The gatherings of the coterie have been nowhere better described than by Cowden Clarke:
“Evenings of Mozartian operatic and chamber music at Vincent Novello’s own house, where Leigh Hunt, Shelley, Keats and the Lambs were invited guests; the brilliant supper parties at the alternate dwellings of the Novellos, the Hunts and the Lambs, who had mutually agreed that bread and cheese, with celery, and Elia’s immortalized ‘Lutheran beer’ were to be the sole cates provided; the meetings at the theatres, when Munden, Dowton, Liston, Bannister, Elliston and Fanny Kelly were on the stage; the picnic repasts enjoyed together by appointment in the fields that lay spread in green breadth and luxuriance between the west end of Oxford Street and the western slope of Hampstead Hill—are things never to be forgotten.”[449]
Miss Mitford relates a ludicrous incident of one of these meetings:
“Leigh Hunt (not the notorious Mr. Henry Hunt, but the fop, poet and politician of the ‘Examiner’) is a great keeper of birthdays. He was celebrating that of Haydn, the great composer—giving a dinner, crowning his bust with laurels, berhyming the poor dear German, and conducting an apotheosis in full form. Somebody told Mr. Haydon they were celebrating his birthday. So off he trotted to Hampstead, and bolted into the company—made a very fine animated speech—thanked him most sincerely for what they had done him and the arts in his person.”[450]
At one time the set became violently vegetarian. The enthusiasm came to a sudden end, as narrated by Joseph Severn:
“Leigh Hunt most eloquently discussed the charms and advantages of these vegetable banquets, depicting in glowing words the cauliflowers swimming in melted butter, and the peas and beans never profaned with animal gravy. In the midst of his rhapsody he was interrupted by the venerable Wordsworth, who begged permission to ask a question. ‘If,’ he said, ‘by chance of good luck they ever met with a caterpillar, they thanked their stars for the delicious morsel of animal food.’ This absurdity all came to an end by an ugly discovery. Haydon, whose ruddy face had kept the other enthusiasts from sinking under their scanty diet—for they clung fondly to the hope that they would become like him, although they increased daily in pallor and leanness—this Haydon was discovered one day coming out of a chop-house. He was promptly taxed with treachery, when he honestly confessed that every day after the vegetable repast he ate a good beef-steak. This fact plunged the others in despair, and Leigh Hunt assured me that on vegetable diet his constitution had received a blow from which he had never recovered. With Shelley it was different, for he was by nature formed to regard animal food repulsively.”[451]
The causes of the enmity of the press were political rather than literary or personal and have already been sufficiently dwelt upon in the preceding chapters. The strong rivalry between Edinburgh and London as publishing strongholds intensified the strife. Hunt in particular had centered attention upon himself by his persistent and violent attacks on Gifford and Southey for several years previous to 1817. Besides The Examiner’s persistent allusions to these two unregenerates, a savage diatribe had appeared in the Feast of the Poets, which alluded to Gifford’s humble origin and mediocre ability, charged him with being a government tool, and continued: “But a vile, peevish temper, the more inexcusable in its indulgence, because he appears to have had early warning of its effects, breaks out in every page of his criticism, and only renders his affected grinning the more obnoxious ... I pass over the nauseous epistle to Peter Pindar, and even notes to his Baviad and Mœviad, where though less vulgar in his language, he has a great deal of the pert cant and snip-snap which he deprecates.”[452] During 1817, The Examiner had concerned itself particularly with Southey. He had been called an apostate, a hypocrite, and almost every other name in Hunt’s abusive vocabulary. Sir Walter Scott had not been spared. His politics were said to be easily estimated by the “simple fact, that of all the advocates of Charles the Second, he is the least scrupulous in mentioning his crimes, because he is the least abashed;” his command of prose was declared equal to nothing beyond “a plain statement or a brief piece of criticism;” his poetry “a little thinking conveyed in a great many words.”[453] Hunt thus secured to himself, through offensive and aggressive abuse, the hostility of the Tories both in England and in Scotland. His weaknesses and affectations made him a conspicuous and assailable target for the inevitable return fire.[454]
The establishment by the Tories of the Quarterly Review in 1809 and of Blackwood’s Magazine in 1817 was with the view of opposing and, if possible, of suppressing the Edinburgh Review and The Examiner. The brunt of the hostility fell upon the latter, for Hunt, by reason of his extreme social and religious policy, could not always rally the Edinburgh Review to his support. With the founding of the London Magazine in 1820 he had a new ally in its editor, John Scott, but the war had then already raged for three years, and Scott fell a victim to it in two years’ time.[455] By a process of elimination Scott fixed the identity of “Z”—such was the only signature of the articles on the Cockney School in Blackwood’s—upon Lockhart. He also asserted that Lockhart was the editor of the magazine. Lockhart demanded an apology. His friend Christie took up the quarrel. In the duel which followed Scott was fatally wounded. His death followed Keats’s within four days.
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 Horæ Sinicæ 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 Ambrosianæ, 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 Ambrosianæ. Sir Walter Scott is told that he cannot remain innocent if he remains indifferent to the machinations of the “Ebony and Shandrydan School”—as the writer pleases to call the Blackwood’s group. Another interesting pamphlet of like nature is The Scorpion Critic Unmasked; or Animadversions on a Pretended Review of “Fleurs, a Poem, in Four Books,” which appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine for June, 1821, in a Letter to a Friend.[457] Blackwood’s had called Nathaniel John Hollingsworth, the author of the poem, and others of his type, the “Leg of Mutton School.”[458] Nothing in fact seems to have given this magazine so much malicious delight as to create schools, perhaps in a spirit of rivalry with the “Lake School” of the Edinburgh Review. In the preceding April the “Manchester School” had been presented by Blackwood’s to the public. Hollingsworth in turn created the “Scorpion School” in order to deride Blackwood’s. Other pamphlets of the same kind were Rebellion again Gulliver; or R-D-C-L-SM in Lilliput. A Poetical Fragment from a Lilliputian Manuscript, an anonymous publication which appeared in Edinburgh in 1820; Aspersions answered: an explanatory Statement, advanced to the Public at Large, and to Every Reader of The Quarterly Review in Particular;[459] and Another Article for the Quarterly Review;[460] both by William Hone in reply to the charge of irreligion made by the Quarterly against him.