_Blackwood's_ of December, 1822, had passages on the Cockney School in _Noctes Ambrosianae_. Number VII. of the series of articles on its members reviewed Hunt's _Florentine Lovers_, or, in their phrasing, his _Art of Love_, the story of which is wilfully misrepresented. Hunt is declared "the most irresistible knight-errant errotic extant ... the most contemptible little capon of the bantam breed that ever vainly dropped a wing, or sidled up to a partlet. He can no more crow than a hen. Byron makes love like Sir Peter, Moore like a tom-tit and Hunt like a bantam." The writer then charges Hunt with irreligion, indecency, sensuality and licentiousness. He is called "A Fool" and an "exquisite idiot." Such a burst of rage on the part of the anti-Cockneys, after their wrath had begun to cool as seen in the review of the _Literary Pocket Book_, was doubtless due to Hunt's association in _The Liberal_ with Byron: "What can Byron mean by patronizing a Cockney?... by far the most unaccountable of God's works ... a scavenger raking in the filth of the common sewers and stews, for a few gold pieces thrown down by a nobleman.... But that Satan should stoop to associate with an incubus, shows that there is degeneracy in hell." The tirade closes with a poem of six stanzas of which this is a fair sample: "The kind Cockney Monarch, he bids us farewell Taking his place in the Leghorn-bound smack-- In the smack, in the smack--Ah! will he ne'er come back?" At the appearance of the last number of _The Liberal_, _Blackwood's_ rejoiced thus: "Their hum, to be sure, is awfully subdued. They remind me of a mutchkin of wasps in a bottle, all sticking to each other--heads and tails--rumps glued with treacle and vinegar, wax and pus--helpless, hopeless, stingless, wingless, springless--utterly abandoned of air--choked and choking--mutually entangling and entangled--and mutually disgusting and disgusted--the last blistering ferment of incarnate filth working itself into one mass of oblivion in one bruised and battered sprawl of swipes and venom."[495] _Blackwood's_ of October, 1823, declared Hazlitt to be the most loathsome and Hunt the most ludicrous of the group. Before the close of the year Hunt threatened the magazine with a suit for libel. This threat did not prevent in January a notice of Hunt's _Ultra-Crepidarius_, a satire on Gifford much in the vein and style of the _Feast of the Poets_. Mercury and Venus come to earth in search of the former's lost shoe. On their arrival they discover that it has been converted by command of the gods into a man named Gifford. The satire is facetiously attributed by _Blackwood's_ to Master Hunt, aged ten; a "small, smart, smattering satirist of an air-haparent ... Cockney chick." The parent is reproached for putting a child in such a position.