There can surely be few pieces of literary portraiture in the world more unpleasant than the portrait drawn of Byron in 1822 by Leigh Hunt.  It gave great offence to Byron’s friends, who insisted upon his noble and generous qualities, and maintained that Leigh Hunt was taking a spiteful revenge for what he conceived to be the indignity and injustice with which Byron had treated him.  Leigh Hunt was undoubtedly a trying person in some ways.  He did not mind dipping his hand into a friendly pocket, and he had a way of flinging himself helplessly upon the good nature of his friends, a want of dignity in the way he accepted their assistance, which went far to justify the identification of him with the very disagreeable portrait which Dickens drew of him, as Harold Skimpole in Bleak House.  But for all that he was an affectionate, candid, and eminently placable person, and if it is true that he darkened the shadows of Byron’s temperament, and insisted too strongly on his undesirable qualities, there is no reason to think that the portrait he drew of Byron was not in the main a true one; and it may be added that a vast amount of generosity and nobility require to be thrown into the opposite scale before Byron can be rehabilitated or made worthy of the least admiration and respect.

Byron had invited Leigh Hunt out to Italy, with the design of producing, with his assistance, a monthly Review of a literary type.  Leigh Hunt came out with his wife and family, and accepted quarters under Byron’s roof.  Byron had already tired of the scheme and repented of his generosity.  Leigh Hunt avers that Byron was an innately avaricious man, and that, though he occasionally lavished money on some favourite scheme, it was only because, though he loved money much, he loved notoriety more.  The good angel of the situation was Shelley, who really made all the arrangements for Hunt’s sojourn and presented him with the necessary furniture for his rooms.  Shelley was certainly entirely indifferent to money, and profusely generous.  He had begun by admiring Byron, with all the enthusiasm of hero-worship, but a closer acquaintance had revealed much that was distasteful and even repugnant to him, and it may safely be said that if he had lived he would soon have withdrawn from Byron’s society.  Shelley’s ideas of morality were not conventional; his affection and enthusiasm for people burnt fiercely and waned, yet when he sinned, he sinned through a genuine passion.  But Byron, according to Leigh Hunt, was a cold-blooded libertine, and had no conception of what love meant, except as a merely animal desire, which he abundantly gratified.

The awkward menage was established.  Byron was at the Casa Lanfranchi at Pisa, and gave Leigh Hunt the ground floor.  Leigh Hunt describes him as lounging about half the day in a nankeen jacket and white duck trousers, singing in a swaggering fashion, in a voice at once “thin and veiled,” a boisterous air of Rossini’s, riding out with pistols accompanied by his dogs, and sitting up half the night to write Don Juan over gin and water.  He was living at the time with the Countess Guiccioli, who had married a man four times her age, had obtained a separation, and now lived as Byron’s mistress, with her father and brother in the same house.