Wilson and Lockhart in those days as their admiration for Wordsworth. The sins of their first number are half redeemed by the article in Wordsworth's praise, a really fine, eloquent piece of work in Wilson's boisterous but not undiscriminating manner of laudation. But not even Wordsworth could long escape the random swash of Wilson's bludgeon, and a very few years later his friends were astonished to read a ferocious outbreak against him in one of the _Noctes_ by the same hand. In regard even to the detested Hazlitt the magazine blew in some degree hot and cold, printing through several numbers a series of respectful summaries, supplied from London by Patmore, of his Surrey Institution lectures; in another number a courteous enough estimate of his and Jeffrey's comparative powers in criticism; and a little later taking him to task on one page rudely, but not quite unjustly, for his capricious treatment of Shakespeare's minor poems and on another page addressing to him an insulting catechism full of the vilest personal imputations. The only contemporary whose treatment by the Blackwood trio is truly consistent was Leigh Hunt, and of him it was consistently blackguardly. To return to the first number of the new series, three articles were counted on to create an uproar. First, the aforesaid emptying of the critical slop-pail on Coleridge. Second, the _Translation from an ancient Chaldee Manuscript_, being a biting personal satire, in language parodied from the Bible, on noted Edinburgh characters, including the Blackwood group themselves, disguised under transparent nicknames that stuck, Blackwood as Ebony, Wilson as the Leopard, Lockhart as the Scorpion that delighteth to sting the faces of men. Third, the article on the Cockney School of Poetry, numbered as the first of the series, headed with a quotation from Cornelius Webb, and signed with the initial 'Z.' As a thing to hang gibes on, the quotation from the unlucky Webb is aptly enough chosen:-- Our talk shall be (a theme we never tire on) Of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, (Our England's Dante)--Wordsworth, Hunt, and Keats, The Muses' son of promise, and what feats He yet may do-- Nor are the gibes themselves quite unjustified so far as they touch merely the underbred insipidities of Leigh Hunt's tea-party manner in _Rimini_. But they are as outrageously absurd as they are gross and libellous when they go on to assail both poem and author on the score of immorality.