[435] Clarke, Recollection of Writers, p. 230.
[436] But compare Hunt’s own remarks on p. 40.
[437] The biographers of the two men have taken various attitudes toward the value of Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries. Galt says that the pains Hunt took to elaborate faults of Byron make one think Hunt was treated according to his deserts, and that the troubles he labored under may have caused him to misapprehend Byron’s jocularity for sarcasm, and caprice for insolence. (Life of Byron, p. 260.) Garnett considers the book a “corrective of merely idealized estimates of Lord Byron,” and its “reception more unfavorable than its deserts.” (Encyclopædia Britannica, “Byron,” Ninth Edition.) Nichol thinks that while the book was prompted by uncharitableness and egotism, Byron’s faults were only slightly magnified: that the poetic insight, the cosmopolitan sympathy and courage of Hunt have given a view that nothing else could have done. (Life of Byron, p. 165.) R. B. Johnson thinks that it was a correct estimate written in self-justification. Undoubtedly it should not have come from Hunt, yet if it had not been written Hunt would not have been defended nor Byron so well known. He says there is “no reason to regret any part of the affair but the heated and persistent abuse with which one of the most sensitive and humane of men has been loaded on account of it.” (Leigh Hunt, p. 50.) Noble says that “Byron’s friends met unpleasant truths by still more unpleasant falsehoods.” (The Sonnet in England, p. 115.) Alexander Ireland, says the book was the great blunder of Hunt’s life, “ought not to have been written, far less published.” (Dictionary of National Biography.)
[438] Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, p. 89.
[439] Ibid., pp. 20-21.
[440] Byron, Letters and Journals, II, p. 208.
[441] Ibid., II, p. 461.
[442] Thornton Hunt, in his edition of his father’s Correspondence, 1862, in this connection defended Byron, and credited him with “a strong sympathy with all that was beautiful and generous, with a desire to do right,
[443] P. 14. For an apology made six years earlier see a letter from Hunt to Thomas Moore. (Correspondence, II, p. 38.)
[444] Hunt, A Jar of Honey from Mt. Hybia, p. 155.