"And Shelley truly loved Leigh Hunt. Their friendship was honorable to both, for it was as disinterested as sincere; and I hope Gurney will let a certain person in the City understand that I treat his offer of a reviewal of Mr. Hunt's _London Journal_ with disdain. If he has anything to say against us or that gentleman, either conjunctly or severally, let him out with it in some other channel; and I promise him a touch and taste of the crutch. He talks to me of _Maga's_ desertion of principle; but if he were a Christian--nay, a man--his heart and his head would tell him that the Animosities are mortal, but the Humanities live for ever--and that Leigh Hunt has more talent in his little finger than the puling prig, who has taken upon himself to lecture Christopher North in a scrawl crawling with forgotten falsehoods."[497] Professor Wilson's invitation to Hunt to contribute to his magazine was declined politely but firmly. Leigh Hunt wrote to Charles Cowden Clarke: "_Blackwood's_ and I, poetically, are becoming the best friends in the world. The other day there was an Ode in _Blackwood_ in honour of the memory of Shelley; and I look for one of Keats. I hope this will give you faith in glimpses of the Golden Age."[498] Nowhere does Hunt show resentment or malice for the sufferings of years. Yet Mrs. Oliphant, in her advocacy of the Blackwood group, goes the length of saying that he displayed "feebleness of mind and body," "petty meannesses," "unwillingness or incapacity to take a high view even of friends or benefactors," a lightheartedness and frivolity, and "enduring spite." She grudgingly admits his "almost feminine grace and charm." She says that he thought his friends deserved only "casual thanks when they did what was but their manifest duty ... bitter and spiteful satire when they attended to their own affairs instead." She makes a radically false statement when she says that he defended Byron, Shelley, Keats, Moore, and many others in _The Examiner_, but found an opportunity to say an evil word of most of them afterwards; and that when _Blackwood's_ or the _Quarterly_ attacked him, he was convinced that "it must be really one of his friends who was being struck at through him."[499] The _Quarterly_ delayed longer in assuming a friendly attitude. It remained silent until 1867, when Bulwer, in a comparison of Hunt and Hazlitt, conceded to the former a gracefulness and kindliness of disposition, a smoothness of tone and delicacy of finish in his writing. There was no formal apology as in the case of _Blackwood's_.