The Literary Gazette joined in the hue-and-cry against “the pert vulgarity and miserable low-mindedness of Cockney-land,” against “the disagreeable, envious, bickering, hating, slandering, contemptible, drivelling and be-devilling wretches.”[496] Blackwood’s of February, 1830, in a review of Moore’s Life, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, satirizes the conversational habits of the Cockneys “who all keep chattering during meals and after them, like so many monkeys, emulous and envious of each other’s eloquence, and pulling out with their paws fetid observations from their cheek-pouches, which are nuts to them, though instead of kernel, nothing but snuff.”
Not only did the articles in Blackwood’s cease after this last, but in 1834 a full and complete apology was tendered Hunt by Christopher North:
“And Shelley truly loved Leigh Hunt. Their friendship was honorable to both, for it was as disinterested as sincere; and I hope Gurney will let a certain person in the City understand that I treat his offer of a reviewal of Mr. Hunt’s London Journal with disdain. If he has anything to say against us or that gentleman, either conjunctly or severally, let him out with it in some other channel; and I promise him a touch and taste of the crutch. He talks to me of Maga’s desertion of principle; but if he were a Christian—nay, a man—his heart and his head would tell him that the Animosities are mortal, but the Humanities live for ever—and that Leigh Hunt has more talent in his little finger than the puling prig, who has taken upon himself to lecture Christopher North in a scrawl crawling with forgotten falsehoods.”[497]
Professor Wilson’s invitation to Hunt to contribute to his magazine was declined politely but firmly. Leigh Hunt wrote to Charles Cowden Clarke: “Blackwood’s and I, poetically, are becoming the best friends in the world. The other day there was an Ode in Blackwood in honour of the memory of Shelley; and I look for one of Keats. I hope this will give you faith in glimpses of the Golden Age.”[498] Nowhere does Hunt show resentment or malice for the sufferings of years. Yet Mrs. Oliphant, in her advocacy of the Blackwood group, goes the length of saying that he displayed “feebleness of mind and body,” “petty meannesses,” “unwillingness or incapacity to take a high view even of friends or benefactors,” a lightheartedness and frivolity, and “enduring spite.” She grudgingly admits his “almost feminine grace and charm.” She says that he thought his friends deserved only “casual thanks when they did what was but their manifest duty ... bitter and spiteful satire when they attended to their own affairs instead.” She makes a radically false statement when she says that he defended Byron, Shelley, Keats, Moore, and many others in The Examiner, but found an opportunity to say an evil word of most of them afterwards; and that when Blackwood’s or the Quarterly attacked him, he was convinced that “it must be really one of his friends who was being struck at through him.”[499]
The Quarterly delayed longer in assuming a friendly attitude. It remained silent until 1867, when Bulwer, in a comparison of Hunt and Hazlitt, conceded to the former a gracefulness and kindliness of disposition, a smoothness of tone and delicacy of finish in his writing. There was no formal apology as in the case of Blackwood’s.
Carlyle says that Hunt suffered an “obloquy and calumny through the Tory press—perhaps a greater quantity of baseness, persevering, implacable calumny, than any other living writer has undergone; which long course of hostility ... may be regarded as the beginning of his worst distresses, and a main cause of them down to this day.”[500] Macaulay said: “There is hardly a man living whose merits have been so grudgingly allowed, and whose faults have been so cruelly expiated.”[501] For a period of more than a quarter of a century, from the beginning of the crusade against him until about 1845, partly as the result of the misrepresentation of the press, and partly as a natural consequence of his own foibles and early blunders, a pretty general antagonism existed against him. At the end of that time his honesty and talents were recognized and rewarded publicly by the government. And the public has come more and more to esteem his personal character.
The Quarterly of April, 1818, contained the stupid and savage review of Endymion, provoked almost solely by the Keats’s offence in being the friend and public protégé of Leigh Hunt. The simple and manly preface[502] was misconstrued into a formula for Huntian poetry, and its allusion to a “London drizzle or a Scotch mist” into a “deprecation of criticism in a feverish manner.” Leigh Hunt asked years afterwards how “anybody could answer such an appeal to the mercy of strength with the cruelty of weakness. All the good for which Mr. Gifford pretended to be zealous, he might have effected with pain to no one, and glory to himself; and therefore all the evil he mixed with it was of his own making.”[503] The general trend of the article and the reviewer’s acknowledgment that he had read only the first book of the poem are well known. The following passage refers directly to Keats’s connection with Hunt:
“The author is a copyist of Mr. Hunt, but he is more unintelligible, almost as rugged, twice as diffuse, and ten times more tiresome and absurd than his prototype; who, though he impudently presumed to seat himself in the chair of criticism, and to measure his own poetry by his own standard, yet generally had a meaning. But Mr. Keats advanced no dogmas which he was bound to support by examples; his nonsense is therefore quite gratuitous; he writes it for his own sake, and, being bitten by Mr. Leigh Hunt’s insane criticism, more than rivals the insanity of his poetry.”[504]
Blackwood’s followed the Quarterly’s lead in August, reviewing Keats’s first volume at the same time with Endymion. He is reproached with madness, with metromania, with low origin, with perversion of talents suited only to an apprenticeship, all because he admired Hunt sufficiently to adopt some of his theories and because he had been called in The Examiner one of “two stars of glorious magnitude.” The sonnet Written on the day that Mr. Leigh Hunt left prison, the Sonnet to Haydon, and Sleep and Poetry, are anathematized. In the last Keats is said to speak with