disgusted at the very start and declaring that the journal would be an ‘abortion.’ His reception of Mrs. Hunt, according to Williams, was ‘shameful.’ Mrs. Hunt naturally retorted the dislike, and Hunt reported one of her sharp sayings to Byron, in order, as he says, to mortify him. No men could be less congenial. Byron's aristocratic loftiness encountered a temper forward to take offence at any presumption of inequality. Byron had provided Hunt with lodgings, furnished them decently, and doled out to him about 100l. through his steward, a proceeding which irritated Hunt, who loved a cheerful giver. Shelley's death (8 July) left the two men face to face in this uncomfortable relation.
The ‘Liberal,’ so named by Byron, survived through four numbers. It made a moderate profit, which Byron abandoned to Hunt (Hunt, i. 87, ii. 412), but he was disgusted from the outset, and put no heart into the experiment. He told his friends, and probably persuaded himself, that he had engaged in the journal out of kindness to the Hunts, and to help a friend of Shelley's; and takes credit for feeling that he could not turn the Hunts into the street. His chief contributions, the ‘Vision of Judgment’ and the letter ‘To my Grandmother's Review,’ appeared in the first number, to the general scandal. ‘Heaven and Earth’ appeared in the second number, the ‘Blues’ in the third, the ‘Morgante Maggiore’ in the fourth, and a few epigrams were added. Hunt and Hazlitt, who wrote five papers (Memoirs of Hazlitt, ii. 73), did most of the remainder, which, however, had clearly not the seeds of life in it. The ‘Vision of Judgment’ was the hardest blow struck in a prolonged and bitter warfare. Byron had met Southey, indeed, at Holland House in 1813, and speaks favourably of him, calls his prose perfect, and professes to envy his personal beauty (Diary, 22 Nov. 1813). His belief that Southey had spread scandalous stories about the Swiss party in 1816 gave special edge to his revived antipathy. In 1818 he dedicated ‘Don Juan’ to Southey in ‘good simple savage verse’ (Letter 322), bitterly taunting the poet as a venal renegade. In 1821 Southey published his ‘Vision of Judgment,’ an apotheosis of George III, of grotesque (though most unintentional) profanity. In the preface he alludes to Byron as leader of the ‘Satanic school.’ Byron in return denounced Southey's ‘calumnies’ and ‘cowardly ferocity.’ Southey retorted in the ‘Courier’ (11 Jan. 1822), boasting that he had fastened Byron's name ‘upon the gibbet for reproach and ignominy, so long as it shall endure.’ Medwin (p. 179) describes Byron's fury on reading these courtesies. He instantly sent off a challenge in a letter (6 Feb. 1822) to Douglas Kinnaird, who had the sense to suppress it. His own ‘Vision of Judgment,’ written by 1 Oct. 1821, was already in the hands of Murray, now troubled by ‘Cain.’ Byron now swore that it should be published, and it was finally transferred by Murray to Hunt.
Byron meanwhile had been uprooted from Pisa. A silly squabble took place in the street (21 March 1822), in which Byron's servant stabbed an hussar (see depositions in Medwin). Byron spent some weeks in the summer at Monte Nero, near Leghorn (where he and Mme. Guiccioli sat to the American painter West), and returned to Pisa in July. About the same time the Gambas were ordered to leave Tuscan territory. Byron's stay at Pisa had been marked by the death of Allegra (20 April) and of Shelley (8 July). Details of the ghastly ceremony of burning the bodies of Williams and Shelley (15 and 16 Aug.) are given by Trelawny, with characteristic details of Byron's emotion and hysterical affectation of levity. Shelley, who exaggerated Byron's poetical merits (see his enthusiastic eulogy of the fifth canto of ‘Don Juan’ on his visit to Pisa), was kept at a certain distance by his perception of Byron's baser qualities. Byron had always respected Shelley as a man of simple, lofty, and unworldly character, and as undeniably a gentleman by birth and breeding. Shelley, according to Trelawny (i. 80), was the only man to whom Byron talked seriously and confidentially. He told Moore that Shelley was ‘the least selfish and the mildest of men,’ and added to Murray that he was ‘as perfect a gentleman as ever crossed a drawing-room’ (Letters 482 and 506). He was, however, capable of believing and communicating to Hoppner scandalous stories about the Shelleys and Claire, and of meanly suppressing Mrs. Shelley's confutation of the story (see Mr. Froude in Nineteenth Century, August 1883; and Mr. Jeaffreson's reply in the Athenæum, 1 and 22 Sept. 1883).
Trelawny had stimulated the nautical tastes of Byron and Shelley. Captain Roberts, a naval friend of his at Genoa, built an open boat for Shelley, and a schooner, called the Bolivar, for Byron. Trelawny manned her with five sailors and brought her round to Leghorn. Byron was annoyed by the cost; knew nothing, says Trelawny, of the sea, and could never be induced to take a cruise in her. When Byron left Pisa, after a terrible hubbub of moving his household and his baggage, Trelawny sailed in the Bolivar, Byron's servants following in one
