[8] Both Byron and Barry Cornwall have expressed their sense of contrast between certain vulgarities of Hunt's diction and his personal good breeding. Byron before their quarrel declared emphatically that he was 'not a vulgar man'; and Barry Cornwall, admitting that he 'indulged himself occasionally in pet words, some of which struck me as almost approaching to the vulgar,' goes on to say that 'he was essentially a gentleman in conduct, in demeanour, in manner, in his consideration for others,' and to praise him for his 'great fund of positive active kindness,' his freedom from all irritable vanity, his pleasure and liberality in praising (Bryan Walter Procter, _An Autobiographical Fragment_, 1877, pp. 197-200).
[9] This reconstruction of the scene is founded on a comparison of the sonnets themselves with Woodhouse's note on Keats's subsequent palinode, _A Hymn to Apollo_. Woodhouse says the friends were both crowned with laurel, but it seems more likely that he should have made this mistake than that a similar performance should have been twice repeated (Houghton MSS.).
WINTER 1816-1817: HAYDON: OTHER NEW FRIENDSHIPS: THE DIE CAST FOR POETRY
Haydon and the Elgin marbles--Haydon as painter and writer--Vanity, pugnacity, and piety--Haydon on Leigh Hunt--Keats and Haydon meet--An enthusiastic friendship--Keats and the Elgin marbles--Sonnets and protestations--Hazlitt and Lamb--Friendship of Hunt and Shelley--Lamb and Hazlitt on Shelley--Haydon and Shelley: a battle royal--Keats and Shelley--A cool relation--John Hamilton Reynolds--His devotion to Keats--The Reynolds sisters--James Rice--Charles Wells--William Haslam--Joseph Severn--Keats judged by his circle--Described by Severn--His range of sympathies--His poetic ambition--The die is cast--First volume goes to press.
So much for the relations of Keats with Hunt himself in these first six months of their intimacy. Next of the other intimacies which he formed with friends to whom Hunt introduced him. One of the first of these, and for a while the most stimulating and engrossing, was with the painter Haydon. This remarkable man, now just thirty, had lately been victorious in one of the two great objects of his ambition, and had achieved a temporary semblance of victory in the other. For the last eight years he had fought and laboured to win national recognition for the deserts of Lord Elgin in his great work of salvage--for such under the conditions of the time it was--in bringing away the remains of the Parthenon sculptures from Athens. By dint of sheer justice of conviction and power of fight, and then only when he had been reinforced in the campaign by foreigners of indisputable authority like the archaeologist Visconti and the sculptor Canova, he had succeeded in getting the pre-eminence of these marbles among all works of the sculptor's art acknowledged, and their acquisition for the nation secured, in the teeth of powerful and bitterly hostile cliques. His opponents included both the sentimentalists who took their cue from Byron's _Curse of Minerva_ in shrieking at Elgin as a vandal, and the dilettanti who, blinded to the true Greek touch by familiarity with smoothed and pumiced Roman copies, had declared the Parthenon sculptures to be works of the age of Hadrian.