[87] Same [88] _Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine_, V. ii, p. 285-6 [89] Ibid., V. ii, p. 287 As for the third of the three articles which best illustrate the whoopla-spirit of this new venture, Lockhart’s paper “On the Cockney School of Poetry”, all is said when we say it was the first of a series of corrosive and scurrilous articles directed against Leigh Hunt in particular, and Hazlitt and Webbe, and in general, the “younger and less important members” of that school, “The Shelley’s and the Keatses”! Modern critics! Beware how you cast stones at our Percy Smith’s and Reggie Brown’s! Says our young friend Lockhart in this article that Leigh Hunt is “a man of little education. He knows absolutely nothing of Greek, almost nothing of Latin”[90] ... and so forth and so on. He cannot “utter a dedication, or even a note, without betraying the _Shibboleth_ of low birth and low habits. He is the ideal of a Cockney poet.... He has never seen any mountain higher than Highgate-hill, nor reclined by any streams more pastoral than the Serpentine River. But he is determined to be a poet eminently rural, and he rings the changes--till one is sick of him, on the beauties of the different ‘high views’ which he has taken of God and nature, in the course of some Sunday dinner parties at which he has assisted in the neighborhood of London.... As a vulgar man is perpetually laboring to be genteel--in like manner the poetry of this man is always on the stretch to be grand.”[91] [90] Ibid., V. ii, p. 38 [91] Ibid., V. ii, p. 39 This is just a taste of what is in reality very clever stuff. The subject of approbation or disapprobation had best be omitted. At any rate “Maga” “started something”, for the term “Cockney School” was taken up by the major and minor Reviews and nearly every daily paper of England and Scotland. What Wilson said later (1832) in a review of Tennyson’s poems, characterizes the _Blackwood_ attitude toward the Cockneys from the first: “Were the Cockneys to be to church, we should be strongly tempted to break the Sabbath.”[92] Whatever our evaluation of this sort of criticism, the admission perhaps saves the reputation of Lockhart and other _Blackwood_ critics! Their opposition was more a matter of principle than of judgment. [92] J. H. Millar: _A Literary History of Scotland_, p. 506