“Nor let it be said that, either on this or any other occasion, the moral Satyrists (sic) in this magazine ever wished to remain unknown. How, indeed, could they wish for what they well knew was impossible? All the world has all along known the names of the gentlemen who have uttered our winged words. Nor did it ever, for one single moment, enter into the head of any one of them to wish—not to scorn concealment. To gentlemen, too, they at all times acted like gentlemen; but was it ever dreamt by the wildest that they were to consider as such the scum of the earth? ‘If I but knew who was my slanderer,’ was at one time the ludicrous skraigh of the convicted Cockney. Why did he not ask? and what would he have got by asking? Shame and confusion of face—unanswerable argument and cruel chastisement. For before one word would have been deigned to the sinner, he must have eaten—and the bitter roll is yet ready for him—all the lies he had told for the last twenty years, and must either have choked or been kicked.”
In January, 1818, Blackwood’s issued a manifesto of their future campaign. The Keatses, Shelleys, and Webbes, were to be taken in turn. The charges of profligacy and obscenity against Hunt’s poem were repeated, but it was emphatically stated that there was no implication made in reference to his private character—an ominous statement that any one with any knowledge of Blackwood’s usual methods could only construe into a warning that such an implication would speedily follow. The article was signed “Z,” a shadowy personage who sorrowfully called himself the “present object” of Hunt’s resentment and dislike. He seems to have expected gratitude and affection in return for articles that would compare favorably with the most scurrilous billingsgate of any of the Humanistic controversies. In May, 1818, with due ceremony, Hunt was proclaimed “King of the Cockneys” and editor of the Cockney Court-gazette. His kingdom was the “Land of Cockaigne,” a borrowing, most probably, from the thirteenth century satire by that name. Keats’s sonnet containing the line “He of the rose, the violet, the spring” became the official Cockney poem—by an “amiable but infatuated bardling.” John Hunt was made Prince John. With the lapse of time Hunt’s crimes seem to have multiplied. He is called a lunatic, a libeller, an abettor of murder and of assassination, a coward, an incendiary, a Jacobin, a plebeian and a foe to virtue. He is instructed, if sickened with the sins and follies of mankind, to withdraw
“to the holy contemplation of your own divine perfections, and there ‘perk up with timid mouth’ ‘and lamping eyes’ (as you have it) upon what to you is dearer and more glorious than all created things besides, till you become absorbed in your own identity—motionless, mighty, and magnificent, in the pure calm of Cockneyism ... instead of rousing yourself from your lair, like some noble beast when attacked by the hunter, you roll yourself round like a sick hedgehog, that has crawled out into the ‘crisp’ gravel walk round your box at Hampstead, and oppose only the feeble pricks of your hunch’d-up back to the kicks of any one who wishes less to hurt you, than to drive you into your den.”
The Quarterly of the same month contained the notorious review of Foliage. Southey, in a counterfeited Cockney style, contorts Hunt’s devotion to his leafy luxuries, his flowerets, wine, music and other social joys into Epicureanism[492] and like unsound principles. He even goes so far as to accuse him of incest and adultery in his private life. There are disguised but unmistakable references to Keats and to Shelley; the latter is credited with evil doings that fall little short of machinations with the devil. The volume of poems, which was the ostensible pretext for this parade of foul slander, not a word of which was true, has, Southey says, richness of language and picturesqueness of imagery.[493] The July number of Blackwood’s went a step beyond Southey and identified the characters of the Story of Rimini with Hunt and his sister-in-law, Elizabeth Kent. After ostentatiously giving currency to the scandal, “Z” then proceeds to deny the rumor—which had no existence save in the minds of Hunt’s vilifiers—in order to preserve immunity from libel. At the time that Lamb replied to Southey in 1823 he took up these charges made against Hunt in 1818. He said:
“I was admitted to his household for several years, and do most solemnly aver that I believe him to be in his domestic relations as correct as any man. He chose an ill-judged subject for a poem.... In spite of ‘Rimini,’ I must look upon its author as a man of taste and a poet. He is better than so; he is one of the most cordial-minded men that I ever knew, and matchless as a fireside companion. I do not mean to affront or wound your feelings when I say that in his more genial moods, he has often reminded me of you.”[494]
A facetious bit of prose On Sonnet Writing and a Sonnet on Myself in Blackwood’s of April, 1819, parodied excellently the Cockney conceit and mannerisms. The September number contrasted Henry Hunt, the representative of the Cockney School of Politics, with Leigh Hunt, of the Cockney School of Poetry; resenting loudly the claim of the two to prominence for “even Douglasses never had more than one Bell-the-cat at a time.” While Henry Hunt “the brawny white feather of Cockspur-street” addresses street mobs, the other Hunt, “the lank and sallow hypochondriac of the ‘leafy rise’ and ‘farmy fields’ of Hampstead,” “the whining milk-sop sonneteer of the Examiner” is said to speak to a “sorely depressed remnant of ‘single gentlemen’ in lodgings, and single ladies we know not where—a generation affected with headaches, tea-drinking and all the nostalgia of the nerves.” It is hardly necessary to add that there was no connection whatsoever between the two men.
Blackwood’s of October, 1819, announced Foliage to be a posthumous publication of Hunt’s, presented to the public by his three friends, Keats, Haydon and Novello. An affecting picture is drawn of the now-departed Hunt in his once familiar costume of dressing-gown, yellow breeches and red slippers, sipping tea, playing whist and writing sonnets. His statement in the preface that a “love of sociability, of the country, and the fine imagination of the Greeks” had prompted the poems is greatly ridiculed. The first is said to have caused his death by an over-indulgence in tea-drinking; his feeling for nature is said to be limited to the lawns, stiles and hedges of Hampstead and his knowledge of the imagination of the Greeks to quotations. The Sonnet On Receiving a Crown of Ivy from Keats came in for especial derision—“a blister clapped on his head” would have been considered more appropriate.
Hunt’s Literary Pocket Books for 1819 and 1820 were reviewed in Blackwood’s in December, 1819, in a remarkably kind article. They are recommended as worth three times the price. The reviewer, who was no other than “Christopher North,” stated that he had purchased six copies. Blackwood’s of September, 1820, reviewed The Indicator; of December, 1821, the 1822 Literary Pocket Book; the last contained coarse and unkind allusions to Hunt’s health. It declared the production of sonnets in London and its suburbs about equal to the number of births and deaths. In reply, The Examiner of December 16, 1821, in an article entitled Modern Criticism, italicised extracts from Blackwood’s to bring out peculiarities of grammar and diction. Blackwood’s of January, 1822, contained a sonnet which it was pretended was Hunt’s New Year’s greeting, but which was instead a clever parody on his sonnet-style.
The issue of the next month announced the triumvirate of The Liberal and, through Byron’s “noble generosity,” Hunt’s departure with his wife and “little Johnnys” upon a “perilous voyage on the un-cockney ocean.... He and his companions will now, like his own Nereids,
turn
And toss upon the ocean’s lifting billows,
Making them banks and pillows,
Upon whose springiness they lean and ride;
Some with an inward back; some upward-eyed,
Feeling the sky; and some with sidelong hips,
O’er which the surface of the water slips.”