“The kind Cockney Monarch, he bids us farewell
Taking his place in the Leghorn-bound smack—
In the smack, in the smack—Ah! will he ne’er come back?”
At the appearance of the last number of The Liberal, Blackwood’s rejoiced thus:
“Their hum, to be sure, is awfully subdued. They remind me of a mutchkin of wasps in a bottle, all sticking to each other—heads and tails—rumps glued with treacle and vinegar, wax and pus—helpless, hopeless, stingless, wingless, springless—utterly abandoned of air—choked and choking—mutually entangling and entangled—and mutually disgusting and disgusted—the last blistering ferment of incarnate filth working itself into one mass of oblivion in one bruised and battered sprawl of swipes and venom.”[495]
Blackwood’s of October, 1823, declared Hazlitt to be the most loathsome and Hunt the most ludicrous of the group. Before the close of the year Hunt threatened the magazine with a suit for libel. This threat did not prevent in January a notice of Hunt’s Ultra-Crepidarius, a satire on Gifford much in the vein and style of the Feast of the Poets. Mercury and Venus come to earth in search of the former’s lost shoe. On their arrival they discover that it has been converted by command of the gods into a man named Gifford. The satire is facetiously attributed by Blackwood’s to Master Hunt, aged ten; a “small, smart, smattering satirist of an air-haparent ... Cockney chick.” The parent is reproached for putting a child in such a position.
“Had Leigh Hunt, the papa, boldly advanced on any great emergency, at the peril of his life and crown, to snatch the legitimate issue of his own loins from the shrivelled hands of some blear-eyed old beldam, into whose small cabbage-garden Maximilian had headed a forlorn hope, good and well, and beautiful; but not so, when a stalwart and cankered carl like Mr. Gifford, with his quarter-staff, belabours the shoulders of his Majesty, and sire shoves son between himself and the Pounder ... such pusillanimity involves forfeiture of the Crown, and from this hour we declare Leigh dethroned, and the boy-bard of Ultra-Crepidarius King of Cockaigne.”
Wearying of this make-believe, the reviewer discards such a possibility of authorship and considers Hunt’s grandfather, a legendary personage whose age is put at ninety-six and who is given the name of Zachariah Hunt: “What a gross, vulgar, leering old dog it is! Was ever the couch of the celestials so profaned before! One thinks of some aged cur, with mangy back, glazed eye-balls dropping rheum, and with most disconsolate muzzard muzzling among the fleas of his abominable loins, by some accident lying upon the bed where Love and Beauty are embracing and embraced.” As a final potentiality the reviewer deliberates whether Hunt by any possibility could have been the author and closes with this peroration: “There he goes soaking, and swaling, and straddling up the sky, like Daniel O’Rouke on goose back!... Toes in if you please. The goose is galloping—why don’t you stand in the stirrups?... Alas Pegasus smells his native marshes; instead of making for Olympus, he is off in a wallop to the fens of Lincolnshire! Bellerophon has lost his seat—now he clings desperately by the tail—a single feather holds him from eternity.”
Article VIII of the regular series, reviewing Hunt’s Bacchus in Tuscany, appeared in Blackwood’s of August, 1825. His allegiance to Apollo in Cockaigne is declared to have been changed to Bacchus in Tuscany, and his usual beverage of weak tea to a diet of wine on which he swills like a hippopotamus. He is depicted as Jupiter Tonans and his manner to Hebe is compared with a “natty Bagman to the barmaid of the Hen and Chickens.” The same number noticed Sotheby’s translation of Homer. The opportunity was not lost to refer unfavorably to Hunt’s translations of the same in Foliage.
The Rebellion of the Beasts; or The Ass is Dead! Long Live the Ass!!! By a Late Fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge, with the motto “A man hath pre-eminence above a beast,” was published anonymously by J. & H. L. Hunt in London in 1825. There is every reason to believe that it was by Hunt, although he does not mention it elsewhere. It is an exceedingly clever satire on monarchy and far surpasses anything else of the kind that he ever did. Had the Tories of Edinburgh suspected the author it would probably have made them apoplectic with rage.
With Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries the rage of the two periodicals reached a grand climax and seemingly exhausted itself. The Quarterly in March of the same year in which it appeared said: “The last wiggle of expiring imbecility appears in these days to be a volume of personal Reminiscences.” It characterized the book as a melancholy product of coxcombry and cockneyism: as “dirty gabble about men’s wives and men’s mistresses—and men’s lackeys, and even the mistresses of the lackeys:” as “the miserable book of a miserable man; the little airy fopperies of its manner are like the fantastic trip and convulsive simpers of some poor worn-out wanton, struggling between famine and remorse, leering through her tears.” Blackwood’s of the same month pictured Hunt riding in the tourney lists of Cockaigne to the tune of Cock-a-doodle-doo. It accused him, besides those misdemeanors many times previously exploited, of clumsy casuistry, of falsehood regarding his transaction with Colburn, of ill-breeding in dragging his wife into such a book. The following is the culmination of the author’s anger:
“Mr. Hunt, who to the prating pertness of the parrot, the chattering impudence of the magpie—to say nothing of the mowling malice of the monkey—adds the hissiness of the bill-pouting gander, and the gobble-bluster of the bubbly-jock—to say nothing of the forward valour of the brock or badger—threatens death and destruction to all writers of prose or verse, who shall dare to say white is the black of his eye, or that his book is not like a vase lighted up from within with the torch of truth ... Frezeland Bantam is the vainest bird that attempts to crow; and by and by our feverish friend comes out into the light, and begins to trim his plumage! His toilet over he basks on the ditch side, and has not the smallest doubt in the world that he is a Bird of Paradise.”