Mr. Hobhouse to John Murray.

2, HANOVER SQUARE, November, 1820.

I have received your letter, and return to you Lord Byron’s.  I shall tell you very frankly, because I think it much better to speak a little of a man to his face than to say a great deal about him behind his back, that I think you have not treated me as I deserved, nor as might have been expected from that friendly intercourse which has subsisted between us for so many years.  Had Lord Byron transmitted to me a lampoon on you, I should, if I know myself at all, either have put it into the fire without delivery, or should have sent it at once to you.  I should not have given it a circulation for the gratification of all the small wits at the great and little houses, where no treat is so agreeable as to find a man laughing at his friend.  In this case, the whole coterie of the very shabbiest party that ever disgraced and divided a nation—­I mean the Whigs—­are, I know, chuckling over that silly charge made by Mr. Lamb on the hustings, and now confirmed by Lord Byron, of my having belonged to a Whig club at Cambridge.  Such a Whig as I then was, I am now.  I had no notion that the name implied selfishness and subserviency, and desertion of the most important principles for the sake of the least important interest.  I had no notion that it implied anything more than an attachment to the principles the ascendency of which expelled the Stuarts from the Throne.  Lord Byron belonged to this Cambridge club, and desired me to scratch out his name, on account of the criticism in the Edinburgh Review on his early poems; but, exercising my discretion on the subject, I did not erase his name, but reconciled him to the said Whigs.

The members of the club were but few, and with those who have any marked politics amongst them, I continue to agree at this day.  They were but ten, and you must know most of them—­Mr. W. Ponsonby, Mr. George O’Callaghan, the Duke of Devonshire, Mr. Dominick Browne, Mr. Henry Pearce, Mr. Kinnaird, Lord Tavistock, Lord Ellenborough, Lord Byron, and myself.  I was not, as Lord Byron says in the song, the founder of this Club; [Footnote: 

“But when we at Cambridge were
My boy Hobbie O! 
If my memory do not err,
You founded a Whig Clubbie O!”

] on the contrary, thinking myself of mighty importance in those days, I recollect very well that some difficulty attended my consenting to belong to the club, and I have by me a letter from Lord Tavistock, in which the distinction between being a Whig party man and a Revolution Whig is strongly insisted upon.