Mr Haydon enjoys every day the satisfaction of sitting before one of the cartoons of Raphael, with his own greasy hair combed loosly over his collar, after the manner of Raphael—hatted among his hatless disciples—a very God among the Landseers. What would these men have? Are they still unsatisfied with flattery, still like the three daughters of the horse-leech, “crying, Give! give! give!” There is absolutely no pleasing of some people.

The most amusing of the Cockney egotists is certainly our friend Leigh. There is an air of innocent unsuspecting self-adulation about him, which is enough to make one sorry to break upon the train of his sweet fancies. He sits at Hampstead with his pen in his hand, from year’s end to year’s end, and we venture to assert, that he never yet published a single Number of the Examiner paper—a single sonnet or song—of which one half at least was not, in some shape or other, dedicated to himself. “HUNT est quodcunque vides—quodcunque movetur.” We are sick of the personalities of this man—of his vituperative personalities concerning others, and his commendatory personalities concerning himself. The only thing he has not yet done is to give the public an engraving of his “face divine,” and upon what principle he has so long neglected this obvious piece of civility, we profess ourselves much at a loss to imagine—

What a large book his Confessions will make when he publishes them, as he has so long promised to do! There is no need of a Jemmy Boswell in Cockaigne. The truth is, that the whole of the Great Cockney’s writings are only episodes and detached fragments of a “voyage autour de ma chambre.” But we beg pardon of the Chevalier Ximenes, who was a wit, a poet, and a gentleman, for making use of the name of one of the most exquisite of books, to illustrate the character of one of the most vulgar of scribblers.

Those who know any thing about the writings of Mr Hunt cannot have forgotten that very long essay of his in the Round Table, entitled “A Day by the Fireside.“ They must still remember with accuracy the description of Mr Hunt poking the fire, and his wife pouring out the tea with her fingers, “having a touch of Sir Peter Lely about them.” They must recollect his narrative of his own reflections upon the “swirly” smoke, as it ascends with its “brief lambency, or darts out with a spiral thinness, and a sulphureous and continued puffing as from a reed!” But we prefer illustrating our present discussion by a few extracts from a later publication. It is well known that Mr Hunt’s forte is commonly supposed to lie in his theatrical criticisms; therefore, to shew our fairness, we shall begin with the following.

“One of those venal prints, called a daily paper, lately had the audacity to state, that the new comedy rehearsing at Covent-Garden Theatre was a posthumous piece of the late Mr A—. A new comedy from that pen was a refreshing event; and though we were suffering much from a pain in our tooth, which, by the way, we have not yet got entirely rid of (though we think it our duty to such of our readers as live at a distance from the Examiner-office to announce, that it is at present hardly any thing to speak of), we prepared ourselves, with becoming alacrity, to attend its first representation. As the author was said to be dead, we made up our mind to something above mediocrity, for we hare long despaired of seeing any thing good, or even amusing, from the living herd of dramatic scribblers, your B—’s, your C—’s, and your D—’s. We felt all our early school-boy play-going propensities rushing upon us, like old friends returned after a long absence, and we received them with a suitable welcome; and as it was then but twelve o’clock, it seemed as if six o’clock would never come: and we were as impatient to hear the musical cry of “Fine fruit, or a bill of the play,” warbled by some old cracked piazza throat, of thirty years’ service, as we used to be when we were treated to a play once in the Christmas holidays.

“We felt ourselves cosey and comfortable, and just-the-thingish; and at our present age, sitting round our fire, with a friend or two after a cheerful dinner, with our feet on our fender, and our chin on our knees (to the great annoyance of our wife’s peace, by the way, who thinks that “every one ought to have a smell of the fire”), this, we say, is almost as delightful as it used to be to us when we were a boy to gallop over green fields, and wage a war of extermination on the butter-cups—quite as useful and less expensive than that with which our precious ministers amuse themselves. We have often told our readers that our habits and feelings are domestic, but as want of room hinders our saying more on this subject at present, we shall reserve it for the leading article in our next. We shall only add, that though we do now and then fidget the fire with the poker, in spite of our wife’s entreaties to ‘let it draw up a bit,’ yet we  love our little fire-side with all its appendages. And then, to make all as it should be, we have pussy to frisk about us, whom we have lately decorated with a scarlet ribbon—by the way, we wish all ribbons were as well merited and as disinterestedly given—and the singing of the tea-kettle too, which we like a thousand times better than the Italian bravuras of Madame E—, with her thick ancles, and a face that reminds one of a monkey in the measles, though we know what good Italian music is, and can even applaud it on an occasion. Upon the whole, we may say that our little evening circles, in point of good taste and right feeling, might put to the blush some that the Morning Post jocosely calls brilliant and illustrious, and gives a hundred other imposing names to. The sly rogues of managers know well enough that we like our home, and no doubt thought it would be an excellent hoax to kidnap us to the theatre by hook or by crook. We can fancy those bright geniuses, Messrs F—, G—, and H—, sitting down together in the green room, puzzling their brains (we speak of brains here by courtesy) how they might get the Examiner to the first night of their new comedy.  “Let’s give out that it is by A—,” says F—, after an hour’s thinking.—“Damned good,” says G—. “Excellent, dam’me!” says H—. Their scheme succeeded to their own surprise, and no doubt, every one else’s, for we could hear something like a buzz in the house as we entered.

“As our friends declined taking their afternoon’s nap at the new comedy, we went alone. We bought a play-bill at the door, and could not help thinking that if the Attorney-General had bought one, he would have read it carefully through, to see whether there might not be something in it to file an information against, and then have gone home and facetiously talked about the liberty of the press; though, by the way, it is notorious that you cannot write a few pages of scurrility and abuse, particularly it you tack P— R— to the end of it, without danger of being hospitably lodged in a certain rural retreat in Horsemonger-lane, enlivened by what are archly ’ycleped arcades and views of the Surrey hills. For our own part, we are sure our readers will do us the justice to acknowledge that we did all we could to get in there; but as we found we did not like it, and then did all we could to get out again, we shall not readilly be friends with a certain great Personage, who insisted on our staying there the full term of our sentence: and though on certain concessions we may forgive him, he must not expect there can ever exist between us a “How-d’ye-do-George-my-boy” sort of familiarity.”

The acting and actors being dismissed with the usual kind of nonchalance, our Cockney proceeds to a graver part of his theme.