f the offenders, confessed that he had no
personal grudge against any of Blackwood's victims, in fact that he knew
nothing about any of them, but that at the request of John Wilson, his
fellow-editor, he had composed "some squibberies ... with as little malice
as if the assigned subject had been the court of Pekin." The sincere
regret he expressed for the pain which his "jokes" had inflicted ought
perhaps to be counted in extenuation of his errors. It may be true, as his
generous biographer suggests, that "his politics and his feud with many of
these men was an affair of ignorance and accidental associations in
Edinburgh," that under different circumstances "he might have been found
inditing sonnets to Leigh Hunt, and supping with Lamb, Haydon, and
Hazlitt."[23] But meanwhile irreparable mischief had been done to many
reputations, and the life of one man had been sacrificed to his
sportiveness.[24]

The signal for the attack on Hazlitt was given by the Quarterly in
connection with a review of The Round Table, Hazlitt's first book. The
contents of this volume were characterized as "vulgar descriptions, silly
paradox, flat truisms, misty sophistry, broken English, ill humour and
rancorous abuse."[25] A little later, when the Characters of Shakespeare's
Plays seemed to be finding such favor with the public that one edition was
quickly exhausted, the Quarterly extinguished its sale by "proving that
Mr. Hazlitt's knowledge of Shakespeare and the English language is on a
par with the purity of his morals and the depth of his understanding."[26]
The cry was soon taken up by the Blackwood's people in a series on the
Cockney School of Prose. Lockhart invented the expression "pimpled
Hazlitt." It so happened that Hazlitt's complexion was unusually clear,
but the epithet clung to him with a cruel tenacity. When an ill-natured
reviewer could find nothing else to say, he had recourse to "pimpled
essays" or "pimpled criticism."[27] The climax of abuse was reached in an
article entitled "Hazlitt Cross-Questioned," which a sense of decency
makes it impossible to reproduce, and which resulted in the payment of
damages to the victim. Even the publisher Blackwood speaks of it, with
what sincerity it is not safe to say, as disgusting in tone, and Murray,
who was the London agent for the Magazine, refused to have any further
dealings with it. But the harm was done. Hazlitt could not walk out
without feeling that every passer-by had read the