William Blackwood, John Wilson or “Christopher North,” Lockhart, and perhaps Maginn, share the blame severally of Blackwood’s; while in the case of the Quarterly, to Gifford and Southey, already mentioned, must be added Sir Walter Scott and Croker. The two last certainly countenanced the actions of the others, even if they took no more active part. There seems to be no way of determining the individual authorship of the various articles. It was a secret jealously guarded at the time and it is unlikely that any further disclosures will come to light. The victims themselves hazarded as many guesses as more recent critics with no greater degree of certainty. Leigh Hunt thought that the articles were written by Sir Walter Scott;[461] Hazlitt said, “To pay those fellows in their own coin, the way would be to begin with Walter Scott and have at his clump foot;”[462] Charles Dilke thought that the articles were written by Lockhart with the encouragement of Scott;[463] Haydon thought that “Z” was Terry the actor, an intimate of the Blackwood party, who had been exasperated because Hunt had failed to notice him in The Examiner;[464] Shelley fancied that the articles in the Quarterly were by Southey, and, on his denial, attributed them to Henry Hart Milman.[465] Mrs. Oliphant in her two ponderous volumes, William Blackwood and His Sons, practically asserts that “Z” was Lockhart.[466] If the extent of her research is to be the gauge of its value, her opinion is a very valuable one. Mr. Colvin advances the theory that “Z” was Wilson or Lockhart, possibly revised by William Blackwood.[467] Mr. Courthope thinks that Croker was the author of the articles on Endymion in the Quarterly.[468] Mr. Herford thinks that the whole campaign against the Cockney School was “largely worked out” by Lockhart.[469]
Hunt, Shelley, Hazlitt and Keats were the chief targets in the Cockney School. The attacks on each of these are of such length as to require separate discussion and will be returned to later. Those who attained lesser notoriety were Charles Lamb, Haydon, Barry Cornwall, John Hamilton Reynolds, Cornelius Webb, Charles Wells, Charles Dilke, Charles Lloyd, P. G. Patmore and John Ketch (Abraham Franklin). Those who moved within the same circle and who may by attraction be considered Cockneys are Charles Cowden Clarke and his wife, Vincent Novello, Charles Armitage Brown, the Olliers, Horace and James Smith, Douglas Jerrold, Joseph Severn, Laman Blanchard, Thomas Noon Talfourd, Thomas Love Peacock, and perhaps Thomas Hood.
Charles Lamb was first attacked in 1820. He had written essays somewhat in the manner of Hunt and he was a contributor to the London Magazine, which had blundered by censuring Castlereagh, Canning, and Wilberforce. The much-despised Hazlitt was another of its force. Accordingly, “Elia” was pronounced a “Cockney Scribbler,” Christ’s Hospital an essay full of offensive and reprehensible personalities,[470] and All Fool’s Day “mere inanity and very Cockneyism.”[471] In April, 1822, Blackwood’s returned to the attack but with more than usual good nature. In Noctes Ambrosianæ of that month Tickler is made to say:
“Elia in his happiest moods delights me; he is a fine soul; but when he is dull, his dullness sets human stupidity at defiance. He is like a well-bred, ill-trained pointer. He has a fine nose, but he can’t or won’t range. He always keeps close to your foot, and then he points larks or tit-mice. You see him snuffing and snoking and brandishing his tail with the most impassioned enthusiasm, and then drawn round into a semi-circle he stands beautifully—dead set. You expect a burst of partridges, or a towering cock-pheasant, when lo, and behold, away flits a lark, or you discover a mouse’s nest, or there is absolutely nothing at all. Perhaps a shrew has been there the day before. Yet if Elia were mine, I would not part with him, for all his faults.”
A few years later Lamb became one of Blackwood’s contributors. Two attacks on Lamb proceeded from the Quarterly. The Confessions of a Drunkard, the writer says, “affords a fearful picture of the consequences of intemperance which we have reason to know is a true tale.”[472] In his Progress of Infidelity, Southey asserted that Elia’s volume of essays wanted “only sounder religious feeling, to be as delightful as it is original.”[473] Lamb’s wrath had been slowly gathering under the strain of repeated attacks on Hunt, Hazlitt and himself. It culminated with Southey’s article. In the London Magazine of October, 1823, he repudiated at considerable length the compliments thrust upon him at the expense of his friends, and denied the arraignment of drunkenness and heterodoxy. Matters were then smoothed over between him and Southey through an explanation which his unfailing good nature could not resist.
Haydon was nick-named the “Raphael of the Cockneys.”[474] Until the exhibition of Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem in Edinburgh in 1820, he underwent the same kind of persecution as his friends. His “greasy hair” was about as notorious as Hazlett’s “pimpled face.” But the picture converted Blackwood’s crew. They apologized and confessed that their misapprehensions had been due to the absurd style of laudation in The Examiner. Henceforward they acknowledged him to be “a high Tory and an aristocrat, and a sound Christian.”[475]
Bryan Waller Procter, or Barry Cornwall, was satirized in Blackwood’s for his so-called effeminacy. In October, 1823, the following facetious passage occurs: “the merry thought of a chick—three tea-spoonsfulls of peas, the eighth part of a French roll, a sprig of cauliflower, and an almost imperceptible dew of parsley” would dine the author of The Deluge. The article on Shelley’s Posthumous Poems in the Edinburgh of July, 1824, was attributed to Procter by Blackwood’s and assailed in a most disgusting manner. The article was by Hazlitt.
John Hamilton Reynolds was a friend of Keats, one of the Young Poets reviewed by Hunt in The Examiner, and a contributor to the London Magazine. His two poems, Eden of the Imagination and Fairies, showed Hunt’s influence. In the former he had even dared to praise Hunt in the notes.
Cornelius Webb was the author of numerous poems which exhibit in a marked degree the Huntian peculiarities of diction pointed out in the first chapter. He is moreover responsible for the unfortunate lines so often quoted in derision by Blackwood’s: