of course, and the novice
enlists himself under their banners, proud of his newly-acquired honors,
and starched up to the very throat in all the prim stiffness of his
intellect. A few symptoms of this literary malady appeared as early as
the year 1795, but it then assumed the guise of simplicity and pathos.
It was a poetical Lord Fanny. It wept its pretty self to death by
murmuring brooks, and rippling cascades, it heaved delicious sighs over
sentimental lambs, and love-lorn sheep, apostrophized donkies in the
innocence of primaeval nature; sung tender songs to tender nightingales;
went to bed without a candle, that it might gaze on the chubby faces of
the stars; discoursed sweet nothings to all who would listen to its
nonsense; and displayed (_horrendum dictu_) the acute profundity of its
grief in ponderous folios and spiral duodecimos. The literary world,
little suspecting the dangerous consequences of this distressing malady,
suffered it to germinate in silence; and not until they became
thoroughly convinced that the disorder was of an epidemical nature, did
they start from their long continued lethargy. But it was then too late!
The evil was incurable; it branched out into the most vigorous
ramifications, and following the scriptural admonition, "Increase and
multiply," disseminated its poetry and its prose throughout a great part
of England. As a dog, when once completely mad, is never satisfied until
he has bitten half a dozen more, so the Cockney professors, in laudable
zeal for the propagation of their creed, were never at rest until they
had spread their own doctrines around them. They stood on the house tops
and preached, 'till of a verity they were black in the face with the
heating quality of their arguments; they stationed themselves by the bye
roads and hedges, to discuss the beauties of the country; they looked
out from their garrett [_sic_] windows in Grub-street, and exclaimed,
"_O! rus, quando ego te aspiciam_;" and gave such afflicting tokens of
insanity, that the different reviewers and satirists of the day kindly
laced them in the strait jackets of their criticism. "But all this
availeth _us_ nothing," exclaimed the critics, "so long as _we_ see
Mordecai the Jew sitting at the gate of the Temple; that is to say, as
long as there is one Cockney pericranium left unscalped by the tomahawks
of our satire." But notwithstanding the strenuous exertions of all those
whose brains have not been cast in the moul