[455] He undertook a vindication of the Cockney School in a series of four articles, in which he pointed out the “mean insincerity,” the “vulgar slander,” the “mouthing cant,” the “shabby spite,” the falsehoods and the recantations of Blackwood’s. The description of the conditions, under which Scott pictured the articles of his enemies to have been written, smacks of the mocking humor of Blackwood’s itself: “a redolency of Leith-ale, and tobacco smoke, which floats about all the pleasantry in question,—giving one the idea of its facetious articles having been written on the slopped table of a tavern parlour in the back-wynd, after the convives had retired, and left the author to solitude, pipe-ashes, and the dregs of black-strap.”
[456] Published in Edinburgh in 1820 and signed by “An American Scotchman.”
[457] Published in Newcastle in 1821.
[458] The School was thus described in Blackwood’s: “The chief constellations, in this poetical firmament, consist of led captains, and clerical hangers-on, whose pleasure, and whose business, it is, to celebrate in tuneful verse, the virtues of some angelic patron, who keeps a good table, and has interest with the archbishop, or the India House. Verily they have their reward.” In other words this group was composed of diners-out or parasites, and sycophants for livings and military appointments.
[459] Published in London, 1824.
[460] Published in London also in 1824.
[461] Keats, Works, IV, p. 66.
[462] C. C. Clarke, Recollections of Writers, p. 147.
[463] Keats, Works, IV, p. 66.
[464] Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon, p. 349.