“Keats
The Muses’ son of promise! and what feats
He yet may do.”
His sonnets in the Literary Pocket Book were thus reviewed in Blackwood’s of December, 1821: “Now, Cornelius Webbe is a Jaw-breaker. Let any man who desires to have his ivory dislodged, read the above sonnet to March. Or shall we call Cornelius, the grinder? After reading aloud these fourteen lines, we called in our Odontist, and he found that every tooth in our head was loosened, and a slight fracture in the jaw. ‘My dearest Christopher’, said the Odontist, in his wonted classical spirit, ‘beware the Ides of March.’ So saying, he bounced up in our faces and disappeared.”
Charles Wells was a friend of Hazlitt and of Keats. In true Cockney fashion he sent the latter a sonnet and some roses and thus began the acquaintance. Dilke was a friend of Keats, a radical, and an independent critic in the manner of Hunt. Charles Lloyd was Lamb’s friend, one of the contributors to the Literary Pocket Book of 1820, and a poet of sentimental and descriptive propensities. P. G. Patmore was “Count Tims, the Cockney.”[476] Although he was a correspondent of Blackwood’s, his son has remarked that he was not persona grata, but was employed to secure news from London; and permitted to write only when he did not defend his friends too much.[477] “John Ketch” (Abraham Franklin) is mentioned by Lord Byron as one of the “Cockney Scribblers.”[478] Thomas Hood, as brother-in-law of Reynolds, as assistant editor of the London Magazine, and as an imitator in a small degree in his early work of Lamb and of Hunt may be enumerated among the Cockneys, although he is not usually included. Laman Blanchard was the friend of Procter, Lamb and Hunt. He imitated Procter’s Dramatic Sketches and Lamb’s Essays. Talfourd was a member of the circle and the friend and biographer of Lamb. He defended Edward Moxon when he was prosecuted for publishing Queen Mab. Peacock was the friend of Shelley. The Ollier brothers, publishers, introduced Keats, Shelley, Hunt, Lamb and Procter to the public.[479]
Although Byron was frequently at war with Blackwood’s and the Quarterly, and although he was closely associated with Shelley and Hunt, he was never stigmatized as a member of the Cockney School. Yet through his alliance with them he came in for some opprobrium that he would otherwise have escaped. Blackwood’s strove through ridicule to prevent any growth of familiarity with Hunt or his fraternity. Its attitude towards the dedication to Byron of the Story of Rimini has already been mentioned. Hunt’s statement already quoted on p. 95 that “for the drama, whatever good passages such a writer will always put forth, we hold that he (Byron) has no more qualification than we have” was a choice morsel for the Scotch birds of prey, enjoyed to the fullest extent in a review of Lyndsay’s Dramas of the Ancient World:
“Prigs will be preaching—and nothing but conceit cometh out of Cockaigne. What an emasculated band of dramatists have deployed upon our boards. A pale-faced, sallow set, like the misses of some Cockney boarding-school, taking a constitutional walk, to get rid of their habits of eating lime out of the wall.... But it was reserved to the spirit of atheism of an age, to talk of a Cockney writing a tragedy. When the mind ceases to believe in a Providence, it can believe in anything else; but the pious soul feels that while to dream, even in sleep, that a Cockney had written a successful tragedy, would be repugnant to reason; certainly a more successful tragedy could not be imagined, from the utter destruction of Cockaigne and all its inhabitants. An earthquake or a shower of lava would be too complimentary to the Cockneys; but what do you think of a shower of soot from a multitude of foul chimneys, and the smell of gas from exploded pipes. Something might be made of the idea.... The truth is, that these mongrel and doggerel drivellers have an instinctive abhorrence of a true poet; and they all ran out like so many curs baying at the feet of the Pegasus on which Byron rode ... and the eulogists of homely, and fireside, and little back-parlour incest, what could they imagine of the unseduceable spirit of the spotless Angiolina?... When Elliston, ignorant of what one gentleman owes to another, or driven by stupidity to forget it, brought the Doge on the stage, how crowed the Bantam Cocks of Cockaigne to see it damned!... But Manfred and the Doge are not dead; while all that small fry have disappeared in the mud, and are dried up like so many tadpoles in a ditch, under the summer drowth. ‘Lord Byron,’ quoth Mr. Leigh Hunt, ‘has about as much dramatic genius as ourselves!’ He might as well have said, ‘Lucretia had about as much chastity as my own heroine in Rimini;’ or, ‘Sir Phillip Sidney was about as much of the gentleman as myself!’”[480]
Byron’s attitude toward the Cockney School was expressed in a letter written to John Murray during the Bowles controversy:
“With the rest of his (Hunt’s) young people I have no acquaintance, except through some things of theirs (which have been sent out without my desire), and I confess that till I had read them I was not aware of the full extent of human absurdity. Like Garrick’s ‘Ode to Shakespeare,’ they ‘defy criticism.’ These are of the personages who decry Pope.... Mr. Hunt redeems himself by occasional beauties; but the rest of these poor creatures seem so far gone that I would not ‘march through Coventry with them, that’s flat!’ were I in Mr. Hunt’s place. To be sure, he has ‘led his ragamuffins where they will be well peppered’; but a system-maker must receive all sorts of proselytes. When they have really seen life—when they have felt it—when they have travelled beyond the far distant boundaries of the wilds of Middlesex—when they have overpassed the Alps of Highgate, and traced to its sources the Nile of the New River—then, and not till then, can it properly be permitted to them to despise Pope.... The grand distinction of the under forms of the new school of poets is their vulgarity. By this I do not mean that they are coarse, but ‘shabby-genteel,’ as it is termed. A man may be coarse and yet not vulgar, and the reverse.... It is in their finery that the new school are most vulgar, and they may be known by this at once; as what we called at Harrow “A Sunday blood” might be easily distinguished from a gentleman, although his clothes might be the better cut, and his boots the best blackened of the two:—probably because he made the one or cleaned the other, with his own hands.... In the present case, I speak of writing, not of persons. Of the latter I know nothing; of the former I judge as it is found.”[481]
Byron’s opinion of Keats is too well known to need repetition. He thought there was hope for Barry Cornwall if “he don’t get spoiled by green tea and the praises of Pentonville and Paradise Row. The pity of these men is, that they never lived in high life nor in solitude: there is no medium for the knowledge of the busy or the still world. If admitted into high life for a season, it is merely as spectators—they form no part of the mechanism thereof.”[482]
Blackwood’s of December, 1822, in a review of The Liberal, advised Byron to “cut the Cockney”—“by far the most unaccountable of God’s works.” Hunt is denominated “the menial of a lord.” When Byron notwithstanding its advice continued his “conjunction with these deluded drivellers of Cockaigne” Blackwood’s grew savage towards the peer himself: it is said that he suffered himself
“to be so enervated by the unworthy Delilahs which have enslaved his imagination, as to be reduced to the foul office of displaying blind buffooneries before the Philistines of Cockaigne ... I feel a moral conviction that his lordship must have taken the Examiner, the Liberal, the Rimini, the Round Table, as his model, and endeavored to write himself down to the level of the capacities and the swinish tastes of those with whom he has the misfortune, originally, I believe, from charitable motives, to associate. This is the most charitable hypothesis which I can frame. Indeed there are some verses which have all the appearance of having been interpolated by the King of the Cockneys.”[483]