Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 003.djvu/204

 which it wrings out delirious and passionate outcries at the very moment when you are lauding your coolness and magnanimity.

And now, before parting with you for a month, allow me to return you my best thanks, for the very kind and condescending permission which, in a late Number of the Examiner, you gave me to come forward and avow myself. This was more than kind it was generous. I need fear nothing from you so you inform me. But it would seem as if there were some other formidable Champion into whose hands you would wish slyly to deliver me. Of him, as of you, my contempt is perfect. As you got him to praise you and your verses in the Edinburgh Review, so may you get him at small cost to defend you in a Sunday Newspaper. But let him have a cooling draught before he enters the lists. I observed him lately breaking all the laws of chivalry, by using foul language to some humble squire who had spied a pimple on his nose. Give him a visor and send him forth to the battle. Choose for his shield-bearer the flower of the Cockney youth. Have warm possets and salves ready against his return from the combat, and one or two of your own "Nepheliads" to bring some "bubbling freshness" to his green wounds. Let this man of steel come at his leisure. You at least are disposed of. True that you called out "a foul blow," but it has been decided against you by impartial umpires, and it is evident that you have not weighed your metal before you rushed into the battle. Your imprudence has been great; had it not been the offspring of so much conceit I should have disdained to punish it. The die is cast. It is now too late to talk of retreating.

And now, for the present, I know not that I have much more to add. That you have been irritated to a state of lunacy by my Critiques on the Cockney School of Poetry, of which you are the founder, is proved by your raving and incoherent denials. You, who have libelled so many men, ought not to have considered yourself sacred from the hand of vengeance. Above all persons living, you, the Editor of the Examiner, who have so often run a muck, stabbing men, women, and children, should, if unable to defend yourself when the avenger came, have Letter from Z. to Leigh Hunt. had the sense and fortitude at least to endure punishment with decent composure. But your whole mind seems to be one universal sore of vanity, and the pinch of a finger and thumb causes you to shriek out, as if you were broken on the wheel, and to burst into insane invectives with the very avowal of silence on your pale quivering lips. Silent you cannot remain; and when you speak out against me, what is it you say? Nothing. Your abilities, which on some subjects are considerable, then utterly desert you; and instead of rousing yourself from your lair, like some noble beast when attacked by the hunter, you roll yourself round like a sick hedge-hog, that has crawled out into the "crisp" gravel walk round your box at Hampstead, and oppose only the feeble prickles of your hunch'd-up back to the kicks of one who wishes less to hurt you, than to drive you into your den.

The question at issue between Leigh Hunt and Z. is not to be decided by raving on your side, or contempt on mine. It is to be decided by that portion of the public who have read your works, and, if need be, the charges I have brought against them. You alone, of all the writers in verse of the present day, of any pretensions, real or imaginary, to the character of poet, have been the secret and invidious foe of virtue. 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 self-reproach. A brother would tear it indignantly from a sister's hand, and the husband who saw his wife's eyes resting on it with any other expression than of contempt or disgust, would have reason to look with perplexing agony on the countenances of his children.

You may, henceforth, endeavour to remain silent, and it may be well for you that you do so. But I shall hereafter have much to say to you. Your vulgar vanity, your audacious arrogance, your conceited coxcombry, your ignorant pedantry, all the manifold sins and iniquities of Cockneyism lie spread before me as in a map; and I will not part with your Majesty till I have shewn your crown, which you imagine is formed of diamonds and pearls, to be wholly composed of .paste and parchment, and