of character we remember is that of Mr. Leigh Hunt’s father, the Rev. Isaac Hunt, originally a barrister in America, then a fugitive loyalist, and afterwards a clergyman of the Church of England, who lost a bishopric by his too social qualities. . . .

[John Gibson Lockhart], “[Hunt's Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries]” in Quarterly Review Vol. 37 No. 74 (March 1828)

Mr. Hunt speaks with no respect of his father’s talents, but represents him as a graceful elocutionist. He was, we gather, one of those comely, smooth-tongued, demi-theatrical spouters who sometimes command for a season or two the rapture of pretty ladies, and the flutter of perfumed pocket-handkerchiefs. Totally destitute of the learning of his new profession, and by no means remarkable, if we are to believe his son, for clerical propriety of habits, it is not wonderful that the creole orator was disappointed in his expectation of church patronage; or indeed, that, after a little time, his chapel-celebrity was perceptibly on the decline. Government gave him a moderate pension as an American loyalist; and as soon as he found that this was to be all, the reverend gentleman began to waver somewhat in his opinions both as to church and state. In a word, he ended in being an unitarian, and a republican, and an universalist; and found that this country was as yet far too much in the dark to approve either of his new opinions, or of the particular circumstances under which he had abandoned his old ones. Worldly disappointment soon turns a weak mind sour; and stronger minds than this have had recourse to dangerous stimulants in their afflictions. . . .

William Howitt, “Leigh Hunt” in Homes and Haunts of the most eminent British Poets (London: Richard Bentley, 1847) 2 Vols

That is a fine filial eulogy; but still finer and more eloquent has been the practical one of the life and writings of the son. Whoever knows anything of these, perceives how the qualities of the mother have lived on, not only in the grateful admiration of the poet, but in his character and works. This is another proud testimony added to the numerous ones revealed in the biographies of illustrious men, of the vital and all-prevailing influence of mothers. What does not the world owe to noble-minded women in this respect? and what do not women owe to the world and themselves in the consciousness of the possession of this authority? To stamp, to mould, to animate to good, the generation that succeeds them, is their delegated office. The are admitted to the co-workmanship with God; his actors in the after age are placed in their hands at the outset of their career, when they are plastic as wax, and pliant as the green withe. It is they who can shape and bend as they please. It is they—as the your, beings advance into the world of life, as passions kindle, as eager desires seize them one after another, as they ire alive with ardour, and athirst for knowledge and experience of the great scene of existence into which they are thrown—it is they who can guide, warn, inspire with the upward or the downward tendency, and cast through them on the future ages the blessings or the curses of good or evil. They are the gods and prophets of childhood. . . .

William Howitt, “Leigh Hunt” in Homes and Haunts of the most eminent British Poets (London: Richard Bentley, 1847) 2 Vols

The whole description of this charming and cordial family, is one of those beautiful and sunny scenes in human life, to which the heart never wearies of turning. It makes the rememberer exclaim:—“Blessed house! May a blessing be upon your rooms, and your lawn, and your neighbouring garden, and the quiet old monastic name of your street; and may it never he a thoroughfare; and may all your inmates he happy! Would to God one could renew, at a moment’s notice, the happy hours we have enjoyed in last times, with the same circles, in the same houses!” . . .

Anonymous, “Review of Lord Byron and some of His Contemporaries” in Monthly Review Vol. S3 7 (March 1828)

For such education as he has received, he has been chiefly indebted to Christ Hospital. Whatever reputation he has earned in literature, he owes, and to his credit be it spoken, entirely to his own exertions. If we were asked what we think of Mr. Hunt’s politics, we should answer, that, generally speaking, we approve of them; liberal measures have always found in him a steady and energetic, and sometimes, even an eloquent defender. Several of his miscellaneous compositions in light literature, we think favourably of. They have in them a raciness, occasionally, that reminds us of the elder masters of our language. His poetry we think verbose, and conceited in its diction, sickly in its imagery, cockneyfied (to use an expressive phrase) in its descriptive passages, and poor and tawdry in its sentiments. The most interesting portion of his memoir, is that which relates to his imprisonment; it has been already before the world in another publication, and therefore we pass it over. . . .

[John Gibson Lockhart], “[Hunt's Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries]” in Quarterly Review Vol. 37 No. 74 (March 1828)

We had always understood, that Mr. Hunt, before he was known by anything but his juvenile verses, obtained some situation in the War-office; and that he lost this, after many warnings, in consequence of libelling the Duke of York, then commander-in-chief, in the newspapers; but of this story, there is no trace in the quarto before us, and we, therefore, suppose it must have been, at least, an exaggeration. If it were true, it might account, in some measure, for the peculiar bitterness of personal spleen with which the Examiner, from the beginning of its career, was accustomed to treat almost every branch of the Royal family. . . .

[John Gibson Lockhart], “[Hunt's Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries]” in Quarterly Review Vol. 37 No. 74 (March 1828)

Mr. Hunt then fills several pages of his quarto with blasphemous extracts from the last number of the Philosophical Dictionary now printing in that commodious fashion at the Examiner press; and having used his scissars and paste as largely as he judged right and proper in regard to the interests of the proprietors of that useful work, he adds, ‘At these passages I used to roll with laughter; and I cannot help laughing now, writing, as I am, alone, by my fireside,’ (p. 394). . . .

Leigh Hunt, “Memoir of Mr. James Henry Leigh Hunt. Written by Himself” in Monthly Magazine Vol. NS 7 (April 1810)

After spending some time in that gloomiest of all “darkness palpable,” a lawyer’s office—and plunging, when I left it, into alternate study and morbid idleness, studious all night, and hypochondriac all day, to the great and reprehensible injury of my health and spirits, it fell into my way to commence theatrical critic in a newly established paper, called the News, and I did so with an ardour proportioned to the want of honest newspaper criticism, and to the insufferable dramatic nonsense which then rioted in public favour. . . .

[John Gibson Lockhart], “[Hunt's Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries]” in Quarterly Review Vol. 37 No. 74 (March 1828)

We presume the turnkeys make a pretty penny by showing the spot where the great Mr. Hunt actually ‘sat amidst his books, and saw the imaginary sky overhead and the paper roses about him.’—p. 425. The Raleigh chamber in the Tower, Galileo’s dungeon at Rome, and Tasso’s at Ferrara, are the only scenes of parallel interest that, at this moment, suggest themselves to our recollection. . . .