"Nor let it be said that, either on this or any other occasion, the moral Satyrists (sic) in this magazine ever wished to remain unknown. How, indeed, could they wish for what they well knew was impossible? All the world has all along known the names of the gentlemen who have uttered our winged words. Nor did it ever, for one single moment, enter into the head of any one of them to wish--not to scorn concealment. To gentlemen, too, they at all times acted like gentlemen; but was it ever dreamt by the wildest that they were to consider as such the scum of the earth? 'If I but knew who was my slanderer,' was at one time the ludicrous skraigh of the convicted Cockney. Why did he not ask? and what would he have got by asking? Shame and confusion of face--unanswerable argument and cruel chastisement. For before one word would have been deigned to the sinner, he must have eaten--and the bitter roll is yet ready for him--all the lies he had told for the last twenty years, and must either have choked or been kicked." In January, 1818, _Blackwood's_ issued a manifesto of their future campaign. The Keatses, Shelleys, and Webbes, were to be taken in turn. The charges of profligacy and obscenity against Hunt's poem were repeated, but it was emphatically stated that there was no implication made in reference to his private character--an ominous statement that any one with any knowledge of _Blackwood's_ usual methods could only construe into a warning that such an implication would speedily follow. The article was signed "Z," a shadowy personage who sorrowfully called himself the "present object" of Hunt's resentment and dislike. He seems to have expected gratitude and affection in return for articles that would compare favorably with the most scurrilous billingsgate of any of the Humanistic controversies. In May, 1818, with due ceremony, Hunt was proclaimed "King of the Cockneys" and editor of the Cockney Court-gazette. His kingdom was the "Land of Cockaigne," a borrowing, most probably, from the thirteenth century satire by that name. Keats's sonnet containing the line "He of the rose, the violet, the spring" became the official Cockney poem--by an "amiable but infatuated bardling." John Hunt was made Prince John. With the lapse of time Hunt's crimes seem to have multiplied. He is called a lunatic, a libeller, an abettor of murder and of assassination, a coward, an incendiary, a Jacobin, a plebeian and a foe to virtue. He is instructed, if sickened with the sins and follies of mankind, to withdraw