"The beaux are attorney's apprentices, with chapeau bras and Limerick gloves--fiddlers, harp teachers, and clerks of genius: the belles are faded, fan-twinkling spinsters, prurient vulgar misses from school, and enormous citizen's wives. The company are entertained with luke-warm negus, and the sounds of a paltry piano forte.... His poetry resembles that of a man who has kept company with kept-mistresses. His muse talks indelicately like the tea-sipping milliner's girl. Some excuse for her there might have been, had she been hurried away by imagination or passion; but with her, indecency seems a disease, she appears to speak unclean things from perfect inanition." Hunt "would fain be always tripping and waltzing, and he is very sorry that he cannot be allowed to walk about in the morning with yellow breeches and flesh-colored silk stockings. He sticks an artificial rosebud in his button hole in the midst of winter. He wears no neckcloth, and cuts his hair in imitation of the prints of Petrarch."
Nature in the eyes of a Cockney was said to consist only of "green fields, jaunty streams, and o'er-arching leafiness;" no mountains were higher than Highgate-hill nor streams more pastoral than the Serpentine River.[485] _Blackwood's_ was near the truth in its criticism of Hunt's conception of nature. While his appreciation was very genuine, it was restricted to rural or suburban scenes, "of the town, towny."[486] The scale was that of the window garden or a flower pot. Who but he could rhapsodize over a cut flower or a bit of green; or could speak in spring "of being gay and vernal and daffodilean?"[487] Yet he produced some delightful rural poetry. Take this for instance:
"You know the rural feeling, and the charm That stillness has for a world-fretted ear, 'Tis now deep whispering all about me here, With thousand tiny bushings, like a swarm Of atom bees, or fairies in alarm Or noise of numerous bliss from distant spheres."[488]
The general characteristics of the school, briefly summarized, were said to be ignorance and vulgarity, an entire absence of religion, a vague and sour Jacobinism for patriotism, admiration of Chaucer and Spenser when they resemble Hunt, and extreme moral depravity and obscenity. November, 1817, of _Blackwood's_ contained the notorious accusation against the _Story of Rimini_ of immorality of purpose.[489] The poem was called "the genteel comedy of incest." Francesca's sin was declared voluntary and her sufferings sentimental. The changes from the historical version, an espousal by proxy instead of betrothal, the omission of deformity, the substitution of the duel for murder, and the happy opening, were pronounced wilful perversions for the furtherance of corruption. Ford's treatment of the same theme much more elevated. Hunt's defense was that the catastrophe was Francesca's sufficient punishment.[490] In May, 1818, the same charge was repeated: "No woman who has not either lost her chastity, or is desirous of losing it, ever read the 'Story of Rimini' without the flushings of shame and of self-reproach."