The method of attack with the _Quarterly_ and with _Blackwood's_ was much the same. They differed chiefly in the style of approach. The former may be compared to heavy artillery, slow, cumbrous and crushing. The reviews indeed often verge on dullness and stupidity. Neither Gifford nor Southey seemed to have been blessed with the saving grace of humor in dealing with the Cockney School. _Blackwood's_, on the other hand, had too much, for whenever one of the so-called Cockneys was mentioned, its contributors wallowed in the mire of coarse buffoonery and cruel satire, disgusting scandal and vulgar parody. The only counter-irritant to such a dose is the clever joking and keen humor; but even when this is clean, which is rare, the whole is rendered unpalatable by the thought of its cruelty and of its frequent falsity. Furthermore, _Blackwood's_ was more merciless in its persecution than the _Quarterly_ in that it was untiring. It was perpetually discharging a fresh fusilade. Both magazines disguised their real motives under a cloak of religious zeal and monarchical loyalty. While Hunt did much to bring the hornet's nest about his ears, he was not wholly deserving of the amount, and not at all of the kind, of stinging calumny that he had to endure. Neither were the members of the Cockney School the only ones who provoked such antagonism from the same magazine. Other famous libels of _Blackwood's_ that should be mentioned to show the disposition of its controllers were the _Chaldee Manuscript_; the _Madonna of Dresden_ and other effusions of the "_Baron von Lauerwinckel_"; the _Diary_ and _Horae Sinicae of Ensign O'Doherty_; and the _Diary of William Wastle, Blackwood and Dr. Morris_. _Letter to Sir Walter Scott, Bart., on the Moral and other Characteristics of the Ebony and Shandrydan School_,[456] cites a full list of _Blackwood's_ victims. These, besides those of the Cockney School, were said to be Jeffrey, Professor Playfair, Professor Dugald Stewart, Professor Leslie, James Macintosh, Lord Brougham, Moore, Professor David Ricardo, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Pringle, Dalzell, Cleghorn, Graham, Sharpe, Jameson, and Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd. The characters in _Noctes Ambrosianae_, Ticklers, Scorpions and Shepherds, were said by the pamphleteer to respectively tickle, sting and stultify, and to make a business "of insulting worth, offending delicacy, caluminating genius, and outraging the decencies and violating all the sanctities of life." Their weapons were "loathsome billingsgate and brutality," and "sublime bathos." An interesting statement, not elsewhere found, is made by the anonymous author of the pamphlet that the proprietor of the Black Bull Inn imputed the death of his wife to the first volume of _Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk_, a series similar to the _Noctes Ambrosianae_. Sir Walter Scott is told that he cannot remain innocent if he remains indifferent to the machinations of