In this year of Byron’s centenary, Leigh Hunt’s name inevitably recurs. His relations with Byron are told and re-told, and ‘the common weakness of throwing the principal character into a high light by darkening the shadows around those who surrounded him’ at times relegates Hunt to the outer darkness. He is ‘sly and venomous’ according to one critic, who on Byron himself is admirable. It is not, however, our intention to discuss the Byron-Hunt episode. A severance of friendship is always a tragedy. And an attempt to justify the one at the expense of the other is only to accentuate the tragic note. We can afford to forget that they ever ceased to be friends. We may leave Byron in his ‘high light,’ but we would fain dissipate somewhat the shadows that surround Leigh Hunt’s name, not by putting forward a reasoned defence of the man and his actions, but by recalling one of his Essays wherein he describes his discovery of a Saint. The genuine appreciation of goodness and virtue which the Essay exhibits may help us to see him in his true light—to see him, perhaps, as Shelley saw him :

The essay is to be found in The Seer; or, Common f laces Refreshed, a collection of Hunt’s Essays published in 1841.