Article VIII of the regular series, reviewing Hunt's _Bacchus in Tuscany_, appeared in _Blackwood's_ of August, 1825. His allegiance to Apollo in Cockaigne is declared to have been changed to Bacchus in Tuscany, and his usual beverage of weak tea to a diet of wine on which he swills like a hippopotamus. He is depicted as Jupiter Tonans and his manner to Hebe is compared with a "natty Bagman to the barmaid of the Hen and Chickens." The same number noticed Sotheby's translation of Homer. The opportunity was not lost to refer unfavorably to Hunt's translations of the same in _Foliage_.
_The Rebellion of the Beasts_; or _The Ass is Dead! Long Live the Ass!!! By a Late Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge_, with the motto "A man hath pre-eminence above a beast," was published anonymously by J. & H. L. Hunt in London in 1825. There is every reason to believe that it was by Hunt, although he does not mention it elsewhere. It is an exceedingly clever satire on monarchy and far surpasses anything else of the kind that he ever did. Had the Tories of Edinburgh suspected the author it would probably have made them apoplectic with rage.
With _Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries_ the rage of the two periodicals reached a grand climax and seemingly exhausted itself. The _Quarterly_ in March of the same year in which it appeared said: "The last wiggle of expiring imbecility appears in these days to be a volume of personal Reminiscences." It characterized the book as a melancholy product of coxcombry and cockneyism: as "dirty gabble about men's wives and men's mistresses--and men's lackeys, and even the mistresses of the lackeys:" as "the miserable book of a miserable man; the little airy fopperies of its manner are like the fantastic trip and convulsive simpers of some poor worn-out wanton, struggling between famine and remorse, leering through her tears." _Blackwood's_ of the same month pictured Hunt riding in the tourney lists of Cockaigne to the tune of Cock-a-doodle-doo. It accused him, besides those misdemeanors many times previously exploited, of clumsy casuistry, of falsehood regarding his transaction with Colburn, of ill-breeding in dragging his wife into such a book. The following is the culmination of the author's anger: