The first number of the Noctes Ambrosianæ appeared in March. The following passage refers to the launching of The Liberal in a dialogue between the Editor and O’Doherty:
O. Hand me the lemons. This holy alliance of Pisa will be a queer affair. The Examiner has let down its price from a tenpenny to a sevenpenny. They say the Editor here is to be one of that faction, for they must publish in London, of course.
Ed. Of course, but I doubt if they will be able to sell many. Byron is a prince, but these dabbling dogglerers destroy every dish they dip in.
O. Apt alliteration’s artful aid.
Ed. Imagine Shelly [sic], with his spavin, and Hunt, with his staingalt, going in harness with such a caperer as Byron, three-a-breast. He’ll knock the wind out of them both the first canter.
O. ’Tis pity Keats is dead.—I suppose you could not venture to publish a sonnet in which he is mentioned now? The Quarterly (who killed him, as Shelly says) would blame you.
Ed. Let’s hear it. Is it your own?
O. No; ’twas written many months ago by a certain great Italian genius, who cuts a figure about the London routs—one Fudgiolo.
Ed. Try to recollect it. (Here follows the sonnet.)
Blackwood’s of December, 1822, had passages on the Cockney School in Noctes Ambrosianæ. Number VII. of the series of articles on its members reviewed Hunt’s Florentine Lovers, or, in their phrasing, his Art of Love, the story of which is wilfully misrepresented. Hunt is declared “the most irresistible knight-errant errotic extant ... the most contemptible little capon of the bantam breed that ever vainly dropped a wing, or sidled up to a partlet. He can no more crow than a hen. Byron makes love like Sir Peter, Moore like a tom-tit and Hunt like a bantam.” The writer then charges Hunt with irreligion, indecency, sensuality and licentiousness. He is called “A Fool” and an “exquisite idiot.” Such a burst of rage on the part of the anti-Cockneys, after their wrath had begun to cool as seen in the review of the Literary Pocket Book, was doubtless due to Hunt’s association in The Liberal with Byron: “What can Byron mean by patronizing a Cockney?... by far the most unaccountable of God’s works ... a scavenger raking in the filth of the common sewers and stews, for a few gold pieces thrown down by a nobleman.... But that Satan should stoop to associate with an incubus, shows that there is degeneracy in hell.” The tirade closes with a poem of six stanzas of which this is a fair sample: