Byron's opinion of Keats is too well known to need repetition. He thought there was hope for Barry Cornwall if "he don't get spoiled by green tea and the praises of Pentonville and Paradise Row. The pity of these men is, that they never lived in _high life_ nor in _solitude_: there is no medium for the knowledge of the _busy_ or the _still_ world. If admitted into high life for a season, it is merely as _spectators_--they form no part of the mechanism thereof."[482]
_Blackwood's_ of December, 1822, in a review of _The Liberal_, advised Byron to "cut the Cockney"--"by far the most unaccountable of God's works." Hunt is denominated "the menial of a lord." When Byron notwithstanding its advice continued his "conjunction with these deluded drivellers of Cockaigne" _Blackwood's_ grew savage towards the peer himself: it is said that he suffered himself
"to be so enervated by the unworthy Delilahs which have enslaved his imagination, as to be reduced to the foul office of displaying blind buffooneries before the Philistines of Cockaigne ... I feel a moral conviction that his lordship must have taken the Examiner, the Liberal, the Rimini, the Round Table, as his model, and endeavored to write himself down to the level of the capacities and the swinish tastes of those with whom he has the misfortune, originally, I believe, from charitable motives, to associate. This is the most charitable hypothesis which I can frame. Indeed there are some verses which have all the appearance of having been interpolated by the King of the Cockneys."[483]
When Byron and Hunt had separated, _Blackwood's_ attempted to reinstate Byron in his former position by declaring that he had been disgusted beyond endurance on Hunt's arrival in Italy and that he had cut him very soon in a "paroxysm of loathing."[484]
The declaration of war between the Cockneys and the Tory press was made with a review of the _Story of Rimini_ in the _Quarterly_ of January, 1816. From this time on Hunt was the choice prey of the two magazines, and others were attacked principally on account of him, or reached through him. Hunt's writings were termed "eruptions of a disease" with which he insists upon "inoculating mankind;" his language "an ungrammatical, unauthorized, chaotic jargon." _Blackwood's_ of October, 1817, contained the first of the long series of abusive articles which appeared in its columns. Hazlitt in the _Edinburgh Review_ in June of the preceding year had acclaimed the _Story of Rimini_ to be "a reminder of the pure and glorious style that prevailed among us before French modes and French methods of criticism." In it he had discovered a resemblance to Chaucer, to the voluptuous pathos of Boccaccio and to the laughing graces of Ariosto. To offset such statements _Blackwood's_ dubbed the new school the "Cockney School" and made Hunt its chief doctor and professor. (Later, in 1823, _Blackwood's_ proudly claimed the honor of christening and said that the _Quarterly_ used the epithet only when it had become a part of English criticism.) It declared the dedication to Byron an insult and the poem the product of affectation and gaudiness and continued: