When The Liberal was organized Shelley was spoken of thus:
“But Percy Bysshe Shelly has now published a long series of poems, the only object of which seems to be the promotion of atheism and incest; and we can no longer hesitate to avow our belief, that he is as worthy of co-operating with the King of Cockaigne, as he is unworthy of co-operating with Lord Byron. Shelley is a man of genius, but he has no sort of sense or judgment. He is merely ‘an inspired idiot.’ Leigh Hunt is a man of talents, but vanity and vulgarity neutralize all his efforts to pollute the public mind. Lord Byron we regard not only as a man of lofty genius, but of great shrewdness and knowledge of the world. What can HE seriously hope from associating his name with such people as these?”[518]
As in the case of Keats, Blackwood’s did not have the decency to desist from its indecent articles after Shelley’s death. September, 1824, this vulgar ridicule of the two dead poets appeared in answer to Bryan Waller Procter’s review of Shelley’s poems in the preceding number of the Edinburgh Review:
“Mr. Shelley died, it seems, with a volume of Mr. Keats’s poetry grasped with the hand in his bosom—rather an awkward posture, as you will be convinced if you try it. But what a rash man Shelley was, to put to sea in a frail boat with Jack’s poetry on board. Why, man, it would sink a trireme. In the preface to Mr. Shelley’s poems we are told that his ‘vessel bore out of sight with a favorable wind;’ but what is that to the purpose? It had Endymion on board, and there was an end. Seventeen ton of pig iron would not be more fatal ballast. Down went the boat with a ‘swirl’! I lay a wager that it righted soon after evicting Jack.”
In the face of these articles against it as evidence, Blackwood’s, as early as January, 1828, had the audacity to claim—perhaps with the expectation that its audience was gifted with a sense of subtle humor—that Shelley had been praised in its pages for his fortitude, patience, and many other noble qualities, and that this praise had irritated the other Cockneys and made the whole trouble. If Keats suffered at the hands of the Edinburgh dictators for his association with Hunt the balance weighed in the other direction in the case of Shelley. All the crimes and opinions of which he was deemed guilty were passed on to Hunt. But Hunt gladly suffered for Shelley.
Hazlitt, although of Irish descent and a native of Shropshire, and of such independence as to belong to no school whatsoever, came in for a share of abuse second only in virulence to that showered on Hunt.[519] In the Quarterly of April, 1817, in a review of the Round Table, probably in retaliation for his abuse of Southey in The Examiner, Hazlitt’s papers are denominated “vulgar descriptions, silly paradoxes, flat truisms, misty sophistry, broken English, ill-humour and rancorous abuse.” His characterizations of Pitt and Burke are “vulgar and foul invective,” and “loathsome trash.” The author might have described washerwomen forever, the reviewer asserts, “but if the creature, in his endeavours to see the light, must make his way over the tombs of illustrious men, disfiguring the records of their greatness with the slime and filth which marks his tracks, it is right to point out that he may be flung back to the situation in which nature designed that he should grovel.”
The Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays was made an excuse for dissecting the morals and understanding of this “poor cankered creature.”[520] The Lectures on the English Poets is characterized as a “third predatory incursion on taste and common sense ... either completely unintelligible, or exhibits only faint and dubious glimpses of meaning ... of that happy texture that leaves not a trace in the mind of either reader or hearer.”[521] The Political Essays was said to mark the writer as a death’s head hawk-moth, a creature already placed in a state of damnation, the drudge of The Examiner, the ward of Billingsgate, the slanderer of the human race, one of the plagues of England.[522] Later, in a discussion of Table Talk,[523] he becomes a “Slang-Whanger“ (“a gabbler who employs slang to amuse the rabble”).
Hazlitt’s Letter to Gifford, 1819, was a reply to all previous attacks of the Quarterly. For a pamphlet of eighty-seven pages on such a subject it is “lively reading,” for Hazlitt, like Burke, as Mr. Birrell has remarked, excelled in a quarrel.[524] He calls Gifford a cat’s paw, the Government critic, the paymaster of the band of Gentleman Pensioners, a nuisance, a
“dull, envious, pragmatical, low-bred man.... Grown old in the service of corruption, he drivels on to the last with prostituted impotence and shameless effrontery; salves a meagre reputation for wit, by venting the driblets and spleen of his wrath on others; answers their arguments by confuting himself; mistakes habitual obtuseness of intellect for a particular acuteness; not to be imposed upon by shallow appearances; unprincipled rancour for zealous loyalty; and the irritable, discontented, vindictive, peevish effusions of bodily pain and mental imbecility for proofs of refinement of taste and strength of understanding.”[525]
Blackwood’s had accepted abstracts of Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Poets[526] from P. G. Patmore without comment and even managed a lengthy comparison of Jeffrey and Hazlitt with an approach to fair dealing. But by August, 1818, he had been identified with the “Cockney crew” and he became “that wild, black-bill Hazlitt,” a “lounge in third-rate bookshops”; and as a critic of Shakspere, a gander gabbling at that “divine swan.” In April of the following year he was christened the “Aristotle” of the Cockneys. His Table Talk provoked ten pages of vituperation,[527] and Liber Amoris, two reviews as coarse as the provocation.[528] In the first of these, apropos of his contributions to the Edinburgh Review and in particular of his article on the Periodical Press of Britain, the downfall of the magazine and its editor is announced as certain. Hazlitt is called a literary flunky, a sore, an ulcer, a poor devil. In the second he is Hunt’s orderly, the “Mars of the Hampstead heavy dragoons.”