, as in no other single representative. Sheridan was
an unrivalled companion,--could talk seven hours without making even
Byron yawn. Steele was the most lovable of spendthrifts. Lending to
these men was but a form of investment. They paid in a coinage of
their own. But Leigh Hunt combined in the happiest manner a readiness
to extract favours with a confirmed habit of never acknowledging the
smallest obligation for them. He is a perfect example of the
condescending borrower, of the man who permits his friends, as a
pleasure to themselves, to relieve his necessities, and who knows
nothing of gratitude or loyalty.

It would be interesting to calculate the amount of money which Hunt's
friends and acquaintances contributed to his support in life.
Shelley gave him at one time fourteen hundred pounds, an amount which
the poet could ill spare; and, when he had no more to give, wrote
in misery of spirit to Byron, begging a loan for his friend, and
promising to repay it, as he feels tolerably sure that Hunt never
will. Byron, generous at first, wearied after a time of his position
in Hunt's commissariat (it was like pulling a man out of a river,
he wrote to Moore, only to see him jump in again), and coldly withdrew.
His withdrawal occasioned inconvenience, and has been sharply
criticised. Hunt, says Sir Leslie Stephen, loved a cheerful giver,
and Byron's obvious reluctance struck him as being in bad taste. His
biographers, one and all, have sympathized with this point of view.
Even Mr. Frederick Locker, from whom one would have expected a
different verdict, has recorded his conviction that Hunt had
probably been "sorely tried" by Byron.

It is characteristic of the preordained borrower, of the man who
simply fulfils his destiny in life, that not his obligations only,
but his anxieties and mortifications are shouldered by other men.
Hunt was care-free and light-hearted; but there is a note akin to
anguish in Shelley's petition to Byron, and in his shamefaced
admission that he is himself too poor to relieve his friend's
necessities. The correspondence of William Godwin's eminent
contemporaries teem with projects to alleviate Godwin's needs. His
debts were everybody's affair but his own. Sir James Mackintosh wrote
to Rogers in the autumn of 1815, suggesting that Byron might be the
proper person to pay them. Rogers, enchanted with the idea, wrote
to Byron, proposing that the purchase money of "The Siege of Corinth"
be devoted to