Leigh Hunt's Relations with Byron, Shelley and Keats

CHAPTER V

Characteristics of the “Cockney School”—Reasons for Tory enmity—Establishment of Blackwood’s Magazine and the Quarterly Review—Their methods of attack—Other targets—Authorship of anonymous articles—Members of the Cockney group—Byron—Hunt—Keats—Shelley— Hazlitt.

The word “Cockney” says Bulwer-Lytton, signifies the “archetype of the Londoner east of Temple Bar, and is as grotesquely identified with the Bells of Bow as Quasimodo with those of Notre Dame.”[446] The epithet remains doubtful in origin but is proverbially significant of odium and of ridicule. R. H. Horne asserts that, in its first application, it meant merely “pastoral, minus nature.”[447] The word did not long carry so harmless a connotation. It was first applied to Hunt by the Tory journals in 1817 and, in the phrase “Cockney School,” was gradually extended until it included most of his associates. The group of men thus arbitrarily banded together did not form a school or cult, and themselves resented such a classification. They differed widely in their fundamental principles of life and art. They were not all of one vocation. On the other hand they had certain superficial points in common which made them collectively vulnerable to the dart of the enemy. They were Londoners[448] by birth or by adoption; with the exception of Shelley they may all be said to have belonged to the middle class; the most Cockneyfied of them had certain vulgar mannerisms; they egotistically paraded their personal affairs in public; they praised each other somewhat fulsomely in dedications and elsewhere, though not always to the full satisfaction of everybody concerned; they presented each other with wreaths of bay, laurel, and roses, and with locks of hair; they agreed in liking Thomas Moore and in disliking Southey; they moved with complacency within a limited circle to the exclusion of a large city; in general they were liberal in politics and in religion; they were in revolt against French criticism; they chose Elizabethan or Italian models, and, as a rule, they conceitedly ignored or contemned contemporary writers.

The gatherings of the coterie have been nowhere better described than by Cowden Clarke:

“Evenings of Mozartian operatic and chamber music at Vincent Novello’s own house, where Leigh Hunt, Shelley, Keats and the Lambs were invited guests; the brilliant supper parties at the alternate dwellings of the Novellos, the Hunts and the Lambs, who had mutually agreed that bread and cheese, with celery, and Elia’s immortalized ‘Lutheran beer’ were to be the sole cates provided; the meetings at the theatres, when Munden, Dowton, Liston, Bannister, Elliston and Fanny Kelly were on the stage; the picnic repasts enjoyed together by appointment in the fields that lay spread in green breadth and luxuriance between the west end of Oxford Street and the western slope of Hampstead Hill—are things never to be forgotten.”[449]

Miss Mitford relates a ludicrous incident of one of these meetings:

“Leigh Hunt (not the notorious Mr. Henry Hunt, but the fop, poet and politician of the ‘Examiner’) is a great keeper of birthdays. He was celebrating that of Haydn, the great composer—giving a dinner, crowning his bust with laurels, berhyming the poor dear German, and conducting an apotheosis in full form. Somebody told Mr. Haydon they were celebrating his birthday. So off he trotted to Hampstead, and bolted into the company—made a very fine animated speech—thanked him most sincerely for what they had done him and the arts in his person.”[450]

At one time the set became violently vegetarian. The enthusiasm came to a sudden end, as narrated by Joseph Severn:

“Leigh Hunt most eloquently discussed the charms and advantages of these vegetable banquets, depicting in glowing words the cauliflowers swimming in melted butter, and the peas and beans never profaned with animal gravy. In the midst of his rhapsody he was interrupted by the venerable Wordsworth, who begged permission to ask a question. ‘If,’ he said, ‘by chance of good luck they ever met with a caterpillar, they thanked their stars for the delicious morsel of animal food.’ This absurdity all came to an end by an ugly discovery. Haydon, whose ruddy face had kept the other enthusiasts from sinking under their scanty diet—for they clung fondly to the hope that they would become like him, although they increased daily in pallor and leanness—this Haydon was discovered one day coming out of a chop-house. He was promptly taxed with treachery, when he honestly confessed that every day after the vegetable repast he ate a good beef-steak. This fact plunged the others in despair, and Leigh Hunt assured me that on vegetable diet his constitution had received a blow from which he had never recovered. With Shelley it was different, for he was by nature formed to regard animal food repulsively.”[451]

The causes of the enmity of the press were political rather than literary or personal and have already been sufficiently dwelt upon in the preceding chapters. The strong rivalry between Edinburgh and London as publishing strongholds intensified the strife. Hunt in particular had centered attention upon himself by his persistent and violent attacks on Gifford and Southey for several years previous to 1817. Besides The Examiner’s persistent allusions to these two unregenerates, a savage diatribe had appeared in the Feast of the Poets, which alluded to Gifford’s humble origin and mediocre ability, charged him with being a government tool, and continued: “But a vile, peevish temper, the more inexcusable in its indulgence, because he appears to have had early warning of its effects, breaks out in every page of his criticism, and only renders his affected grinning the more obnoxious ... I pass over the nauseous epistle to Peter Pindar, and even notes to his Baviad and Moeviad, where though less vulgar in his language, he has a great deal of the pert cant and snip-snap which he deprecates.”[452] During 1817, The Examiner had concerned itself particularly with Southey. He had been called an apostate, a hypocrite, and almost every other name in Hunt’s abusive vocabulary. Sir Walter Scott had not been spared. His politics were said to be easily estimated by the “simple fact, that of all the advocates of Charles the Second, he is the least scrupulous in mentioning his crimes, because he is the least abashed;” his command of prose was declared equal to nothing beyond “a plain statement or a brief piece of criticism;” his poetry “a little thinking conveyed in a great many words.”[453] Hunt thus secured to himself, through offensive and aggressive abuse, the hostility of the Tories both in England and in Scotland. His weaknesses and affectations made him a conspicuous and assailable target for the inevitable return fire.[454]

The establishment by the Tories of the Quarterly Review in 1809 and of Blackwood’s Magazine in 1817 was with the view of opposing and, if possible, of suppressing the Edinburgh Review and The Examiner. The brunt of the hostility fell upon the latter, for Hunt, by reason of his extreme social and religious policy, could not always rally the Edinburgh Review to his support. With the founding of the London Magazine in 1820 he had a new ally in its editor, John Scott, but the war had then already raged for three years, and Scott fell a victim to it in two years’ time.[455] By a process of elimination Scott fixed the identity of “Z”—such was the only signature of the articles on the Cockney School in Blackwood’s—upon Lockhart. He also asserted that Lockhart was the editor of the magazine. Lockhart demanded an apology. His friend Christie took up the quarrel. In the duel which followed Scott was fatally wounded. His death followed Keats’s within four days.

The method of attack with the Quarterly and with Blackwood’s was much the same. They differed chiefly in the style of approach. The former may be compared to heavy artillery, slow, cumbrous and crushing. The reviews indeed often verge on dullness and stupidity. Neither Gifford nor Southey seemed to have been blessed with the saving grace of humor in dealing with the Cockney School. Blackwood’s, on the other hand, had too much, for whenever one of the so-called Cockneys was mentioned, its contributors wallowed in the mire of coarse buffoonery and cruel satire, disgusting scandal and vulgar parody. The only counter-irritant to such a dose is the clever joking and keen humor; but even when this is clean, which is rare, the whole is rendered unpalatable by the thought of its cruelty and of its frequent falsity. Furthermore, Blackwood’s was more merciless in its persecution than the Quarterly in that it was untiring. It was perpetually discharging a fresh fusilade. Both magazines disguised their real motives under a cloak of religious zeal and monarchical loyalty.

While Hunt did much to bring the hornet’s nest about his ears, he was not wholly deserving of the amount, and not at all of the kind, of stinging calumny that he had to endure. Neither were the members of the Cockney School the only ones who provoked such antagonism from the same magazine. Other famous libels of Blackwood’s that should be mentioned to show the disposition of its controllers were the Chaldee Manuscript; the Madonna of Dresden and other effusions of the “Baron von Lauerwinckel”; the Diary and HorÆ SinicÆ of Ensign O’Doherty; and the Diary of William Wastle, Blackwood and Dr. Morris. Letter to Sir Walter Scott, Bart., on the Moral and other Characteristics of the Ebony and Shandrydan School,[456] cites a full list of Blackwood’s victims. These, besides those of the Cockney School, were said to be Jeffrey, Professor Playfair, Professor Dugald Stewart, Professor Leslie, James Macintosh, Lord Brougham, Moore, Professor David Ricardo, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Pringle, Dalzell, Cleghorn, Graham, Sharpe, Jameson, and Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd. The characters in Noctes AmbrosianÆ, Ticklers, Scorpions and Shepherds, were said by the pamphleteer to respectively tickle, sting and stultify, and to make a business “of insulting worth, offending delicacy, caluminating genius, and outraging the decencies and violating all the sanctities of life.” Their weapons were “loathsome billingsgate and brutality,” and “sublime bathos.” An interesting statement, not elsewhere found, is made by the anonymous author of the pamphlet that the proprietor of the Black Bull Inn imputed the death of his wife to the first volume of Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk, a series similar to the Noctes AmbrosianÆ. Sir Walter Scott is told that he cannot remain innocent if he remains indifferent to the machinations of the “Ebony and Shandrydan School”—as the writer pleases to call the Blackwood’s group. Another interesting pamphlet of like nature is The Scorpion Critic Unmasked; or Animadversions on a Pretended Review of “Fleurs, a Poem, in Four Books,” which appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine for June, 1821, in a Letter to a Friend.[457] Blackwood’s had called Nathaniel John Hollingsworth, the author of the poem, and others of his type, the “Leg of Mutton School.”[458] Nothing in fact seems to have given this magazine so much malicious delight as to create schools, perhaps in a spirit of rivalry with the “Lake School” of the Edinburgh Review. In the preceding April the “Manchester School” had been presented by Blackwood’s to the public. Hollingsworth in turn created the “Scorpion School” in order to deride Blackwood’s. Other pamphlets of the same kind were Rebellion again Gulliver; or R-D-C-L-SM in Lilliput. A Poetical Fragment from a Lilliputian Manuscript, an anonymous publication which appeared in Edinburgh in 1820; Aspersions answered: an explanatory Statement, advanced to the Public at Large, and to Every Reader of The Quarterly Review in Particular;[459] and Another Article for the Quarterly Review;[460] both by William Hone in reply to the charge of irreligion made by the Quarterly against him.

William Blackwood, John Wilson or “Christopher North,” Lockhart, and perhaps Maginn, share the blame severally of Blackwood’s; while in the case of the Quarterly, to Gifford and Southey, already mentioned, must be added Sir Walter Scott and Croker. The two last certainly countenanced the actions of the others, even if they took no more active part. There seems to be no way of determining the individual authorship of the various articles. It was a secret jealously guarded at the time and it is unlikely that any further disclosures will come to light. The victims themselves hazarded as many guesses as more recent critics with no greater degree of certainty. Leigh Hunt thought that the articles were written by Sir Walter Scott;[461] Hazlitt said, “To pay those fellows in their own coin, the way would be to begin with Walter Scott and have at his clump foot;”[462] Charles Dilke thought that the articles were written by Lockhart with the encouragement of Scott;[463] Haydon thought that “Z” was Terry the actor, an intimate of the Blackwood party, who had been exasperated because Hunt had failed to notice him in The Examiner;[464] Shelley fancied that the articles in the Quarterly were by Southey, and, on his denial, attributed them to Henry Hart Milman.[465] Mrs. Oliphant in her two ponderous volumes, William Blackwood and His Sons, practically asserts that “Z” was Lockhart.[466] If the extent of her research is to be the gauge of its value, her opinion is a very valuable one. Mr. Colvin advances the theory that “Z” was Wilson or Lockhart, possibly revised by William Blackwood.[467] Mr. Courthope thinks that Croker was the author of the articles on Endymion in the Quarterly.[468] Mr. Herford thinks that the whole campaign against the Cockney School was “largely worked out” by Lockhart.[469]

Hunt, Shelley, Hazlitt and Keats were the chief targets in the Cockney School. The attacks on each of these are of such length as to require separate discussion and will be returned to later. Those who attained lesser notoriety were Charles Lamb, Haydon, Barry Cornwall, John Hamilton Reynolds, Cornelius Webb, Charles Wells, Charles Dilke, Charles Lloyd, P. G. Patmore and John Ketch (Abraham Franklin). Those who moved within the same circle and who may by attraction be considered Cockneys are Charles Cowden Clarke and his wife, Vincent Novello, Charles Armitage Brown, the Olliers, Horace and James Smith, Douglas Jerrold, Joseph Severn, Laman Blanchard, Thomas Noon Talfourd, Thomas Love Peacock, and perhaps Thomas Hood.

Charles Lamb was first attacked in 1820. He had written essays somewhat in the manner of Hunt and he was a contributor to the London Magazine, which had blundered by censuring Castlereagh, Canning, and Wilberforce. The much-despised Hazlitt was another of its force. Accordingly, “Elia” was pronounced a “Cockney Scribbler,” Christ’s Hospital an essay full of offensive and reprehensible personalities,[470] and All Fool’s Day “mere inanity and very Cockneyism.”[471] In April, 1822, Blackwood’s returned to the attack but with more than usual good nature. In Noctes AmbrosianÆ of that month Tickler is made to say:

“Elia in his happiest moods delights me; he is a fine soul; but when he is dull, his dullness sets human stupidity at defiance. He is like a well-bred, ill-trained pointer. He has a fine nose, but he can’t or won’t range. He always keeps close to your foot, and then he points larks or tit-mice. You see him snuffing and snoking and brandishing his tail with the most impassioned enthusiasm, and then drawn round into a semi-circle he stands beautifully—dead set. You expect a burst of partridges, or a towering cock-pheasant, when lo, and behold, away flits a lark, or you discover a mouse’s nest, or there is absolutely nothing at all. Perhaps a shrew has been there the day before. Yet if Elia were mine, I would not part with him, for all his faults.”

A few years later Lamb became one of Blackwood’s contributors. Two attacks on Lamb proceeded from the Quarterly. The Confessions of a Drunkard, the writer says, “affords a fearful picture of the consequences of intemperance which we have reason to know is a true tale.”[472] In his Progress of Infidelity, Southey asserted that Elia’s volume of essays wanted “only sounder religious feeling, to be as delightful as it is original.”[473] Lamb’s wrath had been slowly gathering under the strain of repeated attacks on Hunt, Hazlitt and himself. It culminated with Southey’s article. In the London Magazine of October, 1823, he repudiated at considerable length the compliments thrust upon him at the expense of his friends, and denied the arraignment of drunkenness and heterodoxy. Matters were then smoothed over between him and Southey through an explanation which his unfailing good nature could not resist.

Haydon was nick-named the “Raphael of the Cockneys.”[474] Until the exhibition of Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem in Edinburgh in 1820, he underwent the same kind of persecution as his friends. His “greasy hair” was about as notorious as Hazlett’s “pimpled face.” But the picture converted Blackwood’s crew. They apologized and confessed that their misapprehensions had been due to the absurd style of laudation in The Examiner. Henceforward they acknowledged him to be “a high Tory and an aristocrat, and a sound Christian.”[475]

Bryan Waller Procter, or Barry Cornwall, was satirized in Blackwood’s for his so-called effeminacy. In October, 1823, the following facetious passage occurs: “the merry thought of a chick—three tea-spoonsfulls of peas, the eighth part of a French roll, a sprig of cauliflower, and an almost imperceptible dew of parsley” would dine the author of The Deluge. The article on Shelley’s Posthumous Poems in the Edinburgh of July, 1824, was attributed to Procter by Blackwood’s and assailed in a most disgusting manner. The article was by Hazlitt.

John Hamilton Reynolds was a friend of Keats, one of the Young Poets reviewed by Hunt in The Examiner, and a contributor to the London Magazine. His two poems, Eden of the Imagination and Fairies, showed Hunt’s influence. In the former he had even dared to praise Hunt in the notes.

Cornelius Webb was the author of numerous poems which exhibit in a marked degree the Huntian peculiarities of diction pointed out in the first chapter. He is moreover responsible for the unfortunate lines so often quoted in derision by Blackwood’s:

“Keats
The Muses’ son of promise! and what feats
He yet may do.”

His sonnets in the Literary Pocket Book were thus reviewed in Blackwood’s of December, 1821: “Now, Cornelius Webbe is a Jaw-breaker. Let any man who desires to have his ivory dislodged, read the above sonnet to March. Or shall we call Cornelius, the grinder? After reading aloud these fourteen lines, we called in our Odontist, and he found that every tooth in our head was loosened, and a slight fracture in the jaw. ‘My dearest Christopher’, said the Odontist, in his wonted classical spirit, ‘beware the Ides of March.’ So saying, he bounced up in our faces and disappeared.”Charles Wells was a friend of Hazlitt and of Keats. In true Cockney fashion he sent the latter a sonnet and some roses and thus began the acquaintance. Dilke was a friend of Keats, a radical, and an independent critic in the manner of Hunt. Charles Lloyd was Lamb’s friend, one of the contributors to the Literary Pocket Book of 1820, and a poet of sentimental and descriptive propensities. P. G. Patmore was “Count Tims, the Cockney.”[476] Although he was a correspondent of Blackwood’s, his son has remarked that he was not persona grata, but was employed to secure news from London; and permitted to write only when he did not defend his friends too much.[477] “John Ketch” (Abraham Franklin) is mentioned by Lord Byron as one of the “Cockney Scribblers.”[478] Thomas Hood, as brother-in-law of Reynolds, as assistant editor of the London Magazine, and as an imitator in a small degree in his early work of Lamb and of Hunt may be enumerated among the Cockneys, although he is not usually included. Laman Blanchard was the friend of Procter, Lamb and Hunt. He imitated Procter’s Dramatic Sketches and Lamb’s Essays. Talfourd was a member of the circle and the friend and biographer of Lamb. He defended Edward Moxon when he was prosecuted for publishing Queen Mab. Peacock was the friend of Shelley. The Ollier brothers, publishers, introduced Keats, Shelley, Hunt, Lamb and Procter to the public.[479]

Although Byron was frequently at war with Blackwood’s and the Quarterly, and although he was closely associated with Shelley and Hunt, he was never stigmatized as a member of the Cockney School. Yet through his alliance with them he came in for some opprobrium that he would otherwise have escaped. Blackwood’s strove through ridicule to prevent any growth of familiarity with Hunt or his fraternity. Its attitude towards the dedication to Byron of the Story of Rimini has already been mentioned. Hunt’s statement already quoted on p. 95 that “for the drama, whatever good passages such a writer will always put forth, we hold that he (Byron) has no more qualification than we have” was a choice morsel for the Scotch birds of prey, enjoyed to the fullest extent in a review of Lyndsay’s Dramas of the Ancient World:

“Prigs will be preaching—and nothing but conceit cometh out of Cockaigne. What an emasculated band of dramatists have deployed upon our boards. A pale-faced, sallow set, like the misses of some Cockney boarding-school, taking a constitutional walk, to get rid of their habits of eating lime out of the wall.... But it was reserved to the spirit of atheism of an age, to talk of a Cockney writing a tragedy. When the mind ceases to believe in a Providence, it can believe in anything else; but the pious soul feels that while to dream, even in sleep, that a Cockney had written a successful tragedy, would be repugnant to reason; certainly a more successful tragedy could not be imagined, from the utter destruction of Cockaigne and all its inhabitants. An earthquake or a shower of lava would be too complimentary to the Cockneys; but what do you think of a shower of soot from a multitude of foul chimneys, and the smell of gas from exploded pipes. Something might be made of the idea.... The truth is, that these mongrel and doggerel drivellers have an instinctive abhorrence of a true poet; and they all ran out like so many curs baying at the feet of the Pegasus on which Byron rode ... and the eulogists of homely, and fireside, and little back-parlour incest, what could they imagine of the unseduceable spirit of the spotless Angiolina?... When Elliston, ignorant of what one gentleman owes to another, or driven by stupidity to forget it, brought the Doge on the stage, how crowed the Bantam Cocks of Cockaigne to see it damned!... But Manfred and the Doge are not dead; while all that small fry have disappeared in the mud, and are dried up like so many tadpoles in a ditch, under the summer drowth. ‘Lord Byron,’ quoth Mr. Leigh Hunt, ‘has about as much dramatic genius as ourselves!’ He might as well have said, ‘Lucretia had about as much chastity as my own heroine in Rimini;’ or, ‘Sir Phillip Sidney was about as much of the gentleman as myself!’”[480]

Byron’s attitude toward the Cockney School was expressed in a letter written to John Murray during the Bowles controversy:

“With the rest of his (Hunt’s) young people I have no acquaintance, except through some things of theirs (which have been sent out without my desire), and I confess that till I had read them I was not aware of the full extent of human absurdity. Like Garrick’s ‘Ode to Shakespeare,’ they ‘defy criticism.’ These are of the personages who decry Pope.... Mr. Hunt redeems himself by occasional beauties; but the rest of these poor creatures seem so far gone that I would not ‘march through Coventry with them, that’s flat!’ were I in Mr. Hunt’s place. To be sure, he has ‘led his ragamuffins where they will be well peppered’; but a system-maker must receive all sorts of proselytes. When they have really seen life—when they have felt it—when they have travelled beyond the far distant boundaries of the wilds of Middlesex—when they have overpassed the Alps of Highgate, and traced to its sources the Nile of the New River—then, and not till then, can it properly be permitted to them to despise Pope.... The grand distinction of the under forms of the new school of poets is their vulgarity. By this I do not mean that they are coarse, but ‘shabby-genteel,’ as it is termed. A man may be coarse and yet not vulgar, and the reverse.... It is in their finery that the new school are most vulgar, and they may be known by this at once; as what we called at Harrow “A Sunday blood” might be easily distinguished from a gentleman, although his clothes might be the better cut, and his boots the best blackened of the two:—probably because he made the one or cleaned the other, with his own hands.... In the present case, I speak of writing, not of persons. Of the latter I know nothing; of the former I judge as it is found.”[481]

Byron’s opinion of Keats is too well known to need repetition. He thought there was hope for Barry Cornwall if “he don’t get spoiled by green tea and the praises of Pentonville and Paradise Row. The pity of these men is, that they never lived in high life nor in solitude: there is no medium for the knowledge of the busy or the still world. If admitted into high life for a season, it is merely as spectators—they form no part of the mechanism thereof.”[482]

Blackwood’s of December, 1822, in a review of The Liberal, advised Byron to “cut the Cockney”—“by far the most unaccountable of God’s works.” Hunt is denominated “the menial of a lord.” When Byron notwithstanding its advice continued his “conjunction with these deluded drivellers of Cockaigne” Blackwood’s grew savage towards the peer himself: it is said that he suffered himself

“to be so enervated by the unworthy Delilahs which have enslaved his imagination, as to be reduced to the foul office of displaying blind buffooneries before the Philistines of Cockaigne ... I feel a moral conviction that his lordship must have taken the Examiner, the Liberal, the Rimini, the Round Table, as his model, and endeavored to write himself down to the level of the capacities and the swinish tastes of those with whom he has the misfortune, originally, I believe, from charitable motives, to associate. This is the most charitable hypothesis which I can frame. Indeed there are some verses which have all the appearance of having been interpolated by the King of the Cockneys.”[483]

When Byron and Hunt had separated, Blackwood’s attempted to reinstate Byron in his former position by declaring that he had been disgusted beyond endurance on Hunt’s arrival in Italy and that he had cut him very soon in a “paroxysm of loathing.”[484]

The declaration of war between the Cockneys and the Tory press was made with a review of the Story of Rimini in the Quarterly of January, 1816. From this time on Hunt was the choice prey of the two magazines, and others were attacked principally on account of him, or reached through him. Hunt’s writings were termed “eruptions of a disease” with which he insists upon “inoculating mankind;” his language “an ungrammatical, unauthorized, chaotic jargon.” Blackwood’s of October, 1817, contained the first of the long series of abusive articles which appeared in its columns. Hazlitt in the Edinburgh Review in June of the preceding year had acclaimed the Story of Rimini to be “a reminder of the pure and glorious style that prevailed among us before French modes and French methods of criticism.” In it he had discovered a resemblance to Chaucer, to the voluptuous pathos of Boccaccio and to the laughing graces of Ariosto. To offset such statements Blackwood’s dubbed the new school the “Cockney School” and made Hunt its chief doctor and professor. (Later, in 1823, Blackwood’s proudly claimed the honor of christening and said that the Quarterly used the epithet only when it had become a part of English criticism.) It declared the dedication to Byron an insult and the poem the product of affectation and gaudiness and continued:

“The beaux are attorney’s apprentices, with chapeau bras and Limerick gloves—fiddlers, harp teachers, and clerks of genius: the belles are faded, fan-twinkling spinsters, prurient vulgar misses from school, and enormous citizen’s wives. The company are entertained with luke-warm negus, and the sounds of a paltry piano forte.... His poetry resembles that of a man who has kept company with kept-mistresses. His muse talks indelicately like the tea-sipping milliner’s girl. Some excuse for her there might have been, had she been hurried away by imagination or passion; but with her, indecency seems a disease, she appears to speak unclean things from perfect inanition.” Hunt “would fain be always tripping and waltzing, and he is very sorry that he cannot be allowed to walk about in the morning with yellow breeches and flesh-colored silk stockings. He sticks an artificial rosebud in his button hole in the midst of winter. He wears no neckcloth, and cuts his hair in imitation of the prints of Petrarch.”

Nature in the eyes of a Cockney was said to consist only of “green fields, jaunty streams, and o’er-arching leafiness;” no mountains were higher than Highgate-hill nor streams more pastoral than the Serpentine River.[485] Blackwood’s was near the truth in its criticism of Hunt’s conception of nature. While his appreciation was very genuine, it was restricted to rural or suburban scenes, “of the town, towny.”[486] The scale was that of the window garden or a flower pot. Who but he could rhapsodize over a cut flower or a bit of green; or could speak in spring “of being gay and vernal and daffodilean?”[487] Yet he produced some delightful rural poetry. Take this for instance:

“You know the rural feeling, and the charm
That stillness has for a world-fretted ear,
’Tis now deep whispering all about me here,
With thousand tiny bushings, like a swarm
Of atom bees, or fairies in alarm
Or noise of numerous bliss from distant spheres.”[488]

The general characteristics of the school, briefly summarized, were said to be ignorance and vulgarity, an entire absence of religion, a vague and sour Jacobinism for patriotism, admiration of Chaucer and Spenser when they resemble Hunt, and extreme moral depravity and obscenity. November, 1817, of Blackwood’s contained the notorious accusation against the Story of Rimini of immorality of purpose.[489] The poem was called “the genteel comedy of incest.” Francesca’s sin was declared voluntary and her sufferings sentimental. The changes from the historical version, an espousal by proxy instead of betrothal, the omission of deformity, the substitution of the duel for murder, and the happy opening, were pronounced wilful perversions for the furtherance of corruption. Ford’s treatment of the same theme much more elevated. Hunt’s defense was that the catastrophe was Francesca’s sufficient punishment.[490] In May, 1818, the same charge was repeated: “No woman who has not either lost her chastity, or is desirous of losing it, ever read the ‘Story of Rimini’ without the flushings of shame and of self-reproach.”

The Examiner of November 2 and 16, 1817, quoted extracts from the first of these articles and called upon the author to avow himself; otherwise to an “utter disregard of Truth and Decency, he adds the height of Meanness and Cowardice.”[491] As might have been expected, this demand brought forth nothing more than a disavowal from the London publishers who handled Blackwood’s of all responsibility in the matter. June 14, 1818, The Examiner assailed the editor of the Quarterly as a government critic who disguised a political quarrel in literary garb, as a sycophant to power and wealth:

“Grown old in the service of corruption, he drivels on to the last with prostituted impotence, and shameless effrontery; salves a meagre reputation for wit, by venting the driblets of his spleen and impertinence on others; answers their arguments by confuting himself; mistakes habitual obtuseness of intellect for a particular acuteness, not to be imposed upon by shallow pretensions; unprincipled rancor for zealous loyalty; and the irritable, discontented, vindictive, and peevish effusions of bodily pain and mental infirmity, for proofs of refinement of taste and strength of understanding.”

This condescension to a use of his enemies’ weapons only weakened Hunt’s position. Yet in the light of the secrecy maintained at the time and the mystery surrounding the matter ever since, it is interesting to read Blackwood’s contorted reply to Hunt’s demand for an open fight, written as late as January, 1826:

“Nor let it be said that, either on this or any other occasion, the moral Satyrists (sic) in this magazine ever wished to remain unknown. How, indeed, could they wish for what they well knew was impossible? All the world has all along known the names of the gentlemen who have uttered our winged words. Nor did it ever, for one single moment, enter into the head of any one of them to wish—not to scorn concealment. To gentlemen, too, they at all times acted like gentlemen; but was it ever dreamt by the wildest that they were to consider as such the scum of the earth? ‘If I but knew who was my slanderer,’ was at one time the ludicrous skraigh of the convicted Cockney. Why did he not ask? and what would he have got by asking? Shame and confusion of face—unanswerable argument and cruel chastisement. For before one word would have been deigned to the sinner, he must have eaten—and the bitter roll is yet ready for him—all the lies he had told for the last twenty years, and must either have choked or been kicked.”

In January, 1818, Blackwood’s issued a manifesto of their future campaign. The Keatses, Shelleys, and Webbes, were to be taken in turn. The charges of profligacy and obscenity against Hunt’s poem were repeated, but it was emphatically stated that there was no implication made in reference to his private character—an ominous statement that any one with any knowledge of Blackwood’s usual methods could only construe into a warning that such an implication would speedily follow. The article was signed “Z,” a shadowy personage who sorrowfully called himself the “present object” of Hunt’s resentment and dislike. He seems to have expected gratitude and affection in return for articles that would compare favorably with the most scurrilous billingsgate of any of the Humanistic controversies. In May, 1818, with due ceremony, Hunt was proclaimed “King of the Cockneys” and editor of the Cockney Court-gazette. His kingdom was the “Land of Cockaigne,” a borrowing, most probably, from the thirteenth century satire by that name. Keats’s sonnet containing the line “He of the rose, the violet, the spring” became the official Cockney poem—by an “amiable but infatuated bardling.” John Hunt was made Prince John. With the lapse of time Hunt’s crimes seem to have multiplied. He is called a lunatic, a libeller, an abettor of murder and of assassination, a coward, an incendiary, a Jacobin, a plebeian and a foe to virtue. He is instructed, if sickened with the sins and follies of mankind, to withdraw

“to the holy contemplation of your own divine perfections, and there ‘perk up with timid mouth’ ‘and lamping eyes’ (as you have it) upon what to you is dearer and more glorious than all created things besides, till you become absorbed in your own identity—motionless, mighty, and magnificent, in the pure calm of Cockneyism ... instead of rousing yourself from your lair, like some noble beast when attacked by the hunter, you roll yourself round like a sick hedgehog, that has crawled out into the ‘crisp’ gravel walk round your box at Hampstead, and oppose only the feeble pricks of your hunch’d-up back to the kicks of any one who wishes less to hurt you, than to drive you into your den.”

The Quarterly of the same month contained the notorious review of Foliage. Southey, in a counterfeited Cockney style, contorts Hunt’s devotion to his leafy luxuries, his flowerets, wine, music and other social joys into Epicureanism[492] and like unsound principles. He even goes so far as to accuse him of incest and adultery in his private life. There are disguised but unmistakable references to Keats and to Shelley; the latter is credited with evil doings that fall little short of machinations with the devil. The volume of poems, which was the ostensible pretext for this parade of foul slander, not a word of which was true, has, Southey says, richness of language and picturesqueness of imagery.[493] The July number of Blackwood’s went a step beyond Southey and identified the characters of the Story of Rimini with Hunt and his sister-in-law, Elizabeth Kent. After ostentatiously giving currency to the scandal, “Z” then proceeds to deny the rumor—which had no existence save in the minds of Hunt’s vilifiers—in order to preserve immunity from libel. At the time that Lamb replied to Southey in 1823 he took up these charges made against Hunt in 1818. He said:

“I was admitted to his household for several years, and do most solemnly aver that I believe him to be in his domestic relations as correct as any man. He chose an ill-judged subject for a poem.... In spite of ‘Rimini,’ I must look upon its author as a man of taste and a poet. He is better than so; he is one of the most cordial-minded men that I ever knew, and matchless as a fireside companion. I do not mean to affront or wound your feelings when I say that in his more genial moods, he has often reminded me of you.”[494]

A facetious bit of prose On Sonnet Writing and a Sonnet on Myself in Blackwood’s of April, 1819, parodied excellently the Cockney conceit and mannerisms. The September number contrasted Henry Hunt, the representative of the Cockney School of Politics, with Leigh Hunt, of the Cockney School of Poetry; resenting loudly the claim of the two to prominence for “even Douglasses never had more than one Bell-the-cat at a time.” While Henry Hunt “the brawny white feather of Cockspur-street” addresses street mobs, the other Hunt, “the lank and sallow hypochondriac of the ‘leafy rise’ and ‘farmy fields’ of Hampstead,” “the whining milk-sop sonneteer of the Examiner” is said to speak to a “sorely depressed remnant of ‘single gentlemen’ in lodgings, and single ladies we know not where—a generation affected with headaches, tea-drinking and all the nostalgia of the nerves.” It is hardly necessary to add that there was no connection whatsoever between the two men.

Blackwood’s of October, 1819, announced Foliage to be a posthumous publication of Hunt’s, presented to the public by his three friends, Keats, Haydon and Novello. An affecting picture is drawn of the now-departed Hunt in his once familiar costume of dressing-gown, yellow breeches and red slippers, sipping tea, playing whist and writing sonnets. His statement in the preface that a “love of sociability, of the country, and the fine imagination of the Greeks” had prompted the poems is greatly ridiculed. The first is said to have caused his death by an over-indulgence in tea-drinking; his feeling for nature is said to be limited to the lawns, stiles and hedges of Hampstead and his knowledge of the imagination of the Greeks to quotations. The Sonnet On Receiving a Crown of Ivy from Keats came in for especial derision—“a blister clapped on his head” would have been considered more appropriate.

Hunt’s Literary Pocket Books for 1819 and 1820 were reviewed in Blackwood’s in December, 1819, in a remarkably kind article. They are recommended as worth three times the price. The reviewer, who was no other than “Christopher North,” stated that he had purchased six copies. Blackwood’s of September, 1820, reviewed The Indicator; of December, 1821, the 1822 Literary Pocket Book; the last contained coarse and unkind allusions to Hunt’s health. It declared the production of sonnets in London and its suburbs about equal to the number of births and deaths. In reply, The Examiner of December 16, 1821, in an article entitled Modern Criticism, italicised extracts from Blackwood’s to bring out peculiarities of grammar and diction. Blackwood’s of January, 1822, contained a sonnet which it was pretended was Hunt’s New Year’s greeting, but which was instead a clever parody on his sonnet-style.The issue of the next month announced the triumvirate of The Liberal and, through Byron’s “noble generosity,” Hunt’s departure with his wife and “little Johnnys” upon a “perilous voyage on the un-cockney ocean.... He and his companions will now, like his own Nereids,

turn
And toss upon the ocean’s lifting billows,
Making them banks and pillows,
Upon whose springiness they lean and ride;
Some with an inward back; some upward-eyed,
Feeling the sky; and some with sidelong hips,
O’er which the surface of the water slips.”

The first number of the Noctes AmbrosianÆ appeared in March. The following passage refers to the launching of The Liberal in a dialogue between the Editor and O’Doherty:

O. Hand me the lemons. This holy alliance of Pisa will be a queer affair. The Examiner has let down its price from a tenpenny to a sevenpenny. They say the Editor here is to be one of that faction, for they must publish in London, of course.

Ed. Of course, but I doubt if they will be able to sell many. Byron is a prince, but these dabbling dogglerers destroy every dish they dip in.

O. Apt alliteration’s artful aid.

Ed. Imagine Shelly [sic], with his spavin, and Hunt, with his staingalt, going in harness with such a caperer as Byron, three-a-breast. He’ll knock the wind out of them both the first canter.

O. ’Tis pity Keats is dead.—I suppose you could not venture to publish a sonnet in which he is mentioned now? The Quarterly (who killed him, as Shelly says) would blame you.

Ed. Let’s hear it. Is it your own?

O. No; ’twas written many months ago by a certain great Italian genius, who cuts a figure about the London routs—one Fudgiolo.

Ed. Try to recollect it. (Here follows the sonnet.)

Blackwood’s of December, 1822, had passages on the Cockney School in Noctes AmbrosianÆ. Number VII. of the series of articles on its members reviewed Hunt’s Florentine Lovers, or, in their phrasing, his Art of Love, the story of which is wilfully misrepresented. Hunt is declared “the most irresistible knight-errant errotic extant ... the most contemptible little capon of the bantam breed that ever vainly dropped a wing, or sidled up to a partlet. He can no more crow than a hen. Byron makes love like Sir Peter, Moore like a tom-tit and Hunt like a bantam.” The writer then charges Hunt with irreligion, indecency, sensuality and licentiousness. He is called “A Fool” and an “exquisite idiot.” Such a burst of rage on the part of the anti-Cockneys, after their wrath had begun to cool as seen in the review of the Literary Pocket Book, was doubtless due to Hunt’s association in The Liberal with Byron: “What can Byron mean by patronizing a Cockney?... by far the most unaccountable of God’s works ... a scavenger raking in the filth of the common sewers and stews, for a few gold pieces thrown down by a nobleman.... But that Satan should stoop to associate with an incubus, shows that there is degeneracy in hell.” The tirade closes with a poem of six stanzas of which this is a fair sample:

“The kind Cockney Monarch, he bids us farewell
Taking his place in the Leghorn-bound smack—
In the smack, in the smack—Ah! will he ne’er come back?”

At the appearance of the last number of The Liberal, Blackwood’s rejoiced thus:

“Their hum, to be sure, is awfully subdued. They remind me of a mutchkin of wasps in a bottle, all sticking to each other—heads and tails—rumps glued with treacle and vinegar, wax and pus—helpless, hopeless, stingless, wingless, springless—utterly abandoned of air—choked and choking—mutually entangling and entangled—and mutually disgusting and disgusted—the last blistering ferment of incarnate filth working itself into one mass of oblivion in one bruised and battered sprawl of swipes and venom.”[495]

Blackwood’s of October, 1823, declared Hazlitt to be the most loathsome and Hunt the most ludicrous of the group. Before the close of the year Hunt threatened the magazine with a suit for libel. This threat did not prevent in January a notice of Hunt’s Ultra-Crepidarius, a satire on Gifford much in the vein and style of the Feast of the Poets. Mercury and Venus come to earth in search of the former’s lost shoe. On their arrival they discover that it has been converted by command of the gods into a man named Gifford. The satire is facetiously attributed by Blackwood’s to Master Hunt, aged ten; a “small, smart, smattering satirist of an air-haparent ... Cockney chick.” The parent is reproached for putting a child in such a position.

“Had Leigh Hunt, the papa, boldly advanced on any great emergency, at the peril of his life and crown, to snatch the legitimate issue of his own loins from the shrivelled hands of some blear-eyed old beldam, into whose small cabbage-garden Maximilian had headed a forlorn hope, good and well, and beautiful; but not so, when a stalwart and cankered carl like Mr. Gifford, with his quarter-staff, belabours the shoulders of his Majesty, and sire shoves son between himself and the Pounder ... such pusillanimity involves forfeiture of the Crown, and from this hour we declare Leigh dethroned, and the boy-bard of Ultra-Crepidarius King of Cockaigne.”

Wearying of this make-believe, the reviewer discards such a possibility of authorship and considers Hunt’s grandfather, a legendary personage whose age is put at ninety-six and who is given the name of Zachariah Hunt: “What a gross, vulgar, leering old dog it is! Was ever the couch of the celestials so profaned before! One thinks of some aged cur, with mangy back, glazed eye-balls dropping rheum, and with most disconsolate muzzard muzzling among the fleas of his abominable loins, by some accident lying upon the bed where Love and Beauty are embracing and embraced.” As a final potentiality the reviewer deliberates whether Hunt by any possibility could have been the author and closes with this peroration: “There he goes soaking, and swaling, and straddling up the sky, like Daniel O’Rouke on goose back!... Toes in if you please. The goose is galloping—why don’t you stand in the stirrups?... Alas Pegasus smells his native marshes; instead of making for Olympus, he is off in a wallop to the fens of Lincolnshire! Bellerophon has lost his seat—now he clings desperately by the tail—a single feather holds him from eternity.”

Article VIII of the regular series, reviewing Hunt’s Bacchus in Tuscany, appeared in Blackwood’s of August, 1825. His allegiance to Apollo in Cockaigne is declared to have been changed to Bacchus in Tuscany, and his usual beverage of weak tea to a diet of wine on which he swills like a hippopotamus. He is depicted as Jupiter Tonans and his manner to Hebe is compared with a “natty Bagman to the barmaid of the Hen and Chickens.” The same number noticed Sotheby’s translation of Homer. The opportunity was not lost to refer unfavorably to Hunt’s translations of the same in Foliage.

The Rebellion of the Beasts; or The Ass is Dead! Long Live the Ass!!! By a Late Fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge, with the motto “A man hath pre-eminence above a beast,” was published anonymously by J. & H. L. Hunt in London in 1825. There is every reason to believe that it was by Hunt, although he does not mention it elsewhere. It is an exceedingly clever satire on monarchy and far surpasses anything else of the kind that he ever did. Had the Tories of Edinburgh suspected the author it would probably have made them apoplectic with rage.

With Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries the rage of the two periodicals reached a grand climax and seemingly exhausted itself. The Quarterly in March of the same year in which it appeared said: “The last wiggle of expiring imbecility appears in these days to be a volume of personal Reminiscences.” It characterized the book as a melancholy product of coxcombry and cockneyism: as “dirty gabble about men’s wives and men’s mistresses—and men’s lackeys, and even the mistresses of the lackeys:” as “the miserable book of a miserable man; the little airy fopperies of its manner are like the fantastic trip and convulsive simpers of some poor worn-out wanton, struggling between famine and remorse, leering through her tears.” Blackwood’s of the same month pictured Hunt riding in the tourney lists of Cockaigne to the tune of Cock-a-doodle-doo. It accused him, besides those misdemeanors many times previously exploited, of clumsy casuistry, of falsehood regarding his transaction with Colburn, of ill-breeding in dragging his wife into such a book. The following is the culmination of the author’s anger:

“Mr. Hunt, who to the prating pertness of the parrot, the chattering impudence of the magpie—to say nothing of the mowling malice of the monkey—adds the hissiness of the bill-pouting gander, and the gobble-bluster of the bubbly-jock—to say nothing of the forward valour of the brock or badger—threatens death and destruction to all writers of prose or verse, who shall dare to say white is the black of his eye, or that his book is not like a vase lighted up from within with the torch of truth ... Frezeland Bantam is the vainest bird that attempts to crow; and by and by our feverish friend comes out into the light, and begins to trim his plumage! His toilet over he basks on the ditch side, and has not the smallest doubt in the world that he is a Bird of Paradise.”

The Literary Gazette joined in the hue-and-cry against “the pert vulgarity and miserable low-mindedness of Cockney-land,” against “the disagreeable, envious, bickering, hating, slandering, contemptible, drivelling and be-devilling wretches.”[496] Blackwood’s of February, 1830, in a review of Moore’s Life, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, satirizes the conversational habits of the Cockneys “who all keep chattering during meals and after them, like so many monkeys, emulous and envious of each other’s eloquence, and pulling out with their paws fetid observations from their cheek-pouches, which are nuts to them, though instead of kernel, nothing but snuff.”

Not only did the articles in Blackwood’s cease after this last, but in 1834 a full and complete apology was tendered Hunt by Christopher North:

“And Shelley truly loved Leigh Hunt. Their friendship was honorable to both, for it was as disinterested as sincere; and I hope Gurney will let a certain person in the City understand that I treat his offer of a reviewal of Mr. Hunt’s London Journal with disdain. If he has anything to say against us or that gentleman, either conjunctly or severally, let him out with it in some other channel; and I promise him a touch and taste of the crutch. He talks to me of Maga’s desertion of principle; but if he were a Christian—nay, a man—his heart and his head would tell him that the Animosities are mortal, but the Humanities live for ever—and that Leigh Hunt has more talent in his little finger than the puling prig, who has taken upon himself to lecture Christopher North in a scrawl crawling with forgotten falsehoods.”[497]

Professor Wilson’s invitation to Hunt to contribute to his magazine was declined politely but firmly. Leigh Hunt wrote to Charles Cowden Clarke: “Blackwood’s and I, poetically, are becoming the best friends in the world. The other day there was an Ode in Blackwood in honour of the memory of Shelley; and I look for one of Keats. I hope this will give you faith in glimpses of the Golden Age.”[498] Nowhere does Hunt show resentment or malice for the sufferings of years. Yet Mrs. Oliphant, in her advocacy of the Blackwood group, goes the length of saying that he displayed “feebleness of mind and body,” “petty meannesses,” “unwillingness or incapacity to take a high view even of friends or benefactors,” a lightheartedness and frivolity, and “enduring spite.” She grudgingly admits his “almost feminine grace and charm.” She says that he thought his friends deserved only “casual thanks when they did what was but their manifest duty ... bitter and spiteful satire when they attended to their own affairs instead.” She makes a radically false statement when she says that he defended Byron, Shelley, Keats, Moore, and many others in The Examiner, but found an opportunity to say an evil word of most of them afterwards; and that when Blackwood’s or the Quarterly attacked him, he was convinced that “it must be really one of his friends who was being struck at through him.”[499]

The Quarterly delayed longer in assuming a friendly attitude. It remained silent until 1867, when Bulwer, in a comparison of Hunt and Hazlitt, conceded to the former a gracefulness and kindliness of disposition, a smoothness of tone and delicacy of finish in his writing. There was no formal apology as in the case of Blackwood’s.

Carlyle says that Hunt suffered an “obloquy and calumny through the Tory press—perhaps a greater quantity of baseness, persevering, implacable calumny, than any other living writer has undergone; which long course of hostility ... may be regarded as the beginning of his worst distresses, and a main cause of them down to this day.”[500] Macaulay said: “There is hardly a man living whose merits have been so grudgingly allowed, and whose faults have been so cruelly expiated.”[501] For a period of more than a quarter of a century, from the beginning of the crusade against him until about 1845, partly as the result of the misrepresentation of the press, and partly as a natural consequence of his own foibles and early blunders, a pretty general antagonism existed against him. At the end of that time his honesty and talents were recognized and rewarded publicly by the government. And the public has come more and more to esteem his personal character.

The Quarterly of April, 1818, contained the stupid and savage review of Endymion, provoked almost solely by the Keats’s offence in being the friend and public protÉgÉ of Leigh Hunt. The simple and manly preface[502] was misconstrued into a formula for Huntian poetry, and its allusion to a “London drizzle or a Scotch mist” into a “deprecation of criticism in a feverish manner.” Leigh Hunt asked years afterwards how “anybody could answer such an appeal to the mercy of strength with the cruelty of weakness. All the good for which Mr. Gifford pretended to be zealous, he might have effected with pain to no one, and glory to himself; and therefore all the evil he mixed with it was of his own making.”[503] The general trend of the article and the reviewer’s acknowledgment that he had read only the first book of the poem are well known. The following passage refers directly to Keats’s connection with Hunt:

“The author is a copyist of Mr. Hunt, but he is more unintelligible, almost as rugged, twice as diffuse, and ten times more tiresome and absurd than his prototype; who, though he impudently presumed to seat himself in the chair of criticism, and to measure his own poetry by his own standard, yet generally had a meaning. But Mr. Keats advanced no dogmas which he was bound to support by examples; his nonsense is therefore quite gratuitous; he writes it for his own sake, and, being bitten by Mr. Leigh Hunt’s insane criticism, more than rivals the insanity of his poetry.”[504]

Blackwood’s followed the Quarterly’s lead in August, reviewing Keats’s first volume at the same time with Endymion. He is reproached with madness, with metromania, with low origin, with perversion of talents suited only to an apprenticeship, all because he admired Hunt sufficiently to adopt some of his theories and because he had been called in The Examiner one of “two stars of glorious magnitude.” The sonnet Written on the day that Mr. Leigh Hunt left prison, the Sonnet to Haydon, and Sleep and Poetry, are anathematized. In the last Keats is said to speak with

“contempt of some of the most exquisite spirits that the world ever produced, merely because they did not happen to exert their faculties in laborious affected descriptions of flowers seen in window-pots, or cascades heard at Vauxhall; in short, because they chose to be wits, philosophers, patriots, and poets, rather than to found the Cockney school of versification, morality and politics, a century before its time. After blaspheming himself into a fury against Boileau, etc., Mr. Keats comforts himself and his readers with a view of the present more promising state of affairs; above all, with the ripened glories of the poet of Rimini.”

The denunciation of the “calm, settled, drivelling idiocy” of Endymion in the same article is famous, but in a discussion of the Cockney School it is well to recall the following:

“From his prototype Hunt, John Keats has acquired a sort of vague idea, that the Greeks were a most tasteful people, and that no mythology can be so finely adopted for the purpose of poetry as theirs. It is amusing to see what a hand the Cockneys make of this mythology; the one confesses that he never read the Greek Tragedians and the other knows Homer only from Chapman; and both of them write about Apollo, Pan, Nymphs, Muses, and Mysteries, as might be expected from persons of their education. We shall not, however, enlarge at present upon this subject, as we mean to dedicate an entire paper to the classical attainments and attempts of the Cockney poets.”

The versification is said to expose the defects of Hunt’s system ten times more than Hunt’s own poetry. The mocking close is as follows: “It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop, Mr. John, back to ‘plasters, pills, and ointment boxes,’ etc. But, for Heaven’s sake, young Sangrado, be a little more sparing of extenuatives and soporifics in your practice than you have been in your poetry.”The delusion that these articles were the direct cause of Keats’s death, an impression given wide currency by the passages in Adonais[505] and Don Juan,[506] has long since been dispelled by the evidence of Hunt,[507] Fanny Brawne, C. C. Clarke and, most important of all, Keats’s own letters.[508] It is not likely that he was affected by them as much as either Hunt or Hazlitt, for he showed more indifference and greater dignity under fire than either. His courage and his craving for future fame do not seem to have wavered during the year in which they appeared. Joseph Severn has testified that he never heard Keats mention Blackwood’s and that he considered what his friend endured from the press as “one of the least of his miseries”; that he knew so little about the whole matter that when he met Sir Walter Scott in Rome many years after he was at a loss to understand Scott’s embarrassment when Keats’s name was mentioned; and it was not until a friend afterwards explained that Scott was connected with one of the magazines which was popularly supposed to have caused Keats’s death that he could fathom it.[509]

It would have been impossible for a more obtuse man than Leigh Hunt not to have realized from the import of these two articles that Keats was abused largely because of the association with himself and, but for that, might have remained in peaceful obscurity. Hunt therefore wisely refrained from further defense as it would only have made matters worse. During the year 1818 only one notice of Keats appeared in The Examiner.[510] During the same year three sonnets to Keats appeared in Foliage. Yet it has been several times stated that Hunt forsook Keats at this time. Keats, under the hallucination of disease himself, accused Hunt of neglect, yet there were three reasons which made a persistent defense on the part of Hunt not to be expected. First, he was unaware, according to his own statement, of the extent of the defamation; second, he realized that his championship and friendship had been the original cause of wrath in the enemies’ camp against Keats and that any activity on his part would only incense them further,[511] and third, he did not approve of Keats’s only publication of that year and could not give it his support, as he frankly told Keats himself. Mr. Forman and Mr. Rossetti both scout the idea of disertion and disloyalty. Yet Mr. Hall Caine has made much[512] of a charge which has been denied by Hunt and ultimately repudiated by Keats. He has, moreover, overlooked the fact that Hunt’s bitter satire, Ultra-Crepidarius, was written in 1818 as a reply to Keats’s critics but was withheld from publication, presumably only for reasons of prudence, until 1823. When Keats’s feeling on the subject was brought to his knowledge years later, Hunt wrote:

“Keats appears to have been of opinion that I ought to have taken more notice of what the critics said against him. And perhaps I ought. My notices of them may not have been sufficient. I may have too much contented myself with panegyrizing his genius, and thinking the objections to it of no ultimate importance. Had he given me a hint to another effect, I should have acted upon it. But in truth, as I have before intimated, I did not see a twentieth part of what was said against us; nor had I the slightest notion, at that period, that he took criticism so much to heart. I was in the habit, though a public man, of living in a world of abstractions of my own; and I regarded him as of a nature still more abstracted, and sure of renown. Though I was a politician (so to speak), I had scarcely a political work in my library. Spensers and Arabian Tales filled up the shelves; and Spenser himself was not remoter, in my eyes, from all the common-places of life, than my new friend. Our whole talk was made up of idealisms. In the streets we were in the thick of the old woods. I little suspected, as I did afterwards, that the hunters had struck him; and never at any time did I suspect that he could have imagined it desired by his friends. Let me quit the subject of so afflicting a delusion.”[513]

The Edinburgh Review of August, 1820, discussed Endymion and the 1820 volume. While it lamented the extravagances and obscurities, the “intoxication of sweetness” and the perversion of rhyme, it gave Keats due credit for his genius and his appreciation of the spirit of poetry. Hunt’s review of Lamia[514] and the other poems of the 1820 volume appeared in The Indicator of the same month. Blackwood’s answered the next month, abusing Hunt roundly and faintly praising the poems. The following proves that their chief object was to strike Hunt through Keats:

“It is a pity that this young man, John Keats, author of Endymion, and some other poems, should have belonged to the Cockney School—for he is evidently possessed of talents that, under better direction, might have done very considerable things. As it is, he bids fair to sink himself beneath such a mass of affectation, conceit, and Cockney pedantry, as I never expected to see heaped together by anybody, except the first founder of the School.... There is much merit in some of the stanzas of Mr. Keats’s last volume, which I have just seen; no doubt he is a fine feeling lad—and I hope he will live to despise Leigh Hunt and be a poet.”

Hazlitt, in May of the next year wrote of the persecution of Keats in the Edinburgh Review:

“Nor is it only obnoxious writers on politics themselves, but all their friends and acquaintances, and those whom they casually notice, that come under their sweeping anathema. It is proper to make a clear stage. The friends of Caesar must not be suspected of an amicable intercourse with patriotic and incendiary writers. A young poet comes forward; an early and favourable notice appears of some boyish verses of his in the Examiner, independently of all political opinion. That alone decides fate; and from that moment he is set upon, pulled in pieces, and hunted into his grave by the whole venal crew in full cry after him. It was crime enough that he dared to accept praise from so disreputable a quarter.”

In a letter from Hunt in Italy to The Examiner, July 7, 1822, an inquiry is made why Mr. Gifford has never noticed Keats’s last volume: “that beautiful volume containing Lamia, the story from Boccaccio, and that magnificent fragment Hyperion?” Blackwood’s of August replied to these two defenses in a tirade of twenty-two pages against the Edinburgh Review, Hazlitt, and Hunt. The Noctes AmbrosianÆ of October continued in the same strain and, though the grave should have protected Keats from such banter, revived the old allusions to the apothecary and his pills.

In self defense against the charge, that its attacks and those of the Quarterly had broken Keats’s heart, Blackwood’s in January, 1826, said that it alone had dealt with Keats, Shelley and Procter with “common sense or common feeling”; that, seeing Keats in the road to ruin with the Cockneys, it had “tried to save him by wholesome and severe discipline—they drove him to poverty, expatriation and death.” The most remarkable part of this remarkable justification is this: “Keats outhunted Hunt in a species of emasculated pruriency, that, although invented in Little Britain, looks as if it were the prospect of some imaginative Eunuch’s muse within the melancholy inspiration of the Haram” (sic).

In March, 1828, in a review of Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, the Quarterly seized the opportunity to revert to the author’s friendship for Keats in its old hostile manner; and, in a criticism of Coleridge’s poems in August, 1834, to speak of his “dreamy, half-swooning style of verse criticised by Lord Byron (in language too strong for print) as the fatal sin of Mr. John Keats.” Finally in March, 1840, in Journalism in France, there is another feeble effort at defense; a resentment of the “twaddle” against the Quarterly “when they had the misfortune to criticise a sickly poet, who died soon afterwards, apparently for the express purpose of dishonoring us.”

One of Hunt’s utterances in regard to Keats and his critics disposes finally of the matter: “his fame may now forgive the critics who disliked his politics, and did not understand his poetry.”[515]

From Italy Shelley wrote to Peacock:

“I most devoutly wish I were living near London.... My inclination points to Hampstead; but I do not know whether I should not make up my mind to something more completely suburban. What are mountains, trees, heaths, or even glorious and ever beautiful sky, with such sunsets as I have seen at Hampstead, to friends? Social enjoyment, in some form or other, is the Alpha and the Omega of existence. All that I see in Italy—and from my tower window I now see the magnificent peaks of the Apennine half enclosing the plain—is nothing. It dwindles into smoke in the mind, when I think of some familiar forms of scenery, little perhaps in themselves, over which old remembrances have thrown a delightful colour.”[516]

The attacks of the Quarterly of May, 1818, on Shelley’s private life and of April, 1819, on the Revolt of Islam, and the reply of The Examiner, have already been discussed on p. 77 of the third chapter. The assault was renewed in October, 1821. The dominating characteristic of Shelley’s poetry is said to be “its frequent and total want of meaning.” In Prometheus Unbound there were said to be many absurdities “in defiance of common sense and even of grammar ... a mere jumble of words and heterogeneous ideas, connected by slight and accidental associations, among which it is impossible to distinguish the principal object from the accessory.” The poem is declared to be full of “flagrant offences against morality and religion” and the poet to have gone out of his way to “revile Christianity and its author.” As a final verdict the reviewer says: “Mr. Shelley’s poetry is, in sober sadness, drivelling prose run mad.... Be his private qualities what they may, his poems ... are at war with reason, with taste, with virtue, in short, with all that dignifies man, or that man reveres.” The London Literary Gazette joined its forces to the Quarterly and scored Prometheus Unbound in 1820, Queen Mab in 1821. The Examiner of June 16, 23 and July 7, 1822, contained Hunt’s answer to the two onslaughts. He accused the writer in the Quarterly of having used six stars to indicate an omission, in order to imply that the name of Christ had been blasphemously used; of having put quotation marks to sentences not in the author criticised and of having intentionally left out so much at times as to make the context seem absurd. At the same time Hunt stated that he agreed that Shelley’s poetry was of “too abstract and metaphysical a cast ... too wilful and gratuitous in its metaphors”; and that it would have been better if he had kept metaphysics and polemics out of poetry. But at the same time he asserted that Shelley had written much that was unmetaphysical and poetically beautiful, as The Cenci, the Ode to a Skylark and Adonais. Of the second he wrote: “I know of nothing more beautiful than this,—more choice of tones, more natural in words, more abundant in exquisite, cordial, and most poetic associations.” He characterized Southey’s reviews as cant, Gifford’s as bitter commonplace and Croker’s as pettifogging.

Blackwood’s reviewed Adonais and The Cenci in December, 1821. The Della Cruscans were reported to have come again from “retreats of Cockney dalliance in the London suburbs” and “by wainloads from Pisa.” The Cockneys were said to hate everything that was good and true and honorable, all moral ties and Christian principles, and to be steeped in desperate licentiousness. Adonais is fifty-five stanzas of “unintelligible stuff” made up of every possible epithet that the poet has been able to “conglomerate in his piracy through the Lexicon.” The sense has been wholly subordinated to the rhymes. The author is a “glutton of names and colours” and has accomplished no more than might be done on such subjects as Mother Goose, Waterloo or Tom Thumb. Two cruel and loathsome parodies follow: Wouther the city marshal broke his leg and an Elegy on My Tom Cat, which, it is claimed, are less nonsensical, verbose and inflated than Adonais. The Cenci is “a vulgar vocabulary of rottenness and reptilism” in an “odiferous, colorific and daisy-enamoured style.” It is regretted by the writer that it is impossible to believe that Shelley’s reason is unsettled, for this would be the best apology for the poem.[517]When The Liberal was organized Shelley was spoken of thus:

“But Percy Bysshe Shelly has now published a long series of poems, the only object of which seems to be the promotion of atheism and incest; and we can no longer hesitate to avow our belief, that he is as worthy of co-operating with the King of Cockaigne, as he is unworthy of co-operating with Lord Byron. Shelley is a man of genius, but he has no sort of sense or judgment. He is merely ‘an inspired idiot.’ Leigh Hunt is a man of talents, but vanity and vulgarity neutralize all his efforts to pollute the public mind. Lord Byron we regard not only as a man of lofty genius, but of great shrewdness and knowledge of the world. What can HE seriously hope from associating his name with such people as these?”[518]

As in the case of Keats, Blackwood’s did not have the decency to desist from its indecent articles after Shelley’s death. September, 1824, this vulgar ridicule of the two dead poets appeared in answer to Bryan Waller Procter’s review of Shelley’s poems in the preceding number of the Edinburgh Review:

“Mr. Shelley died, it seems, with a volume of Mr. Keats’s poetry grasped with the hand in his bosom—rather an awkward posture, as you will be convinced if you try it. But what a rash man Shelley was, to put to sea in a frail boat with Jack’s poetry on board. Why, man, it would sink a trireme. In the preface to Mr. Shelley’s poems we are told that his ‘vessel bore out of sight with a favorable wind;’ but what is that to the purpose? It had Endymion on board, and there was an end. Seventeen ton of pig iron would not be more fatal ballast. Down went the boat with a ‘swirl’! I lay a wager that it righted soon after evicting Jack.”

In the face of these articles against it as evidence, Blackwood’s, as early as January, 1828, had the audacity to claim—perhaps with the expectation that its audience was gifted with a sense of subtle humor—that Shelley had been praised in its pages for his fortitude, patience, and many other noble qualities, and that this praise had irritated the other Cockneys and made the whole trouble. If Keats suffered at the hands of the Edinburgh dictators for his association with Hunt the balance weighed in the other direction in the case of Shelley. All the crimes and opinions of which he was deemed guilty were passed on to Hunt. But Hunt gladly suffered for Shelley.Hazlitt, although of Irish descent and a native of Shropshire, and of such independence as to belong to no school whatsoever, came in for a share of abuse second only in virulence to that showered on Hunt.[519] In the Quarterly of April, 1817, in a review of the Round Table, probably in retaliation for his abuse of Southey in The Examiner, Hazlitt’s papers are denominated “vulgar descriptions, silly paradoxes, flat truisms, misty sophistry, broken English, ill-humour and rancorous abuse.” His characterizations of Pitt and Burke are “vulgar and foul invective,” and “loathsome trash.” The author might have described washerwomen forever, the reviewer asserts, “but if the creature, in his endeavours to see the light, must make his way over the tombs of illustrious men, disfiguring the records of their greatness with the slime and filth which marks his tracks, it is right to point out that he may be flung back to the situation in which nature designed that he should grovel.”

The Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays was made an excuse for dissecting the morals and understanding of this “poor cankered creature.”[520] The Lectures on the English Poets is characterized as a “third predatory incursion on taste and common sense ... either completely unintelligible, or exhibits only faint and dubious glimpses of meaning ... of that happy texture that leaves not a trace in the mind of either reader or hearer.”[521] The Political Essays was said to mark the writer as a death’s head hawk-moth, a creature already placed in a state of damnation, the drudge of The Examiner, the ward of Billingsgate, the slanderer of the human race, one of the plagues of England.[522] Later, in a discussion of Table Talk,[523] he becomes a “Slang-Whanger“ (“a gabbler who employs slang to amuse the rabble”).

Hazlitt’s Letter to Gifford, 1819, was a reply to all previous attacks of the Quarterly. For a pamphlet of eighty-seven pages on such a subject it is “lively reading,” for Hazlitt, like Burke, as Mr. Birrell has remarked, excelled in a quarrel.[524] He calls Gifford a cat’s paw, the Government critic, the paymaster of the band of Gentleman Pensioners, a nuisance, a

“dull, envious, pragmatical, low-bred man.... Grown old in the service of corruption, he drivels on to the last with prostituted impotence and shameless effrontery; salves a meagre reputation for wit, by venting the driblets and spleen of his wrath on others; answers their arguments by confuting himself; mistakes habitual obtuseness of intellect for a particular acuteness; not to be imposed upon by shallow appearances; unprincipled rancour for zealous loyalty; and the irritable, discontented, vindictive, peevish effusions of bodily pain and mental imbecility for proofs of refinement of taste and strength of understanding.”[525]

Blackwood’s had accepted abstracts of Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Poets[526] from P. G. Patmore without comment and even managed a lengthy comparison of Jeffrey and Hazlitt with an approach to fair dealing. But by August, 1818, he had been identified with the “Cockney crew” and he became “that wild, black-bill Hazlitt,” a “lounge in third-rate bookshops”; and as a critic of Shakspere, a gander gabbling at that “divine swan.” In April of the following year he was christened the “Aristotle” of the Cockneys. His Table Talk provoked ten pages of vituperation,[527] and Liber Amoris, two reviews as coarse as the provocation.[528] In the first of these, apropos of his contributions to the Edinburgh Review and in particular of his article on the Periodical Press of Britain, the downfall of the magazine and its editor is announced as certain. Hazlitt is called a literary flunky, a sore, an ulcer, a poor devil. In the second he is Hunt’s orderly, the “Mars of the Hampstead heavy dragoons.”

Hazlitt found relief for his feelings by threatening Blackwood’s with a lawsuit. Yet in July, 1824, appeared an elaborate comparison of Hunt and Hazlitt in Blackwood’s choicest manner and in March, 1825, a review of the Spirit of the Age. After 1828 the defamatory articles ceased entirely. In 1867 appeared what might be construed into an attempt at reparation by Bulwer-Lytton. Hazlitt was still spoken of as the most aggressive of the Cockneys, discourteous and unscrupulous, a bitter politician who would substitute universal submission to Napoleon for established monarchial institutions; but he is credited with strong powers of reason, of judicial criticism and of metaphysical speculation, and with perception of sentiment, truth and beauty.

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