Charles Lamb was first attacked in 1820. He had written essays somewhat in the manner of Hunt and he was a contributor to the _London Magazine_, which had blundered by censuring Castlereagh, Canning, and Wilberforce. The much-despised Hazlitt was another of its force. Accordingly, "Elia" was pronounced a "Cockney Scribbler," _Christ's Hospital_ an essay full of offensive and reprehensible personalities,[470] and _All Fool's Day_ "mere inanity and very Cockneyism."[471] In April, 1822, _Blackwood's_ returned to the attack but with more than usual good nature. In _Noctes Ambrosianæ_ of that month Tickler is made to say:
"Elia in his happiest moods delights me; he is a fine soul; but when he is dull, his dullness sets human stupidity at defiance. He is like a well-bred, ill-trained pointer. He has a fine nose, but he can't or won't range. He always keeps close to your foot, and then he points larks or tit-mice. You see him snuffing and snoking and brandishing his tail with the most impassioned enthusiasm, and then drawn round into a semi-circle he stands beautifully--dead set. You expect a burst of partridges, or a towering cock-pheasant, when lo, and behold, away flits a lark, or you discover a mouse's nest, or there is absolutely nothing at all. Perhaps a shrew has been there the day before. Yet if Elia were mine, I would not part with him, for all his faults."
A few years later Lamb became one of _Blackwood's_ contributors. Two attacks on Lamb proceeded from the _Quarterly_. The _Confessions of a Drunkard_, the writer says, "affords a fearful picture of the consequences of intemperance which we have reason to know is a true tale."[472] In his _Progress of Infidelity_, Southey asserted that Elia's volume of essays wanted "only sounder religious feeling, to be as delightful as it is original."[473] Lamb's wrath had been slowly gathering under the strain of repeated attacks on Hunt, Hazlitt and himself. It culminated with Southey's article. In the _London Magazine_ of October, 1823, he repudiated at considerable length the compliments thrust upon him at the expense of his friends, and denied the arraignment of drunkenness and heterodoxy. Matters were then smoothed over between him and Southey through an explanation which his unfailing good nature could not resist.