1828.] Notes for the Month. 29t 



Now the patience of human nature has its limits. It was per- 

 fectly justifiable for Mr. Hunt to vilify kings and princes, and sneer at 

 " conventional pretensions/' and Pall Mall precedencies, in the Examiner 

 newspaper. He might have laughed at the folly of aristocracy, and its 

 insolence ; and castigated its emptiness and its profligacy ; and proved 

 that a " lord" was no more in the scale of creation than a louse, to his 

 heart's content, while he sat in his study at Paddington. But he had 

 no right to go into the company, and sit down in the habitation, of Lord 

 Byron, for the purpose of uttering such crudities : and he had less than 

 prudence to hold out such temptations to any man, in whose power his 

 own folly had entirely placed him ; and from whom he was at this very 

 time, as he himself states, receiving that constant pecuniary assistance, 

 without which it was impossible for him and his family to live ! 



A man must possess superhuman self-command, to be able to pardon 

 annoyance, where the attack is evidently wilful, and the means of 

 punishment easy and at hand. For the slights, or inflictions, which 

 Mr. Hunt received at Byron's hands, it is difficult not to see that his 

 own conduct was irresistibly calculated to provoke them. When he 

 suggests that " Mrs. Hunt"- apart from any " conventionally" moral 

 objection had no desire to know the Countess Guiccioli ; and speaks of 

 that lady as nothing more than ' ( a buxom parlour boarder." Or when 

 Byron is found to be "too poor a logician even to provoke an argument I" 

 Or where one cause of the failure of the Liberal is, that the people 

 were disappointed " they find that, without the name, they could not 

 discover Lord Byron's writing from other people's." Or where Mr. 

 Hunt perceives the ridiculousness of heraldic distinctions, and of people's 

 sealing their letters with " maxims, and mottoes, and stately moralities." 

 All these suggestions of Mr. Hunt's, together with his other innumerable 

 corrections of Byron's faults, were most unluckily suited to the locality 

 (LORD BYRONS'S OWN MANSION) in which Mr. Hunt was placed. And 

 when he talked to Lord Byron of the " good cause :" and of setting 

 up the Liberal " to restore the fortunes of a battered race of patriots ;" 

 of himself, as necessarily excused from ordinary rules of conduct and 

 government, because he was a "patriot:" and of his brother, who 

 printed the magazine, as " a better patriot than a bookseller !" all that 

 the noble lord would perceive from such illuminations, was that the best 

 of " causes" could not sweeten every alliance : and that even " patriots" 

 their brothers, and wives, and eldest boys, and even acquaintances 

 might be the most unendurable persons in the world. 



Now, all these simple truths, and all the mortifications which he would 

 have to endure at Pisa, Mr. Hunt might have known before he went there. 

 He meant to do nothing that was degrading or mean : but there was gross 

 folly, and we are afraid an unlucky vanity and overrated self-estimation, 

 in what he did, notwithstanding. His own plea of " necessity," men in 

 general will treat with very little reverence ; and, for ourselves, we go 

 much farther we will not receive it at all. If the absence of wealth 

 could cast discredit upon Mr. Hunt, we would not advert to the fact, 

 although he himself relies upon it : but it cannot do this ; and Mr. 

 Hunt knows that it cannot. Poverty (sordid as the world's feeling 

 passes to be) is only discreditable, because it is the prima facie evidence 

 of the want of those powers which should enable a man to become rich. 

 No one (as Mr. Hazlitt observes) sneers at the poverty of a soldier, or 

 of a clergyman ! if we look shy at a poor advocate, or a poor physician, 



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