breathed from the shin-bone of his own poor old deceased grandmother.
What a mixture of the horrible and absurd! And the man who thus writes
is--not a Christian, for that he denies--but, forsooth, a poet! one of
the

Great spirits who on earth are sojourning!

But Leigh Hunt is not guilty, in the above paragraph, of shocking levity
alone,--he is guilty of falsehood. It is not true, that he learns for
the first time, from that anonymous letter (so vulgar, that we could
almost suspect him of having written it himself) what charges were in
circulation against him. He knew it all before. Has he forgotten to whom
he applied for explanation when Z.'s sharp essay on the Cockney Poetry
cut him to the heart? He knows what he said upon those occasions, and
let him ponder upon it. But what could induce him to suspect the amiable
Bill Hazlitt, "him, the immaculate," of being Z.? It was this,--he
imagined that none but that foundered artist could know the fact of his
feverish importunities to be reviewed by him in the Edinburgh Review.
And therefore, having almost "as fine an intellectual touch" as "Bill
the painter" himself, he thought he saw Z. lurking beneath the elegant
exterior of that highly accomplished man.

Dear Hazlitt, whose tact intellectual is such,
That it seems to feel truth as one's fingers do touch.

But, for the present, we have nothing more to add. Leigh Hunt is
delivered into our hands to do with him as we will. Our eyes shall be
upon him, and unless he amend his ways, to wither and to blast him. The
pages of the Edinburgh Review, we are confident, are henceforth shut
against him. One wicked Cockney will not again be permitted to praise
another in that journal, which, up to the moment when incest and
adultery were defended in its pages, had, however openly at war with
religion, kept at least upon decent terms with the cause of morality. It
was indeed a fatal day for Mr. Jeffrey, when he degraded both himself
and his original coadjutors, by taking into pay such an unprincipled
blunderer as Hazlitt. He is not a coadjutor, he is an accomplice. The
day is perhaps not far distant, when the Charlatan shall be stripped to
the naked skin, and made to swallow his own vile prescriptions. He and
Leigh Hunt are

Arcades ambo
Et cantare pares--

Shall we add,

et respondere parati?

Z. ON KEATS

[From _Blackwood's Magazine_, August, 1818]

COCKNEY SCHOOL OF POETRY

No. IV

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