"My original motives I already explained (in the letter which you thought proper to show): they are the _true_ ones, and I abide by them, as I tell you, and I told Leigh Hunt when he questioned me on the subject of that letter. He was violently hurt, and never will forgive me at bottom; but I can't help that. I never meant to make a parade of it; but if he chose to question me, I could only answer the plain truth: and I confess I did not see any thing in the letter to hurt him, unless I said he was 'a bore,' which I don't remember. Had their Journal gone on well, and I could have aided to make it better for them, I should then have left them, after my safe pilotage off a lee shore, to make a prosperous voyage by themselves. As it is, I can't, and would not, if I could, leave them among the breakers. "As to any community of feeling, thought, or opinion, between Leigh Hunt and me, there is little or none. We meet rarely, hardly ever; but I think him a good-principled and able man, and must do as I would be done by. I do not know what world he has lived in, but I have lived in three or four; but none of them like his Keats and kangaroo terra incognita. Alas! poor Shelley! how we would have laughed had he lived, and how we used to laugh now and then, at various things which are grave in the suburbs! "You are all mistaken about Shelley. You do not know how mild, how tolerant, how good he was in society; and as perfect a gentleman as ever crossed a drawing-room, when he liked, and where liked. "I have some thoughts of taking a run down to Naples (_solus_, or, at most, _cum sola_) this spring, and writing, when I have studied the country, a Fifth and Sixth Canto of Childe Harold: but this is merely an idea for the present, and I have other excursions and voyages in my mind. The busts[92] are finished: are you worthy of them? "Yours, &c. N.B. "P.S. Mrs. Shelley is residing with the Hunts at some distance from me. I see them very seldom, and generally on account of their business. Mrs. Shelley, I believe, will go to England in the spring. "Count Gamba's family, the father and mother and daughter, are residing with me by Mr. Hill (the minister's) recommendation, as a safer asylum from the political persecutions than they could have in another residence; but they occupy one part of a large house, and I the other, and our establishments are quite separate. "Since I have read the Quarterly, I shall erase two or three passages in the latter six or seven cantos, in which I had lightly stroked over two or three of your authors; but I will not return evil for good. I liked what I read of the article much.