ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the story of how these three writers embrace what Coleridge called the "critical machine", and how they can be seen to step outside it. It also shows how in these highly partisan feuds, like the feuds of 1817 involving the two great quarterlies and those radicals-turned-conservatives Southey and Coleridge, entertainment eventually trumps politics, as reformist and conservative writers work together to surprise, amuse, and intrigue readers of varying political persuasions. Hunt, Hazlitt, and Lady Morgan tend to allow the terms of their counterattacks to be dictated by the Quarterly, at times resorting to mere point-by-point refutations of the Torie's objections to their alleged offences. Ultra-Crepidarius, published towards the end of 1823, on one level merely perpetuates the animus behind the "Spider" poem, but it also marks Hunt's breaking away from what he called, in a letter to Percy and Mary Shelley, "old rusty resentments".
