The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1833-10-04 00:00:00

OF PRESTON, AND OTHERS.

Poor Bulwer has lately published a most unfortunate congeries
of trash, called England and the English ; he should have enti-
tled it Cockneyland and the Cockneys. The book is nothing
more nor less than a paltry collection of the various stupidities
which were deemed too stupid for the New Monthly Magazine.
We have the same nonsensical impertinence about the House of
Commons—the same extolling of the mean people who compose
the liberal part of that assembly, and their idiotical talk—the
same struggling and plunging to unite the hack-literary man,
drawing his wages from a bookseller, with the character of the
independent gentleman of long descent, deriving his revenue
from his acres—the same horrid stuff about the gentility of the
unheard-of Bulwers, and "all the rest of it," that infects all
Bulwer's works, sacred or profane.

In a word, Bulwer is the new "king of the cockneys." Af-
fectation, impertinence, arrogance, stupidity, ignorance, male-
volence all these qualifications for the throne-literary of
Cockaigne are his in abundant store. He does not wear yellow
breeches, we admit; hut he does sport a particoloured neck-
cloth, bedaubed at the bottom with a gilt chain. He walks into
a drawing-room with a high-striding strut, and endeavours to
talk sweet nothings to the ladies, who soon shrink from his con-
tact, warned off partly by the disgusting style of his conversa-
tion, and altogether by the unsavoury odour of his breath ;
which, Lady Morgan declares, would knock down a copul, a
word in the Irish language signifying a horse. He fancies
himself as handsome a. man as Malvolio ; and everlastingly
smiling in cross garters, shews off in the appropriate livery of
that immortal flunkey, as his representative in " the reformed
house."

The man is generally acknowledged to be a blockhead past
redemption; and we shall take another opportunity of dissect-
ing his book ; in the meanwhile it is our duty to remark, that
one passage it contains has had the good fortune of awaking the
ire of Westmacott. Bulwer—himself the shabbiest of mankind
—had the insolence to " show up" Westmacott, under the
name of Sneak, and to attribute to him various mean things,
similar to those which Bulwer himself was and is in the habit
of perpetrating. Into this controversy we shall not enter, for
the very good reason that Westmacott has taken proceedings
against poor Bentley, the hapless publisher of this rubbish (al-
ready sufficiently punished by the want of sale of his good-fur-
nothing speculation) ; and intends, we understand, to call Bul-
wer as a witness in the case. There he will stand in court to
be sifted; and as we take it for granted Westmacott will secure
a proper counsel, we are certain that there will be some fun.
We shall review the "testimony of Balwee" at no small
length, when the time comes. - . .

In the mean while, during the dependence of this suit, our
friend of the Age has taken the cudgels in his own hands, and
demolished the great Shabbaroon in splendid style. The first
paragraph of the pamphlet before us is excellent.
" a work published with your name, you hare done your-
self the honour of attacking me. This you had a Rerfeet right to do
—no man entertains more profound contempt for you than I ; and no
man will more constantly give expression to that feeling. It has been,
my ambition through life to deserve the hostility of such arrogant
coxcombs as yourself, and I am delighted to find your name enrolled
among my public enemies."

.
This is very well ; what follows is better. Bulger had been
so rash as to talk of beating Westmacott. In spite of the
juvenility of the name, we do not think the New Monthly has a
chance against the Age. We back the veteran, at any odds.
At all events, if Bulger meant anything beyond a cowardly ro-
domontade, he is bound to try his luck after the following retort
from Bernard Blackmantle, appearing unmuffled, and without
the gloves:—
_

But, sir, when you talk of personal castigation, you afford me an
opportunity (which not even my scorn for your drivelling character
can induce me to pass over) of publicly meeting the threat of a blus-
tering bully. Yet, no—the class of bullies (and, according to your
own bout, you have mixed with all classes) are, at all events, pos-
sessed of the semblance and pretence of manhood, and would have
just cause of complaint if mentioned in conjunction with a sneaking
and cowardly puppy. You, sir, must in this, as in all instances, stand
alone. You belong to no class. The aristocracy justly despise a
scribbling fop, the smallest of the poor small gentry. The literary
world, with equal justice, despise the tuft-hunting cad of Henry Col-
burn. In parliament you are laughed at, and, in society, the object
of ridicule. But though thus immeasurably below the bully, I will in
pity bestow on you a few words of public notice."

These aro "words that burn." Here Bulwer, who had de.
Glared his intention of belabouring Westmacott, is by the said
Westmacott called a sneaking and cowardly puppy—a scrib-
bling fop—the smallest of the poor small gentry—a tuft-hunt-
ing cad of Colburn•—a butt of the House of Commons. Has
Buiwer beaten Westmacott? Not he! he thinks better of it.
Then succeed some extracts from the Age, in which the non-
sensical pretences of Beau Gingerbread are duly held up to
contempt; and then comes something about ourselves, which
we cannot forbear quoting:—

" Your address to Lockhart, and likewise to Picken, are well
known. An able writer in Frayer's Magazine soon exposed, with
crushing hand, the impudent absurdity of the letter. Lockhart has
hitherto despised yon too much to make any answer. Base and un-
grateful you are in your attack on him ; for the main ideas, brutally
perverted, of your novels, are stolen from his Adam Blair or Reginald
Dalton, or the imitators of these works. By and by, perhaps, Lock-
hart may notice you in some withering sentence. To whom, then,
have you awarded the weed of praise 7 To the worst authors of the
sham fashionable school; to old D'lsraeli, and to the pet scribblers,
male and female, of the Edinburgh Review."
We flatter ourselves we did demolish the letter to Picken with
" crushing hand." We may say " adieu, sir," to Bulwer, with
great consolation to our own minds. Why Lockhart does not
punish him we cannot tell; but we take it for granted that
" there's a bra' time coming;" or perhaps the game is too low.
From Lockhart down to Bulwer the descent is rather steep.
We nevertheless recommend the Quarterly Reviewer to bestow
a kick on the expelled New Monthly man, whenever he finds
it convenient. It need not be very hard; for a slight inflic-
tion of such a foot as Lockhart's would be quite sufficient to
destroy such a fragile object as that which Bulwer would
present for pedal punishment.

And here wa let him go. He came into our magazine world
with an impertinent swagger, as if he was of different clay
from the rest of us. He insulted the very patriarchs of our
tribe in his first essays, with a sort of reckless impudence which
called for immediate punishment. It c ould not be expected
that we, the old long-trained veterans of magazinery, were to
he fluttered like doves in a dovecot by the first intruder among
us, even though he had written some smart magazine papers,
bound up in,a volume called Pelham; and accordingly he was
taught the difference. We have set the gentleman in his true
light before the public, and he has skulked away from our corps
with a damaged character and a battered countenance. His
farewell to the readers of the New Monthly is one of the most
comic specimens of lugubrious buffoonery ever exhibited on any
stage, and only equalled by his namesake Liston's appearance
while walking to his own funeral in the Illustrious Stranger.
Bulwer himself, no doubt, imagined it to be something as touch-
ing and stupendous of interest as the farewell of Buonaparte to
his Guard at Fontainebleau. In one respect it somewhat re-
sembled that celebrated leavetaking, because both Bulwer and
Buonaparte had most materially thinned and scattered the con-
gregations which they addressed.

So now, as he has left us, we leave" him. Henceforward he
may be the prey of Westmacott, if that Great Captain of the
Age thinks such garbage worthy preying upon. Bulwer may
depend upon our word, when we assure him, that if he does not
take some notice of the pamphlet which we have been just
reviewing, he may abandon to the day of his death any pre-
tensions to the character of a gentleman.
Adieu, sir 1

2. As we have above exhibited one pair of periodical writers
in single combat--if that can be called combat where all
the heavy blows are on one side—we think it may not be
an inappropriate wind-up to give a passing notice of another
contest, in some degreo of the same kind. Cobbett
has been exposing. one of the fifty mean Whig jobs which
characterise this mean ministry of ours, and the ministerial
papers have had orders to abuse him in consoquence.—
Among those engaged in this work, we are sorry to see the once
independent Morning Chronicle, which has now degrmled its
free condition to the servile posture of a Treasury hack. It
defended the appointment of John Wood, the patriot of Pres-
ton, and his associate., to highly paid places on a quack com-
mission, for the duties of which (if any thing honest were in-
tended) they were wholly unqualified, and attacked Cobbett
for his exposure of the job. The sage of Oldham is not a man
to be knocked about with impunity; and in his Register of 21st
September he thus returns the compliment:—
" Desrna.vrx TAX-P.ATBR9.—It was naturally to be'expected, that
the pulling out of rearing Rushton by the hair of the head, and of sly
and creeping Parkes by the heels, and the hustling of John Wocd
about, as we do a detected shop-lifter ; it was natural to expect that
these vermin, thus exposed as they were in the last Register, would
become furious and extremely tonguey. That which I expected has
taken place. John Wood, snug in his sixteen hundred a year, eats his
fat mess, and keeps quiet, like a yard-hog, when he comes at night
for the swill : you may half beat his brains oat ; but to squeak, he
must cease to eat ; and, as my Lord Althorp knows as well as any man
in England, the devil can't make him do that, while there is a drop at
the bottom of the trough. How often these greedy tax-eaters must
remind my lord of those hogs, of which he has long been so famous a
breeder, and a pair of which, such as he once gave to John Price, I
wish he would give me, not of his two-legged ones, for God's sake !
Not of his roaring Rushtons, his Parkeses ; bat of those honest, and
much more intelligent foustlegged creatures, being of a reddish brown
ground with yellow stripes. How often, when beset by the swinish
multitude of tax-eaters at the Treasury, he must look back with a
sigh towards the more moderate herd that he has left in Northarnp-
tonshire I

" It n•as natural to expect that these vermin would come forth with
most bitter reproaches. They were lying, 149 they thought, out of
tight, and forgotten : quiet as a sow in beans,' is an old saying.
You cannot see her the beans are-so high ; the food is just upon a le-
vel with her mouth ; it is at once nutritive and moist (just like taxes

she munches, and stuffs, and sleeps ; the beans afford her fond, drink.
and shelter, and, taking good care not to grunt, there she bides very
often till pigging-time. Thus happily situated ten days ago were
Wood (emphatically called John), roaring 'Rushton, and Joseph
Parkes. If you drag out the sow, my Lord Althorp knows what a de-
vil of a noise she will make : you would think that murder was com-
mitting in every part of the village at one and the same time. When
I was at Havre de Grace, rather more than forty years ago, I saw the
people in the grand Place, running towards a spot whence issued fe-
male screams of 'on neassassine .1 on ye assassine I' Believing that
somebody was assassinating a woman, I ran amongst the rest; but to
my agreeable surprise I soon found that it was a woman that kept a
certain sort of house, receiving discipline at the hands of a sort of
beadle, who had her hands fast to a whipping-post, and was applying
a cat very efficiently to her naked shoulders. Something in this sort
of way roaring Rushton and Parkes have been crying out against me,
since I pulled them out in my last Register. As the means of putting
forth their cries, they have resorted to Dr. Black, who, by a long se-
ries of tackings-about and of dullness, has, at last, brought the poor
old Chronicle to that point at which the doctors usually say, ' You may
let her have what she likes.' I most solemnly declare that I believe
it to be more than two months since I so much as saw a Morning
Chronicle, until the 14th of this month, when a neighbour in Fleet-
street, who generally sees it on its way somewhere else, saw the arti-
cle which has called forth these remarks : and, seeing that thero was
something about me, he, the next day, got the paper second-hand,
and made me a present of it ; and thus, once more, I had a sight of
dismal old ChroNicle. The hare sight of her so impressed upon my
mind the idea of her approaching dissolution, that I instinctively run
my hand into my waistcoat pocket, to search for a couple of old Liver-
pool's heavy pennies to lay upon her eyelids."