The negotiations which had preceded Hunt's visit to Italy, raised forebodings in Shelley's mind as to the reception he would meet from Byron; nor were these destined to be unfulfilled.

Trelawny tells us how irksome the poet found it to have "a man with a sick wife, and seven disorderly children," established in his palace.

To Mrs.Hunt he was positively brutal; nor could he tolerate her self-complacent husband, who, while he had voyaged far and wide in literature, had never wholly cast the slough of Cockneyism.

Hunt was himself hardly powerful enough to understand the true magnitude of Shelley, though he loved him; and the tender solicitude of the great, unselfish Shelley, for the smaller, harmlessly conceited Hunt, is pathetic.

They spent a pleasant day or two together, Shelley showing the Campo Santo and other sights of Pisa to his English friend.