"But he did not begin life under good influences. He had a mother, herself, in all probability, the victim of bad training, who would fling the dishes from table at his head, and tell him he would be a scoundrel like his father. His father, who was cousin to the previous lord, had been what is called a man upon town, and was neither rich nor very respectable. The young lord, whose means had not yet recovered themselves, went to school, noble but poor, expecting to be in the ascendant with his title, yet kept down by the inconsistency of his condition. He left school to put on the cap with the gold tuft, which is worshipped at college:--he left college to fall into some of the worst hands on the town:--his first productions were contemptuously criticised, and his genius was thus provoked into satire:--his next were overpraised, which increased his self-love:--he married when his temper had been soured by difficulties, and his will and pleasure pampered by the sex:--and he went companionless into a foreign country, where all this perplexity could repose without being taught better, and where the sense of a lost popularity could be drowned in license. "I am sorry I ever wrote a syllable respecting Lord Byron which might have been spared. I have still to relate my connection with him, but it will be related in a different manner. Pride, it is said, will have a fall; and I must own, that on this subject I have experienced the truth of the saying. I had prided myself--I should pride myself now if I had not been thus rebuked--on not being one of those who talk against others. I went counter to this feeling in a book; and to crown the absurdity of the contradiction, I am foolish enough to suppose that the very fact of my so doing would show that I had done it in no other instance! that having been thus public in the error, credit would be given me for never having been privately so! Such are the delusions inflicted on us by self-love. When the consequence was represented to me as characterized by my enemies, I felt, enemies though they were, as if I blushed from head to foot. It is true I had been goaded to the task by misrepresentation:--I had resisted every other species of temptation to do it:--and, after all, I said more in his excuse, and less to his disadvantage, than many of those who reproved me. But enough. I owed the acknowledgment to him and to myself; and I shall proceed on my course with a sigh for both, and I trust in the good will of the sincere."[445] CHAPTER V Characteristics of the "Cockney School"--Reasons for Tory enmity--Establishment of _Blackwood's Magazine_ and the _Quarterly Review_--Their methods of attack--Other targets--Authorship of anonymous articles--Members of the Cockney group--Byron--Hunt--Keats--Shelley-- Hazlitt.