his patron perhaps superciliously repelled.  Mrs. Hunt does not seem to have been a very judicious person.  “Trelawny here,” said Byron jocularly, “has been speaking against my morals.”  “It is the first time I ever heard of them,” she replied.  Mr. Hunt, by his own admission, had “peculiar notions on the subject of money.”  Byron, on his part, was determined not to be “put upon,” and doled out through his steward stated allowances to Hunt, who says that only “stern necessity and a large family” induced him to accept them.  Hunt’s expression that the 200_l_. was, in the first instance, a debt to Shelley, points to the conclusion that it was remitted on that poet’s death.  Besides this, Byron maintained the family till they left Genoa for Florence in 1823, and defrayed up to that date all their expenses.  He gave his contributions to the Liberal gratis; and, again by Hunt’s own confession, left to him and his brother the profits of the proprietorship.  According to Mr. Galt “The whole extent of the pecuniary obligation appears not to have exceeded 500 l.; but, little or great, the manner in which it was recollected reflects no credit either on the head or heart of the debtor.”

Of the weaknesses on which the writer—­bent on verifying Pope’s lines on Atossa—­from his vantage in the ground-floor, was enabled to dilate, many are but slightly magnified.  We are told for instance, in very many words, that Byron clung to the privileges of his rank while wishing to seem above them; that he had a small library, and was a one-sided critic; that Bayle and Gibbon supplied him with the learning he had left at school; that, being a good rider with a graceful seat, he liked to be told of it; that he showed letters he ought not to have shown; that he pretended to think worse of Wordsworth than he did; that he knew little of art or music, adored Rossini, and called Rubens a dauber; that, though he wrote Don Juan under gin and water, he had not a strong head, &c., &c.  It is true, but not new.  But when Hunt proceeds to say that Byron had no sentiment; that La Guiccioli did not really care much about him; that he admired Gifford because he was a sycophant, and Scott because he loved a lord; that he had no heart for anything except a feverish notoriety; that he was a miser from his birth, and had “as little regard for liberty as Allieri,”—­it is new enough, but it is manifestly not true.  Hunt’s book, which begins with a caricature on the frontispiece, and is inspired in the main by uncharitableness, yet contains here and there gleams of a deeper insight than we find in all the volumes of Moore—­an insight, which, in spite of his irritated egotism, is the mark of a man with the instincts of a poet, with some cosmopolitan sympathies, and a courage on occasion to avow them at any risk.  “Lord Byron,” he says truly, “has been too much admired by the English because he was sulky and wilful, and reflected in his own person their love of dictation and excitement.  They owe his memory a greater regard, and would do it much greater honour if they admired him for letting them know they were not so perfect a nation as they supposed themselves, and that they might take as well as give lessons of humanity, by a candid comparison of notes with civilization at large.”