On October 9, 1822, he wrote to Moore that he had done all he could for Hunt "but in the affairs of this world he himself is a child";[423] "As it is, I will not quit them (the Hunts) in their adversity, though it should cost me my character, fame, money, and the usual et cetera.... 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, or would not, if I could, leave them amidst the breakers. As to any community of feeling, thought, or opinions between L. H. and me, there is little or none; we meet rarely, hardly ever; but I think him a good-principled and able man.[424]... You would not have had me leave him in the street with his family, would you? And as to the other plan you mention, you forget how it would humiliate him--that his writings should be supposed to be dead weight! Think a moment--he is perhaps the vainest man on earth, at least his own friends say so pretty loudly; and if he were in other circumstances I might be tempted to take him down a peg; but not now--it would be cruel.[425]... A more amiable man in society I know not, nor (when he will allow his sense to prevail over his sectarian principles) a better writer. When he was writing his _Rimini_ I was not the last to discover its beauties, long before it was published. Even then I remonstrated against its vulgarisms; which are the more extraordinary, because the author is anything but a vulgar man."[426] During April, 1823, the Countess of Blessington had a conversation with Byron in which he said that while he regretted having embarked in _The Liberal_, yet he had a good opinion of the talents and principles of Hunt, despite their diametrically opposed tastes.[427] On April 2, 1823, he wrote that Hunt was incapable or unwilling to help himself; that he could not keep up this "genuine philanthropy" permanently; and that he would furnish Hunt with the means to return to England in comfort.[428] There is no proof that Byron ever made such an offer to Hunt. The purchase money of Hunt's journey home was _Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries_. On July 23, 1823, Byron went to Greece. The Hunts, provided by him with L30 for the trip, left Genoa about the same time for Florence, where they were literally stranded, in ill-health and without sufficient means for support,[429] until their departure for England in September, 1825. The suffering there and the foul calumny at home magnified in Hunt's mind[430] the indignity and injustice that had been put upon him and warped his sense of gratitude and honor in the whole affair. He wrote from Florence: "The stiffness of age has come into my joints; my legs are sore and fevered; and I sometimes feel as if I were a ship rotting in a stagnant harbour."[431] Mrs. Shelley protested to Byron concerning his treatment of