red by
the wise men of this and other generations, has nothing to erect in
their room but the baseless and air-built fabrics of a dreaming
Imagination.

ON THE COCKNEY SCHOOL OF POETRY

No. I

[From _Blackwood's Magazine_, October, 1817]

Our talk shall be (a theme we never tire on)
Of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron,
(Our England's Dante)--Wordsworth--HUNT, and KEATS,
The Muses' son of promise; and of what feats
He yet may do.

CORNELIUS WEBB.

While the whole critical world is occupied with balancing the merits,
whether in theory or in execution, of what is commonly called THE LAKE
SCHOOL, it is strange that no one seems to think it at all necessary to
say a single word about another new school of poetry which has of late
sprung up among us. This school has not, I believe, as yet received any
name; but if I may be permitted to have the honour of christening it, it
may henceforth be referred to by the designation of THE COCKNEY SCHOOL.
Its chief Doctor and Professor is Mr. Leigh Hunt, a man certainly of
some talents, of extravagant pretensions both in wit, poetry, and
politics, and withal of exquisitely bad taste, and extremely vulgar
modes of thinking and manners in all respects. He is a man of little
education. He knows absolutely nothing of Greek, almost nothing of
Latin, and his knowledge of Italian literature is confined to a few of
the most popular of Petrarch's sonnets, and an imperfect acquaintance
with Ariosto, through the medium of Mr. Hoole. As to the French poets,
he dismisses them in the mass as a set of prim, precise, unnatural
pretenders. The truth is, he is in a state of happy ignorance about them
and all that they have done. He has never read Zaire nor Phedre. To
those great German poets who have illuminated the last fifty years with
a splendour to which this country has, for a long time, seen nothing
comparable, Mr. Hunt is an absolute stranger. Of Spanish books he has
read Don Quixote (in the translation of Motteux), and some poems of Lope
de Vega in the imitations of my Lord Holland. Of all the great critical
writers, either of ancient or of modern times, he is utterly ignorant,
excepting only Mr. Jeffrey among ourselves.

With this stock of knowledge, Mr. Hunt presumes to become the founder of
a new school of poetry, and throws away entirely the chance which he
might have had of gaining some true poetical fame, had he been less
lofty in his pretensions. The