Prior to his acquaintance with Hunt, Byron had taken his seat in the House of Lords and had made speeches against the framebreakers of Nottingham and in behalf of Catholic emancipation. A month after their meeting he made a third speech introducing Major Cartwright's petition for reform in Parliament. The second and third of these measures, in particular, were warmly advocated by _The Examiner_, with which paper Byron was familiar, as references in his letters show. It is therefore not hazardous to surmise that his sympathy with liberal policies, alien to his Tory blood and aristocratic spirit, was due, in part at least, to this influence. Byron's political principles on the whole were as evanescent and intermittent as a will-o'-the-wisp.[317] His chief tenets were the assertion of the individual; antagonism against all authority; a striving after freedom. Brandes, Elze and Treitscke agree in attributing his political enthusiasm to the intense passion of his nature rather than to his moral convictions.[318] His religious convictions were as fugitive as his political and, like those of Hunt and other advanced thinkers of the age, seem to have been without deference to any existing creed or dogma. At his gloomiest moments he confessed that he denied nothing but doubted everything. Hunt says of Byron's religion that he "did not know what he was.... He was a Christian by education, he was an infidel by reading. He was a Christian by habit, but he was no Christian upon reflection."[319] The phrase, "I am of the opposition" applies to his religion as well as to his politics, as indeed it serves as the key-note to almost every action of his life. Leigh Hunt has given a characteristic account of his first sight of Byron "rehearsing the part of Leander," in the River Thames sometime before he went to Greece in 1809: "I saw nothing in Lord Byron at that time, but a young man, who, like myself, had written a bad volume of poems; and though I had sympathy with him on this account, and more respect for his rank than I was willing to suppose, my sympathy was not an agreeable one; so, contenting myself with seeing his lordship's head bob up and down in the water, like a buoy, I came away. Lord Byron when he afterwards came to see me in prison, was pleased to regret that I had not stayed. He told me, that the sight of my volume at Harrow had been one of his incentives to write verses, and that he had had the same passion for friendship which I had displayed in it. To my astonishment he quoted some of the lines, and would not hear me speak ill of them."[320] Hunt's _Juvenilia_, beyond having served as one of the incentives to the writing of Byron's _Hours of Idleness_, does not seem to have affected it. For Hunt's undercurrent of friendship and cheerfulness were substituted Byron's prevailing notes of amorousness and melancholy.