The Silent Isle by A.C. Benson

There can surely be few pieces of literary portraiture in the world more unpleasant than the portrait drawn of Byron in 1822 by Leigh Hunt. It gave great offence to Byron's friends, who insisted upon his noble and generous qualities, and maintained that Leigh Hunt was taking a spiteful revenge for what he conceived to be the indignity and injustice with which Byron had treated him. Leigh Hunt was undoubtedly a trying person in some ways. He did not mind dipping his hand into a friendly pocket, and he had a way of flinging himself helplessly upon the good nature of his friends, a want of dignity in the way he accepted their assistance, which went far to justify the identification of him with the very disagreeable portrait which Dickens drew of him, as Harold Skimpole in _Bleak House_.

But for all that he was an affectionate, candid, and eminently placable person, and if it is true that he darkened the shadows of Byron's temperament, and insisted too strongly on his undesirable qualities, there is no reason to think that the portrait he drew of Byron was not in the main a true one; and it may be added that a vast amount of generosity and nobility require to be thrown into the opposite scale before Byron can be rehabilitated or made worthy of the least admiration and respect.