That Hunt should have been willing to bring his wife and a growing family under the same roof does not reflect much credit on him, especially when he found that Byron was not averse to saying cynical and even corrupting things to Hunt’s boys, when Hunt himself was absent.  Mrs. Leigh Hunt took a stronger line; she cordially disliked Byron from the first.  On one occasion when Byron said to her that Trelawny had been finding fault with his morals, Mrs. Leigh Hunt said trenchantly that it was the first time she had ever heard of them.

Leigh Hunt soon perceived that he and Byron had very little in common.  Byron disliked his familiarity and his airs of equality; while he himself was not long in discovering Byron to be egotistical to the verge of insanity, childishly vain of his rank, ill-natured, jealous, coarse, inconsiderate, disloyal, a blabber of secrets, mean, deceitful.  But the glamour of Byron’s fame, the romance that surrounded him, his rank, which Leigh Hunt valued almost pathetically, kept the amiable invalid—­for such Leigh Hunt was at this time—­hanging on to Byron’s skirts and claiming his protection.  The Review began with a flourish of trumpets, but soon broke down; and finally the very uncongenial partnership was dissolved.

One cannot pardon Leigh Hunt at any stage.  He ought never to have accepted the original invitation; he ought never to have retained the undignified position of a sort of literary parasite.  He endeavoured to protect his own self-respect by adopting a tone of easy familiarity with Byron, which only resulted in galling his host; and he ought not to have written his very damaging reminiscences of the period, though it is quite clear that he felt under no obligation whatever to Byron.

Still it is a deeply interesting piece of portraiture, and probably substantially accurate.  The painful fact is that Byron was a very ill-bred person.  He had drawn a prize in the lottery of life, and had obtained, so to speak, by accident of birth, a position that gave him fortuitously the consequence which numbers of ambitious men spend their lives in trying to obtain.  And then, too, we must not lose sight of Byron’s genius, though it is abundantly clear that all there was of noble and beautiful in Byron’s nature was entirely given to his art, and that outside of his art there remained nothing but a temperament burdened with all the ugliest faults of the artistic nature, artificially forced and developed by untoward circumstance.  There remains the perennial mystery of genius, which can put into glowing words and exquisite phrases emotions which it can conceive but cannot feel.  Leigh Hunt’s deliberate view of Byron is that he did everything for effect, that his vanity was boundless and insatiable, and that even his raptures were stage raptures.  There is little reason to doubt it.  Byron’s tumultuous agonies of soul were little more than the rage of the spoilt child, who cannot bear that things should go contrary to its desires.