The unhealthy and jaundiced medium through which the Founder of the Cockney School views every thing like moral truth, is apparent, not only from his obscenity, but also from his want of respect for all that numerous class of plain upright men, and unpretending women, in which the real worth and excellence of human society consists.  Every man is, according to Mr. Hunt, a dull potato-eating blockhead—­of no greater value to God or man than any ox or dray-horse—­who is not an admirer of Voltaire’s romans, a worshipper of Lord Holland and Mr. Haydon and a quoter of John Buncle and Chaucer’s Flower and Leaf.  Every woman is useful only as a breeding machine, unless she is fond of reading Launcelot of the Lake, in an antique summer-house.

How such a profligate creature as Mr. Hunt can pretend to be an admirer of Mr. Wordsworth, is to us a thing altogether inexplicable.  One great charm of Wordsworth’s noble compositions consists in the dignified purity of thought, and the patriarchal simplicity of feeling, with which they are throughout penetrated and imbued.  We can conceive a vicious man admiring with distant awe and spectacle of virtue and purity; but if he does so sincerely, he must also do so with the profoundest feeling of the error of his own ways, and the resolution to amend them.  His admiration must be humble and silent, not pert and loquacious.  Mr. Hunt praises the purity of Wordsworth as if he himself were pure, his dignity as if he also were dignified.  He is always like the ball of Dung in the fable, pleasing himself, and amusing by-standers with his “nos poma natamus.”  For the person who writes Rimini, to admire the Excursion, is just as impossible as it would be for a Chinese polisher of cherry-stones, or gilder of tea-cups, to burst into tears at the sight of the Theseus or the Torso.

The Founder of the Cockney School would fain claim poetical kindred with Lord Byron and Thomas Moore.  Such a connexion would be as unsuitable for them as for William Wordsworth.  The days of Mr. Moore’s follies are long since over; and, as he is a thorough gentleman, he must necessarily entertain the greatest contempt for such an under-bred person as Leigh Hunt.  But Lord Byron!  How must the haughty spirit of Lara and Harold contemn the subaltern sneaking of our modern tuft-hunter.  The insult which he offered to Lord Byron in the dedication of Rimini,—­in which he, a paltry cockney newspaper scribbler, had the assurance to address one of the most nobly-born of English Patricians, and one of the first geniuses whom the world ever produced, as “My dear Byron,” although it may have been forgotten and despised by the illustrious person whom it most nearly concerned,—­excited a feeling of utter loathing and disgust in the public mind, which will always be remembered whenever the name of Leigh Hunt is mentioned.  We dare say Mr. Hunt has some fine dreams about the true nobility being the nobility of talent, and flatters himself, that with those who acknowledge only that sort of rank, he himself passes for being the peer of Byron.  He is sadly mistaken.  He is as completely a Plebeian in his mind as he is in his rank and station in society.  To that highest and unalienated nobility which the great Roman satirist styles “sola atque unica,” we fear his pretensions would be equally unavailing.