"Mr. Shelley died, it seems, with a volume of Mr. Keats's poetry grasped with the hand in his bosom--rather an awkward posture, as you will be convinced if you try it. But what a rash man Shelley was, to put to sea in a frail boat with Jack's poetry on board. Why, man, it would sink a trireme. In the preface to Mr. Shelley's poems we are told that his 'vessel bore out of sight with a favorable wind;' but what is that to the purpose? It had Endymion on board, and there was an end. Seventeen ton of pig iron would not be more fatal ballast. Down went the boat with a 'swirl'! I lay a wager that it righted soon after evicting Jack."
In the face of these articles against it as evidence, _Blackwood's_, as early as January, 1828, had the audacity to claim--perhaps with the expectation that its audience was gifted with a sense of subtle humor--that Shelley had been praised in its pages for his fortitude, patience, and many other noble qualities, and that this praise had irritated the other Cockneys and made the whole trouble. If Keats suffered at the hands of the Edinburgh dictators for his association with Hunt the balance weighed in the other direction in the case of Shelley. All the crimes and opinions of which he was deemed guilty were passed on to Hunt. But Hunt gladly suffered for Shelley.
Hazlitt, although of Irish descent and a native of Shropshire, and of such independence as to belong to no school whatsoever, came in for a share of abuse second only in virulence to that showered on Hunt.[519] In the _Quarterly_ of April, 1817, in a review of the _Round Table_, probably in retaliation for his abuse of Southey in _The Examiner_, Hazlitt's papers are denominated "vulgar descriptions, silly paradoxes, flat truisms, misty sophistry, broken English, ill-humour and rancorous abuse." His characterizations of Pitt and Burke are "vulgar and foul invective," and "loathsome trash." The author might have described washerwomen forever, the reviewer asserts, "but if the creature, in his endeavours to see the light, must make his way over the tombs of illustrious men, disfiguring the records of their greatness with the slime and filth which marks his tracks, it is right to point out that he may be flung back to the situation in which nature designed that he should grovel."