CORNELIUS WEBB.

While the whole critical world is occupied with balancing the merits, whether in theory or in execution, of what is commonly called THE LAKE SCHOOL, it is strange that no one seems to think it at all necessary to say a single word about another new school of poetry which has of late sprung up among us.  This school has not, I believe, as yet received any name; but if I may be permitted to have the honour of christening it, it may henceforth be referred to by the designation of THE COCKNEY SCHOOL.  Its chief Doctor and Professor is Mr. Leigh Hunt, a man certainly of some talents, of extravagant pretensions both in wit, poetry, and politics, and withal of exquisitely bad taste, and extremely vulgar modes of thinking and manners in all respects.  He is a man of little education.  He knows absolutely nothing of Greek, almost nothing of Latin, and his knowledge of Italian literature is confined to a few of the most popular of Petrarch’s sonnets, and an imperfect acquaintance with Ariosto, through the medium of Mr. Hoole.  As to the French poets, he dismisses them in the mass as a set of prim, precise, unnatural pretenders.  The truth is, he is in a state of happy ignorance about them and all that they have done.  He has never read Zaire nor Phedre.  To those great German poets who have illuminated the last fifty years with a splendour to which this country has, for a long time, seen nothing comparable, Mr. Hunt is an absolute stranger.  Of Spanish books he has read Don Quixote (in the translation of Motteux), and some poems of Lope de Vega in the imitations of my Lord Holland.  Of all the great critical writers, either of ancient or of modern times, he is utterly ignorant, excepting only Mr. Jeffrey among ourselves.

With this stock of knowledge, Mr. Hunt presumes to become the founder of a new school of poetry, and throws away entirely the chance which he might have had of gaining some true poetical fame, had he been less lofty in his pretensions.  The story of Rimini is not wholly undeserving of praise.  It possesses some tolerable passages, which are all quoted in the Edinburgh Reviewer’s account of the poem, and not one of which is quoted in the very illiberal attack upon it in the Quarterly.  But such is the wretched taste in which the greater part of the work is executed, that most certainly no man who reads it once will ever be able to prevail upon himself to read it again.  One feels the same disgust at the idea of opening Rimini, that impresses itself on the mind of a man of fashion, when he is invited to enter, for a second time, the gilded drawing-room of a little mincing boarding school mistress, who would fain have an At Home in her house.  Every thing is pretence, affectation, finery, and gaudiness.  The beaux are attorneys’ 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 citizens’ wives.  The company are entertained with lukewarm negus, and the sounds of a paltry piano forte.