The Cockney School attacks, as Jeffrey Cox has observed, cleverly invert the elaborate mock court of the Cockney king in order to identify literary affectation and presumption. The burlesque pomp and ceremony of the Cockney ritual is generally appropriated to the provincial mindset and egoistic character of the Cockney author. Lamb's ludic and self-denigrating persona appears closer in spirit to the carnivalesque festival described in the Dictionary than to the derogatory term that appropriates it. The periodical conditions of commodification and the anonymous, corporate identity simultaneously seem to inspire the Elian self, and cause the magazine in which Elia appears to be damagingly embroiled within the Cockney dispute, as an expression of anxiety over metropolitan culture. Both of Lamb's metropolitan peers in this chapter, Hunt and Hazlitt, identify what are essentially Elian characteristics in their respective attempts to find a mode of periodical writing which is not synonymous with the all-pervasive, demonizing Cockney label. Because Lamb's former editor and fellow periodical-writing Londoner Hunt is derided as the archetypal Cockney author he represents the prime agent of this anxiety, yet this is a position from which he offers a perceptive analysis of Lamb's timely qualities as an antidote to Cockneyism. Responding in more ambivalent fashion to the rise of periodicals than the protagonists of the Cockney dispute and complicating the demonized figure of the Cockney itself, the foremost critic of the age, Hazlitt, tentatively gestures towards the irony-based defusion of metropolitan anxiety uniquely engineered by Lamb. Lamb writes not against Cockneyism or Hunt, therefore, but the virulent anxiety that gathers around the Cockney figure.