Leigh Hunt's Relations with Byron, Shelley and Keats
John Stuart Mill · en
With _Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries_ the rage of the two
periodicals reached a grand climax and seemingly exhausted itself. The
_Quarterly_ in March of the same year in which it appeared said: "The last
wiggle of expiring imbecility appears in these days to be a volume of
personal Reminiscences." It characterized the book as a melancholy product
of coxcombry and cockneyism: as "dirty gabble about men's wives and men's
mistresses--and men's lackeys, and even the mistresses of the lackeys:" as
"the miserable book of a miserable man; the little airy fopperies of its
manner are like the fantastic trip and convulsive simpers of some poor
worn-out wanton, struggling between famine and remorse, leering through
her tears." _Blackwood's_ of the same month pictured Hunt riding in the
tourney lists of Cockaigne to the tune of Cock-a-doodle-doo. It accused
him, besides those misdemeanors many times previously exploited, of clumsy
casuistry, of falsehood regarding his transaction with Colburn, of
ill-breeding in dragging his wife into such a book. The following is the
culmination of the author's anger:
"Mr. Hunt, who to the prating pertness of the parrot, the chattering
impudence of the magpie--to say nothing of the mowling malice of the
monkey--adds the hissiness of the bill-pouting gander, and the
gobble-bluster of the bubbly-jock--to say nothing of the forward
valour of the brock or badger--threatens death and destruction to all
writers of prose or verse, who shall dare to say white is the black
of his eye, or that his book is not like a vase lighted up from
within with the torch of truth ... Frezeland Bantam is the vainest
bird that attempts to crow; and by and by our feverish friend comes
out into the light, and begins to trim his plumage! His toilet over
he basks on the ditch side, and has not the smallest doubt in the
world that he is a Bird of Paradise."
The _Literary Gazette_ joined in the hue-and-cry against "the pert
vulgarity and miserable low-mindedness of Cockney-land," against "the
disagreeable, envious, bickering, hating, slandering, contemptible,
drivelling and be-devilling wretches."[496] _Blackwood's_ of February,
1830, in a review of Moore's _Life, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron_,
satirizes the conversational habits of the Cockneys "who all keep
chattering during meals and after them, like so many monkeys, emulous and
envious of each other's eloquence, and pulling out with their paws fetid
observations from their cheek-pouches, which are nuts to them, though
instead of kernel, nothing but snuff."
Not only did the articles in _Blackwood's_ cease after this last, but in
1834 a full and complete apology was tendered Hunt by Christopher North: