post-office.]

"Of Hunt I see little--once a month or so, and then on his own
business, generally. You may easily suppose that I know too little of
Hampstead and his satellites to have much communion or community with
him. My whole present relation to him arose from Shelley's unexpected
wreck. You would not have had me leave him in the street with his
family, would you? and as to the other plan you mention, you forget
how it would _humiliate_ him--that his writings should be supposed to
be dead weight![1] Think a moment--he is perhaps the vainest man on
earth, at least his own friends say so pretty loudly; and if he were
in other circumstances, I might be tempted to take him down a peg;
but not now,--it would be cruel. It is a cursed business; but neither
the motive nor the means rest upon my conscience, and it happens that
he and his brother _have_ been so far benefited by the publication in
a pecuniary point of view. His brother is a steady, bold fellow, such
as _Prynne_, for example, and full of moral, and, I hear, physical
courage.

[Footnote 1: The passage in one of my letters to which he here refers
shall be given presently.]

"And _you_ are _really_ recanting, or softening to the clergy! It
will do little good for you--it is _you_, not the poem, they are at.
They will say they frightened you--forbid it, Ireland!

"Yours ever,

"N.B."