deadly sins seemed to lurk in that mouth. Forster said the portrait was ill-engraved; Landor's explosions of wrath covered a generous and sympathetic nature, always eager for the right and the true. I asked Forster how it came that Dickens, in one of his last prefaces, could declare that he had not Leigh Hunt in his mind when he painted Harold Skimpole. It was a cruel caricature, turning foibles and weaknesses into crimes, but it was undeniably Leigh Hunt. 'Oh,' said Forster, 'if you had seen the proofs before they passed through my hands you might have better grounds for that opinion. So much was cut out that we persuaded ourselves that the salient traits were effaced, but too many of them remained. Dickens was alarmed at the impression he had made, and did his best to repair the wrong, and doubtless like the queen in the play, did protest too much.'"
Browning thought Hunt had been ill-treated; he had been punished with a severity his offences did not justify. Yes, I said, for the second time at least in Hunt's life his insouciance and levity had been visited with a savage scorn which ought to be reserved for breaches of honour. Moore plunged him in a bath of vitriol for his book on Lord Byron.
"But fed as he was, and this makes it a dark case,
With sops every day from the lion's own pan,
He lifts up his leg 'gainst the noble beast's carcase,
And … does all a dog so diminutive can."
We know now, Moore knew then, that Byron was selfish and arrogant, and sorely affronted the sensitive poet whom Shelley loved so well. Hunt's two years' imprisonment for suggesting that the immaculate Prince Regent associated with persons of doubtful repute, was not a greater injustice than Moore's pasquinade.
From Moore's humour the talk passed to that of Southey, which Browning professed to admire. I said I must correct my judgment on this point by so high an authority. I had always considered Southey's humorous poems dull and even dreary. There were one or two exceptions perhaps, and the others had sometimes a happy line; but how did he compare with Canning, Praed, or Moore? Browning replied that Southey's humour was of a different genre from that of the poets I named, but he deemed it good of its kind.
