‘I presume you have heard that Mr. Shelley and Captain Williams were lost on the 7th ultimo in their passage from Leghorn to Spezzia, in their own open boat. You may imagine the state of their families: I never saw such a scene, nor wish to see another. You were all brutally mistaken about Shelley, who was, without exception, the best and least selfish man I ever knew. I never knew one who was not a beast in comparison.’[7]
Writing August 8, 1822, to Thomas Moore, Byron says in allusion to Shelley’s death:
‘There is thus another man gone, about whom the world was ill-naturedly, and ignorantly, and brutally mistaken. It will, perhaps, do him justice now, when he can be no better for it.’
In another letter, written December 25, 1822, Byron says:
‘You are all mistaken about Shelley. You do not know how mild, how tolerant, how good he was in society; and as perfect a gentleman as ever crossed a drawing-room, when he liked, and where he liked.’
Byron’s opinion of Leigh Hunt, and his own connection with that ill-fated venture known as The Liberal, is concisely given by Byron himself in a letter to Murray. The Liberal, published October 15, 1822, was fiercely attacked in the Literary Gazette and other periodicals. The Courier for October 26, 1822, calls it a ‘scoundrel-like publication.’ Byron writes:
‘I am afraid the journal is a bad business, and won’t do; but in it I am sacrificing myself for others—I can have no advantage in it. I believe the brothers Hunt to be honest men; I am sure they are poor ones. They have not a rap: they pressed me to engage in this work, and in an evil hour I consented; still, I shall not repent, if I can do them the least service. I have done all I can for Leigh Hunt since he came here; but it is almost useless. His wife is ill, his six children not very tractable, and in the affairs of the world he himself is a child. The death of Shelley left them totally aground; and I could not see them in such a state without using the common feelings of humanity, and what means were in my power to set them afloat again.’
In another letter to Murray (December 25, 1822) Byron says:
‘Had their [the Hunts’] journal gone on well, and I could have aided to make it better for them, I should then have left them, after my 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 amidst the breakers. As to any community of feeling, thought, or opinion between Leigh Hunt and me, there is little or none. We meet rarely, hardly ever; but I think him a good-principled and able man, and must do as I would be done by. I do not know what world he has lived in, but I have lived in three or four; and none of them like his Keats and Kangaroo terra incognita. Alas! poor Shelley! how he would have laughed had he lived, and how we used to laugh now and then, at various things, which are grave in the Suburbs!’
It is perhaps not generally known that Shelley bequeathed a legacy of £2,000 to Byron. Byron’s renunciation of this token of friendship is ignored by Professor Dowden in his life of Shelley. Writing to Leigh Hunt on June 28, 1823, Byron says: