[424] _Ibid._, V, p. 157, December 25, 1822. [425] _Ibid._, VI, pp. 167-168. [426] _Ibid._, V, p. 588. [427] Lady Blessington, _Conversations of Lord Byron_, p. 77. [428] _Letters and Journals_, VI, pp. 182-183, April 2, 1823. [429] Hunt's only means of support were the income from his contributions to _Colburn's New Monthly Magazine_, from the _Wishing Cap Papers_ in _The Examiner_, and an annuity of L100. (_Correspondence_, I, p. 227.) [430] _Correspondence_, I, p. 233-234. [431] _Correspondence_, I, p. 228. See Hazlitt's account of Hunt in Italy given in a letter from Haydon to Miss Mitford. (Haydon, _Life, Letters and Table Talk_, pp. 223-225.) [432] Moore, _Memoirs_, IV, p. 220; V, p. 182. [433] _Letters and Journals_, VI, p. 174, 1823. [434] _Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries_, preface, p. 3. [435] Clarke, _Recollection of Writers_, p. 230. [436] But compare Hunt's own remarks on p. 40. [437] The biographers of the two men have taken various attitudes toward the value of _Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries_. Galt says that the pains Hunt took to elaborate faults of Byron make one think Hunt was treated according to his deserts, and that the troubles he labored under may have caused him to misapprehend Byron's jocularity for sarcasm, and caprice for insolence. (_Life of Byron_, p. 260.) Garnett considers the book a "corrective of merely idealized estimates of Lord Byron," and its "reception more unfavorable than its deserts." (_Encyclopaedia Britannica_, "Byron," Ninth Edition.) Nichol thinks that while the book was prompted by uncharitableness and egotism, Byron's faults were only slightly magnified: that the poetic insight, the cosmopolitan sympathy and courage of Hunt have given a view that nothing else could have done. (_Life of Byron_, p. 165.) R. B. Johnson thinks that it was a correct estimate written in self-justification. Undoubtedly it should not have come from Hunt, yet if it had not been written Hunt would not have been defended nor Byron so well known. He says there is "no reason to regret any part of the affair but the heated and persistent abuse with which one of the most sensitive and humane of men has been loaded on account of it." (_Leigh Hunt_, p. 50.) Noble says that "Byron's friends met unpleasant truths by still more unpleasant falsehoods." (_The Sonnet in England_, p. 115.) Alexander Ireland, says the book was the great blunder of Hunt's life, "ought not to have been written, far less published." (_Dictionary of National Biography._) [438] _Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries_, p. 89. [439] _Ibid._, pp. 20-21. [440] Byron, _Letters and Journals_, II, p. 208. [441] _Ibid._, II, p. 461. [442] Thornton Hunt, in his edition of his father's _Correspondence_, 1862, in this connection defended Byron, and credited him with "a strong sympathy with all that was beautiful and generous, with a desire to do right,