292 Notes for the Month. [.MARCH, 



it is because we associate with this poverty want of estimation, and, 

 by consequence, the want of that merit by which competence should 

 be acquired. Now, Mr. Hunt stands beyond the scope of this suspi- 

 cion : every body knows that he has the faculty to acquire competence, 

 if he is content to exert it : And, therefore (like truth), he may be 

 " blamed," but not " shamed," by its absence. But the truth is, that 

 Mr. Hunt's plea of " poverty" for joining Lord Byron, is an imposition 

 and an imposition which will not pass upon the public, though we have no 

 doubt it passed upon himself. Mr. Hunt was not poor. He had no business 

 to be poor. Every body who knows any thing of literary details, knows 

 that he could have gained a livelihood, and more than a livelihood (at 

 the time when he went to Pisa), by the fair exercise of his talents in 

 England. But it suited his taste better to go ; and his vanity deluded 

 him to think that he could go no one else in his situation could have 

 gone but he could go, with honour and credit. He believed that the 

 world really was fairy ground ; and that a dictum from the printing- 

 office in Catherine- street must necessarily be received all over it as a 

 " general order." That " the editor of the Examiner" " could do no 

 wrong ;" and that " the gods took care of people who wrote such books 

 as Foliage, and Rimini/', He found, to his rather cost, that the world 

 entertained a very different doctrine : that every body in Italy counted 

 a pound note to be just twenty shillings ; and that Lord Byron counted 

 it so too. 



Under such circumstances, for all ends but for the amusement which 

 it has afforded to the public, and the money which it has brought to the 

 author and the publisher, Mr. Hunt's book would have been better left 

 unwritten. A man of his professions and ostentatiously proclaimed 

 opinions should not have become the attache (we wish to use the least 

 offensive term possible) of Lord Byron, or any other " lord." Diogenes 

 was a king while he spurned the gifts of Alexander : but what would 

 he have been two hours afterwards, if the tub had been found empty, and 

 the late occupant smirking at the palace gate ? The tone and temper of 

 the matter relative to Lord Byron, pretty nearly answers the matter 

 itself ; and the sorrows of the writer,, on his own account, will excite 

 little sympathy in the minds of his friends, while they afford dangerous 

 handles for ridicule to any who may be his enemies. Lord Byron 

 (with all his genius) was a splenetic, self-willed, flattery-spoiled, and 

 not very generous man ! Who is there ever read his works, and con- 

 sidered his extraordinary fortunes, that will either be surprised at this 

 result, or find exceeding matter for accusation in it ? And even this is 

 the account delivered by a man whose anger he provoked ; who had 

 opportunities of detecting his ill qualities (where he had any), such as 

 proverbially no character can resist ; whose whole narrative is a history 

 written to assure the reader, that there never was a jot of difference 

 between Byron's personal importance and his (the writer's) own ; and 

 who doubts, most liberally, every tolerable quality of his Lordship- 

 from his personal courage, down to the number of shawls he gave 

 Madame Guiccioli without troubling himself to record many facts, in 

 support of this great variety of suspicion. 



This notice, however, has carried us farther than we intended ; and it 

 only remains to say a few words upon the execution of the work generally; 

 which we may do very shortly for it is very lively and agreeable. Only 

 a small portion of it relates to the affairs of Lord Byron; and the remainder 

 is filled up by notices of Mr. Hunt's early literary life ; of his voyage 



