The shallow and impotent pretensions, tenets, and attempts, of this man,—­and the success with which his influence seems to be extending itself among a pretty numerous, though certainly a very paltry and pitiful, set of readers,—­have for the last two or three years been considered by us with the most sickening aversion.  The very culpable manner in which his chief poem was reviewed in the Edinburgh Review (we believe it is no secret, at his own impatient and feverish request, by his partner in the Round Table), was matter of concern to more readers than ourselves.  The masterly pen which inflicted such signal chastisement on the early licentiousness of Moore, should not have been idle on that occasion.  Mr. Jeffrey does ill when he delegates his important functions into such hands as Mr. Hazlitt.  It was chiefly in consequence of that gentleman’s allowing Leigh Hunt to pass unpunished through a scene of slaughter, which his execution might so highly have graced that we came to the resolution of laying before our readers a series of essays on the Cockney School—­of which here terminates the first. Z.

THE COCKNEY SCHOOL OF POETRY

No.  III

[From Blackwood’s Magazine, July, 1818]

Our hatred and contempt of Leigh Hunt as a writer, is not so much owing to his shameless irreverence to his aged and afflicted king—­to his profligate attacks on the character of the king’s sons—­to his low-born insolence to that aristocracy with whom he would in vain claim the alliance of one illustrious friendship—­to his paid panderism to the vilest passions of that mob of which he is himself a firebrand—­to the leprous crust of self-conceit with which his whole moral being is indurated—­to that loathsome vulgarity which constantly clings round him like a vermined garment from St. Giles’—­to that irritable temper which keeps the unhappy man, in spite even of his vanity, in a perpetual fret with himself and all the world beside, and that shews itself equally in his deadly enmities and capricious friendships,—­our hatred and contempt of Leigh Hunt, we say, is not so much owing to these and other causes, as to the odious and unnatural harlotry of his polluted muse.  We were the first to brand with a burning iron the false face of this kept-mistress of a demoralizing incendiary.  We tore off her gaudy veil and transparent drapery, and exhibited the painted cheeks and writhing limbs of the prostitute.  We denounced to the execration of the people of England, the man who had dared to write in the solitude of a cell, whose walls ought to have heard only the sighs of contrition and repentance, a lewd tale of incest, adultery, and murder, in which the violation of Nature herself was wept over, palliated, justified, and held up to imitation, and the violators themselves worshipped as holy martyrs.  The story of Rimini had begun to have its admirers; but their deluded minds were startled at our charges,—­and