< Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 003.djvu
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1818.]

On the Cockney School of Poetry.

455

your family, and your wife as the most abject of your slaves, (of course not a willing one), that you are so entirely devoted to the gratification of your passions, and so comletely given up to sensuality, that no female of your acquaintance is secure from your addresses, for not any ties are considered by you as sacred, if they come in contact with your inclination; and that a sister of Mrs Hunt's resides with you, who is the mother of at least one child, of which you are the father. When I heard this account, my first thought was to send it to you instantly, in order that I might judge, by the notice you took of it, whether it was true; my second dismissed it altogether as a vile fabrication, nor has it ever occurred to my memory since, till I read the article in the Quarterly, where the writer so evidently accuses you of these things, which, if you are innocent of, you certainly cannot comprehend his meaning, that in justice I have been induced to send you every information in my power, to enable you to repel and prove his accusation false. In the hope that you can, and will do so, I remain your sincere Wellwisher.' "An assailant of all the women that came in his way! A tyrant to his wife! And the father of children by her sister!—Really, the Editor of this paper never knew his prodigious effect on the bigotted and the worldly-minded till now! He was prepared for and has borne a good deal of calumny, both real and imaginary, in differing with them; and he has always let it run silently from off him, like rain from a bird's wings. He must give the present shower a shake, if it is only to oblige his well-wisher. He says, then, that the whole of these charges are most malignantly and ridiculously false, so as to make those who are in habits of intercourse with him alternately give way to indignation and laughter. He knows several ladies, whom he respects and admires, and even (with permission of poor Giffard) likes to see happy; but he believes they are no more afraid of him than of the light at their windows: and as to being a tyrant to his wife, and the father of nieces and nephews,—whatever may be the charity of his opinions, the charge is really a little too ludicrously uncharitable towards them, under all circumstances. He looks at his wife and his family, and shakes his shoulders and their own with laughing which, by the way, is rather an iniquitous custom of his. It might as well be said of him, that he had Mr Giffard's temper, or used his grandmother's shin-bone for a switch."

There is no need for us to sink down this unhappy man into deeper humiliation. Never before did the abuse and prostitution of talents bring with them such prompt and memorable punishment. The pestilential air which Leigh Hunt breathed forth into the world to poison and corrupt, has been driven stiflingly back upon himself, and he who strove to spread the infection of a loathsome licentiousness among the tender moral constitutions of the young, has been at length rewarded, as it was fitting he should be, by the accusation of being himself guilty of those crimes which it was the object of "The Story of Rimini" to encourage and justify in others. The world knew nothing of him but from his works; and were they blameable (even though they erred) in believing him capable of any enormities in his own person, whose imagination feasted and gloated on the disgusting details of adultery and incest? They were repelled and sickened by such odious and unnatural wickedness—he was attracted and delighted. What to them was the foulness of pollution, seemed to him the beauty of innocence. What to them was the blast from hell, to him was the air from heaven. They read and they condemned. They asked each other "What manner of man is this?" The charitable were silent. It would perhaps be hard to call them uncharitable who spoke aloud. Thoughts were associated with his name which shall be nameless by us; and at last the wretched scribbler himself has had the gross and unfeeling folly to publish them all to the world, and that too in a tone of levity that could have been becoming only on our former comparatively trivial charges against him of wearing yellow breeches, and dispensing with the luxury of a neckcloth. He shakes his shoulders, according to his rather iniquitous custom, at being told that he is suspected of adultery and incest! A pleasant subject of merriment, no doubt, it is—though somewhat embittered by the intrusive remembrance of that unsparing castigator of vice, Mr Gifford, and clouded over by the melancholy 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 learnt for the first time, from that anonymous letter (so vulgar, that we could almost suspect him of having written it himself)

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