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A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
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 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO 
 ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 
 
 LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 
 
 TORONTO 
 
A GROUP OF 
 ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 OF THE 
 
 EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 J5Y 
 Pi/ 
 
 Cr T. WINCHESTER 
 
 PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 IN WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY 
 
 Nefo gorfc 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 1910 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
Copyright, 1910, 
 By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 
 
 Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1910. 
 
 Nortxrooti IPress 
 
 J. S. Cushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 
 
 Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 
 
 ©CLA256084 
 
Co 
 
 MY FRIEND AND COLLEAGUE 
 
 OSCAR KUHNS 
 
The following papers pretend to no discovery of 
 new biographical fact, nor to any reversals of estab- 
 lished critical verdict. They are, for the most part, 
 the result of many pleasant hours in a college semi- 
 nary room; and their interest, if any interest they 
 have, is that attending the informal discussion of a 
 group of familiar and delightful English prose-writers. 
 
 If a disproportionate attention seems given in these 
 pages to biography rather than to criticism, it should 
 be remembered that Hazlitt, Lamb, De Quincey, 
 Wilson, and Hunt all found their themes within their 
 own personal experience. Perhaps no other body 
 of English prose, equally large and important, is 
 so exclusively autobiographical. The biographical 
 method of approach, always useful, is here the only 
 one open to the critic. He must first know the man 
 before he can estimate the book. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The New Essay — Jeffrey as Critic i 
 
 William Hazlitt 26 
 
 Charles Lamb 76 
 
 Thomas De Quincey 118 
 
 John Wilson 166 
 
 Leigh Hunt 204 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH 
 ESSAYISTS 
 
 THE NEW ESSAY — JEFFREY AS CRITIC 
 
 I 
 
 Very different literary forms have been designated 
 by the common name Essay. In strictness, it is 
 to Montaigne that we owe the name and the thing. 
 His Essais, excellently translated by John Florio in 
 1583, were at once popular in England, and Bacon, 
 fourteen years later, borrowed their title for his 
 famous little bundles of apothegm. The influence 
 of the Essais, continuing into the next century, in- 
 creased with the liking for all things French after 
 the Restoration, and is attested by Cotton's new 
 translation in 1680. They evidently furnished the 
 model for those charming discursive papers by 
 Cowley, Halifax, and Temple, which closely resemble 
 some of the best work of Hazlitt or Lamb. 
 
 But the sudden and immense popularity of the 
 Taller and Spectator in the Queen Anne time brought 
 into prominence another type of the essay. It is 
 the peculiar praise of Addison that he knew how 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 to give permanent charm to the familiar, even to the 
 trivial, by nicety of literary skill. His manner is 
 simple, yet always easy and urbane. He had noth- 
 ing of importance to say; but he could say it with a 
 suavity, humor, and grace that make the veriest 
 nothings admirable. He was no philosopher, no 
 statesman, and a very mediocre critic, but his little 
 papers on a fan or a petticoat, on the foibles of Sir 
 Roger or the vanity of Ned Softly, may last as long 
 as the Paradise Lost, and very probably find more 
 readers. 
 
 For more than half a century, the acknowledged 
 mastery of Addison tended to popularize this lit- 
 erary form in which he had won such success. 
 Before the close of the century there had appeared 
 more than a hundred periodicals, — most of them 
 as short-lived as the flies of a summer, — which at- 
 tempted to do what had been done so brilliantly 
 in the Tatler and the Spectator. But they all failed. 
 The essay of the Addisonian type demands the skill 
 of an Addison. It lost its distinctive charm even in 
 the treatment of Goldsmith ; and it becomes a solid, 
 clumsy thing under the ponderous handling of John- 
 son in the Rambler and Idler. Before the close of 
 the century its form was outgrown; the modern 
 essay has a quite different origin. 
 
 For two hundred years, indeed, many excellent 
 prose papers of moderate length, wTitten upon 
 
THE NEW ESSAY 
 
 weighty themes, political, philosophical, and crit- 
 ical, had appeared as prefaces, letters, pamphlets, 
 and short treatises; but it was the new Reviews and 
 Magazines, founded at the beginning of the nine- 
 teenth century, that produced the modern essay. 
 Now, for the first time, we have that extended dis- 
 cussion of some one theme, popular in manner yet 
 accurate in statement, and admitting high literary 
 finish to which we now confine the name of essay. 
 The founding of the Edinburgh Review in 1802, not 
 only introduced to the public a new group of young 
 liberal writers, it introduced a new type of writing, 
 a type adapted to a wide range of subjects, giving 
 expression to the author's personality, and affording 
 scope for almost any kind of rhetorical excellence. 
 
 The Edinburgh had, indeed, been preceded by a 
 number of so-called Reviews; 1 of which all but two 
 were short-lived and of no influence. These two, 
 however, the Monthly Review, founded in 1749, 
 and the Critical Review, in 1756, were already of 
 quite venerable age. Though they contained little 
 but book-notices, for half a century they had been 
 rival pretenders to the realm of English criticism. 
 By looking over the correspondence of Fanny Burney 
 
 1 The London Review, 1775-1780; A New Review, 1782-1786; 
 the English Review, 1 783-1 796; the Analytical Review, 1788- 
 1799. 
 
 3 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 or of Cowper, one may see how their verdicts were 
 dreaded by young or timorous authors. The 
 Monthly Review was conducted by that redoubtable 
 Philistine, Ralph Griffiths, who starved and bullied 
 Goldsmith, and furnished security for the poet's 
 gay clothing at the price of four articles for the 
 Review. Most of Griffiths' criticism, however, was 
 written by feebler men, poor-devil authors whose 
 opinions were always at his dictation. He paid them 
 at the rate of two guineas a sheet of sixteen pages, 
 and as their idea of a review was eight pages of quo- 
 tation to one of criticism, they can hardly be said 
 to have been underpaid. To the reader of to-day 
 their writing seems so empty that we wonder how it 
 could have been deemed a misfortune to be damned 
 by such ignorant judges. On the appearance of 
 Gray's Elegy the critic of the Monthly ventures 
 only the opinion that "the excellence of this little 
 poem may compensate for its lack of quantity. " The 
 Bentley edition, two years later, moved him to enthu- 
 siasm by the "head and tail pieces with which each 
 poem is adorned, which are of uncommon excellence, 
 the Melancholy in particular being exquisite." Oc- 
 casionally, and especially toward the close of the 
 century, a new author is greeted with something like 
 intelligent recognition. The Kilmarnock edition 
 of Burns, for example, by some rare good luck, was 
 reviewed by some one able to discern, under the 
 
 4 
 
THE NEW ESSAY 
 
 Scottish dialect, — which he calls disgusting, — the 
 genius of a new kind of poet. But, as a rule, it is 
 difficult to discern any relation between the approval 
 of the critic and the quality of the work. And there 
 is seldom anything to break the deadly dulness of 
 the writing save the rather spirited comments which 
 each editor now and then bestows upon the other. 
 For they were always at loggerheads. " The Monthly 
 Review,'' 1 said Griffiths, a year after the Critical 
 was founded, "is not written by physicians without 
 practice, authors without learning, men without 
 decency, and gentlemen without manners. " Smollett, 
 editor of the Critical, rejoined with similar urbanity: 
 "The Critical Review is not written by a parcel of 
 obscure hirelings under the restraint of a bookseller 
 and his wife. The writers for the Critical are un- 
 connected with booksellers and unawed by old 
 women." 1 Making allowance for editorial heat, 
 each Review seems to have characterized the other 
 not very unfairly. 
 
 With only these senile rivals in the field, the sudden 
 and phenomenal success of the Edinburgh Review 
 is no marvel. The familiar story of the meeting of 
 those three eager but impecunious Edinburgh stu- 
 dents, Sydney Smith, Brougham, and Jeffrey, when 
 the Edinburgh Review was conceived, is a classic of 
 literary history, and deserves to be. For the Edin- 
 
 1 Forster's Life of Goldsmith, Book II, Ch. i. 
 
 5 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 burgh was essentially a new thing. The idea seems 
 to have been an unpremeditated suggestion of Syd- 
 ney Smith's; there had been no happier literary 
 inspiration since Richard Steele hit upon the plan of 
 the Tatler, nor any more pregnant with results for 
 our later prose literature. The three young enthu- 
 siasts were scholars and gentlemen, and they took 
 their Review out of Grub Street at once. At first, 
 indeed, it was proposed that the writers of articles 
 should have no remuneration at all; that "it should 
 be," as the biographer of Jeffrey puts it, " all gentle- 
 man and no pay." But this was thought to be a 
 little too quixotic, and the wiser rule was adopted that 
 all contributors should be required to take pay, and 
 should be paid like gentlemen. The papers were to 
 be much longer than those in the old Reviews ; and, 
 while they still retained the form of a review of a 
 book or books, instead of being a mere list of quota- 
 tions with a little commonplace comment, they were 
 animated discussions of important subjects of con- 
 temporary interest, for which the books under notice 
 served merely as a text. The writers evidently had 
 opinions of their own: sometimes a little arrogant, 
 sometimes a little shallow, but at all events not 
 merely perfunctory ; and they knew how to set forth 
 those opinions with the spirit and the style of gentle- 
 men. In literary matters the new Review was 
 thought brilliant and magisterial; and in politics, 
 
 6 
 
THE NEW ESSAY 
 
 at a time when conservatism was having everything 
 its own way, these young men dared, if somewhat 
 cautiously, to avow pronouncedly liberal opinions. 
 
 It is true that the reader of to-day who turns over 
 the early volumes of the Edinburgh runs the risk of 
 finding the luminary not quite so brilliant as the ac- 
 counts of its reception have led him to expect. There 
 is certainly not so much dash and audacity in the 
 opening numbers as one would suppose from the 
 surprise and indignation they excited. The writers 
 seem rather to assume a dignified assurance of 
 manner. But any one who prepares himself by a 
 short course of reading in what called itself criticism 
 before 1800 will find the most homiletical passages 
 of the Review " stick fiery off indeed." And it must 
 be remembered that there is not much duller reading 
 to be found on earth than that between the covers of 
 any Review a century old, with its pother over ques- 
 tions settled three generations ago, and over books 
 and men alike gathered now to a forgotten past. 
 
 It is a more serious charge against these early 
 volumes of the Edinburgh and of the Quarterly 
 Review, established in 1807, that they contain little 
 or nothing of permanent value as literature. Yet 
 this, too, was inevitable. Perhaps the -most im- 
 portant service of the two Reviews was the intelli- 
 gent guidance of opinion on public affairs. By 
 far the larger number of the articles were on such 
 
 7 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 subjects. But any periodical devoting its attention 
 so largely to current political questions of the hour 
 must be content to see most of its writing pass into 
 that wallet wherein Time puts alms for oblivion. 
 The article that is timely is seldom immortal. Only 
 some unusual intensity, like Swift's, or some unusual 
 philosophic vision like Burke's, can give to writing 
 on such themes lasting value. And none of the early 
 reviewers had either of these qualifications in any 
 high degree. 
 
 For the literary criticism, which occupied consider- 
 able space in both Reviews, there is, perhaps, a little 
 more to be said. The new Reviews doubtless did 
 something to raise the quality of literary criticism. 
 With their pretensions they could not afford to utter 
 partial, hasty, ill-considered verdicts. Criticism 
 was forced to justify its decisions, and to look about 
 for some general principles. Doubtless nothing like 
 a science of criticism was elaborated — it may be 
 questioned whether there is any such a science ; but 
 the Reviews at least demanded from the critic care- 
 ful reading, instructed judgment, and some definite 
 views as to the grounds of literary excellence. They 
 were, as has been said, a kind of college of criticism. 
 Yet much of the resulting work was either very com- 
 monplace or very perverse. The Reviews certainly 
 made some notorious mistakes. But critics, like the 
 rest of us, are very fallible, and their worst mistakes 
 
 8 
 
THE NEW ESSAY 
 
 might be pardoned them if it could be shown that 
 they had often introduced to public notice genius 
 not yet recognized, or removed unworthy prejudice, 
 or anticipated in any way the verdict of the next 
 generation. But that the Reviews rendered any such 
 service, between 1800 and 1825, is very doubtful. A 
 careful reading of all the critical notices in the 
 Edinburgh and Quarterly during these years will 
 prove that they usually followed the public taste, 
 occasionally opposed it, but never led it. They 
 echoed the popular admiration for Scott and Byron ; 
 but the other three great poets, Wordsworth, Shelley, 
 and Keats, won recognition in spite of their neglect 
 and abuse. Jeffrey's persistent attacks upon Words- 
 worth are matter of familiar knowledge, and unques- 
 tionably did something to retard the poet's fame; 
 they set a fashion not yet quite outgrown. From 
 18 1 5 to 1837 neither Review has anything to say of 
 Wordsworth: having made up their verdict of con- 
 demnation, they refuse to alter or even to repeat it. 
 Everybody remembers that the Quarterly, "so savage 
 and tartarly," had the blame of killing John Keats ; 
 while the Edinburgh had no word of recognition for 
 him, and only broke silence in 1820 when his brief 
 career was closed. Shelley was abused by the 
 Quarterly through three violent articles, and the cau- 
 tious Edinburgh did not venture a word of him 
 until 1824 — two years after he was dead. 
 
 9 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 Yet, after all, the most perverse literary criticism 
 is not without value. It at least calls attention to 
 the book. Probably the poet himself would rather 
 be damned than ignored. And by the discussion of 
 faults and merits, even by the opposition he pro- 
 vokes, the critic does something to educate public 
 taste; the collision of opposite opinions generates a 
 kind of literary atmosphere and not infrequently 
 evolves something like critical principles. Had it 
 not been for the blind dogmatism of the Edinburgh, 
 we might never have had Coleridge's Biographia 
 Literaria. The criticism of the last hundred years, 
 begun by these Reviews, has certainly done much to 
 render public interest in literature more general and 
 more intelligent, and thus to raise the standard of 
 production. 
 
 II 
 
 It must be admitted that in all this early critical 
 writing there are but very few papers that will find a 
 place among English classics. Southey furnished 
 to the Quarterly a body of solid and sensible prose 
 writing, mostly on political subjects, and all of it 
 now dusty and dead. Gifford, the editor of the 
 Quarterly, was a dull-sighted, thick-skinned, heavy- 
 handed critic, with little acumen and no delicacy, 
 who richly deserved the flogging he got from Hazlitt. 
 He liked to pose as a literary judge and executioner, 
 
 10 
 
THE NEW ESSAY 
 
 but he wrote comparatively little himself, and that 
 little was never of much value. Of the Edinburgh 
 men, Brougham, though a vigorous and careless 
 writer, was never ambitious of literary repute. Syd- 
 ney Smith was unsurpassed as a wit, raconteur, 
 letter-writer; but his papers in the Edinburgh are 
 mostly on ecclesiastical and political topics, and only 
 two or three of them show him at his best. The critic 
 among the reviewers was Francis Jeffrey. From 
 1802 to about 1830 he was accounted beyond ques- 
 tion the first of literary critics. As the century 
 advanced, his fame declined. His obstinate and con- 
 temptuous depreciation of Wordsworth was remem- 
 bered against him when the poet had come to his own. 
 There were a good many irreverent people of the 
 later generation who thought his criticism, when 
 not commonplace, merely smart. Yet as late as 
 1867 Carlyle pronounced him "by no means supreme 
 in criticism or in anything else ; but it is certain that 
 no critic has appeared among us since worth naming 
 beside him." And only the other day, in an able 
 and discriminating study, Professor Gates * was pro- 
 testing against the neglect of Jeffrey's good work in 
 Jeffrey's own famous words "This will never do!" 
 
 It is easy to understand Jeffrey's contemporary 
 popularity. In the first place, he wrote a clear, 
 rapid, fluent English. Doubtless he is sometimes 
 
 1 Three Studies in Literature, 1899. 
 II 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 too fluent and makes a little philosophy go a long 
 way ; but his style has a metallic brilliancy, not un- 
 like that of his admirer, Macaulay. He knows how 
 to say telling things, and he has infinite store of illus- 
 tration. Then, too, like Macaulay, he is always 
 cock-sure — which is pleasing in a critic. His 
 sweeping assertions, his lavish use of the super- 
 lative and the unusual, give to his writing a magis- 
 terial air that most readers find very satisfying. Pro- 
 vided he agrees with us, — and Jeffrey never differed 
 boldly with current opinion, — we like the critic to 
 tell us authoritatively how we ought to feel about 
 a book, and why we ought to feel so. We compli- 
 ment ourselves on having reached substantially a 
 sound judgment without his aid; and the loftier the 
 critic, the greater the compliment of his agreement 
 with us. 
 
 Then Jeffrey's criticism has always a certain hard 
 common sense. It is clear and sane, level to the com- 
 prehension of everybody. There is nothing subtle 
 in it. He never goes much below the surface, and 
 cannot give you those penetrating glimpses that 
 sometimes illuminate the whole of an author's work. 
 He likes his meaning plain and his emotions familiar. 
 Anything profound, mystical, or even strikingly 
 original is likely to put him out. He emerges from 
 the farther end of one of Wordsworth's long passages 
 of transcendentalism blinking and angry. But the 
 
 12 
 
THE NEW ESSAY 
 
 large, obvious excellences of thought and feeling, 
 which all men perceive, he can state and appraise 
 with intelligence and justice. He is best, therefore, 
 on such objective writers as Scott; best of all, I 
 think, on books like Mrs. Hutchinson's Memoirs 
 or Pepys' Diary, that present no problems, and 
 invite narrative treatment with copious illustrative 
 quotations. But even in his most unsympathetic 
 reviews, like those on the Lake School, his opinions, 
 however blind, have a plausibility that recommends 
 them to average prosaic common sense. He is never 
 perverse or paradoxical of set purpose. 
 
 Jeffrey's method, unlike that of most recent critics, 
 is dogmatic, never exactly what we have come to call 
 impressionist. The modern critic strives to suggest 
 the total effect upon himself of the work under re- 
 view; to make you feel as the work has made him 
 feel. He is the medium through which you are to 
 be put en rapport with the author. Jeffrey's method 
 is altogether different. He does not aim to give you 
 an appreciation of the book, but an estimate of it. 
 This is an intellectual process, a judicial process, the 
 application of principles to reach a verdict. All 
 Jeffrey's criticism is in this manner; he is always 
 proving, expounding, defending. This method 
 not only tends to conventional decisions, but it is 
 unlikely to produce writing of the highest literary 
 quality. For it does not appeal to our sympathy, 
 
 13 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 but to our judgment ; and it gives to the critic little 
 room for the play of imagination or the expression 
 of his own personality. 
 
 It is this method that determines the favorite form 
 of Jeffrey's critical articles; for they are nearly all 
 built on the same plan. They begin with an elabo- 
 rate introduction, which often takes up about a third 
 of the paper. This introduction is devoted either 
 to a re'sume" of some period of literary history or to a 
 statement of general principles on which his specific 
 critical judgments are to be based ; then follows, for 
 the rest of the paper, a detailed estimate of the book, 
 usually with copious excerpts to illustrate and enforce 
 the verdict. These introductions, when of the his- 
 torical sort, are usually correct in their facts, but they 
 are superficial and show little sense of the deeper re- 
 lations of literature to history. For instance, the 
 sketch of the course of English poetry that precedes 
 the review of Ford's Dramatic Works is an interest- 
 ing sketch of the elementary external facts of English 
 literary history for two centuries; but it is almost 
 entirely without those illuminating glimpses that 
 prove keen critical insight, and it gives you no clear 
 notion of the ways in which the changing national 
 life embodies itself in literature. In the instance 
 mentioned, as in some others, the first part of the 
 essay seems to have little connection with the rest — 
 the introduction does not introduce. Similar com- 
 
 14 
 
THE NEW ESSAY 
 
 ment might be made on the opening sections of 
 the reviews of Campbell's English Poets and of 
 Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. Such passages are of 
 interest as showing that Jeffrey had some dawn- 
 ing conception of an historical method in criticism; 
 but he hardly had more. And he seemed quite un- 
 able to apply any such method to the literature of 
 his own day. One would have thought, for ex- 
 ample, that in the poetry of Byron and its wonderful 
 vogue all over Europe, Jeffrey might have seen and 
 pointed out some significant expression of the spirit 
 of the age ; but it cannot be said that he ever did. 
 
 The other kind of introduction, that is taken up 
 with general critical principles, is often still more 
 disappointing. For this formidable array of truths, 
 which would seem to make the conclusion drawn 
 from them quite irresistible, turns out on examination 
 to be only the generalized expression of Francis 
 Jeffrey's personal likes and dislikes, a set of high 
 priori statements all out of his own head. He always 
 assumes himself to be the representative of those 
 instructed few who have authority on matters of 
 taste, and he mistakes the limitations of his own ap- 
 preciation for general laws. A good many critics, I 
 am afraid, do that ; but Jeffrey shakes still more our 
 confidence in the stability of his judgment, not merely 
 by the jaunty facility with which he lays down gen- 
 eral principles, but by his unlucky denial, now and 
 
 i5 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 then, of some statement assumed as an eternal truth 
 only a little while before. Thus, writing in April, 
 1810, an elaborate review on the poetry of Crabbe, 
 he declares that we are all "touched more deeply 
 as well as more frequently in real life with the suffer- 
 ings of peasants than of princes . . . and an effort 
 to interest in the feelings of the humble and obscure 
 will call forth more deep, more numerous, and more 
 permanent emotions than can be excited by the for- 
 tunes of princesses and heroes"; but four months 
 later, having to explain the wonderful popularity of 
 Scott, he decides that it is mostly due to his subject, 
 and that "kings, warriors, knights, outlaws, min- 
 strels, secluded damsels and true lovers" are the sort 
 of persons to appeal to the general poetic sense. And 
 his whole a priori explanation of the conditions of 
 poetic popularity was, two years later, overset by the 
 meteoric fame of Byron on quite different grounds. 
 In the essay on Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, Jeffrey 
 declares that "human nature is everywhere funda- 
 mentally the same"; in the review of Baber's Me- 
 moirs , two years later, he decides that there is "a 
 natural and inherent difference in the character and 
 temperament of the European and Asiatic races." 
 One who goes straight through his essays will come 
 upon a considerable number of such contradictions. 
 Jeffrey's general principles we suspect are mostly 
 made to order. He first makes up his decision upon 
 
 16 
 
THE NEW ESSAY 
 
 the work under review, quite empirically, and then 
 frames a set of universal truths to justify his deci- 
 sion. Mr. Leslie Stephen, indeed, goes so far as to 
 say that Jeffrey had no real taste of his own at all, 
 and is always asking himself, not "What do I feel?" 
 but "What is the correct remark to make?" But 
 this seems to me unfair. Jeffrey, I should rather 
 say, is always asking himself "Why ought I to feel 
 as I do?" He has a very genuine, though limited, 
 appreciation, and is bent on justifying it. 
 
 His various likes and dislikes are curious, and often 
 apparently irreconcilable. Yet a little reflection 
 will show how they all spring from a common ground 
 of temperament. Jeffrey, if I understand him, was 
 a singular combination — I can hardly say compound 
 — of sense and sensibility. His emotions were easy 
 to get at; but they were checked by anything im- 
 probable, by any shock to his prosaic sense of fact. 
 He sincerely professed enthusiastic admiration for 
 the romantic literature of the sixteenth century, 
 especially the Elizabethan drama, which, he says, 
 "I have long worshipped with a kind of idolatrous 
 veneration"; but for the romantic literature of his 
 own day, he had a very qualified liking. Coleridge's 
 Ancient Mariner seems always to have been to 
 him nothing better than an old sailor's foolish yarn; 
 of Christabel he says — or, at all events, allowed 
 the Edinburgh to say, in a review always attributed 
 c 17 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 to him — that " the thing is utterly destitute of value, 
 a mixture of raving and drivelling . . . beneath 
 criticism." His estimate of Scott was forced up 
 by the pressure of public opinion; but of Marmion 
 he could say, in 1808 : " We must remind our readers 
 that we never entertained much partiality for this 
 sort of composition, and ventured on a former occa- 
 sion to regret that an author endowed with such 
 talents should consume them in imitation of obsolete 
 extravagances. . . . To write a modern romance 
 of chivalry seems to be much such a phantasy as 
 to build a modern abbey or an English pagoda." 
 On the other hand, for the work of Crabbe, the most 
 merciless of realists, he always had a great admira- 
 tion. Here, he said, are the facts of life. These 
 farmers and shopkeepers and workhouse folk are 
 the real thing; they "represent the common people 
 of England pretty much as they are" — not as Mr. 
 Wordsworth's philosophical peddlers, and sententious 
 leech-gatherers, and hysterical school masters. In a 
 word, Jeffrey liked romanticism, — as he understood 
 it, — and he liked realism ; but he did not like them 
 mixed. The romantic writers, he would say, may 
 fairly abandon the present and the actual; but to 
 throw the hues of imagination on the facts of common 
 life, as Wordsworth attempted to do, this was merely 
 to falsify the facts without illuminating them. 
 So, too, he objects to the conventional poetic dic- 
 18 
 
THE NEW ESSAY 
 
 tion of the eighteenth century on precisely the same 
 grounds as Wordsworth in his famous preface, and 
 sometimes in almost the same words. He praises 
 Cowper without stint as the first to abandon that dic- 
 tion and to break away from all rigid poetic conven- 
 tion. Yet not the most finical classicist of the eigh- 
 teenth century could have had greater dread of any- 
 thing rude or undignified. Wordsworth's simplicity 
 he accounts vulgar and puling; and he shudders 
 politely over such very mild improprieties as the 
 guard-room talk of the soldiers in the Lady of the 
 Lake. One wonders how he would have survived a 
 reading of — let us say — some of Rudyard Kip- 
 ling's ballads. The one poet most entirely to his 
 liking was Campbell, always proper and always 
 sentimental. "We rejoice," he says, in opening his 
 review of the Gertrude of Wyoming, "to see once 
 more a polished and pathetic poem;" though he 
 fears it may not appeal to the taste of an age 
 "vitiated by babyishness" (i.e. of Wordsworth) "or 
 antiquarism" (i.e. of Scott). In a famous passage 
 in one of the very latest of his papers — quoted 
 by everybody who has written anything on Jeffrey 
 since Christopher North quoted it first in Blackwood 
 — looking backward over a generation, he concludes 
 that Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Crabbe, are already 
 passing into oblivion; Scott's novels have put out 
 his poetry; even the splendid strains of Moore are 
 
 19 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 fading into distance and dimness, and the blazing 
 star of Byron receding from its place of pride ; while 
 the two poets who still keep the laurels fresh with no 
 signs of fading are — Rogers and Campbell ! 
 
 All of which proves, not that Jeffrey had no taste 
 of his own, but that it was narrowed in its range, on 
 the one hand by a hard common sense, and on the 
 other by a rather prim sentimentality. It was his 
 misfortune that, with his limited critical equipment, 
 he had to deal with two or three very original poets, 
 innovators who broke new paths for themselves. 
 Of Shelley he never ventured any estimate at all. 
 The great Edinburgh criticism of Shelley was written 
 by Hazlitt. Byron for a time quite dazed him, as 
 he dazed everybody. Before that overmastering 
 genius, even Jeffrey's insistent common sense was 
 blinded. He holds his breath over the magnilo- 
 quence of Manfred, and avers that the dialogue 
 which to so many of us now seems the veriest bathos is 
 " so exquisitely managed that all sense of its impossi- 
 bility is swallowed up in beauty." The worst fault 
 of Manfred he declares to be, not that it is hollow and 
 theatric, but that it "fatigues and overawes us with 
 terror and sublimity." He has doubtless suffered 
 most from his judgment of Wordsworth. Yet 
 to-day the most enthusiastic Wordsworthian must 
 admit that there is a good deal of solemn rubbish 
 
 20 
 
THE NEW ESSAY 
 
 in Wordsworth, and not a little puerility. Nobody 
 is obliged to read the whole of the Excursion; while 
 as for Goody Blake and Harry Gill, Alice Fell, 
 Peter Bell, and some dozen or more of that family, 
 no one need much care to save them from the jaws 
 of devouring Time. Our quarrel with Jeffrey is 
 that he is not content to say of the Excursion, as 
 Bottom says of the play, "There are things in this 
 that will never please," but he must go on to pick out 
 for special reprobation some of the very best passages 
 in the poem. So in his flings at Wordsworth's sim- 
 plicity, scattered through various essays, — as those 
 on Crabbe and on Burns, — he points his ridicule by 
 mentioning just the verses dearest to the lovers of 
 Wordsworth, as the Leech-Gatherer, the Matthew 
 poems, Michael, and what he calls "the stuff about 
 dancing daffodils." The truth is that to the prac- 
 tical, mundane intelligence of Jeffrey all the most 
 characteristic excellences of Wordsworth's poetry 
 were quite invisible. Wordsworth's feeling of an 
 all-pervading spiritual power in nature, his resulting 
 conviction of the direct influence of nature upon 
 character, his notion of the effect of the imagination 
 on moral culture, — all this to Jeffrey was mere 
 mystical nonsense. Wordsworth's subjective treat- 
 ment of humble life, that, he thought, was a whim- 
 sical falsification of fact. There were no such plain 
 people. He could not see it was not the peasant that 
 
 21 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 made the poem, but Wordsworth's thought about the 
 peasant. Wordsworth's poetical theories may have 
 been right or may have been wrong; but before he 
 condemned them Jeffrey should have understood 
 them. 
 
 In briefest summary, then, we may admit that to 
 Jeffrey, rather than to any other man, may be given 
 the credit of raising the critical essay to the rank of a 
 recognized literary form; that his writing is always 
 brilliant and plausible; that his critical verdicts are 
 always clear, and if upon matters within the range of 
 his appreciation, sensible and just. On the other 
 hand, it must also be admitted that his range of ap- 
 preciation is limited; that his impressions are often 
 worth more than the dogmas he invents to justify 
 them; and that a considerable part of his fame was 
 due to the immense and novel popularity of the Re- 
 view which raised him for a time to literary dicta- 
 torship almost like that of Dryden or Johnson. 
 
 Ill 
 
 But important as was the service of the two great 
 Reviews in calling out a new variety of literature, the 
 most entertaining prose written in England between 
 1800 and 1825 is not to be found in their pages. The 
 men whose work we have to consider in this volume 
 contributed but little to the Reviews, and none of 
 
 22 
 
THE NEW ESSAY 
 
 their best. The reason is obvious. The Review 
 did not invite that kind of writing out , of which 
 the best literature is made. It was not essays 
 they wanted, but extended reviews of contemporary 
 questions, suggested by some current book or books. 
 Within such limitations there was little opportunity 
 for original and creative work, or even for that play 
 of personal feeling, that intimate and subjective 
 note, which so often gives to writing permanent liter- 
 ary charm. The whimsical humors of Lamb, the 
 causeries of Hazlitt, the rambling reminiscences of 
 De Quincey, the jovial "Noctes" of Wilson, — they 
 would each and all have been out of place in the dig- 
 nified pages of the Edinburgh or Quarterly. More- 
 over, both Reviews had provoked the most violent 
 antagonism of some of the best contemporary writ- 
 ers. Neither De Quincey nor Lamb could ever 
 forgive the Edinburgh its vituperation of Words- 
 worth and Coleridge, the gods of their early idolatry ; 
 while to Hazlitt, the mere mention of GifTord and the 
 Tory Quarterly was a red rag to set him roaring, 
 and the Edinburgh, with its timid Whiggism and 
 dread of all radicalism, seemed to him but little better. 
 Much of the work of these men, therefore, found 
 publication, not in the Reviews but in the new Maga- 
 zines. The father of all English Magazines was the 
 Gentleman's Magazine, founded by Edward Cave 
 in 1 73 1, and followed before 1800 by several other 
 
 23 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 periodicals of similar character. All these Maga- 
 zines, however, as their name implied, were reposi- 
 tories for miscellaneous matter — summaries of 
 recent news with brief comment, excerpts from 
 current literature or from rare or curious books, 
 expositions of difficult or obscure passages in the 
 classics or in Scripture, bits of odd and striking fact 
 and incident. They afforded scanty room for origi- 
 nal writing of any sort. Perhaps the most note- 
 worthy contribution to them before 1800 was those 
 famous reports of parliamentary debates written by 
 Sam Johnson, mostly out of his own head. But in 
 18 14 the New Monthly Magazine was established 
 under the editorship of the poet Campbell; three 
 years later appeared that more famous periodical, 
 Blackwood's Magazine, which at once rivalled the 
 Reviews in popularity and influence. In 182 1 the 
 London Magazine was started by John Scott, — the 
 brilliant young critic who fell in a duel next year, — 
 with Charles Lamb announced as one of its prin- 
 cipal contributors. These new Magazines were 
 entirely unlike the dreary publications of that name 
 in the preceding century. The new Reviews had 
 vastly raised the character and repute of periodical 
 writing; to write for them now brought fame with 
 the public and hard cash from the publisher. This 
 high standard the new Magazines maintained. They 
 commanded the pens of the most brilliant and am- 
 
 24 
 
THE NEW ESSAY 
 
 bitious young men. Published not quarterly but 
 monthly, they were fresher and more vigorous than 
 the Reviews; open to good writing on all subjects, 
 they invited papers more varied, original, imagina- 
 tive, than could find admission to the Reviews. Un- 
 der such encouragement we get a new type of essay. 
 The essays of Hazlitt, De Quincey, and Lamb com- 
 bine the personal, intimate charm of Addison's best 
 work with a more highly elaborated form and a 
 much wider range of interest. There is no type of 
 literature more altogether delightful; and there are 
 no better specimens of the type than in the work of 
 the writers we have to consider in the following pages. 
 
 25 
 
WILLIAM HAZLITT 
 
 Any sketch of William Hazlitt may fitly begin 
 with an extract from his most familiar essay — the 
 most delightful essay of personal reminiscence in the 
 English language. It is the story of his spiritual 
 birth. 
 
 " My father was a dissenting minister, at Wem, in 
 Shropshire; and in the year 1798 (the figures that 
 compose the date are to me like the ' dreaded name of 
 Demogorgon') Mr. Coleridge came to Shrewsbury 
 to succeed Mr. Rowe in the spiritual charge of a 
 Unitarian congregation there. He did not come till 
 late on the Saturday afternoon before he was to 
 preach ; and Mr. Rowe, who himself went down to the 
 coach in a state of anxiety and expectation, to look 
 for the arrival of his successor, could find no one at 
 all answering the description but a round-faced man, 
 in a short black coat (like a shooting jacket) which 
 hardly seemed to have been made for him, but who 
 seemed to be talking at a great rate to his fellow- 
 passengers. Mr. Rowe had scarce returned to give 
 
 26 
 
WILLIAM HAZLITT 
 
 an account of his disappointment, when the round- 
 faced man in black entered, and dissipated all doubts 
 on the subject by beginning to talk. He did not cease 
 while he stayed; nor has he since, that I know of. 
 He held the good town of Shrewsbury in delightful 
 suspense for three weeks that he remained there, 
 'fluttering the proud Salopians like an eagle in a 
 dove-cote,' and the Welsh mountains that skirt 
 the horizon with their tempestuous confusion, agree 
 to have heard no such mystic sounds since the days of 
 
 " 'High-born Hoel's harp or soft Llewellyn's lay.' 
 
 As we passed along between Wem and Shrewsbury, 
 and I eyed their blue tops seen through the wintry 
 branches, or the red rustling leaves of the sturdy 
 oak trees by the roadside, a sound was in my ears as 
 of a Syren's song; I was stunned, startled with it, 
 as from deep sleep; but I had no notion then that 
 I should ever be able to express my admiration to 
 others in motley imagery or quaint allusion, till the 
 light of his genius shone into my soul, like the sun's 
 rays glittering in the puddles of the road." 
 
 And then follows the account of Coleridge's ser- 
 mon, next day : — 
 
 "For myself, I could not have been more delighted 
 if I had heard the music of the spheres. Poetry and 
 Philosophy had met together. Truth and Genius 
 had embraced, under the eye and with the sanction 
 
 27 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 of religion. This was even beyond my hopes. I re- 
 turned home well satisfied. The sun that was still 
 laboring, pale and wan, through the sky, obscured by 
 thick mists, seemed an emblem of the good cause; 
 and the cold dank drops of dew, that hung half 
 melted on the beard of the thistle, had something 
 genial and refreshing in them ; for there was a spirit 
 of hope and youth in all nature, that turned every- 
 thing into good." 
 
 It is dangerous to begin quoting Hazlitt ; one never 
 knows when to stop. Better even than these first 
 paragraphs are the later portions of this charming 
 essay, describing that visit of the following spring 
 when the young Hazlitt tramped three days through 
 mud and mire to see the god of his idolatry at home 
 in the Nether-Stowey cottage ; was taken by Cole- 
 ridge to see Wordsworth at the Alfoxden House hard 
 by; discussed with Coleridge everything in heaven 
 and earth, and heard Wordsworth read in solemn 
 chant his yet unpublished Lyrical Ballads; lived for 
 three exalted weeks in such companionship, returning 
 often on evenings from Alfoxden to Stowey by the 
 lovely wooded walk, when the nightingale sang in 
 the leafage, the stream that slipped through the 
 green glimmered in the moonlight, and Coleridge's 
 voice sounded on 
 
 "Of Providence, foreknowledge, will and fate, 
 Fix'd fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute." 
 28 
 
WILLIAM HAZLITT 
 
 The whole picture still glows in Hazlitt's pages 
 with the color of his early hope and dream. Noth- 
 ing that the poets themselves wrote in that annus 
 mirabilis, 1 798-1 799, not even the diary of Dorothy 
 Wordsworth for those months, can bring the local 
 habitation, the homely life and high thinking of 
 Coleridge and Wordsworth, so vividly to the imagina- 
 tion as this paper of Hazlitt's. 
 
 At the time of this memorable visit Hazlitt was 
 just completing his twentieth year. At first thought 
 it may not be quite clear why he always acknowl- 
 edged such great obligation to Coleridge; for his 
 own mind had by this time already taken its bent, 
 and he had a full set of radical opinions, if not yet 
 quite made, at least in the making. 
 
 His radicalism he came honestly by. Dissent and 
 revolt, both political and religious, ran in the blood 
 of his family. An elder brother of his father had 
 early migrated to America, heartily espoused the 
 cause of the American rebels, and served with dis- 
 tinction through the Revolutionary War. Hazlitt's 
 father had been educated in Glasgow University 
 for a Presbyterian minister; but he soon devel- 
 oped a more pronounced liberalism, and before he 
 began preaching he had become a Unitarian. A 
 radical in politics also, he formed the acquaintance 
 of Benjamin Franklin, and during all the period of 
 the American difficulties found himself in hearty 
 
 29 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 sympathy with the cause his brother had espoused. 
 After the conclusion of peace he came over to Amer- 
 ica himself with his family, minded to pass his life 
 in the new republic where liberty had taken up her 
 seat. He did reside for more than a year in Phila- 
 delphia, and gave a course of lectures in the Uni- 
 versity of Pennsylvania; thence he removed to the 
 vicinity of Boston, in which city he is said to have 
 organized the first Unitarian society in America. 
 But Unitarianism could not yet make much headway 
 against Puritan orthodoxy; and no congregation 
 would quite venture to give the young English 
 preacher a settlement. We may surmise, too, that 
 his studious and retiring temper found the atmos- 
 phere of our New England society rather raw. At 
 all events he returned to England in the summer of 
 1787, and shortly after settled in the little parish of 
 Wem, in Shropshire. Here he lived all the rest of 
 his days, "repining but resigned," says his son, "far 
 from the only two things he loved — talk about dis- 
 puted texts of Scripture, and the cause of civil and 
 religious liberty." A fine type of the learned, ra- 
 tional dissenter, this elder Hazlitt, in the tiny study 
 at Wem, surrounded by his tall folios, or in the garden 
 gathering "broccoli plants and kidney beans of his 
 own rearing," his imagination far away in dreams of 
 patriarchal eld, yet now and then waking to some 
 stout utterance in behalf of tolerance and liberty to- 
 
 30 
 
WILLIAM HAZLITT 
 
 day. He survived to the venerable age of eighty-four ; 
 and when the end came, says his daughter, "he made 
 no complaint, nor did he give one groan, but went on 
 talking of glory, honor, and immortality to the end." 
 From him his son inherited, along with his specula- 
 tive, introspective habit, a certain largeness of imagi- 
 nation and a sense of the high solemnities of life. 
 When Hazlitt's writing is at its very best, we may feel 
 in its stately rhythm and its sublime imagery the 
 moving of his father's spirit. 
 
 It was, however, the father's love of civil and 
 religious liberty that showed earliest in the young 
 Hazlitt. His first printed article, a letter to a Shrews- 
 bury newspaper in 1791, was an indignant rebuke of 
 the intolerant churchmen who sympathized with the 
 Birmingham mob that had just burned down the 
 house of Dr. Priestley. The breadth of view and force 
 of statement in this paper, by a boy of thirteen, was 
 very remarkable. The years from fourteen to 
 twenty-one are probably the determining period of 
 every man's life. For Hazlitt they certainly were. 
 Like so many men of generous temper, he had fallen 
 under the spell of the French Revolution, which was 
 unrolling its stupendous drama during just those 
 years from 1792 to 1799, when his opinions were 
 a-forming. Before he was seventeen he had drawn 
 out a scheme of civil and criminal legislation based 
 on the most doctrinaire notions of individual rights. 
 
 3 1 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 For three or four years, thereafter, he was striving 
 in vain to put into satisfactory literary shape a treatise 
 on the Principles of Human Action which should 
 prove " the natural disinterestedness of human 
 nature." The central thesis of this speculation he 
 conceived to be an important discovery of his own — 
 certainly it would be important, if true. But the 
 course of history in those years, one thinks, must 
 have strained his theory rather severely sometimes. 
 The early excesses and atrocities of the Revolution, 
 the worst of which occurred while he was in his early 
 teens, could not change his convictions, but (though 
 there is no record of his experience in those years) 
 I suspect they did sometimes becloud his enthusiasm. 
 Indeed, Hazlitt was always distrustful of enthusiasm. 
 He had no liking for the raw multitude, and all his 
 days had some trouble to keep his sympathies on 
 good terms with his principles. He confessed, later 
 in life, that he had been staggered in his devotion to 
 republicanism and puritanism, when he reflected that, 
 though there was plenty of both in America, it was 
 yet doubtful whether in all the United States, from 
 Boston to Baltimore, — his geography wouldn't let 
 him go farther south, — we could produce a single 
 head like one of Titian's noblemen, nurtured in 
 all the pride of aristocracy and all the blindness of 
 popery. He never shared Wordsworth's interest in 
 humble folk, and declared that those Cumberland 
 
 32 
 
WILLIAM HAZLITT 
 
 ploughmen and peddlers were low company that, 
 for himself, he did not care to meet. Ignorance is 
 always bad enough, he said, but rustic ignorance is 
 intolerable. Nor did the fact that common folk were 
 hardly treated suffice to make them interesting. 
 " Never pity people," he says, "because they are ill- 
 used; they only wait the opportunity to use others 
 just as ill." Hate the oppressor and prevent the 
 evil if you can, but do not fancy there is any virtue 
 in being oppressed. The unfortunate are not a jot 
 more amiable than their neighbors. Such cynical 
 sentiments, to be sure, come from the later years of 
 disillusion; but Hazlitt was never really a democrat. 
 He always hated the kings more than he loved the 
 peoples. 
 
 With this temper it is not difficult to understand 
 how, by 1798, his political devotion had already 
 begun to fix itself upon Napoleon Bonaparte. By the 
 beginning of the nineteenth century Napoleon had 
 crushed the sanguinary factions of the Revolution 
 into order ; he had raised the young French republic 
 out of chaos to a pitch of eminence above the highest 
 dream of Richelieu; he had liberated Italy — or 
 said he had ; he had shaken every throne on the con- 
 tinent, and stood for the moment before all the world, 
 the foe of all the elder tyranny, the champion of an 
 ordered, victorious liberty. Here was a noble figure, 
 u who nothing common did nor mean"; worthy 
 D 33 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 to march at the front of the new age. For William 
 Hazlitt, he was ever thereafter the hero who had 
 broken up the old order, the protagonist in the cause 
 of the Peoples against the Divine Right of Kings. 
 
 And it was for somewhat analogous reasons that 
 the young Hazlitt welcomed Coleridge so gladly. 
 In those years he was an eager student of the best 
 things in letters; but here again he found a clash 
 between his tastes and his principles. The ablest 
 contemporary literature, the eloquence, the imagina- 
 tion, he had to own, were on the wrong side. He 
 was quick enough to see that incomparably the best 
 prose written in his time was in Burke's great pam- 
 phlet against the French Revolution. "From the 
 first time I ever cast my eye on anything of Burke's," 
 he writes, "I said to myself, this is true eloquence. 
 All other styles seemed to me pedantic or infinitesi- 
 mal; Burke's was forked and playful as the light- 
 ning." The doctrine was all wrong, but how im- 
 mensely superior as literature was this heresy to the 
 frigid sermons, the meagre and acrid pamphlets of 
 the other party. It was then that he met Coleridge. 
 Here, at last, was the orator, the philosopher, the 
 poet — and on the side of the angels ! For those 
 were the days of Coleridge young, full of all glad 
 enthusiasm, and with a gift of speech to make the 
 most abstruse philosophy sound musical as Apollo's 
 lute. It is easy to understand what strengthening 
 
 34 
 
WILLIAM HAZLITT 
 
 of resolve, what stimulus to independent thinking, 
 what large though vague ideals, this man Coleridge 
 would give to the lonely and isolated young thinker. 
 Not, however, that there were any immediate re- 
 sults to show for it. The results were to come some 
 twenty years later. Throughout the period of his 
 early manhood Hazlitt was, indeed, trying hard to put 
 his notions on paper; but without success. He 
 averred that he had thought for eight years without 
 being able to write a single page. This sterility was 
 due, in part, doubtless, to his own exacting literary 
 judgment, in part to his inexperience and the im- 
 maturity of the conceptions he was trying to express ; 
 but it was due, most of all, to the fact that he was 
 wrestling with subjects that, however interesting to 
 him at the time, were not really congenial. Hazlitt 
 was an acute and subtle thinker, but he was never a 
 systematic thinker. I should say that with all his 
 fondness for speculation he never had the gift of 
 philosophic exposition. He is delightful whenever, 
 as in his later essays, he lets himself go; and many 
 really profound truths of human nature slip into the 
 stream of fancy, and sentiment, and half-cynical 
 observation that he pours out with no care for method. 
 In fact, he never writes well save when he is writing 
 of himself. But in those early efforts he was trying 
 to be impersonal and philosophic. The Argument 
 in Favor of the Natural Disinterestedness of the 
 
 35 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 Human Mind, — which did not get published 
 until 1805, — unlike his later work, is dry as a re- 
 mainder biscuit. If Hazlitt found it difficult to write, 
 we find it quite as difficult to read. Nor do the 
 philosophers have much to say for it. The central 
 theme of the treatise Hazlitt thought to be an impor- 
 tant discovery of his own; namely, that there is no 
 such thing "as an innate and necessary selfishness." 
 Which may or may not be true, Hazlitt' s argument 
 thereupon not being lucid to the non-metaphysical 
 mind; but as he admits "a practical self-interest 
 arising out of habit and circumstances" which may 
 serve as well as the innate article, the "discovery" 
 would not seem very startling. Hazlitt himself al- 
 ways had a fondness for the book, — I suppose because 
 it had cost him so much labor, — and he reworked 
 the substance of it in two of his later essays. 
 
 Hopeless of success in literature, Hazlitt tried 
 art. His elder brother was a portrait painter of 
 some promise, and he resolved to adopt the same 
 profession. In 1802, after the peace of Amiens, 
 he went over to Paris to study in the Louvre, just 
 then enriched by Napoleon's plunder from all the 
 galleries of Europe. But in this art, too, he felt his 
 powers fell far short of his ideals, and about 1806, 
 after years of patient effort, he laid down his brush. 
 Yet those years were, perhaps, among the most 
 profitable of his life. He was not only preparing 
 
 36 
 
WILLIAM HAZLITT 
 
 himself to be as good a critic of art as of literature, 
 but he was gaining a delicacy of perception and a 
 keenness of appreciation for all the outward charm 
 of the world that was to make him one of the most 
 picturesque of writers. And it is perhaps not fanci- 
 ful to say that his constant endeavor as a portrait 
 painter to read the meaning of faces had something 
 to do with his remarkable power in the analysis and 
 interpretation of character, shown in his later writ- 
 ings. 
 
 But whatever the profit of those years of appren- 
 ticeship to art, they certainly were the happiest 
 years of Hazlitt's life. No one can read his delight- 
 ful essay On the Pleasures of Painting without 
 feeling that he was doing what he loved to do. For 
 he loved to live by himself, with the companionship 
 of those forms of nature and those works of art that 
 will not quarrel nor betray. His work as a painter 
 called him out of the temper of irritation to which 
 he was naturally inclined, out of the meaner accom- 
 paniments of controversy, and gave him for a time 
 a certain poise and quiet. For beauty always has 
 one advantage over truth as an object of contempla- 
 tion — you know it when you see it ; you cannot 
 doubt or dispute over it. 
 
 Hazlitt's mind was ripening in all ways during the 
 years from 1798 to 1808; by the end of that decade 
 it had got its growth. The thirty or forty books 
 
 37 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 that were to be his life-long companions — Shake- 
 speare, Milton, Rousseau, the eighteenth-century 
 English essayists and writers, to name only those 
 he liked most — he had got by heart; for the rest 
 of his life he kept on reading them over and over. 
 He used to say in later life that he had not read a 
 new book since he was thirty. His political notions, 
 too, had taken their final shape, and had subtly 
 linked themselves with the brightest memories of 
 that golden time. In the essay On the Pleasures 
 of Painting he tells us with a thrill of longing and 
 recollection how he finished one of his first portraits 
 on the day which brought news of the battle of 
 Austerlitz. 
 
 " I walked out in the afternoon, and as I returned, 
 saw the evening star set over a poor man's cottage, 
 with other thoughts and feelings than I shall ever 
 have again. Oh, for the revolution of the great 
 Platonic year, that those days might come over again ! 
 I could gladly sleep out the intervening 365,000 
 years!" 
 
 One thinks, by contrast, of the great Pitt, on hear- 
 ing the same news, saying in despair, "Fold up the 
 map of Europe," and sinking back to die. To the 
 statesman it was the dark close of a great chapter 
 of history; to the young painter the triumphal 
 opening of a new one. In fact, I think one reason 
 why Hazlitt held so obstinately to his opinions was 
 
 38 
 
WILLIAM HAZLITT 
 
 that they had been identified with his purest senti- 
 ments, hallowed by a thousand of the dearest asso- 
 ciations of his youth. To deny or change them 
 seemed treachery to the best impulses of his best 
 years. 
 
 Just what Hazlitt was doing for several years after 
 he gave up painting, is not very clear. His home, 
 up to about 1808, seems to have been with his 
 father at Wem ; but he was much in London, and in 
 1805 he had formed the acquaintance of his best 
 friend, Charles Lamb. For the next twenty years 
 it was at this quiet bachelor fireside of Charles and 
 Mary Lamb that he found his tongue loosened to 
 say his best and brightest things. He soon met all 
 of Lamb's set, — Godwin, Burney, Manning, Rick- 
 man, Dyer, and the rest, — and though he was too 
 shy and moody to be a "clubable man," his face 
 came to be familiar at Lamb's Wednesday nights, 
 and in some fortunate hours he could be the most 
 brilliant of the company. Mary said he was orna- 
 mental as a Wednesday man, but he was more useful 
 on common days, when he dropped in after a quarrel 
 or a fit of the glooms. He had no desire to extend 
 the circle of his acquaintance, especially in that half 
 of society a young man of twenty-seven might have 
 been thought most willing to know. Lamb writes 
 to Wordsworth in 1806: "W. Hazlitt is in town. 
 I took him to see a very pretty girl professedly, 
 
 39 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 where there were two young girls — the very head 
 and sum of the Girlery was two young girls — they 
 neither laughed, nor sneered, nor giggled, nor whis- 
 pered — but they were young girls — and he sat 
 and frowned blacker and blacker, indignant that 
 there should be such a thing as Youth and Beauty, 
 till he tore me away before supper in perfect misery, 
 and owned that he could not bear young girls. They 
 drove him mad. So I took him home to my old nurse, 
 where he recovered perfect tranquillity. Indepen- 
 dent of this, and as I am not a young girl myself, 
 he is a great acquisition to us." ! 
 
 In 1808, however, the misogynist, having no 
 visible means of support, married — having first 
 written a refutation of the doctrines of Malthus. 
 The lady was Miss Sarah Stoddard, a friend of the 
 Lambs, who apparently had not enough of either 
 youth or beauty to frighten Hazlitt's shyness. Miss 
 Stoddard was the kind of a woman spoken of with 
 awe as "of superior ability"; well emancipated, 
 strong of mind and body. She had, moreover, 
 some eighty pounds a year, while Hazlitt, as Lamb 
 said, had only what he could claim from the parish. 
 In addition to her income she had a Lilliputian 
 estate at Winterslow, near Salisbury, and there the 
 newly married couple took up their residence. Four 
 years later, however, in 181 2, finding it necessary to 
 
 1 June 26, 1806. 
 40 
 
WILLIAM HAZLITT 
 
 do something for the support of his family, Hazlitt 
 came up to London, and spent most of his after 
 life there. Yet he always had a fondness for Winter- 
 slow. A lonely wayside inn on the edge of the heath, 
 a mile from the village, was the refuge to which, in 
 all his later years, he would flee when vexed by 
 society or craving solitude for work. His very best 
 writing was done there. 
 
 On coming up to London, Hazlitt obtained a posi- 
 tion on the Chronicle newspaper, first as reporter 
 and then as theatrical critic. But it was Leigh 
 Hunt's Examiner that enabled him to find his genius. 
 In 1814 Hunt projected a series of essays in the 
 easy manner of Addison which should deal with the 
 humors, the foibles, the philosophy of daily life. 
 In these papers, afterward collected under the title 
 The Round Table, Hazlitt first opened that delight- 
 ful personal vein in which all his best work is done. 
 His drudgery on the Chronicle had shown him that 
 he could write when he must ; now for the first time 
 he found it easy to write. He was morbidly shy and 
 reserved in company, but for that very reason the 
 most unreserved of authors with the pen. The 
 man who doesn't dare to take himself for granted in 
 society is just the most communicative in his study. 
 He isn't talking to you, he is talking to himself — 
 and talking about himself. There is criticism, and 
 satire, and fancy, and philosophy in what Hazlitt 
 
 41 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 writes; but it is all in the first person, all passed 
 through the medium of his own feeling. It is William 
 Hazlitt pouring himself out on paper. 
 
 After the appearance of the Table Talk Hazlitt 
 was sure of an audience and a publisher, and might 
 have been secure from pecuniary embarrassment, 
 had he not always obeyed somewhat too literally the 
 Scripture injunction to take no thought for the 
 morrow. In the fifteen years that remained to him 
 he produced a very considerable body of literature. 
 The best of it is in the volumes entitled Table Talk 
 and The Plain Speaker, and in similar papers con- 
 tributed to various periodicals, and collected by his 
 son under the title Sketches and Essays. In 1818 
 he gave two courses of literary lectures on the 
 English Comic Writers and on the English Poets; 
 and in the following year a third course on the 
 Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth. These 
 essays and lectures, with some other critical and 
 miscellaneous writing, fill twelve rather stodgy vol- 
 umes in the latest edition of his works. To these 
 we must add what he himself deemed his magnum 
 opus, the Life of Napoleon, upon which he lavished 
 the toil of his last years. 
 
 The life of Hazlitt, after he had once found his pen 
 and his place, is without noteworthy external inci- 
 dent, if we except those growing out of his domestic 
 infelicity. That is not a pretty, nor — for us — a 
 
 42 
 
WILLIAM HAZLITT 
 
 very important story. What perverse fate induced 
 William Hazlitt and Sarah Stoddard to marry, no 
 man can tell; though doubtless Miss Stoddard 
 could have given a syllogism for it — she was of that 
 sort. But Hazlitt said in a charming essay, "I 
 love myself without a reason; I would have my 
 wife do so, too." Lamb thought there was some 
 love on both sides at first, but apparently not 
 enough to last long. There was never any violent 
 rupture, still less any jealousy on either side or any 
 cause for it; but the very unconventional ways of 
 Mrs. Hazlitt evidently got on her husband's nerves 
 a good deal, while to a woman of her large, red 
 health such a man as Hazlitt doubtless seemed a 
 poor creature. After 1819 they lived mostly apart, 
 and in 1822, by mutual consent, went up to Edin- 
 burgh to make the forty days' residence there neces- 
 sary for a divorce under the Scottish law. Mrs. 
 Hazlitt's journal during this time shows a remarkable 
 superiority to considerations of sentiment. Hazlitt 
 himself, meantime, during one of his periods of 
 bachelor residence in London, had fallen very pre- 
 cipitously in love with a certain Sarah Walker, the 
 daughter of a tailor in whose house he was lodging. 
 Probably a little flattered and a little bewildered by 
 the attentions of so singular a character, the girl did 
 not at once refuse them, and Hazlitt's regard passed 
 at once into something like insanity. Miss Walker, 
 
 43 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 however, had sense enough to see that marriage with 
 him would be folly; while he was in Edinburgh she 
 refused to correspond with him, and when he re- 
 turned to London, a separated man, he found that 
 she had wisely transferred her regard to an earlier 
 and younger suitor. Hazlitt thereupon sat down 
 and put the whole story of his passion into a book, 
 which in its astonishing frankness quite out-Rous- 
 seaus Rousseau. The Liber Amoris (which Mr. 
 Le Gallienne took needless trouble to rescue from 
 oblivion in a reprint some years ago) is not exactly 
 a bad book — there was nothing base in Hazlitt's 
 infatuation; but in its vulgar lack of all reserve it 
 is nearly as unpleasant reading as some of our 
 modern decadent novels. To say the truth, there 
 is, not only here but occasionally elsewhere in Haz- 
 litt's explosions of petulance or of sentiment, some- 
 thing a little under-bred. He hadn't quite the 
 dignified reticence of a gentleman. Sarah Walker 
 
 — having once " cleansed his stuffed bosom of that 
 perilous stuff" by publishing the Liber Amoris 
 
 — he speedily forgot. Next year, 1824, he married 
 a certain Mrs. Bridgewater, of whom nothing 
 particular is known save she had three hundred 
 pounds a year. On this Hazlitt took the conti- 
 nental journey he had long coveted, to Paris (where 
 he met the first Mrs. Hazlitt and gave her some of 
 the second Mrs. Hazlitt's money), to Genoa, Florence, 
 
 44 
 
WILLIAM HAZLITT 
 
 and Rome. The last part of his wedding journey, 
 however, he seems to have taken alone; and when, 
 on his return to England next year, he wrote to his 
 wife asking her to join him, she replied that they 
 were now separated forever. From that time Hazlitt 
 led a rather hermit-like life in London and in the 
 Hut at Winterslow, writing occasionally for the 
 magazines and for the Edinburgh, and toiling hard 
 at his Life of Napoleon. His health, injured per- 
 haps by his habit of drinking enormous quan- 
 tities of strong tea, began to break, and he died 
 in 1830, at the age of fifty-two. 
 
 II 
 
 Hazlitt's last words were, "Well, I have had a 
 happy life." This certainly seems at first blush 
 a strange verdict upon a life full of disappointment 
 and complaint. For Hazlitt had never mastered 
 the art of living with men, still less the art of living 
 with woman. His best friends found him sometimes 
 very difficult. He was morbidly timid and sus- 
 picious by nature. De Quincey says that if Hazlitt 
 left some friend in a room for a few minutes, on his 
 return he would look about him with a mixed air of 
 suspicion and defiance as if challenging something 
 that had been said against him in his absence. 
 Leigh Hunt used to describe a shake of his hand as 
 
 45 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 something like a fish tendering you his fin. His 
 face wore habitually a half-sad, half-angry look, over 
 which some high thought or noble feeling would 
 throw a sudden flash as of a lightning gleam, then 
 fading out again in sullen night. He knew him- 
 self the most awkward of mortals, and in one of his 
 essays confesses that he had never been able to 
 come through a door gracefully. In an admirable 
 letter to his son just going away to school, he says 
 with an evident ^twinge of memory: "I wish you 
 to learn Latin, French, and dancing. I would 
 insist upon the last more particularly, because it is 
 of the greatest consequence to your success in life." 
 And this moody sensitiveness was, of course, 
 increased by the publicity that his writings brought 
 him. His political opinions drew down upon his 
 head the most virulent criticism from the Tory 
 Quarterly and the Blackwood. The whiskey-drinking, 
 swash-buckler reviewers of the Blackwood, especially, 
 assailed him, after their wont, with such personal 
 abuse that Mr. Blackwood was forced to some sort 
 of apology, under threat of a suit for libel. Such 
 attacks put Hazlitt into a kind of trembling, angry 
 terror, and actually drove him for days into seclu- 
 sion. Nor could he expect active sympathy from 
 any quarter. His old friends, he felt, had been 
 alienated by his own political consistency. The 
 cause to which Coleridge and Wordsworth and 
 
 46 
 
WILLIAM HAZLITT 
 
 Southey, as well as himself, had given their alle- 
 giance a score of years before, they had now basely 
 deserted. He hated Southey almost as heartily as 
 he hated Wellington; and he is always lamenting 
 over Coleridge, as over an archangel fallen. On 
 the other hand, he distrusted all mere doctrinaire 
 radicals and fanatics, all loud declaimers like Byron, 
 and for such rhapsodical enthusiasts as Shelley, he 
 had a dislike amounting to a positive contempt. 
 Such men, he thought, had wrecked the Revolu- 
 tion at its beginning. As it was, he felt himself 
 on most matters of importance in a minority of one, 
 an Ishmaelite with every man's hand against him. 
 The one man whom he did admire to idolatry was 
 the one man whom all parties united to fear and 
 to detest — Napoleon Bonaparte. Waterloo closed 
 the chapter of his hopes. When the Congress of 
 Vienna set up the Bourbon monarchy in France — 
 an abomination in a desolation — and forced upon 
 prostrate Europe the old odious doctrine of the 
 Divine Right of Kings, Hazlitt refused any longer 
 to look to the future. Thereafter he solaced himself 
 with memories and with the proud consciousness 
 of his own loyalty to a fallen cause. 
 
 "For my part, I started in life with the French 
 Revolution, and I have lived, alas ! to see the end 
 of it. But I did not foresee this result. My sun 
 arose with the first dawn of liberty, and I did not 
 
 47 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 think how soon both must set. The new impulse to 
 ardor given to men's minds imparted a congenial 
 warmth and glow to mine ; we were strong to run a 
 race together, and I little dreamed that long before 
 mine was set, the sun of liberty would turn to blood, 
 or set once more in the night of despotism. Since 
 then, I confess, I have no longer felt myself young, 
 for with that my hopes fell." 
 
 This disappointment came, we shall remember, 
 just as his own literary career was opening, and gave 
 a bitter taste to all his success. Indeed he never 
 cared much for merely literary success. The higher 
 forms of creative literature he knew himself unequal 
 to ; the reviews and essays for the magazines he con- 
 sidered of little permanent value. He would have 
 been pleased to render some signal literary service 
 to a cause of which he felt himself a champion 
 or a martyr ; but the only two of his books that he 
 prized few people would read then and nobody reads 
 now, — the essay on the Disinterestedness of the 
 Human Mind and the Life of Napoleon. Thus dis- 
 appointed and embittered, he identified his disap- 
 pointments with his principles, and persuaded him- 
 self that he did well to be angry. And he could be 
 very angry. Burke's apostasy drove him into a kind 
 of a frenzy: "That man . . . who has done more 
 mischief than perhaps any other man in the world 
 
 48 
 
WILLIAM HAZLITT 
 
 . . . who would have blotted out the broad, pure 
 light of heaven because it did not first shine in at 
 the little Gothic windows of St. Stephen's Chapel ! 
 . . . " and he goes on until his indignation fairly chokes 
 him. Wellington had won Waterloo because he was 
 just stupid enough to sit still and let his army do what 
 it chose; Walter Scott, like Bacon, was the "greatest, 
 wisest, meanest of mankind"; Gifford was a "low- 
 bred, self-taught, servile pedant, a doorkeeper and a 
 lacquey to learning," admirably qualified by a com- 
 bination of defects to be the editor of the Quarterly 
 Review. In some of his angry and querulous moods 
 he manages to score about all his contemporaries. 
 Even Lamb fell under his displeasure for a time, 
 and Mary wished Hazlitt would not hate mankind 
 quite so universally. 
 
 Yet, after all, I think Hazlitt's last words were not 
 untrue. For the final impression one gets from 
 reading him is that his life was by no means all un- 
 happy. For one thing he must have got a good deal 
 of pleasure out of his antipathies. Nobody liked 
 a fight better. " Good nature," he says somewhere, 
 "is only another name for stupidity," in nine cases 
 out of ten mere indolence of disposition. Your 
 really amiable people are those the world calls 
 disagreeable — like himself. They will not weakly 
 consent with you. They have opinions of their 
 own, and the spirit to defend them, and are willing 
 e 49 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 to sacrifice even the failings of their friends at the 
 shrine of truth. For himself, he took care that his 
 best friendships should not grow stagnant by long 
 standing. He owned that he had quarrelled with 
 all his acquaintances at one time or another, and 
 shouldn't have liked them much unless he had. 
 He cared little for the people who had no faults to 
 talk about. But he enjoyed most a settled, hearty 
 antipathy, one that would keep for a lifetime, and 
 enlist his principles in its behalf. One of his most 
 characteristic essays is entitled On the Pleasures 
 of Hating; and it is written with gusto. Happiness, 
 as well as virtue, he held, consists not merely in 
 loving the good, but in hating the evil; and he 
 could always identify the evil he hated with some 
 pet adversary of his own. His pleasure was all the 
 keener that he knew himself always on the unpopu- 
 lar side, and could taste the sweet sense of being 
 wronged. And as there was no one his match in 
 venomed satire, he had the peculiarly happy fortune 
 of vanquishing his antagonist and losing his cause; 
 and thus enjoyed at once the pride of victory and the 
 pride of martyrdom. 
 
 In truth, no small share of the satisfaction of Haz- 
 litt's maturer life came from a certain high, self-ap- 
 proving melancholy. He felt himself one of the faith- 
 ful few who championed a lost cause, who despair but 
 never surrender. He would fain withdraw from a 
 
 5° 
 
WILLIAM HAZLITT 
 
 world that misunderstood and slandered him, and 
 cloister himself with his books and his memories 
 to chew the cud of bitter-sweet fancy. II Penseroso 
 is far from being an unhappy man; and almost all 
 his delights were well known to William Hazlitt. 
 Such essays as Reading Old Books, On Living to 
 One's Self , On the Past and Future, Why Distant 
 Objects Please, A Farewell to Essay Writing, are 
 the most perfect expression in modern prose writing 
 of Milton's ideal, worthy companions of his immor- 
 tally familiar verse. The charms of art and letters 
 and music, the graver and more pensive beauties of 
 the world about us, softened in the mellow light of 
 memory — one sees them all in such essays, and 
 knows that the writer could not have been altogether 
 unhappy. 
 
 And in such essays it is easy to discover the charm 
 of the man's personality. For Hazlitt was not a 
 cynic, rather a sentimentalist. His sensibilities were 
 overstrung. His shyness and suspicion, his irritabil- 
 ity of temper, really came of an eager, timorous 
 craving for sympathy that he never expected to 
 find. Underneath his moods there was a hunger 
 for affection. The few friends who really under- 
 stood him, while they enjoyed his stinging satire, 
 his subtle paradox, knew that behind the mask of 
 this shy and moody temper the man cherished an 
 admiration for all noble things, a love for all beauti- 
 
 5 1 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 ful things; they knew that the enmity and irritation 
 that made him difficult were often half affected, to 
 give pungency to his criticism, while his friendships 
 were real and abiding. The tribute of his best and 
 most discriminating friend, Lamb, in an oft-quoted 
 letter to Southey, is proof enough of the essential 
 manhood of Hazlitt: "I think W. H. to be, in his 
 natural and healthy state, one of the wisest and 
 finest spirits breathing; so far from being ashamed 
 of that intimacy which was between us, it is my 
 boast that I was able for so many years to have 
 possessed it entire ; and I think I shall go to my grave 
 without finding or expecting to find such a compan- 
 ion." 
 
 Ill 
 
 But whatever Hazlitt was as a man, he was cer- 
 tainly one of the most delightful of writers. Let me 
 first except Sir Walter's novels and everything of 
 Lamb's, and then I insist that the very best prose 
 written in England between 1800 and 1830 is to be 
 found in the pages of William Hazlitt. Nobody is 
 obliged to read anybody's Complete Works. Drop 
 out the Liber Amoris and most of the attempts 
 at formal philosophical and political discussion, 
 and there will still remain a body of Hazlitt's writ- 
 ing which by comparison makes De Quincey seem 
 tumid, Wilson turgid, and Hunt vapid. Indeed I 
 
 52 
 
WILLIAM HAZLITT 
 
 can understand, though I cannot quite share, the 
 preference Walter Bagehot is said to have expressed 
 for Hazlitt over Lamb. As far as mere style goes, 
 I should hold that Hazlitt had no equal in his day. 
 "He says things of his own in a way of his own," 
 declared Coleridge ; which is not a very inadequate 
 description of good prose. Perhaps he had not the 
 constructive ability for a great work, — though the 
 Napoleon is very well composed, — but we have 
 no better master of the short familiar essay. De 
 Quincey, always unfair to Hazlitt, complained that 
 he was never eloquent because his thoughts were 
 "abrupt, discontinuous, non-sequacious." Perhaps 
 he was not eloquent; eloquence is usually out of 
 place in such writings as his, though there are many 
 passages in these essays that, if not eloquent, are 
 something better. But Hazlitt's writing, whether 
 "sequacious" or not, is never without both order 
 and movement. De Quincey had taken as his 
 model the long-breathed, pompous English of the 
 early seventeenth century, and refused to admire 
 any writing that did not echo that prolonged sonorous 
 note. Hazlitt's models — so far as he had any — 
 were rather the essayists of the next century, Addison, 
 Steele, Swift; and no more serviceable, idiomatic 
 English than theirs was ever written. He has their 
 ease and urbanity, their love of the first person 
 singular, their gift to put themselves en rapport with 
 
 53 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 the reader. But he has, also, what they never had, 
 a vivid imagination and a quick sense of the ro- 
 mantic. He cannot announce any proposition but 
 instantly there comes trooping about it a throng of 
 images and examples. His style is, therefore, of 
 necessity profuse, but it is neither diffuse nor 
 labored. When he gets into a glow of passion or 
 imagination, he may go on piling clause upon clause, 
 and sometimes makes a sentence of portentous 
 length, but his structure is simple; he has no tricks 
 of style, and his very mannerisms are unconscious. 
 His language is choice, but it is the speech of daily 
 life, without a trace of preciosity. He is always 
 spontaneous and sincere. He is certainly very 
 extravagant now and then, especially in his abuse, 
 and pours upon his enemy "a nice derangement of 
 epitaphs"; but he is genuinely angry. For the 
 moment he means all he says; though very likely 
 on the next page he may relent and salve the wound 
 he has made by some regretful memory or confes- 
 sion. No writing was ever less bookish; it is 
 the voice of William Hazlitt speaking right on. 
 Mr. Henley is so impressed with this colloquial 
 charm as to believe that, excellent as is Hazlitt's 
 writing, he must have talked even better than he 
 wrote. But I doubt that. It is not of record that 
 he talked brilliantly, save now and then when alone 
 with Lamb or one or two other intimates. Listen- 
 
 54 
 
WILLIAM HAZLITT 
 
 ers put him out. I suspect he always talked best 
 with himself, alone with his books and his memories, 
 in the Hut at Winterslow. 
 
 He has been criticised for his habit of profuse 
 quotation. It would be a juster criticism that he 
 quotes very carelessly. In a lecture on Shakespeare 
 he remarks that "in trying to recollect any other 
 author we sometimes stumble, in case of failure, on a 
 word as good ; in Shakespeare any other word but 
 the true one is sure to be wrong." And then, within 
 three pages, he quotes from Hamlet after this fashion : 
 
 "There is a willow hanging o'er a brook 
 That shows its hoary leaves in the glassy stream," 
 
 which is what FalstafT might term "damnable 
 iteration." But the very freedom of his quotations, 
 at all events, proves them unstudied. They slip 
 unconsciously into his lines from the stores of his 
 memory ; and the stuff of his own writing is so good 
 as not to suffer by contrast with his frequent borrow- 
 ings. 
 
 But though Hazlitt's style is so spontaneous, it 
 is never really careless or slovenly. His best work 
 was done rapidly, illumined by the momentary 
 play of allusion and the gleam of fancy best struck 
 out when the mind is heated and eager. Yet it 
 always shows that instinctive sense of phrase which 
 is the hall-mark of good style; and it always has 
 
 55 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 that crowning grace of prose, a good rhythm. All 
 good writing, he says somewhere, sounds well when 
 read aloud; his own bears that test. His manner, 
 while familiar, has not only ease, but distinction. 
 He said, with pardonable pride, in his last years, 
 "I have written no common-place, nor a line that 
 licks the dust." And frequently in some mood of 
 lofty thought or mournful memory his effects of tone 
 and rhythm are far more subtle and moving than any 
 of De Quincey's bravura. There are such passages in 
 the essay On Antiquity, — an essay that Sir Thomas 
 Browne would have loved — in that On the Feeling of 
 Immortality in Youth, On Novelty and Familiarity, 
 and in half a score of others. Read a dozen of his 
 essays, with their constant play of allusion, their apt — 
 if over-abundant — quotation ; their fleeting glimpses 
 of imagination, now august, now beautiful, now 
 pathetic, but always vivid; their brilliant, half- 
 earnest paradox; their mild tone of melancholy 
 reflection ; their flashes of cynical satire ; all flowing 
 in a rhythm, unstudied yet varied and musical — 
 and then you understand why many of the best 
 masters of modern prose — Macaulay, Walter 
 Bagehot, Robert Louis Stevenson, Augustine 
 Birrell — have given to the style of Hazlitt their 
 praise and the better tribute of imitation. "We are 
 fine fellows," said Stevenson once, in despairing ad- 
 miration, "but we can't write like William Hazlitt." 
 
 56 
 
WILLIAM HAZLITT 
 
 If we turn to the matter of his writing, it may be 
 perhaps admitted that, outside of his literary criti- 
 cism, he had not much to teach us. If a man has 
 resolved never to change his mind, it doesn't much 
 matter what he thinks. Hazlitt had practically 
 left off thinking at thirty, and his opinions, there- 
 fore, had mostly stiffened into prejudices before he 
 was fifty. His political principles had all resolved 
 themselves into hatred of the authority of kings. 
 On that theme he has numerous variations, and 
 he can be infinitely entertaining in his attacks, angry 
 or mournful, upon the enemies of the truth once 
 delivered to William Hazlitt and Napoleon Bona- 
 parte; but it cannot be said that he is very instruc- 
 tive. The final result of a quarter-century of political 
 struggle, diplomatic scheming, and gigantic military 
 effort, all over Europe, had been, so he thought, 
 to send to St. Helena the one great foe of sanctified 
 tyranny, and to force upon the world a solemn assent 
 to that blasphemous doctrine, the Divine Right of 
 Kings. And to this result both parties in England 
 had contributed in about equal measure. The 
 best statement of his attitude toward English politics 
 after Waterloo is found in his preface to a volume 
 of political essays collected in 1819. The Tories, 
 of course, are the objects of his bitter hatred, the 
 inveterate foes of popular liberty, the leaders in that 
 opposition which had crushed the movements of 
 
 57 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 revolution all over Europe, reseated a Bourbon on 
 the throne of France, and arrayed a million of 
 bayonets in defence of the odious doctrine of Divine 
 Right. Yet, at all events, the Tories were to be 
 credited with consistency. You knew what they 
 were at. The Whigs, on the contrary, have not 
 the courage of their convictions, or they have no con- 
 victions. To be an English Whig in the glorious 
 days of 1688 was to be a representative of the people, 
 that People who had deposed one King to make 
 another, and could do it again. But now, under 
 such sophistical teaching as that of Burke, the 
 Whigs were substantially at one with the Tories 
 on the only questions of importance. In the great 
 European case of the People vs. the Kings, they 
 were on the side of the Kings. " A modern Whig," 
 says Hazlitt, bitterly, "is the fag end of a Tory 
 ... a Trimmer, that is, a coward to both sides of a 
 question, who dares not be known as an honest 
 man, but is a sort of whiffling, shuffling, cunning, 
 silly, contemptible, unmeaning negation of the two." 
 The two great Reviews were like opposite coaches, 
 "that raise a great deal of dust and spatter one 
 another with mud, but both travel on the same 
 road and arrive at the same destination." As to 
 the doctrinaire radicals, Godwin, Bentham, Home 
 Tooke, and the rest, they were little better. They 
 really represent not the people, but each man him- 
 
 58 
 
WILLIAM HAZLITT 
 
 self and nobody else. They have each his own 
 theory, and are bent on reforming the world by pure 
 reason; overlooking the sentiments, affections, and 
 prejudices of man, they cannot combine and cannot 
 command. They furnish no principle of party 
 cohesion, and consequently can never hope to do 
 anything against the well-compacted forces of 
 legitimacy and tradition. A reformer, in fact, is 
 pretty sure to turn out a marplot. To the charge 
 that in this condemnation he involved himself, 
 Hazlitt would probably have assented readily enough. 
 He knew that he had no gift for association or 
 leadership. In the opening sentences of the pref- 
 ace just quoted, he says, "I am no politician, and 
 still less can I be said to be a party man ; but I have 
 a hatred for tyranny and a contempt for its tools." 
 His writing on political matters is, unfortunately, 
 mostly limited to the various expressions of this 
 hatred ; and he never seemed to have any just appre- 
 ciation of the great force of liberal sentiment that 
 was gathering head in England for the twenty years 
 after Waterloo, to culminate in the reforms of 
 1832. 
 
 Mr. Saintsbury, who always likes good round 
 statement, pronounces Hazlitt the greatest critic 
 England has yet produced. This seems to me a 
 little extravagant; but if he will change the tense of 
 
 59 
 
\ 
 
 A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 his verb, I agree. Hazlitt was the greatest critic 
 England had seen up to that time. The truth is, 
 as Hazlitt himself admirably says, "Coleridge threw 
 a great stone into the standing pool of English 
 criticism which spattered some people with mud, 
 but which gave a motion to the surface which has not 
 since subsided." Coleridge's own work, of course, 
 was mostly inchoate or fragmentary; but he certainly 
 did give a new character and direction to criticism; 
 and Hazlitt was first of the many critics to feel his 
 influence. His criticism is to be found not only in 
 his lectures on English writers, but scattered through 
 all his miscellaneous writing, some of the best of it 
 in passing comment or illustration. It is never 
 formal or systematic. He repudiates over and 
 over again the academic criticism of the eighteenth 
 century, which judged a work of the imagination by 
 the measuring-rod of Aristotle, often without giving 
 us any idea of its power and charm. Montaigne 
 — of whom he gives an admirable estimate in a 
 single page — he avers to be the true critic, "who 
 didn't compare books with rule and system or fall 
 out with a book that is good for anything because all 
 the angles on the corners are not right angles," 
 but rather tells us what he himself likes in it. This 
 is always Hazlitt's method. He is the first of Eng- 
 lish impressionist critics, and he is still one of the 
 very best. Though his manner may seem sketchy or 
 
 60 
 
WILLIAM HAZLITT 
 
 discursive, he succeeds in saying the few essential 
 things about his author. He goes to the root of the 
 matter. His brief comments, for example, on 
 Addison, Steele, or Swift are better as appreciations 
 than half an acre of academic platitude. There is 
 a personal quality in his criticism. He writes with 
 gusto. A book to him is not a mere academic 
 exercise, a "piece of literature"; it is a piece of 
 life, the voice of a man or a woman with whom it 
 is worth while to be acquainted. Criticism thus 
 becomes intimate, familiar. You may very often 
 discover the essential character of a book as of a 
 man, by some incidental question, some shrewd 
 practical comparison of views. You want to find 
 out, not how your book conforms to certain rules; 
 you want to find out what it is good for. Now 
 Hazlitt has in a remarkable degree the gift to enjoy 
 for himself what is best in literature, and the gift to 
 convey that enjoyment to his reader — which I take 
 it is the chief function of criticism. 
 
 To be sure, criticism of this sort has its limitations. 
 It is likely to be confined to the range of the critic's 
 favorite reading. Fortunately, however, Hazlitt's 
 taste was sound, and it was catholic. He seldom 
 made the mistake of liking the second best better 
 than he liked the best. I do not think his reading 
 was exhaustive in any period of our literature. He 
 cared little for the little men. In his lectures on 
 
 61 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 English poetry he slips hastily over the minor seven- 
 teenth-century men, owning that with some of them — 
 Donne, for example — he has no acquaintance. He 
 sometimes took the dangerous risk of judging an 
 author by a small sample. Thus all the biographies 
 record that he once lectured on Beaumont and 
 Fletcher and was afterwards foolish enough to let 
 out that he had only read about a quarter of their 
 work; but it was probably the best quarter, for the 
 lecture is a very good one. But what I here insist 
 on is that he had a thoroughly sympathetic appre- 
 ciation of the best work of widely different periods. 
 He was in hearty accord with the new romantic 
 liking for Shakespeare and the Elizabethan drama; 
 but at the same time he protested earnestly against 
 the blindness of those critics who, like De Quincey, 
 could see nothing worthy to be called poetry in Pope. 
 In fact, the best criticism of Shakespeare, save only 
 that of Coleridge, written in that generation, and the 
 best estimate of Pope, so far as I know, in any genera- 
 tion, are both to be found in the lectures of Hazlitt. 
 It would be difficult to name any critic who has 
 shown sufficient breadth of appreciation to estimate 
 with equal justice such widely different poets as 
 Shakespeare, Pope, Burns, Wordsworth, and Byron. 
 It is a more serious objection to the impressionist 
 critic that he has no historical perspective. Hazlitt, 
 it may be admitted, seldom makes any attempt to 
 
 62 
 
WILLIAM HAZLITT 
 
 set an author in his proper surroundings or to show 
 how the essential qualities of the literature of a period 
 are decided, or at all events largely influenced, by 
 political and social conditions. He was interested 
 in the absolute value of a book, not in the forces of 
 circumstance and environment that may have pro- 
 duced it. Nor could we expect him to be. The 
 historical type of criticism is of recent growth; and 
 its value is perhaps overestimated in these days when 
 we tend to explain everything by the principle of 
 evolution. For, after all, every great work of liter- 
 ature is differentiated from every other as the expres- 
 sion of a unique personality that cannot be pre- 
 dicted or explained. 
 
 But though Hazlitt's critical writing is made up for 
 the most part of his personal judgments, it should 
 not be thought that these judgments are purely 
 empirical or unreasoned. Quite the contrary. He 
 knew not only what he liked, but why he liked it. 
 His mind was prone to speculation, and while he 
 makes no parade of critical principles, there are 
 frequent passages of reflection in all his work 
 which unite philosophic acumen with literary 
 sensibility. The lecture on Descriptive Poetry, 
 for example, contains an acute analysis of the 
 charm of nature, especially as used in literature. 
 A collection of such passages and sentences, 
 culled from his writing, would form a very con- 
 
 63 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 siderable body of critical dicta. His one attempt 
 at more systematic examination of an abstract 
 literary theme, the lecture on The Nature of Poetry, 
 is, in my judgment, one of the very best contribu- 
 tions to that world-old discussion. 
 
 Perhaps the surest proof of a critic's ability is to 
 be found in his verdicts upon his contemporaries. 
 So long as he attempts little more than to explain 
 and justify the decisions of posterity, he runs little 
 risk of serious error; but it is quite another thing 
 to discover genius yet unheralded, to withstand 
 obstinate prejudice, or to refuse adulation to the 
 reigning popular idol. Hazlitt stands this test well. 
 In only one instance is there any pronounced dissent 
 to-day from his judgments upon his contemporaries. 1 
 The Edinburgh Review article on Shelley (July, 
 1824) will always be resented by Shelleyans; we 
 may all admit that it is deficient in sympathy. Yet 
 something may be said for Hazlitt. Shelley, the 
 man, his opinions, his philosophy of life, he esti- 
 mated very justly. No one has better expressed the 
 visionary quality of Shelley's thought, combined with 
 
 1 1 assume that the review of Coleridge's Christabel in the 
 Edinburgh Review, September, 1816, was not written by Hazlitt. 
 I am not unaware that the authorship of the paper is still in dis- 
 pute ; but for myself I can find in it no trace of Hazlitt's manner. 
 He could be caustic enough on the character and opinions of 
 Coleridge ; but such stupid comment as this on Coleridge's poetry he 
 never wrote. The article in my opinion is aut Jeffrey aut diabolus. 
 
 64 
 
WILLIAM HAZLITT 
 
 high sincerity of purpose and a certain lonely obsti- 
 nacy of will. But the poetry of such a nature Hazlitt 
 could not highly prize. It seemed to him deficient in 
 genuine human interest. Hazlitt always liked to keep 
 his feet on the ground ; and this verse was pure vision, 
 a beautiful mist arising from social and political doc- 
 trines essentially untrue. We shall remember that 
 Mr. Matthew Arnold held a not dissimilar opinion. 
 It is certainly to be said in praise of Hazlitt's 
 contemporary criticism that it was proof against 
 his party spleen. He kept his prejudices out of his 
 verdicts most remarkably. In those days, when to be 
 a Liberal was to be damned without mercy by the 
 Quarterly and by Blackwood, he was always ready 
 to own that good might come even out of a quar- 
 terly reviewer. We have seen how he united the most 
 inflammatory hatred of Burke with enthusiastic 
 admiration for Burke's writing. Sir Walter Scott, 
 the hide-bound Tory aristocrat, the servile wor- 
 shipper of kings, he abuses through a portentous 
 sentence two pages long into which he has gathered 
 pretty nearly all the vocabulary of opprobrium; 
 and in the same essay he fairly goes into rapture over 
 the Waverley Novels — the worst of them, he says, is 
 better than any other person's best, and all together 
 they are a new edition of human nature. Words- 
 worth, the solid, conservative stamp-distributor, who 
 sat in the Lake District solemnly admiring his own 
 f 65 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 moral being, was the butt of some of his keenest 
 satire; but the very best and most discriminating 
 criticism of Wordsworth's poetry between 1815 and 
 1825 was written by Hazlitt; indeed, I hardly know 
 of any better since. Even Southey, the renegade 
 laureate of George the Fourth, with his absurd 
 Kehamas and Visions of Judgment, Hazlitt praises 
 generously — though perhaps always with a tinge 
 of irony — as one of the best of prose-writers and 
 admirable of men, as virtuous as though there were 
 no cakes and ale. It was Lamb who said (and all 
 critics after him) that Hazlitt was more just in his 
 praise than in his blame ; the truth seems to be that 
 he was just to literary excellence wherever he found 
 it. It was only the dull pretenders like Gifford, 
 whose politics and literature were alike intolerable, 
 that provoked his unmixed hatred. 
 
 But the most interesting, and I think the most 
 valuable, part of Hazlitt's work is to be found, not in 
 his criticism, but in the miscellaneous essays in 
 the Table Talk, the Winterslow Essays, the Round 
 Table, the Plain Speaker. These essays are so 
 varied in subject that it is not easy to describe them, 
 but they all have this in common: they are sub- 
 jective and autobiographical. Hazlitt is drawing 
 directly upon his own experience. In this, by the 
 way, he is doing just what his contemporaries were 
 
 66 
 
WILLIAM HAZLITT 
 
 doing. That was the period of egotism in English 
 literature. Not only the prose men, — Hazlitt, 
 De Quincey, Lamb, — but even more noticeably the 
 great poets, — Wordsworth, reverently detailing 
 through eight thousand lines the growth of his mind ; 
 Byron, bearing over Europe the pageant of his bleed- 
 ing heart ; Shelley, panting with alternate aspiration 
 and despair, — every one of them "looked in his heart 
 and wrote." Scott alone had some dramatic gift 
 and could find his themes outside himself. The 
 value of such self-revelation depended, obviously, 
 upon the self revealed. In the personality of Hazlitt 
 there is certainly no lack of interest. We see in his 
 essays an intellect disciplined and broadened by 
 long thought, enriched by the best reading and by 
 early and intimate acquaintance with two or three 
 of the ablest men of that generation ; a vivid imagina- 
 tion and a quick eye for beauty; a temper flashing 
 into anger at opposition or softened to melancholy 
 by failure, yet constant to the ideals of youth; a 
 vein of perversity which always liked the back side of 
 a truth and the under side of a quarrel; and a gift 
 of phrase ranging from caustic epigram to lofty 
 eloquence. And in his egotism there is no Byronic 
 posing nor any braggart quality; it is frank, naive, 
 almost unconscious. 
 
 Some of these miscellaneous essays are on philo- 
 sophic themes; as, Why Distant Objects Please, On 
 
 67 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 Personal Identity, On the Past and Future, On the 
 Feeling of Immortality in Youth. Yet they are as 
 genuinely autobiographical as the others. There 
 is keen penetration, subtle analysis in plenty, but 
 mixed with Hazlitt's sardonic humor, colored by 
 his personal feelings, illustrated from his own 
 experience. He was always fond of speculation 
 upon the laws of conduct. He said that he had left 
 off reading at an early age ; but he had been watching 
 the human comedy intently all his days, and his 
 power of psychological analysis was very acute. 
 He likes to expose the unfamiliar side of some 
 familiar truth, to break up our self-satisfied common- 
 place, to explode a paradox under some smug pro- 
 priety. He has in memory rich stores of example, 
 and he constantly enlivens an abstract discussion 
 with some shrewd bit of observation or bright 
 gleam of fancy. In this subtle, imaginative, half- 
 cynical philosophy of everyday life no other Eng- 
 lish essayist is so great a master. His pages sparkle 
 with truths of character and conduct cast into striking 
 aphorisms or epigrams, often with an edge of satire. 
 
 "We enjoy a friend's society only in proportion 
 as he is satisfied with ours." 
 
 "To look down upon anything seemingly implies 
 a greater elevation and enlargement of view than 
 to look up to it." 
 
 68 
 
WILLIAM HAZLITT 
 
 "An excess of modesty is, in effect, an excess of 
 pride." 
 
 " Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity 
 and afraid of being overtaken by it." 
 
 "A woman's attachment to her husband is not to 
 be suspected if she will allow no one to abuse him but 
 herself." 
 
 " There appears to be no natural necessity for evil, but 
 that there is a perfect indifference to good without it.' 
 
 " We never do anything well until we cease to think 
 about the manner of doing it." 
 
 "An Englishman is sure to speak his mind more 
 plainly than others — yes, if it will give you more 
 pain to hear it." 
 
 Such pithy statements were not carefully studied 
 for rhetorical effect. Hazlitt was never ambitious of 
 mere smartness. But he did like to put the extreme 
 case, to show some fact of human nature in unfamiliar 
 and unexpected relations. He confesses a tendency 
 to "chase my ideas into paradox or mysticism." For 
 a paradox is not a falsehood which seems true, but 
 a truth that seems false; and in that guise it often 
 gains admission where truth in homespun common- 
 place would be ignored or turned away. 
 
 But the most striking and characteristic passages 
 in these philosophical essays are those in which 
 Hazlitt — to use his phrase again — chases his 
 
 69 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 idea, not into paradox, but into mysticism. He was 
 always haunted by some sense of the mystery that 
 touches our practical life at every point, the unfathom- 
 able depth of meaning in our common speech. At 
 the suggestion of a simple incident or familiar word, 
 he may pass into a mood of solemn wonder and imag- 
 ining. Thus, for example, the problem of the essen- 
 tial nature of Time, the little instant marked off for 
 each of us as by the bounds of Birth and Death from 
 the Eternities, had always a strange fascination for 
 him. " That things should be that are now no more, 
 creates in my mind," he says, "the most profound 
 astonishment. I cannot solve the mystery of the 
 past, nor exhaust my pleasure in it." In his moods 
 of reflection upon this world-old mystery, though he 
 never preached, his writing takes on a solemn yet 
 impassioned dignity of movement and imagery that 
 sets it beside our very noblest prose. Such a sen- 
 tence as this, with its heaped-up statement of all the 
 possibilities of life suddenly smitten across by the 
 stroke of annihilation, reminds us of Jeremy Taylor. 
 
 "To see the golden sun, the azure sky, the out- 
 stretched ocean; to walk upon the green earth and 
 be lord of a thousand creatures ; to look down yawn- 
 ing precipices or over distant sunny vales ; to see the 
 world spread out under one's feet as a map ; to bring 
 the stars near ; to view the smallest insects through a 
 
 70 
 
WILLIAM HAZLITT 
 
 microscope; to read history, and consider the revo- 
 lutions of empire and the successions of generations ; 
 to hear of the glory of Tyre, of Sidon, of Babylon, 
 of Susa, and to say all these were before me, and are 
 now nothing ; to say I exist in such a point of time, 
 and in such a point of space ; to be a spectator and a 
 part of its ever moving scene ; to witness the change 
 of season, of spring and autumn, of winter and sum- 
 mer ; to feel hot and cold, pleasure and pain, beauty 
 and deformity, right and wrong; to be sensible to 
 the accidents of nature; to consider the mighty 
 world of eye and ear; to listen to the stock-dove's 
 notes amid the forest deep ; to journey over moor and 
 mountain; to hear the midnight sainted choir; to 
 visit lighted halls, or the cathedral's gloom, or sit in 
 crowded theatres and see life itself mocked ; to study 
 the works of art, and refine the sense of beauty to 
 agony ; to worship fame, and dream of immortality ; 
 to look upon the Vatican, and to read Shakespeare; 
 to gather up the wisdom of the ancients, and to pry 
 into the future; to listen to the trump of war, the 
 shout of victory ; to question history as to the move- 
 ments of the human heart; to seek for truth; to 
 plead the cause of humanity; to overlook the world 
 as if time and nature poured their treasures at our 
 feet, — to be and to do all this, and then in a moment 
 to be nothing — to have it all snatched from us as by 
 a juggler's trick or a phantasmagoria!" 
 
 7i 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 The most entertaining of all the essays, however, 
 and probably the most familiar, are in a still more 
 intimate, personal manner. Sometimes they are 
 made up entirely of reminiscence, like the familiar 
 essay on My First Acquaintance with Poets, 
 quoted at the beginning of this paper, or that well- 
 known account of the evening in Lamb's chambers, 
 On People One would Wish to have Seen. But 
 more frequently Hazlitt takes a topic that starts some 
 train of reflection or gratifies some pet animosity, 
 and talks a half-hour, On Reading Old Books, On the 
 Look of a Gentleman, On Disagreeable People, On 
 the Pleasures of Hating, or on Painting. You do not 
 go to such writing as this for instruction or for in- 
 spiration ; but instruction is usually a bore, and what 
 professes to be inspiration is often only irritation. 
 Yet Hazlitt's papers are never made up of languid 
 revery or idle gossip. He is always giving some sud- 
 den fillip to your thinking. This writing is a revela- 
 tion of an active, nervous mind. The familiar 
 relations of society, the old anxieties, affections, 
 hopes, and disappointments of common life, he sets in 
 picturesque circumstance, and invests them all with 
 his own emotion. These essays are his criticism of 
 life. And not by any means an altogether unwhole- 
 some criticism of life, I should say. Doubtless his 
 predominant moods are not buoyant or optimistic. 
 He enjoys poor health, and is a little over-severe on 
 
 72 
 
WILLIAM HAZLITT 
 
 the red, rotund, thick-skinned, average British man. 
 He was a little too much inclined to make a virtue 
 of his own aversions, and to mistake his own suspi- 
 cion and ill-nature for stern fidelity to principle. 
 "No good-natured man," he says, "was ever martyr 
 to a cause" — like himself. But he is always pi- 
 quant, original, and commands our interest for his 
 opinions, if not our assent. The whims and petty 
 perversities that doubtless made him difficult as a 
 friend make him delightful as a writer. For he was 
 no real cynic or misanthrope. He kept his ideals 
 noble and sound. To be sure, he had sometimes 
 idealized the wrong persons — Sarah Walker and 
 Napoleon Bonaparte, for example; and the result 
 was unfortunate for his temper when he discovered 
 his error, and unfortunate for his reputation when he 
 did not. But his thoughts and memory dwelt habit- 
 ually upon things honest and lovely, and of good 
 report. He never jeers at virtue, and he has no cynic 
 scorn for his early dreams. On the contrary, all the 
 best of these papers have a backward glance of fond 
 reminiscence. His favorite phrase is "I remember." 
 He might have said with Wordsworth, 
 
 "The thought of our past years in me doth breed 
 Perpetual benediction." 
 
 But with a difference. For, out of all his memories, 
 Hazlitt, like Jacques (of whom I have often thought 
 
 73 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 he must have been a reincarnation) , can suck melan- 
 choly as a weasel sucks eggs. It is not the mourn- 
 ful melancholy of a sated voluptuary, or the sour 
 melancholy of a selfish cynic; it is the gentle regret 
 for the early days of books and friends and hopes. 
 He himself evidently takes a serene satisfaction in 
 it; and it softens all his angry or querulous moods 
 into the twilight tones of recollection. You shall not 
 read far without coming upon some passage of genu- 
 inely poetic vision and feeling — glimpses of that 
 kind of retreat he loved best, not rugged or remote, 
 but in some softer solitude, as at Winterslow, hallowed 
 by old associations, and in sound of village bells; 
 memories of scenes he knew, or friends he loved, or 
 books he read. He hears the sound of the curfew 
 he heard when a boy 
 
 "Swinging slow with sullen roar," 
 
 and the generations that are gone, the tangled forest 
 glades and hamlets brown of his native country, the 
 woodman's art, the Norman warrior armed for battle, 
 the conqueror's iron rule, and the peasant's lamp ex- 
 tinguished, all start into memory at that clamorous 
 peal. He recalls the time, when, in the inn at Tewks- 
 bury, he sat up the livelong night to read Paul and 
 Virginia; the place where he first read Mrs. Inch- 
 bald's Simple Story, " while an old crazy hand-organ 
 outside was playing Robin Adair, and a summer 
 
 74 
 
WILLIAM HAZLITT 
 
 shower dropped manna on my head"; or that hour 
 when first the great Mrs. Siddons passed before his 
 sight and shook his soul to tears. In such passages 
 his writing has all the charms of poetry save only 
 the accomplishment of verse. 
 
 It would be idle to claim for Hazlitt a place among 
 those writers who have greatly added to the knowl- 
 edge, or influenced the thought, of their time. His 
 work is not, like that of Carlyle or Ruskin or even of 
 Arnold, so dominated by urgent moral purpose as to 
 make it an efficient spiritual force. Nor can it be 
 said that in the whole body of his writing there is any 
 one thing that for weight of thought or perfection of 
 structure can take highest rank as literature. But 
 it is safe to say that, as a master of style and as a 
 critic of literature, he had no superior in his own day, 
 and has had very few since. And his miscellaneous 
 writings will have a perennial charm as a storehouse 
 of the fancies, the humors, the poetry and wisdom, 
 the opinions and prejudices, the friendships and en- 
 mities of the man William Hazlitt. Every page is 
 the utterance of his unique personality. He may 
 have been "gey ill to live with"; but few men have 
 known how to write more companionable books. 
 Readers who ask first of all that a book shall have a 
 live man in it will keep his volumes always within 
 easy reach, on the same shelf with Elia and Boswell. 
 
 75 
 
CHARLES LAMB 
 
 It seems idle to sit down to write an essay on 
 Charles Lamb. As Hazlitt remarks somewhere, 
 "There is nothing to be said respecting an author 
 that all the world have made up their minds about." 
 It is perhaps, also, a little dangerous, as well as idle ; 
 the average reader is likely to resent the assumption 
 that any one is better acquainted with Elia than he is. 
 For Charles Lamb belongs to the small group of 
 authors for whom we cherish a kindly feeling that 
 precludes any cool, critical estimate. They may be 
 great writers, or they may not ; they are good fellows. 
 There are not many such. Cicero's famous praise 
 of books that invigorate our youth and delight our 
 age, delectant domi, non impediunt foris, pernoctant 
 nobiscum, peregrinantur, rusticantur, is by no means 
 true of all good literature. Who takes up the 
 Paradise Lost to read in that half-hour before he 
 blows out his bedside candle, or tucks the Decline 
 and Fall into his valise as he is starting upon a 
 journey? These great men are not for all hours. 
 But old Howell, and Izaak Walton, and Dick Steele, 
 
 76 
 
CHARLES LAMB 
 
 and Oliver Goldsmith, and Sam Johnson in Boswell, 
 these are of that company of friends to whom we 
 need no critic's introduction. And of this company 
 probably most readers would pronounce Charles 
 Lamb most familiar and most dear. 
 
 We may be sure, indeed, that there must have been 
 some unusual power in any personality that can thus 
 transmit its charm through the generations ; but we 
 do not care to apply to his work the methods of 
 critical analysis. Moreover, the critic, especially 
 if he be a student of literary evolution, with an itch 
 for explaining things, is likely to find himself put 
 about by Lamb. Because Lamb is not to be ac- 
 counted for. He doesn't fit into any theory. He 
 doesn't illustrate anything. In describing the course 
 of literary tendencies you don't quite know where to 
 put him. He might as well have lived in the early 
 part of the seventeenth century as in the early part 
 of the nineteenth; in fact, after five o'clock in the 
 afternoon he usually did live in the early part of the 
 seventeenth century. He was fourteen years old 
 when the French Revolution broke out, and the tumult 
 of that movement, with its long reverberations in 
 every department of thought, filled England all his 
 days ; but you may read his books and letters without 
 guessing that there ever was a revolution in France — 
 or anywhere else. Some of the intimates of his man- 
 hood were very rigid conservatives, like Wordsworth 
 
 77 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 and Southey ; one or two were admirers of Napoleon, 
 like Hazlitt; some were extreme doctrinaire revo- 
 lutionists, like Godwin; but he neither contested 
 their opinions nor adopted them. In himself the 
 elements were so mixed as to make a personality 
 quite unique, not to be classified, and not to be 
 mapped neatly out in an essay. 
 
 Doubtless Lamb lives in our imagination chiefly 
 as a humorist. Everybody knows a score of good 
 stories of him, of his whimsicalities of speech and 
 manner, his droll jests, his execrable — and irre- 
 sistible — puns. We picture him clad in black, like 
 some nervous parson, slipping down Fleet Street of a 
 morning, on fragile legs, — those "immaterial legs," 
 as Tom Hood called them, — to his day's work at the 
 desk in the India House. Getting there a little late, 
 very likely; but, as he said, "I m-make up for that 
 b-by going away early." Or it is on one of those 
 Wednesday evenings in the little room up three flights 
 in the Temple buildings, when the cold ham and ale 
 are on the table, and the door opens to let in Hazlitt, 
 and Godwin, and Procter, and Burney, and Rickman, 
 and Ayrton; and perhaps, on some rare and famed 
 occasion, the heavy form of Coleridge himself comes 
 toiling uncertainly up the stair, and his great 
 forehead, like the dome of Paul's in the babble of 
 London, throws a high dignity over the company. 
 Or, perhaps, one likes best of all to think of him in 
 
 78 
 
CHARLES LAMB 
 
 one of those long evenings at home with Mary, the 
 sister, at one side of the table writing (it may 
 be one of her Tales from Shakespeare), and the 
 brother opposite in a halo of smoke — he is certainly 
 going to leave off tobacco next week — reading in 
 some tall folio first edition he has just brought home 
 in triumph, with the feeling of recklessness that 
 follows an extravagant purchase. But wherever he 
 may be, there is, if not always mirth, always humor, 
 and a good humor. His laughter was not like the 
 crackling of thorns under a pot, but genial, kindly, 
 wise. He knew how by a jest, a waggish remark, 
 half drollery and half sympathy, to break up the crust 
 of commonplace that gathers over our thought, to 
 enliven the lead-colored monotony that makes life toil- 
 some and — what is worse — prosaic. And the abil- 
 ity to do this surely is one of the best gifts of genius. 
 Yet, after all, it is not, I think, his humor that 
 shows most strikingly in Lamb's life, but what, for 
 want of a more precise name, I should call heroism — 
 an undemonstrative, silent, and supremely difficult 
 virtue. In truth, he knows but little of Lamb who 
 cannot discern at the core of his character steadfast 
 resolution, patient endurance. His whole life was a 
 discipline of self-denial and renunciation. From 
 boyhood he was a scholar, with a love for the tradi- 
 tions of learning and the charm of letters. At 
 Christ's Hospital he instinctively selected as his closest 
 
 79 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 friend that one bluecoat boy who carried better brains 
 than any other lad of his years in England. Yet 
 when he left school, in 1792, Lamb could not follow 
 this friend Coleridge to the University, but, at the age 
 of sixteen, must begin his lifelong slavery to "the 
 desk's dull wood." It may have been fortunate for 
 us that he was thus " defrauded of the sweet food of 
 academic institution," and forced to that harder 
 and more varied experience out of which came the 
 subtle, half-pathetic humor of Elia ; but any one who 
 has read the delightful paper Oxford in Vacation 
 knows how keenly Lamb felt the loss all his days. 
 
 Then, in September, 1796, came the solemn trag- 
 edy of his life — that black day when there fell upon 
 his sister Mary the first of those visitations to recur 
 so often through all her after years, and in sudden 
 frenzy she took the life of her mother. Lamb gave 
 up at once all other plans and hopes and loves to 
 provide for his sister. Nothing could be nobler 
 than the quiet, self-forgetful temper in which he 
 accepted that lifelong charge, excusing the selfish 
 indifference of his elder brother who should have 
 shared it, and esteeming his exclusive care of Mary 
 not a burden, but a privilege. He knew that this 
 duty must set him apart in many ways from his 
 old friends and associations. That poem, the Old 
 Familiar Faces, surely one of the most pathetic 
 in our literature, was not written near the close of 
 
 80 
 
CHARLES LAMB 
 
 his life, but near its beginning, when he was but 
 twenty-three years old; and recounts the sense of 
 loneliness and isolation with which he fronted the 
 coming years : — 
 
 "I have had playmates, I have had companions, 
 In the days of childhood, in my joyful schooldays, 
 All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 
 
 "Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother, 
 Why wert thou not born in my father's dwelling? 
 So might we talk of the old familiar faces — 
 
 "How some they have died, and some they have left me, 
 And some are taken from me ; all are departed ; 
 All, all are gone, the old familiar faces." 
 
 We can never know how much that tender and watch- 
 ful devotion to his sister, through thirty-six years, 
 cost Charles Lamb. He lived in constant anxiety 
 for her, fearful now of too much excitement and now 
 of too much monotony, and always dreading the 
 oft-recurring summons for their separation. " Don't 
 say anything, when you write, about our low spirits," 
 writes Mary to Sarah Stoddard; " it will vex Charles. 
 You would laugh, or you would cry, perhaps both, 
 to see us sit together, looking at each other with long 
 and rueful faces, and saying, 'How do you do?' and 
 'How do you do?' and then we fall a-crying and 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 say we will be better on the morrow. Charles says 
 we are like tooth-ache and his friend gum-boil, which 
 though a kind of ease is an uneasy kind of ease.' , 
 But it was only to a few of his nearest friends, like 
 Coleridge and Wordsworth, that Lamb would make 
 any mention of his anxieties; and to them almost 
 always in a tone of cheer. Once only, after the re- 
 pulse of his boyish attachment for Anne Simmons, 
 did he allow himself to think of any other love so 
 near as Mary's — and then only for a few hours. 
 One lonely day in 1819, his long-cherished friendship 
 for that charming actress and large-hearted woman, 
 Fanny Kelly, so far got the better of his prudence 
 that he wrote her a proposal of marriage. When 
 she declined it, with a grace and kindness worthy 
 herself, Lamb sat down at once and wrote the fol- 
 lowing note : — 
 
 " Dear Miss Kelly, — Your injunctions shall be 
 obeyed to a tittle. I feel myself in a lackadaisical, 
 no-how-ish kind of humor. I believe it is the rain 
 or something. I had thought to have written seri- 
 ously, but I fancy I succeed best in epistles of mere 
 fun; puns and that nonsense. You will be good 
 friends with us, will you not? Let what has past 
 'break no bones' between us. 
 
 " Yours very truly, 
 " C. L. 
 82 
 
CHARLES LAMB 
 
 " Do you not observe the delicacy of not signing 
 my full name? 
 
 "N.B. Do not paste that last letter of mine into 
 your Book." 
 
 Nobody will question the verdict of Lamb's best 
 biographer, Mr. Lucas, that there is no better letter 
 than that in English literature, "nor, in its instant 
 acceptance of defeat, its brave half-smiling admission 
 that yet another dream was shattered, one more 
 pathetic." 
 
 Through all those years Lamb never complained ; 
 he never railed at the universe ; he never put on any 
 airs of heroic endurance or virtuous resignation. He 
 bore his burdens and did his duty like a man. Some 
 of the most characteristic phases of his humor, when 
 closely scanned, turn out to be only the obverse of 
 this manly sincerity and endurance. Just because 
 life was to him so serious a matter, he took delight 
 in upsetting those people who are always mistaking 
 stupidity for seriousness and dulness for dignity. 
 He had perhaps too little patience with those aggres- 
 sively earnest folk, bent on improving their minds 
 or souls — and ours ; especially worthy women of 
 that kind, who have missions and ideas and all that 
 sort of thing. There is a racy letter in which he tells 
 Coleridge of an evening he and his sister have en- 
 dured tea-drinking with one of Coleridge's admirers, 
 
 83 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 a Miss Benje or Benjay, who discussed Hannah More 
 and Pope's poetry and Doctor Gregory, and defended 
 the opinion that differences of human intellect are 
 the effect of organization. "I attempted to carry it 
 off with a pun on organ, but it went off very flat, 
 and she immediately conceived a very low opinion of 
 my metaphysics, and turning to Mary, put some 
 question to her in French, probably having heard 
 that neither Mary nor I understand French." 
 
 So, too, his healthy dislike for all affectations of 
 sensibility often gave a rude shock to the soft senti- 
 mentalists. "Mr. Lamb," said a lady to him, "I 
 think so highly of my pastor, because I know him so 
 well; you don't know him, Mr. Lamb, but I know 
 him so well." "N-no, madam," said Lamb, "I 
 d-don't know him; but d-damn him at a venture, 
 madam, d-damn him at a venture!" For himself 
 he had an almost hysterical dread of seeming to 
 invite a condescending sympathy or approval. He 
 refused to be pitied. "For God's sake," he wrote 
 Coleridge, "don't make me ridiculous any more 
 by terming me 'gentle-hearted' in print;" and, in 
 his next letter, "blot out 'gentle-hearted' and sub- 
 stitute drunken-dog, ragged-head, seld-shaven, odd- 
 eyed, stuttering, or any other epithet which truly 
 and properly belongs to the gentleman in question." 
 Genuinely bashful, afraid of being misunderstood, 
 when he deemed his listener either hostile or patroniz- 
 
 84 
 
CHARLES LAMB 
 
 ing, he sometimes took a perverse pleasure in making 
 himself as disagreeable or as inane as possible. It 
 was the contrariness of the boy in him. Patmore said 
 that to those who didn't know him, or knowing, 
 could not or did not appreciate him, he passed for 
 "something between an imbecile, a brute, and a 
 buffoon." One can well imagine his mood when 
 confronted with the grim rigor of Mr. Thomas 
 Carlyle. Yet his most audacious impudence was 
 oftenest put on to cover his own tenderness, or to 
 prevent some over-effusiveness from his friends. 
 "My sister Mary," he said on introducing her to 
 Tom Hood. " Allow me to introduce my sister Mary, 
 she is a very good woman, but she d-drinks !" Un- 
 derneath all this whimsicality there was a foundation 
 of patient, unselfish endurance. His humor is like 
 his smile; a quizzical yet appealing smile, behind 
 which, they tell us, there always seemed a tender 
 background of far-away sadness — traces of the toil 
 and struggle of his life seen through whatever mask 
 the humor of the hour might put on. "His serious 
 conversation, like his serious writing," says Hazlitt, 
 " is his best. His jests scald like tears, and he probes 
 a question with a play upon words." The heroism 
 of such a life, I should say, is of a higher and harder 
 sort than Mr. Carlyle's loud heroism of eloquence. 
 There is no need to deny Lamb his frailties. He 
 doubtless exaggerated his own vices, and he took a 
 . 85 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 pleasure in mystifying proper persons by confessing 
 lapses of which he was never guilty; but everybody 
 knows that he was always, in Mary's phrase, rather 
 smoky, and sometimes rather drinky. As he owned, 
 he kept a little on this side of abstemiousness. We 
 may admit, too, that in his last years the resolute, 
 persistent whimsicality of the worn old man was now 
 and then almost painful. He was a little too impa- 
 tient of the decorum of years; a little too prone to 
 attempt by sheer frivolity to escape the ineluctable 
 demands of age. But he must be either a very 
 blind or a very sour-spirited critic who cannot see 
 that these failings were mostly the result of the tragic 
 circumstance of his life. He was by nature a genial, 
 rather than a jovial, man, select rather than indis- 
 criminate in his friendships. I do not find that in 
 his early years he had any intimate friends besides 
 Coleridge. But after insanity fell upon Mary, he 
 felt himself forced to seek wider and more jovial 
 companionship that he might escape the gloom and 
 monotony of his life, and the danger of such life for 
 her. Some of the acquaintances he picked up while 
 he was slaving for London journals were poor devils 
 like Fell and Fenwick, who could make but slender 
 claim either to ability or to morals ; but Lamb, at 
 all events, was attracted by what was best in them, 
 and he never admitted them to the circle of his inti- 
 mates. He loved the humors of life, and always 
 
 86 
 
CHARLES LAMB 
 
 preferred in his friends some flavor of originality 
 to prosaic common sense. As he says in that acute 
 piece of self-analysis, the Preface to the Second 
 Edition of the Elia Essays: — 
 
 "He chose his companions for some individuality 
 of character which they manifested. His intimates, 
 to confess a truth, were in the world's eye a ragged 
 regiment. He found them floating on the surface of 
 society ; and the color, or something else, in the weed 
 pleased him. The burrs stuck to him — but they 
 were good and loving burrs for all that. He never 
 greatly cared for the society of what are called good 
 people." 
 
 George Dyer, Martin Burney, Jem White, Thomas 
 Manning, William Ayrton — what an interesting 
 company of eccentrics they form; and we should 
 hardly have known them at all had we not met them 
 at Lamb's hospitable bachelor table. And besides 
 them there is a goodly company of friends not un- 
 known to fame, Hazlitt, Procter, Crabb Robinson, 
 Tom Hood, Cowden Clark, Leigh Hunt, and the 
 rest. To say truth, Lamb had a genius for friend- 
 ship. He could discover something amiable in every- 
 body. He drew about him men who were polar 
 opposites in temperament and bitterly antagonistic 
 in opinion; men like Godwin and Wordsworth, 
 
 87 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 Hunt and Sou they, who would never have given a 
 hand to each other save on the common ground of 
 their friendship for Lamb. He stoutly defended them 
 to each other, and appreciated whatever was genuine 
 and human in them all. He made free with their 
 follies, quizzed them on their fads or peculiarities 
 with an impudence that might have been intolerable 
 in any one else. " M-martin," he stammered out over 
 the whist table to Burney, "if d-dirt were trumps, 
 what a hand you'd hold!" When Coleridge talked 
 a stricken hour, wrapped in a cloud of lofty meta- 
 physic, Lamb only remarked dryly, "Coleridge is 
 so full of his fun !" But no one took offence. In- 
 deed no one could be more quick than Lamb him- 
 self to perceive, or more careful to avoid, anything 
 that might wound the feelings of others. Men who, 
 like Hazlitt, quarrelled with everybody else, never 
 could quarrel with him. It was Charles and Mary 
 Lamb, and one may say only they, that could keep 
 the friendship of William Hazlitt and Sarah Stoddard, 
 not only before their ill-assorted marriage, — at 
 which ceremony Lamb confessed he was convulsed 
 with mistimed laughter, — but when, in the later 
 days, they were separated from each other and from 
 everybody else. Charles and Mary Lamb would 
 cherish no resentment for any slight, or misunder- 
 standing, or desertion. When Hazlitt lay in his last 
 illness alone and unbefriended, it was Lamb who 
 
 88 
 
CHARLES LAMB 
 
 hastened to visit him, stood by his bedside, and held 
 the hand of the dying man to the end. 
 
 But it should be remembered that Lamb's best and 
 closest friends were precisely the best and greatest 
 men of his time. He was surrounded by an oddly 
 assorted company on the Wednesday evenings ; but 
 he kept his closest intimacy for two or three — for 
 Coleridge and the Wordsworths. There are few 
 letters in the language like those of Lamb to the 
 Wordsworths, so full of mingled humor and pathos, 
 of the most delicate sympathies. These people really 
 knew each other — which is too uncommon a thing 
 in this world. And this is Lamb's last letter to Cole- 
 ridge, written probably, as Mr. Dykes Campbell sug- 
 gests, to remove some mistaken, sick man's fancy : — 
 
 " My dear Coleridge, — Not one unkind thought 
 has passed in my brain about you. ... If you ever 
 thought an offence, much more wrote it against me, it 
 must have been in the times of Noah, and the great 
 waters swept it away. Mary's most kind love, and 
 maybe a wrong prophet of your bodings ! — here she 
 is crying for mere love over your letter. I wring out 
 less, but not sincerer, showers." 
 
 Two years later, Coleridge, at the end of his weary 
 illness, turning over the pages of his early poems, 
 comes upon that one, The Lime-Tree Bower My 
 Prison, written during the visit of Charles and Mary 
 
 8 9 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 Lamb to Nether Stowey, so long ago, when they were 
 all young and happy; and he writes under it: "Ch. 
 and Mary Lamb — dear to my heart, yea, as it 
 were my heart. S. T. C. JEt 63, 1834. 1797-1834, 
 37 years!" When he died, Lamb went broken- 
 hearted, murmuring to himself, "Coleridge is dead, 
 Coleridge is dead!" In almost his last recorded 
 lines he writes: "His great and dear spirit haunts 
 me. I cannot make a criticism on men and books 
 without an ineffectual turning and reference to him." 
 And a few days later he followed his old familiar 
 friend. I say it warms the heart to think of such a 
 friendship as this, and makes us deem more nobly 
 of human nature. Thomas Carlyle, seeing Lamb 
 in those last years, notes in him "insuperable pro- 
 clivity to gin"; judges there is "a most slender fibre 
 of actual worth in that poor Charles." William 
 Wordsworth, writing a few months after Lamb had 
 gone, cries out — 
 
 " O he was good, if e'er a good man lived ! " 
 So blindly may the jaundiced cynic misinterpret the 
 man whom the wise poet understands. 
 
 II 
 
 Literature, it must be remembered, was always an 
 avocation to Lamb. His Works were mostly written 
 at the desk's dull wood, where he labored eight — 
 
 90 
 
CHARLES LAMB 
 
 sometimes nine or ten — hours a day, six days in a 
 week, with only a short vacation in summer, for 
 thirty-six years. In the eighteenth century it used 
 to be thought difficult to be in literature — or in 
 love — and yet attend to business. Pope has some 
 rather mean flings at 
 
 "The clerk foredoomed his father's soul to cross, 
 Who pens a stanza when he should engross." 
 
 But in later years it has been found there is neither 
 difficulty nor discredit in such a combination. Lamb 
 is among the first in a long succession of writers — 
 Rogers, Stuart Mill, Anthony Trollope, William 
 Morris, Edmund Gosse, Austin Dobson, Maurice 
 Hewlett, and others — who have managed to unite 
 business and literature without detriment to either. 
 For Lamb, at all events, such a position — save that 
 his hours were too long — was doubtless fortunate. 
 It gave him regular employment which occupied, 
 without overtaxing, his thought ; it gave certain and 
 definite remuneration which put him beyond the reach 
 of serious financial anxiety. But a life so confining 
 left not much leisure for literary work ; and this may 
 be one reason why, all through his early years, Lamb 
 produced so little. The Elia Essays, which to 
 most people stand for Lamb's work, were written 
 after he was forty-five years old ; and all his writing 
 before the Elia Essays fills only two thin volumes. 
 
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A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 But it is not chiefly the confinement of his work 
 at the India House that explains this scantiness of 
 product during the early years; for the Elia Essays 
 themselves were mostly written in the years 1820 
 and 182 1, when his duties in the counting room were 
 most onerous. The truth is, rather, that up to 
 1820 he had not really found his vein. His earliest 
 literary aspiration was to be a poet rather than an 
 essayist. Four sonnets from his pen were included 
 in Coleridge's first volume of verse, published in 
 1796, and the second edition of that volume, next 
 year, contained a considerable number of short 
 poems by Lamb. The sonnet form, then for a 
 long time unfamiliar in English verse, he probably 
 borrowed from Bowles, to whose work he had been 
 introduced by Coleridge. In sentiment, too, by 
 their gentle grace touched with a placid melancholy, 
 these sonnets may remind us of Bowles. Some 
 fragmentary pieces of blank verse show plainly 
 the influence of Milton and especially of Cowper, 
 whom Lamb in those early days greatly admired. 
 "I could forgive a man for not enjoying Milton," 
 he wrote Coleridge in 1796, "but I would not call 
 that man my friend who should be offended with the 
 divine chit-chat of Cowper." Burns, also, had been 
 for some years, he declared, the god of his idolatry; 
 but I can see no trace whatever in this early verse 
 of the vigor, passion, or humor of the Scotch poet. 
 
 92 
 
CHARLES LAMB 
 
 Nearly all the poetry before 1800 came out of the 
 trials of his own life, the hapless love for the " fair- 
 haired Anna" and the tragedy of his sister's mad- 
 ness. Much of it is in a tone of half-despondent 
 but pious resignation, but with little of Lamb's 
 peculiar fancy and altogether without humor. It is 
 all sincere, but only once — in the Old Familiar 
 Faces — do we get the note of sheer intense emotion, 
 that without the aid of imagery, rhyme, or definite 
 metre, shapes his lines into truest poetry. The 
 album verses and the occasional poetry of his later 
 years are most of them, like the early work, in re- 
 flective or pathetic, not in humorous, tone. We 
 recognize frequently in them the quaint fancy of the 
 seventeenth-century men of whom he was so fond; 
 in one or two instances the union of subtle or ingen- 
 ious thought with deep tenderness of feeling makes a 
 poem of striking quality. Such lines, for instance, 
 as those he sent to Tom Hood on the death of his 
 child, On an Infant dying as soon as Born, could 
 hardly have been written by any other poet of the 
 nineteenth century; to find anything like them you 
 must go back to Wither or Crashaw. One or two of 
 the later poems, however, have nothing of this 
 archaic manner, but, like the Old Familiar Faces, 
 show that unconsciousness of utter sincerity which 
 is the last charm of lyric verse. The lines to Hester 
 Savory, the sprightly and comely Quaker girl that 
 
 93 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 caught his fancy while he was living at Pentonville, 
 
 "When maidens such as Hester die," 
 once read, can never be forgotten. Lamb had but 
 slender poetic gift, doubtless; yet he wrote two or 
 three lyrics of keen emotional power, and the subtle 
 charm of his personality frequently gave to his 
 more trivial and fragmentary verse an interest 
 which the critic hardly knows how to justify. 
 
 Much the same may be said of his early story, 
 Rosamund Gray. One might expect, from its plot 
 and its chief actors, this little romance to be a crude 
 mixture of tragedy and sentimentality. The villain 
 is a quite impossible person whom Lamb got out of 
 his reading; he bears the name of one of the 
 murderers in Marlowe's Edward Second, and really 
 has no character at all, being a kind of diabolus 
 ex machina. Rosamund Gray, the heroine, is one of 
 the helpless, innocent maidens so common in senti- 
 mental fiction after Richardson. The action is 
 baldly melodramatic. Yet into this improbable 
 story Lamb has put so much of his native delicacy of 
 feeling, and he has told it with such an artless, old- 
 fashioned grace of style, as to make it altogether 
 delightful, if not altogether convincing. Its opening 
 words strike the note that is sustained throughout: 
 
 " It was noon-tide. The sun was very hot. An old 
 gentlewoman sat spinning in a little arbor at the 
 
 94 
 
CHARLES LAMB 
 
 door of her cottage. She was blind ; and her grand- 
 daughter was reading the Bible to her. The old lady 
 had just left her work to attend to the story of Ruth." 
 
 The Rosamund Gray, moreover, has special bio- 
 graphical interest. It was written just after Lamb 
 had been forced to relinquish thoughts of any 
 woman's love save his sister's, and it is touched 
 with the pathos of that resignation. Rosamund 
 Gray, the mild-eyed maid whom everybody loved, 
 whose hair fell in bright and circling clusters, is 
 evidently Lamb's "fair Alice W." More than a 
 quarter-century afterwards, in that charming essay, 
 
 Blakesmoor in H shire, in describing an old 
 
 portrait, he speaks of the bright yellow Hertford- 
 shire hair, "so like my Alice." The lover in the 
 story, Allen Clare, and his sister Eleanor are Charles 
 and Mary Lamb; old blind Margaret is their 
 grandmother, Mrs. Field, whose picture Lamb had 
 already drawn in one of his early poems; while the 
 scenery of the tale is that of the home of the fair 
 Alice, the tiny village of Widmore in Hertfordshire, 
 which he described so lovingly long afterwards in 
 the Blakesmoor essay. 
 
 A lover of drama and the stage from boyhood, it 
 was natural that Lamb should try his hand at dra- 
 matic composition. But he never succeeded. In 
 truth, he was without the first requisites of success. 
 
 95 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 He had little creative imagination, and he had no 
 constructive ability. He could not conceive or por- 
 tray original characters; he could not invent effec- 
 tive situations. His farce, Mr. H., which he had 
 hoped might be a stage success, was promptly 
 damned before the first representation was half 
 over — as it deserved to be. Lamb himself, though 
 chapfallen over his failure, had sense enough to 
 hiss among the loudest. The motive — the troubles 
 of a man who endeavors to conceal his name, Hogs- 
 flesh — is too puerile even for farce ; and the changes 
 are rung on the unfortunate word with dreary repe- 
 tition. Lamb had not the gift to write a brilliant 
 or witty dialogue. He could not get out of him- 
 self; and his own humor, the humor of Elia, is too 
 subtle, too peculiarly his own for the broad and 
 obvious effects that comedy demands. Nor is the 
 tragedy, John Woodvil, much more successful. 
 It is dignified and serious, and its manner here and 
 there so close an imitation of the Elizabethans that 
 Godwin, coming upon some lines from it, was sure 
 he had seen them in Beaumont and Fletcher. But 
 it has no real characters, no action, and no adequate 
 motive for any action. And while the style, in 
 some passages, may remind us by diction and 
 rhythm of our elder drama, it has nothing of the 
 passion and intensity which characterized that large 
 utterance of the early gods. 
 
 96 
 
CHARLES LAMB 
 
 In fact, as Mr. Ainger suggests, John Woodvil 
 is of interest chiefly as showing how thoroughly 
 Lamb had already immersed himself in our Eliza- 
 bethan drama. The riper fruits of that study were 
 seen in the volume of Specimens from English 
 Dramatic Poets, which appeared in 1808. This 
 well-known book, though it is a florilegium from 
 the older drama with comparatively little comment 
 by Lamb, is probably his most important, as it is 
 his best-known, contribution to literary criticism. We 
 should remember that in 1808 the great body of 
 Elizabethan and Jacobean drama was practically 
 unknown to intelligent readers. Coleridge's lec- 
 tures did not touch the drama outside of Shakespeare 
 until 1818; Hazlitt's course on the drama was not 
 given until 1821. There were, indeed, some indica- 
 tions of a reviving interest in the drama, as in all 
 our older and romantic literature. Gifford's first 
 edition of Massinger was published in 1805; in 
 181 1, three years after Lamb's book, Weber issued 
 his edition of Ford, warmly commended by Jeffrey 
 in the Edinburgh. Yet it may be truthfully said 
 that it was Lamb, rather than any one else, who 
 first led the average well-read Englishman to think 
 he ought to know something of Beaumont and 
 Fletcher, Ford, Massinger, Heywood, Webster. 
 Since his time these old masters have received, 
 perhaps, quite as much praise as they deserve. 
 h 97 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 And for this over-commendation, too, Lamb's 
 book is largely responsible. In truth, whoever forms 
 his estimate of the elder drama from Lamb's speci- 
 mens will be likely to get an exaggerated idea of 
 its merits. He was captivated by the large imagina- 
 tion in the speech of these men and by their power 
 to show the human soul in its moods of struggle or 
 endurance, beside which the polished convention- 
 alities of later writers seem tame and flat. But 
 his extracts represent their work only at its high 
 points, and give no idea of its crudity and violence, 
 its morbid passion and its frequent distortions of 
 character and motive. 
 
 Everywhere, indeed, Lamb's criticism is selective, ^ 
 the criticism of appreciation rather than of impar- 
 tial estimate. He pays little attention to the meaning 
 and temper of the work as a whole. He does not 
 balance merits and defects; he culls out passages 
 pleasing to linger over with deliberate, prolonged 
 satisfaction. He treated his books as he treated his 
 friends — enjoyed whatever in them was true or 
 original, overlooked or minimized their failings. 
 The rule is perhaps better for friendship than for 
 criticism; yet critical judgment of this sort, if less 
 impartial, is more sympathetic and penetrating. 
 For the same reason Lamb's criticism was not 
 technical or academic, but moral. He cared little 
 for mere form. He brought literature to the test 
 
 9 s 
 
CHARLES LAMB 
 
 of life. The author of a book, the characters in a 
 book, were to him men to be liked or disliked, 
 to be judged by the same standards we apply 
 to our neighbors. That is what often makes a 
 passing remark of Lamb's worth a half-dozen 
 pages of analysis. Thus, in his rambling essay on 
 Some of the Old Actors, the few lines in which 
 he tells how Mrs. Jordan rendered Viola's dis- 
 guised confession of love show Mrs. Jordan to 
 have been an excellent actress, but they also reveal 
 with the utmost delicacy of appreciation the emotion 
 of Viola. In the same essay is incomparably the 
 best interpretation of the character of Malvolio 
 ever written — indeed the only just one that I know 
 of. These persons were as real to Lamb's thought as 
 Hazlitt or Manning; he loved to dwell on their 
 peculiarities, to delight his sense of humor by re- 
 calling all they say and do. And in every case it 
 was Shakespeare's Malvolio or Viola that he knew, 
 not some actor's. An inveterate playgoer, he never- 
 theless felt the danger of forming acquaintance 
 with Shakespeare's men and women on the stage 
 rather than in the study of the imagination. This 
 is the theme of that essay often thought so para- 
 doxical from him, On the Tragedies of Shake- 
 speare. Shakespeare's plays, he declares, are less 
 suited for representation than almost any other, 
 simply because there is in his work more of that 
 
 99 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 element that defies outward expression. In propor- 
 tion as a play is laden with deep moral significance, 
 in proportion as its inner meaning is more impor- 
 tant than its outward action, just in that proportion 
 is the player likely to give it a wrong emphasis. 
 And this is true. 
 
 Lamb's critical appreciation was curiously limited. 
 Contemporary works, save those by his personal 
 friends, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey, he 
 seldom looked into. "When a new book comes 
 out," said he, "I read an old one." In those years 
 all the world was reading and praising the poems 
 and novels of Scott; I do not recall any mention of 
 them by Lamb. Byron he detested as a man, and 
 refused to read him — " he is great in so small a way. " 
 Shelley's unsubstantial verse he could make nothing 
 of. In truth, he did not much sympathize with any 
 of the new romance. In the Elizabethans romance 
 and adventure were fitting. They lived in an at- 
 mosphere of imagination; the world they portrayed 
 was their own world. But that a sober country 
 gentleman who contributed to the Quarterly Review, 
 or a dandy lord who was idolized by London 
 society, should go so far afield into mediaevalism 
 and orientalism for themes of song or story, that 
 seemed to him labored and unnatural. For himself 
 he liked the homely cockney ways of the town 
 better; and no strange foreign strand had for him 
 
 ioo 
 
CHARLES LAMB 
 
 half the charms of that which runs from Charing 
 Cross to Temple Bar. 
 
 Lamb has a few very characteristic papers on the 
 kindred art of painting. Perhaps the most ambitious 
 of all his critical essays is that On the Genius of 
 Hogarth. He makes no pretension to knowledge of 
 the artist's technique; he judges a painting solely 
 by what might be called its literary quality, its imagi- 
 native power to suggest vividly some phase of human 
 life. Another essay, On the Barrenness of the Imagi- 
 native Faculty in the Productions of Modern Art, 
 contains in its few pages more keenness and truth of 
 vision than are found in many learned modern dis- 
 cussions of realism and idealism. Contemporary 
 art, Lamb complains, is content with empty pictorial 
 effects, and quite powerless to tell anything imagi- 
 natively. Not so the elder men. This essay begins 
 with a description, or rather an interpretation, of 
 Titian's great Bacchus and Ariadne in the National 
 Gallery which makes no mention of Titian's glory of 
 color, but indicates admirably that wealth of sugges- 
 tion which seemed to Lamb the secret of art. 
 
 " Is there anything in modern art — we will not 
 demand that it should be equal — but in any way 
 analogous to what Titian has effected in that wonder- 
 ful bringing together of two times in the Ariadne in 
 the National Gallery? Precipitous, with his reeling 
 
 IOI 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 Satyr rout about him, repeopling and reilluming 
 suddenly the waste places, drunk with a new fury 
 beyond the grape, Bacchus, born in fire, firelike 
 flings himself at the Cretan. This is the time pres- 
 ent. With this telling of the story an artist, and no 
 ordinary one, might remain richly proud. Guido 
 in his harmonious version of it saw no further. But 
 from the depths of the imaginative spirit Titian has 
 recalled past time, and laid it contributory with the 
 present to one simultaneous effect. With the desert 
 all ringing with the mad cymbals of his followers, 
 made lucid with the presence and new offers of a god, 
 — as if unconscious of Bacchus or but idly casting 
 her eyes as upon some unconcerning pageant — her 
 soul undistracted from Theseus, — Ariadne is still 
 pacing the solitary shore, in as much heart silence 
 and in almost the same local solitude, with which she 
 awoke at daybreak to catch the forlorn last glances 
 of the sail that bore away the Athenian." 
 
 Most of Lamb's criticism, however, is fragmentary, 
 informal ; much of it is scattered through his private 
 correspondence, especially in the letters to Cole- 
 ridge, Lloyd, and Wordsworth. There might be 
 culled from his writings a volume of acute and 
 stimulating literary comment. And it should be 
 added that all this early work, whether poetry, story, 
 or criticism, is written in an English chaste, simple, 
 1 02 
 
CHARLES LAMB 
 
 but not meagre, such as hardly any other prose- writer 
 between 1790 and 18 10 could command. 
 
 But, after all, we shall always think of Lamb not 
 as poet or critic, but as humorist. And rightly. He 
 was, indeed, at the farthest possible remove from that 
 dreary person, the professional humorist. Of all 
 humor his certainly is the most spontaneous and 
 original. He was a species all by himself — a bundle 
 of the most delightful and unaccountable whimsi- 
 calities. He had the jester's love for pure nonsense, 
 for the ridiculous, pure and simple. He will suggest 
 with grave face some droll conceit, or tell some waggish 
 story, that trips up the heels of your gravity by its 
 sheer absurdity. Among his minor papers is an 
 account of a fat woman in Oxford, — The Gentle Gi- 
 antess, — that no man who isn't starched intolerably 
 stiff can read without shaking in laughter, — pure 
 farce told in the solemn phrase of Sir Thomas Browne. 
 Of puns, which many people of weighty converse 
 feel bound to depreciate, he was a very great master ; 
 and the effect of his puns was doubled, as he very 
 well knew, by his stammer. As one of his friends 
 said, he stammered just enough to make you listen 
 eagerly for the word. His good-natured critical 
 thrusts were often barbed with a pun. "Here's 
 Wordsworth," he stammered, after the poet had been 
 offering some rather lofty criticism on Shakespeare, 
 "he says he could have written H-Hamlet himself, 
 
 103 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 if he only had the m-mind !" And then he had a 
 thousand quips and cranks of freakish fancy that 
 altogether defy classification. Of course it was in 
 his talk that these whimsicalities showed best, the 
 suggestions of the moment accompanied by the 
 twinkle of his eye and the droll tones of his speech. 
 Such bubbles burst as soon as blown; they cannot 
 be repeated. Many of Lamb's good things have, 
 indeed, been told over and over again, and deserve 
 to be; yet all who knew him declared that, as we 
 may well believe, no report can give any adequate 
 notion of that talk, — talk like snap-dragon, as Haz- 
 litt said, sparkling with quaint or witty sayings, bits 
 of waggish impudence, happy epithet and allusion, 
 passing abruptly to some large or serious theme, 
 brightened by a constant play of imagination, and shot 
 through with sudden soft lights of tender feeling. It 
 is, I suspect, only in his letters that we get some idea 
 of the charm of his familiar talk. All the letters to 
 Manning, for example, are delectable. 
 
 But if the letters give the best picture of Lamb's 
 wit and vivacity, it is in the Elia Essays that we 
 see the inmost part of him. There are fifty of these 
 essays. Of this number two are half-humorous 
 fantasies not quite in his best manner, The New 
 Yeafs Coming of Age and The Child Angel; seven 
 are critical ; eight are papers of humorous observa- 
 tion and comment, like The Decay of Beggars or 
 104 
 
CHARLES LAMB 
 
 A Quakers' Meeting; the remaining thirty-four are 
 pure autobiography, concerned entirely with the 
 records of Lamb's own habits, or friendships, or 
 memories. They are all in the first person, and most 
 of them look backward and linger in half-pathetic 
 mood over the charm of things gone by. But in all 
 of them, even in the critical papers, there is a tone of 
 ingenuous confession, a confidence in the sympathy 
 of the reader. There is no ostentation or posing in 
 this, no pride in his interesting self, not a trace of the 
 Byronic temper. Lamb makes a friend of you and 
 tells you what he himself most cares for. Only an 
 honest and kindly nature could venture to unbosom 
 itself so frankly. And even an honest and kindly 
 nature, by presuming too far upon your interest, 
 may easily become a bore ; but, though some earnest 
 folk have been known to pronounce Lamb trifling or 
 perverse, it is inconceivable that he should ever be a 
 bore. 
 
 Nor is Lamb's humor, at least in the Elia Essays, 
 ever idle. His keen enjoyment of the oddities and 
 conceits of life is always tinged with some moral 
 feeling. He delights to quiz our complacent judg- 
 ments, to look beneath our smug conventions. He is 
 always getting behind some sentimentality, or prig- 
 gishness, or pedantry, where he can poke delicious 
 fun at it. If he ever grows severe, it is in scorn for 
 those elegant proprieties that too often mask essential 
 
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A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 coldness of heart. "I shall believe," he says, "in 
 the professions of modern gallantry when in polite 
 circles I see the same attention paid to age as to youth, 
 to homely features as to handsome, to coarse com- 
 plexions as to clear — to the woman as she is a 
 woman; when Dorimant hands a fish-wife across 
 the kennel or assists the apple woman to pick up 
 her dissipated fruit. ,, On the other hand, he had 
 a liking for all such innocent improprieties, weak- 
 nesses, absurdities, as put our human nature at a 
 disadvantage in the eyes of the well-conducted ma- 
 jority. Odd people, unlucky people, tactless people, 
 people in some way left out or left over, though they 
 move his laughter, always appeal to his sympathy. 
 It was not merely in childhood, as he avers, but all 
 through his life, that he had " more yearnings toward 
 that simple architect who built his house upon the 
 sand than for his more cautious neighbor, and prized 
 the simplicity of the five thoughtless virgins beyond 
 the more provident but somewhat unfeminine wari- 
 ness of their competitors." He might almost have 
 said with Touchstone in the play, " It is a poor humor 
 of mine to take that no one else will." In fact, I 
 have sometimes thought that if you seek the closest 
 parallel to the unique character of Lamb, you will 
 find it, not in any veritable man of letters or history, 
 but in this one of Shakespeare's creations for whom 
 we have no better name than "fool," but who is in 
 1 06 
 
CHARLES LAMB 
 
 truth one of his wisest and most unselfish men. There 
 is in both the same curious observation, the same 
 whimsical liking to turn commonplace wrong side 
 out, the same quaint fancy, half humorous and half 
 pathetic, the same fidelity to friends and deep ten- 
 derness of heart. 
 
 Now it is in the Elia Essays that this subtly 
 humorous temperament finds fullest expression. 
 Nobody, so far as I know, has succeeded very well 
 in giving a definition of humor. I certainly shall not 
 attempt one. But it is one obvious characteristic 
 of humor that it can find a peculiar pleasure in 
 the manifold contrasts of life that most of us over- 
 look. When the lofty and the humble are brought 
 into sudden juxtaposition so as to emphasize 
 the lofty, then we have the sense of the sublime; 
 when the contrast emphasizes the humble, then 
 we have the ludicrous, sometimes with a tone 
 of irreverence or vulgarity. When suffering or en- 
 durance is brought into contrast with the common- 
 place so as to emphasize the suffering, then w r e have 
 the sense of the heroic or the pathetic; when the 
 commonplace is emphasized, we have the ludicrous, 
 often of a cynical or unfeeling quality. But there 
 is a humor which gives us the pleasure of unexpected 
 contrast without degrading in the least the nobler 
 element in the comparison, but rather intensifying 
 it. When Emerson bids us hitch our wagon to a 
 
 107 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 star, is the saying humorous or sublime? When 
 Lamb writes to Wordsworth, " God tempers the wind 
 to the shorn Lambs," is that humorous or pathetic? 
 In truth it is both; for humor of that sort is fused 
 with our noblest and deepest feelings. And this is 
 the humor of which the Elia Essays are full; in 
 every sense a good humor — always reverent, al- 
 ways gentle, humane. As we read these essays, we 
 feel how oddly patched a stuff is this human life, to 
 be sure ; but its beauties and its virtues seem all the 
 brighter for the humorous contrast in which they are 
 set, while our follies and vanities provoke a kindly 
 laughter because they are thrown up against a back- 
 ground of noble, and serious, and beautiful things. 
 Obviously, then, such a humor should imply a 
 quick sensibility for whatsoever things are noble, 
 and serious, and beautiful. And it does. You 
 can hardly read a page in these essays without rind- 
 ing proof of that. Now it is a momentary glimpse 
 of some quiet landscape, usually seen through the 
 mellowing light of memory, as the Temple gardens, 
 or the grounds of the old Blakesware mansion, " the 
 furry wilderness, the haunt of the squirrell and day- 
 long murmuring wood pigeon, with that antique 
 image in the centre, god or goddess I knew not." 
 More often, if it be description, it is of some object 
 consecrated by long association with the joys and 
 sorrows of men and calling to our thought some great 
 1 08 
 
CHARLES LAMB 
 
 complex of experience. For Lamb, though he loved 
 nature well, loved men better. Unlike his friend 
 Wordsworth, who hardly seemed to care for men un- 
 less they had somehow passed under the solemniz- 
 ing influence of mountain and sky, Lamb cared little 
 for nature unless it were somehow humanized — 
 unless, if I may say so, it had been lived in. But 
 he did feel most keenly the charm of all those places 
 or objects about which, for generations, had ebbed 
 and flowed the tides of human life. This was the 
 secret of his love for the town. There any ancient 
 building that thrust its grimy venerableness upon the 
 crowded street might suggest that Elian contrast, 
 half humorous, half sad, between the laughter and 
 loving, the scandal and striving of our little day, and 
 the solemn memory of all the yesterdays. Take, for 
 example, this passage on the sun-dials in the Temple 
 gardens : — 
 
 " What an antique air had the now almost effaced 
 sun-dials, with their moral inscriptions, seeming co- 
 evals with that Time which they measured, and to 
 take their revelations of its flight immediately from 
 heaven, holding correspondence with the fountain 
 of light ! How would the dark line steal impercep- 
 tibly on, watched by the eye of childhood, eager to 
 detect its movement, never catched, nice as an evanes- 
 cent cloud or the first arrests of sleep ! 
 
 109 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 " ' Ah ! yet doth beauty like a dial hand 
 
 Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived ! ' 
 
 What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous 
 embowelments of lead and brass, its pert or solemn 
 dulness of communication, compared with the simple 
 altar-like structure and silent heart-language of the 
 old dials ! It stood as the garden god of Christian 
 gardens. Why is it almost everywhere vanished? 
 If its business use be superseded by more elaborate 
 inventions, its moral uses, its beauty, might have 
 pleaded for its continuance. It spoke of moderate 
 labors, of pleasures not protracted after sunset, of 
 temperance, and good hours. It was the primitive 
 clock, the horologe of the first world. Adam could 
 hardly have missed it in Paradise. It was the meas- 
 ure appropriate for sweet plants and flowers to spring 
 by, for the birds to apportion their silver warblings 
 by, for flocks to be led to fold by. The shepherd 
 'carved it out quaintly in the sun,' and, turning 
 philosopher by the very occupation, provided it with 
 mottoes more touching than tombstones." 
 
 What placid grace of rhythm, what quaint felicity 
 of epithet ! And what constant play of imagination, 
 suggesting comparisons so unexpected and yet so 
 apt — the movement of the shadow, "nice as an 
 evanescent cloud or the first arrests of sleep !" And 
 how the thought is gently beguiled by hints of sun- 
 shine and sweet pastoral toil, to that first garden of 
 no 
 
CHARLES LAMB 
 
 all, when the moving shadow began to mark the his- 
 tory of man, and the sun-dial was the " horologe of 
 the first world." And all this poetry is heightened 
 by humorous contrast with the modern clock, " with 
 its ponderous embowelments of lead and brass, and 
 its pert or solemn dulness of communication. " 
 
 Every one has noticed how rich is Lamb's writing 
 in allusion. His memory was stored with the best 
 things in literature and tradition, — imagery, senti- 
 ment, and action, — in the choicest phrase of the mas- 
 ters. All this treasure was at the service of his 
 humor, to illustrate the odd contrast between the 
 threadbare poverty of real life and the boundless 
 wealth of imagination. For in Lamb's allusions 
 the homely commonplace is usually confronted with 
 some fancy, fair or bold ; the hard reality with some 
 ideal beauty. The steward who bustles about on 
 the old Margate hoy is like Ariel, " flaming at once 
 about all parts of the deck" ; the burly cripple with- 
 out legs who wheels himself about the streets in a 
 go-cart is "a grand fragment, as good as an Elgin 
 marble"; when the sooty-faced chimney-sweep's 
 grin discloses his double row of white teeth, Lamb 
 
 quotes : — 
 
 "a sable cloud 
 Turns forth her silver lining on the night." 
 
 But Lamb's richness of allusion is not best exempli- 
 fied by images like these, detached from their setting. 
 
 in 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 It is seen rather in quick turns of humorous phrase, 
 in a single word of quotation, in sudden glimpses and 
 reflections of his reading, so fleeting that we can hardly 
 identify them, yet casting a constant glimmer of 
 humor over the homely facts out of which the essay 
 is woven. In all such allusions the effect is not to 
 degrade the loftier element in the comparison, but 
 to beautify the lower. This is the humor, not of the 
 cynic, but of the poet. It discloses sudden, unfore- 
 seen relations between the highest and the humblest 
 things; it makes us feel "how near is grandeur to 
 our dust." 
 
 Lamb's literary style is unique. If style be meas- 
 ured by the faithfulness with which it reveals the per- 
 sonality of the writer, then Lamb's must be nearly 
 perfect. To attempt any imitation of it would be 
 to fall into intolerable preciosity. In force and com- 
 pass, of course, he is not to be ranked with the great- 
 est men; but nobody's work is more exquisite. To 
 use a phrase more commonly applied to painters, 
 I should call Lamb one of the Little Masters. His 
 diction is a study in verbal values. He had a nice 
 sense of the significance of words, the aroma of asso- 
 ciation. He loved to elaborate a statement slowly, 
 lingering over its details and tasting the flavor of 
 every phrase with deliberate relish. But the charm 
 of his style is due most of all to the constant presence 
 of his imagination. His thought is always concret- 
 112 
 
CHARLES LAMB 
 
 ing itself in illustration or example, and in almost 
 every line blossoms into some rare or graceful fancy. 
 It is so spontaneous that the reader hardly appreciates 
 its richness ; but in reality — if the homely phrase 
 may be pardoned — there is more imagination to the 
 square inch in Lamb's writing than in almost any 
 other modern prose. 
 
 The archaic cast of his style is due, of course, to the 
 influence of his favorite seventeenth-century men, 
 especially Fuller and Sir Thomas Browne. Not that 
 he slavishly copied these men, or even consciously 
 imitated them; but he had steeped himself in their 
 writing till their manner became second nature. 
 In the preface to the Last Essays of Elia, he says, 
 " The essays of the late Elia were villainously pranked 
 in an affected array of antique words and phrases, 
 but they had not been his if they had been other than 
 such ; and better it is that a writer should be natural 
 in a self-pleasing quaintness than to affect a natural- 
 ness (so-called) that should be strange to him." 
 
 In fact, this "self-pleasing quaintness" never does 
 seem affected. Sometimes it gives to a passage an 
 old-fashioned daintiness of manner, as of something 
 laid in lavender: — 
 
 " What a place to be in is an old library ! It seems 
 as though all the souls of all the writers that have 
 bequeathed their labors to these Bodleians, were 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 reposing here, as in some dormitory, or middle state. 
 I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their 
 winding sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. 
 I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage ; 
 and the odor of their old moth-scented coverings is 
 fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples 
 which grew amid the happy orchard." 
 
 But more often this seventeenth-century manner 
 serves to emphasize that contrast between the stately 
 and the familiar upon which, as we have said, so 
 much of Lamb's humor depends. As a rule, no form 
 of pleasantry is more inane than the attempt to apply 
 big words to small things. But Lamb's writing sel- 
 dom degenerates into this form of feeble burlesque. 
 His large utterance seems not only natural to him, but 
 in some way fitting to his theme. There are passages 
 in the essays that, so far as style is concerned, might 
 have been taken bodily out of Sir Thomas Browne's 
 Religio Medici or Urn Burial; yet their antique 
 dignity of manner seems not misapplied. Take, for 
 example, some sentences from A Quakers' Meeting : — 
 
 "Dost thou love silence deep as that 'before the 
 winds were made ' ? go not out into the wilderness, 
 descend not into the profundities of the earth ; shut 
 not up thy casements; nor pour wax into the little 
 cells of thy ears, with little-faith'd, self-mistrusting 
 Ulysses. — Retire with me into a Quakers' Meeting. 
 114 
 
CHARLES LAMB 
 
 "For a man to refrain even from good words, and 
 to hold his peace, it is commendable; but for a 
 multitude, it is a great mastery. 
 
 " What is the stillness of the desert compared with 
 this place? what the uncommunicating muteness of 
 fishes ? — here the goddess reigns and revels. — 
 1 Boreas, and Cesias and Argestes loud,' do not with 
 their interconfounding uproars more augment the 
 brawl — nor the waves of the blown Baltic with their 
 clubbed sounds — than their opposite (Silence her 
 sacred self) is multiplied and rendered more intense 
 by numbers and by sympathy. She too hath her 
 deeps that call unto deeps. Negation itself hath a 
 positive more and less; and closed eyes would seem 
 to obscure the great obscurity of midnight. 
 
 "To pace alone in the cloisters or side aisles of 
 some cathedral, time stricken ; 
 
 " 'Or under hanging mountains, 
 Or by the fall of fountains;' 
 
 is but a vulgar luxury compared with that which those 
 enjoy who come together for the purposes of more 
 complete, abstracted solitude. This is the loneli- 
 ness 'to be felt.' — The Abbey Church of West- 
 minster hath nothing so solemn, so spirit-soothing, 
 as the naked walls and benches of a Quakers' Meet- 
 ing. Here are no tombs, no inscriptions, 
 
 "'. . . Sands, ignoble things, 
 Dropt from the ruined sides of kings' — 
 
 ii5 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 but here is something which throws Antiquity her- 
 self into the foreground — Silence — eldest of 
 things — language of old Night — primitive dis- 
 courser — to which the insolent decays of moulder- 
 ing grandeur have but arrived by a violent, and, as 
 we may say, unnatural progression." 
 
 In such a passage as this there is far more than the 
 half-humorous adaptation of a stately and antiquated 
 manner. This writing, though so rich with rhetoric 
 that, like some gorgeous stuffs, it will almost stand 
 alone, is cumbered with no idle verbiage. Every 
 epithet is a flash of imagination. That conceit of 
 silence as intensified by numbers is worthy of the 
 subtle Dr. John Donne; and some of the phrases 
 are fairly startling in their vivid boldness. "The 
 insolent decays of mouldering grandeur " — I wonder 
 how many prose-writers of the last two centuries 
 could have hit upon that ! To pile together super- 
 annuated diction in involved structure is easy enough ; 
 but to write a passage like that, in the ampler manner 
 of our elder masters, and yet natural and unstrained, 
 of imagination all compact, informed with grave and 
 quiet feeling and yet played about with lambent lights 
 of humor — this is not easy. Who else besides Lamb 
 in the last century and a half has been able to do any- 
 thing like it? But then, who has been able to do 
 anything that Lamb did? 
 116 
 
CHARLES LAMB 
 
 For one comes back to the statement that the charm 
 of Lamb's work and character is unique. It eludes 
 analysis. And the better one knows him, the more 
 impossible does it seem to put into words any ade- 
 quate likeness of the man. His humor, his tender- 
 ness, his imagination, his sense of beauty, and his 
 sense of oddity, — they were all peculiar in quality 
 and more subtly combined than in ordinary men. 
 
 Only once or twice — perhaps only once, in that 
 most intimate of all his essays, the Dream Children 
 — does Lamb drop all affectations and tell us the 
 things that lay nearest his heart in language too 
 utterly sincere even for the disguise of his u self- 
 pleasing quaintness." In that perfect essay humor 
 is quite lost in pathos ; and the English in which the 
 simple story is told, for purity of idiom, chaste sim- 
 plicity, and artless grace of movement, is quite un- 
 surpassed. No one else in Lamb's day wrote such 
 English, and to find anything so perfect you will 
 have to go back to the best passages of the English 
 Bible. Here Lamb has set up a glass where we may 
 see the inmost part of him. 
 
 117 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 I 
 
 One October afternoon in 1807 a post-chaise was 
 crawling slowly up the long hill that separates the 
 vale of Rydal from the vale of Grasmere in the Eng- 
 lish Lake District. In the post-chaise sat a lady and 
 her little daughter. Her two boys, of seven and 
 nine, impatient of the slow ascent had alighted, gone 
 on over the brow of the hill, and were briskly running 
 down the other side toward the Grasmere Valley. 
 Behind them followed as fast as he might a short, 
 frail, little man, who looked himself at first glance 
 to be a boy, but whose face, already beginning to be 
 seamed with thought, showed him to be past his first 
 youth. The three had reached the foot of the hill, 
 when a sharp turn in the road suddenly disclosed to 
 their view a little white cottage, roses and jasmine 
 clambering about its windows, and two dark yew 
 trees throwing a protecting shadow over its wall. 
 At sight of this cottage the young man stopped in- 
 stantly, hesitated, as if about to turn back; but as 
 the boys ran in at the cottage gate, he, too, as if by a 
 118 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 sudden impulse of desire that overcame his shyness, 
 pushed in after them. Just at that moment the post- 
 chaise pulled up at the gate, and a tall, grave-look- 
 ing man with two ladies hurried out from the cottage 
 door to meet it. Our shy but eager young man, 
 who is evidently a stranger to these cottage folk, 
 and for the moment hardly noticed by them, in their 
 haste to greet the lady of the post-chaise, steps mod- 
 estly into the tiny porch of the cottage and awaits 
 his welcome as the whole party comes in. 
 
 This young man, of course, is Thomas De Quincey, 
 travelling to Keswick as an escort for Mrs. Coleridge 
 and her children ; he is meeting for the first time, and 
 with trembling reverence, the great Mr. William 
 Wordsworth. A year before he had come up to 
 the Lake District with intent to call upon the poet, 
 and had got a glimpse of the white cottage from the 
 slope of Hammerscar across the lake ; but had turned 
 back, afraid to enter the presence of the god of his 
 idolatry. But now he is in the cottage with him, 
 taking tea by his humble fireside, not as with one to 
 be feared, but — to use his own phrase — as with 
 Raphael the affable angel, on the terms of man with 
 man. 
 
 This meeting with Wordsworth was a turning- 
 point in the career of Thomas De Quincey. He 
 himself averred that it was marked by a change even 
 in the physical condition of his nervous system. The 
 
 119 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 restless desire, the morbid self -consciousness and self- 
 distrust, the disheartening sense of distance between 
 him and his ideals, — all this vanished in an hour 
 before the homely hospitality of William Wordsworth. 
 It was reassuring to find that the greatest man of 
 the time — for such he thought Wordsworth — was 
 the simplest, content in his retirement among the 
 hills, and careless of the loud noises of fame. But 
 whatever influence this meeting may have had upon 
 the mental development of De Quincey, it certainly 
 may be considered as the beginning of a new period 
 in the outward history of his life. Up to this time 
 he has been a sort of vagrant, without fixed place of 
 residence, without any definite purpose, without any 
 congenial friends. Coleridge he had met a few weeks 
 before this visit to Grasmere; now he has met 
 Wordsworth ; three days later he is to meet Southey ; 
 a few months later he will meet John Wilson. These 
 men, in spite of differences and temporary estrange- 
 ments inevitable with such a temperament as his, 
 remained his best, almost his only, friends for more 
 than half his lifetime. The next summer he visited 
 Wordsworth again; and when, in 1809, Wordsworth 
 left this little cottage, he took it, and called it his home 
 for more than twenty years. Hither, after some six 
 years of bachelor life, he brought a wife from a farm- 
 house at Rydal Water a mile away ; here his children 
 were born. It is hardly too much to say that the 
 120 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 direction of all his later life was determined by this 
 visit to Wordsworth. 
 
 It is not easy, however, to trace with accuracy his 
 doings or his whereabouts, either before or after that 
 event. Some early passages in his life he himself 
 described with great detail in those sketches after- 
 wards pieced together for the Autobiography. But 
 the Autobiography is no connected narrative. It is 
 rather a series of pictures of some moments in which 
 the life of long periods seemed focussed, incidents 
 in which his personality was revealed to himself, or 
 the sadness and wonder of the world struck in upon 
 his soul. The incidents, moreover, are related as they 
 stood in his memory years after they occurred, when 
 his morbidly heightened fancy had doubtless envel- 
 oped them with circumstance unnoticed at the time 
 or altogether imaginary. When all his life had passed 
 into the atmosphere of dream, he never could quite 
 tell how much of it was fact and how much was only 
 dream. 
 
 The one significant fact that seems clear from these 
 records is that De Quincey and all his brothers and 
 sisters were precocious young folk, with a certain 
 wayward intensity of imagination. Two of his 
 sisters died in early childhood, both from some 
 affection of the brain. His eldest brother, who died 
 in young manhood, was a singularly brilliant boy, 
 who lived for years most of the time in a realm of 
 
 121 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 romance of his own creation, and had strength of will 
 enough to make his brothers live there, too. The 
 younger brother, Pink, ran away to sea in his teens, 
 was captured by pirates, recaptured, served in the 
 navy, and in a dozen years passed through a series 
 of adventures wild enough for a Stevenson romance. 
 Whence they got this strain in their blood it might 
 be hard to say ; for their father was a well-to-do mer- 
 chant of Manchester, prosaic enough, for all that 
 appears, both in character and pursuits. Thomas 
 De Quincey at thirteen years of age, — if we may 
 take his word for it, — could read Greek with ease, 
 and at fifteen not only wrote lyric Greek verse, but 
 conversed in Greek fluently, and was in the habit of 
 reading off the daily newspaper into that language — 
 a process that must have racked the Greek consider- 
 ably. "That boy," said one of his masters, " could 
 harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I 
 could address an English one." His father had died 
 when De Quincey was only seven years of age, and 
 the boy was kept in school by his guardians, under 
 an uncongenial master, after he should have been at 
 the University. He ran away, and as he flatly re- 
 fused to go back, his mother gave him a guinea a 
 week and let him wander wherever he would. He 
 drifted about for some months in Wales, living in 
 farmhouses, and astonishing the good folk by his 
 courtesy and his erudition ; and towards winter made 
 
 122 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 his way up to London. His adventures here : how 
 he slept starving and shivering in a Greek Street 
 garret, how he roamed the city with Anne of Oxford 
 Street and fainted of cold and hunger in Soho Square, 
 how he was helped by the good Jews at the rate of 
 eighteen per cent, and at last by some fortunate 
 accident — he never told what — he was discovered, 
 restored to his friends, and sent up to Oxford where 
 he belonged, — all this will be remembered by every- 
 body, for everybody has read the Confessions. Yet 
 the story raises some doubts. Without question it is 
 true in outline ; but I think it must be embroidered a 
 little. This romantic tramping in Wales with his 
 mother's consent and a guinea a week; all this 
 vagabondage and starvation in London when there 
 was bread enough and to spare in his mother's house, 
 — it seems too much to believe of a rational mother 
 or a rational son. I suspect the laudanum has got 
 into the story. 
 
 He entered Worcester College, Oxford, in 1803, 
 and he was there through 1808; but he couldn't 
 have kept his terms regularly in the latter year, and 
 seems not to have been in residence much after the 
 summer of 1807. He formed no intimacies in 
 college, lived much by himself, and as, from some 
 freak or other, he refused to stand his final examina- 
 tions, he never took a degree. But he seems to have 
 read a good deal in literature and philosophy; and 
 
 123 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 he was one of the few young men who hailed with 
 genuine appreciation the early work of Coleridge 
 and Wordsworth. 
 
 In 1809 he took up his residence in the Lake 
 District, occupying the little Grasmere cottage that 
 Wordsworth was then vacating; but what he was 
 doing there for the next twelve years nobody knows. 
 He had adopted no profession. He wrote no books 
 or reviews, and seemed to have no clear vocation 
 to literature. No one knew or saw much of him. 
 He says himself that he was reading German meta- 
 physics and taking opium. Both habits he had 
 acquired while in the University; both accorded 
 well with his dreamy, isolated temper ; both he kept 
 up during life. In 18 19, urged by the needs of an 
 increasing family, he became editor of a local news- 
 paper in Kendal; German metaphysics and Tory 
 politics, however, made a mixture not relished by his 
 rural readers, and after some months he gave up 
 that project. But two years later, in 182 1, appeared 
 in the London Magazine the Confessions of an 
 Opium-Eater, and De Quincey's literary career was 
 begun. For the next four years he was much in 
 London, preparing for the London Magazine a series 
 of some dozen papers continuing and supplementing 
 the Confessions. By 1826 he got the ear of the pub- 
 lic and was a coveted contributor. 
 
 After about this time, however, his interests drew 
 124 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 him away from London to Edinburgh. For more 
 than ten years his closest friend among his neighbors 
 in the Lake District had been, not Wordsworth, 
 for whom his early reverence had now somewhat 
 abated, but John Wilson of Elleray. Wilson 
 was now at the height of his popularity as editor of 
 Blackwood's Magazine, and had already once or 
 twice ventured to introduce the Opium-Eater as a 
 character into his famous Nodes Ambrosianae. He 
 now persuaded his friend to lend his pen to the ser- 
 vice of Blackwood, and after 1826 De Quincey became 
 a frequent contributor to that brilliant periodical. 
 In 1834 Taifs Magazine was set up in Edinburgh; 
 it was for these two journals, Blackwood and Tail, 
 that most of De Quincey's work was done for the 
 rest of his life. In 1830 he removed his family to 
 lodgings in Edinburgh; and in 1837, after the death 
 of his wife, took a cottage at Lasswade, a little way 
 out of the city, which was his home — or at all 
 events the home of his children — so long as he 
 lived. For himself he preferred to do his writing 
 in hired rooms in town, near his publishers; and it 
 is part of the De Quincey legend that he used to occupy 
 a room until it was entirely " snowed up" with papers 
 and manuscripts which he despaired of arranging 
 and yet would not destroy, when he would back out 
 and hire another room, only to be pushed out of 
 this again by the ever accumulating mass of papers. 
 
 "5 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 What seems certain is that he must have produced 
 a vastly greater amount of manuscript than he ever 
 got printed; had he published all he wrote, the 
 array of his works might have been something appall- 
 ing. In his later days he was one of the celebrities 
 of Edinburgh; but it was difficult to get sight of 
 him ; for he refused most of the conventions of society 
 and usually had to be found, if found at all, buried 
 in some of his bookish retreats. He kept on writing 
 to the end ; but the last years of his life were mostly 
 spent in garnering up his scattered papers from the 
 magazines, revising and arranging them for a col- 
 lected edition of his works. In spite of the ill-health 
 by which he had always been harassed, in spite of 
 his life-long opium habit, — or possibly because of 
 it, — the fragile little man outlived all his early 
 friends, and died in 1859, at the good old age of 
 seventy-four. 
 
 II 
 
 After all no one seems to know much of De Quincey; 
 no one ever did know much of him. When you 
 have read all his own Confessions, you feel he has 
 told you little of himself, of his pursuits, his practical 
 outward life, still less of his affections, his inner 
 life. A very considerable body of reminiscence 
 from his contemporaries has, indeed, gathered about 
 his memory, and some thirty years ago Mr. Japp — 
 
 126 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 or, as for some unknown reason he preferred to call 
 himself, Mr. Page — wrote his life in two stout 
 volumes; yet all the letters and the stories leave 
 us with the feeling that we have not really got inside 
 that strange personality. The truth is there seems 
 something demonic, almost spectral, about De 
 Quincey. He wasn't one of your men of large red 
 health, who stand solidly on the ground, and love 
 the broad plain facts of life. He lived in the Gras- 
 mere cottage twenty years; but he formed few 
 acquaintances and left few memories there. Of all 
 his Grasmere neighbors, Dorothy Wordsworth, 
 who had that gift for appreciating genius which 
 is itself a form of genius, always understood him 
 best, and her sympathy and judgment several times 
 stood him in good stead. People of plain com- 
 mon sense naturally found him difficult. Harriet 
 Martineau, — a very large incarnation of common 
 sense, — who lived near him for years, declared that 
 his absorption and selfish moodiness had rendered 
 him quite insensible to the ordinary requisites of 
 honor and courtesy, to say nothing of gratitude 
 and sincerity. But Harriet Martineau was herself 
 rather difficult. In those years of the Grasmere resi- 
 dence he was generally invisible; for he preferred 
 to read and dream indoors by day, and come forth 
 to walk by night. Many a night, past midnight, 
 when all the valley was hushed in slumber and 
 
 127 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 lights had ceased to twinkle in the cottages, his 
 little form might have been made out, flitting like 
 some darker shadow up the hillside, over the 
 fells, or resting in some secluded nook by the 
 Rothay. 
 
 Neither in his own house or anywhere else did 
 the ordinary conventions of society ever get much 
 hold on him. At the call of some chance thought, 
 his daughter says, he might interrupt the process 
 of dressing himself in the morning, and forget alto- 
 gether to resume it, perhaps receiving a visitor later 
 in the day without his coat or wearing half the 
 proper number of stockings. Going to call on 
 Professor Wilson in Gloucester Place, Edinburgh, 
 one stormy evening, he decided to remain over 
 night, and literally stayed a year. During all 
 this visit, Wilson says, he lived in a kind of mysterious 
 seclusion, spending most of his days locked in his 
 room, stretched on the floor before the fire, and 
 was only seen when toward midnight he stole out of 
 doors for a long walk. If he could be captured at a 
 late dinner lasting till two or three in the morning, 
 he would sometimes pour forth a stream of talk that 
 entranced all his hearers. As a rule, however, 
 he refused to take his meals with others; and 
 Wilson's servants used to place food outside the 
 door of his room, leaving him to take it when he 
 liked, and often finding it twelve hours later un- 
 128 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 touched. Later on, in 1843, Wilson declared that, 
 though he supposed himself to be the most intimate 
 friend of De Quincey, and the De Quincey family, 
 then living at Lasswade, frequently sent to him for 
 news of their father, yet he had seen him not above 
 four times in six years. Even his own family, it is 
 clear, always deemed him an odd creature. 
 
 This peculiar abstracted temper was aggravated, 
 doubtless, by the opium habit; but it was not en- 
 gendered by opium. De Quincey was born with 
 eyes that open inwards. He lived in a world of 
 his own — a world of dream and speculation. Not 
 that he was altogether without interest in outward 
 affairs, social, economic, or political; but he was 
 unable to take the obvious and practical view of 
 them. With an almost preternatural gift to discover 
 subtlety or paradox, he was as helpless as a child 
 before the simplest business difficulty. He wan- 
 dered half over Edinburgh one evening trying to 
 negotiate a personal loan for seven shillings sixpence, 
 and offering as security a fifty-pound bank-note; 
 at the same time he was writing a treatise on the 
 Logic of the Laws of Wealth. In this isolation and 
 self-absorption there was nothing of cynicism or 
 misanthropy. On the contrary, there often seemed 
 to be in his manner a kind of timid appeal for 
 human sympathy and companionship. He left 
 upon you the impression of a man "moving about 
 k 129 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 in worlds not realized." He had a soft and dep- 
 recating tone in his voice and a gentle but elaborate 
 courtesy which he extended to everybody alike. 
 Professor Wilson's daughter says that when he was 
 staying in their house, he would inform the cook with 
 a stately deference, as if he had taken her for a 
 duchess, that "owing to dyspepsia affecting my 
 system, and the possibility of any additional derange- 
 ment of the stomach taking place, consequences 
 incalculably distressing would arise, so much so 
 indeed as to increase nervous irritation, and pre- 
 vent me from attending to matters of overwhelm- 
 ing importance, if you do not remember to cut 
 the mutton in a diagonal rather than in a longitu- 
 dinal form." 
 
 But with a friend, or even with a comparative 
 stranger whom he had reason to think thoroughly 
 sympathetic, De Quincey could come out of his with- 
 drawn and silent mood, and be a most delightful 
 companion. No subject could be started in conver- 
 sation that would not soon touch some topic in 
 which he felt an interest ; then a flush would spread 
 itself over the withered little face, the eyelids would 
 lift, slowly and as with an effort, disclosing a pair of 
 wonderful, immortal eyes, the feeble mouth would 
 tremble and twitch for an instant, and then his talk 
 would begin. Low-voiced, deliberate, as if far away, 
 eddying hither and thither, circling about all sorts 
 130 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 of topics yet never quite losing its way, monotonous 
 in tone always, but in matter varied, brilliant, elo- 
 quent, full of ingenious reflection, curious fact, 
 striking paradox, flavored with bits of caustic satire 
 or gossip, shot through with strange lights of fancy. 
 "What wouldn't one give," said Mrs. Carlyle, when 
 first she saw him in an evening company, "what 
 wouldn't one give to have that little man in a box 
 and take him out now and then to talk?" Every- 
 body that ever met him intimately, — Tom Hood, 
 Professor Wilson, Harriet Martineau, Hill Burton, 
 Professor Masson, Mr. Fields, Mr. Gillies, and half 
 a score of other people, — they all testify to that 
 marvellous stream of talk. But, curious to say, so 
 far as I can discover, not one of them ever remem- 
 bered a dozen words of what he said. They descant 
 upon the fluency, the music, the subtlety, the learn- 
 ing of his talk; but what, on any given occasion, 
 Mr. De Quincey was actually talking about, nobody 
 seems to have recorded. In truth it probably didn't 
 much matter. Evidently it was the extraordinary 
 brilliancy of the exercise that fascinated his hearers, 
 rather than any definite body of opinion. It wasn't 
 talk like Johnson's, made up of stout, well-shaped 
 propositions to be defended against all disputants, 
 but rather a winding stream of speculation and rhet- 
 oric, sweeping its long curves through the borders 
 of a dim land of dreams. 
 
 I3 1 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 III 
 
 Now all of De Quincey's literary work is just this 
 talk put into print. He wrote easily — too easily ; 
 it was his mode of talking to himself, and those 
 mounds of manuscript that filled, one after another, 
 the dens in Edinburgh where he spent his days were 
 only other masses of talk that did not get into print. 
 As you open his book you hear the man going on 
 with his monologue. There on the printed page is the 
 curious combination of volubility and precision, the 
 garrulity, the discursiveness, the love of paradox, 
 the indifference to the obvious and the vision for 
 the remote, the labored humor, — all those qualities 
 that, they tell us, used to mark his conversation. 
 Of him it may be said in a very special sense that 
 he being dead yet speaketh. And herein is the best 
 assurance for the permanence of his work. Any writ- 
 ing that can preserve for us in such vivid complete- 
 ness the personality of a man is sure to live ; certainly 
 if that personality be so interesting as De Quincey's. 
 
 On the other hand, writing like this has some very 
 obvious and very serious defects; so serious as to 
 make it doubtful whether most of De Quincey's 
 work can ever rank very high as literature. The truth 
 is that talk, however wonderful, is not exactly lit- 
 erature; it needs first to be composed. But De 
 Quincey never really composed anything. There is 
 132 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 no method in his work, no clear foresight of the end 
 from the beginning, nothing final and finished. With 
 all his learning and subtlety he never wrote anything 
 to be properly called a treatise, though he planned 
 several. His essays, critical or historical, are full 
 of curious fact and conjecture, personal speculation 
 and personal reminiscence, ranging from Dan to 
 Beersheba, but they are seldom or never the clear, 
 well-arranged presentation of the subjects they pro- 
 fess to discuss. He gives a variety of incidental 
 suggestion, frequent illuminating glimpses of the 
 recondite relations of his theme; but he fails in the 
 humbler, though more important, task of giving 
 to his subject ordered and unified treatment. In 
 fact, he never was a direct or systematic thinker. 
 His mental habits were so discursive that, although 
 he had great penetration, he was nevertheless always 
 something of the dilettante. The most miscellaneous 
 of writers, in his last days he was sorely put to it 
 to make any intelligible plan of arrangement for 
 his collected work ; and his latest editor has broken 
 up that plan without being able to devise any much 
 better. A sort of Admirable Crichton, he did nothing 
 with his knowledge, he reached no conclusions, he 
 settled no questions, marked out no new paths for 
 human thought; and the large familiar elements of 
 life out of which great literature is made, man's love 
 and hope and desire, — still less to these could he 
 
 *33 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 give such expression as shall thrill or inspire. He 
 could only gossip; curious, usually interesting, 
 sometimes instructive, it was still gossip — gossip 
 through fourteen stricken volumes. 
 
 But this is not the worst. Gossip is often delight- 
 ful. But this talk, page after page, in the cold print, 
 without the fascinating voice and presence of the 
 Opium-Eater himself, if I mistake not, will often try 
 the patience of the reader. We find ourselves re- 
 membering that life is short. De Quincey is excel- 
 lent reading, if you have leisure; but of leisure he 
 demands a great deal. Professor Masson suggests 
 that a young man could do no better than to take three 
 months and read through the whole body of De 
 Quincey' s writing. Such a course would doubtless 
 sharpen his intellect and broaden greatly the range 
 of his knowledge; but I suspect the young man 
 would have some heavy half-hours. Yet another 
 critic, Mr. Saintsbury, remarks it is probably in 
 youth that the merits of De Quincey are best appre- 
 ciated ; he ought to be read, thinks Mr. Saintsbury, 
 when you are about fifteen or sixteen. Much of 
 De Quincey would probably tax the brains of a lad 
 of sixteen ; yet Mr. Saintsbury may be right in deem- 
 ing that age most tolerant of De Quincey's manner. 
 For at sixteen there seems time enough for anything ; 
 art is short and life is long; before we are fifty we 
 learn better. 
 
 i34 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 We admit to those who admire his style that De 
 Quincey is never verbose ; he never repeats the same 
 thought with needless fulness of phrase. But he is 
 the most prolix of mortals. Tennyson says of the 
 flower in the crannied wall — 
 
 "I pluck you out of the crannies, 
 I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, 
 Little flower — but if I could understand 
 What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
 I should know what God and man is." 
 
 It is this kind of knowledge of every fact and every 
 truth that De Quincey seems bent on imparting. In 
 a very suggestive passage of the Reminiscences he 
 says that in early youth he labored under a peculiar 
 embarrassment whenever he sought to convey his 
 thought in language: "It was not words only I 
 wanted; but I could not unravel, I could not even 
 make perfectly conscious to myself, the subsidiary 
 thoughts into which one leading thought often radi- 
 ates; or, at least, I could not do this with anything 
 like the rapidity requisite for conversation. I la- 
 bored like a sibyl instinct with the burden of pro- 
 phetic woe as often as I found myself dealing with 
 any topic in which the understanding combined with 
 deep feelings to suggest mixed and tangled thoughts ; 
 and thus partly — partly also from my invincible 
 habit of revery — I had a most distinguished talent 
 'pour le silence. '" This states admirably the mode 
 
 J 35 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 of thought he coveted when young, and attained in 
 such perfection in his maturer years. With a mar- 
 vellous richness of vocabulary and the utmost pre- 
 cision of phrase, he was never content to isolate a 
 truth from its connections, as it is needful to do if 
 we would give a clear statement of it in moderate 
 compass. He must pull his thought up by the roots, 
 and then trace out with laborious precision all its 
 minute filaments, and its ramifications into a network 
 of other thought. Everything reminds him of some- 
 thing else. Now if he had, and we had, the secular 
 leisures of a Methuselah, this would be a most profit- 
 able exercise; but the result in our little day is that 
 he exhausts our patience and doesn't exhaust any- 
 thing else. 
 
 In the treatment of any subject De Quincey sel- 
 dom begins at the beginning; he begins a good way 
 back of the beginning. He has to work inward 
 through a thicket of secondary suggestion that has 
 grown up about his original thought, and his path 
 is sure to be circuitous and broken by numerous side 
 excursions. Take as an example his method of 
 approach to the leading proposition of one section 
 of his famous essay on Style — the proposition that 
 Greek literature is concentrated in two periods about 
 seventy-five years apart. That is a simple historical 
 statement, and one would think it might be laid down 
 and proved at once. How does De Quincey get at 
 136 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 it? He begins with a reference to the late Latin 
 poet, Velleius Paterculus, and proceeds to give a 
 sketch of his life and times in three pages ; then comes 
 the statement for which Paterculus was called in, 
 to the effect that genius tends to "agglomerate"; 
 the passage is given in the original, and translated 
 clause by clause, with an embroidery of discussion 
 on the style of Paterculus — three pages more ; then 
 come examples from various literatures ancient and 
 modern, proving the truth of the assertion of Pater- 
 culus — four pages more ; then the reasons in the 
 constitution of the human mind for this periodic 
 manifestation of genius, and the consequent necessity 
 of the alternation of creative and critical periods — 
 four pages more; and then, at last, we come to our 
 central proposition that there were two such periods 
 in Greek literature. All this preliminary pother over 
 Paterculus is quite needless; it does not prove or 
 really introduce De Quincey's main thesis; it is all 
 excrescence. 
 
 Sometimes he is quite unable to get through this 
 preliminary matter, and never reaches his central 
 theme at all. Like Coleridge, he has the exasperat- 
 ing trick of promising some elaborate discussion or 
 exposition, bringing up horse, foot, and dragoons to 
 make ready, and then abruptly retiring from the 
 field. All readers of Coleridge's Biographia Lit- 
 eraria will remember the lively anticipation with 
 
 i37 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 which they — unless forewarned — expected his 
 promised discussion of the Imagination or Eseni- 
 plastic Faculty; and the inclination to profanity 
 when they found Coleridge suddenly deciding, after 
 all his parade of preparation, to postpone the dis- 
 cussion to some more convenient season. De Quin- 
 cey, in his Letters to a Young Man, does precisely 
 the same thing with reference to the philosophy of 
 Kant. He informs his correspondent that he will 
 do what divers other philosophers have vainly 
 essayed to do, give him a succinct statement of the 
 fundamental positions of the Kantian philosophy. 
 Ah, thinks the reader, now we have something definite 
 and much to be desired. But, first, De Quincey must 
 expose the ignorance and folly of previous exposi- 
 tors — six of them ; then he must remind his corre- 
 spondent that the difficulty of Kant arises principally 
 from his terminology, and show that a new terminol- 
 ogy is a necessity in a new philosophy. By that time 
 he is at the end of his sheet, and forced to postpone 
 the exposition of Kant to another letter — which he 
 never wrote. 
 
 And even when he does reach his theme, his treat- 
 ment of it is often sadly lacking in proportion. Some 
 of his critical essays, for example, are so largely taken 
 up with subordinate or collateral matters as to give 
 you little help in estimating the essential character or 
 value of the work criticised. You have been amused 
 138 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 with a great variety of minor considerations, but you 
 come out at the end a little mazed, asking yourself 
 what you have got, after all; and as far as the main 
 object of your search is concerned, very much in the 
 condition — if I may borrow one of De Quincey's 
 own jokes — of the student to whom was propounded 
 the old Cambridge problem, "Given the captain's 
 name and the year of our Lord, to determine the 
 longitude of the ship." 
 
 Perhaps it is in his narrative writing that we find 
 the most remarkable instances of this vagabond 
 manner. It is true, indeed, that here it usually 
 doesn't so much matter. When De Quincey is 
 recounting his own experiences, his rambling garru- 
 lity is rather pleasant. We know he will never get 
 through; this is no story to be finished. When he 
 has talked long enough he will stop; and we need 
 listen no longer than we wish. I don't know that 
 any special illumination is spread over De Quincey's 
 life in the Manchester Grammar School by telling us 
 that his mother had a friend who, when a pretty widow 
 of thirty-six, had married an ugly German named 
 Schreiber, who took snuff ; that Mrs. Schreiber, after- 
 ward separated from Schreiber, took charge of two 
 orphan girls from India, and placed them under a 
 system of excellent discipline that it takes fifteen 
 pages to describe; that one of these girls, with a 
 Madonna-like face and almond-shaped eyes, married 
 
 i39 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 Lord Carberry, studied New Testament Greek with 
 De Quincey, and discussed with him for ten pages the 
 relation of the Christian religion to pagan morality; 
 that Mrs. Schreiber, having a cancerous affection, 
 called in the services of a distinguished surgeon, Dr. 
 White, who administered hemlock with some bene- 
 ficial effects; that Dr. White's two daughters were 
 very fond of Lady Carberry — especially the younger; 
 that Dr. White had a museum and in it a mummy and 
 a skeleton; that the mummy was deposited in a tall 
 clock case, the face covered with a piece of white 
 velvet and not disclosed even to Lady Carberry; 
 that some seventy years before, when there was still 
 something of glamour about the life of the highway- 
 man (for which plausible reasons may be adduced in 
 three pages) there had been a notable robbery and 
 murder committed in a brick house on the west side 
 of the college green in the city of Bristol, near where 
 Southey and Coleridge afterward lived, and forty- 
 eight hours before the robbery, a very tall, handsome 
 young man, respected by his neighbors, had ridden 
 out of the village of Knutsford, and was by many 
 suspected to have been the robber; and that the 
 skeleton in the museum of Dr. White, who attended 
 Mrs. Schreiber, who reared Lady Carberry, who 
 talked Greek with De Quincey, may have been the 
 skeleton of this robber. All this isn't exactly neces- 
 sary to our conception of the life and studies of young 
 140 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 De Quincey in the Manchester Grammar School, 
 but it is amusing. To be sure, a life of De Quincey 
 written on this plan would reach " from here to Meso- 
 potamy, a thing the imagination boggles at" ; but De 
 Quincey isn't writing his life, he is only talking. 
 
 In argument or exposition, where we have a right 
 to expect method and conclusion, this manner is less 
 excusable. Yet here it is not due to revery or mere 
 vagrancy of thought, but rather to De Quincey's 
 irresistible tendency to chase every subject into all 
 its relations. He himself justly claimed to be a 
 vigorous and accurate thinker; but his mind was 
 fascinated by the complexity of forces that enter into 
 every event, the tangled skein of motives that issue 
 in every volition. Minds of this habit cannot con- 
 template one thing at a time, and so are ill-fitted for 
 clear exposition ; they cannot decide promptly, and 
 so are ill-fitted for efficient action. But they often 
 greatly stimulate and broaden other minds. They 
 disclose unsuspected truth, and show the profounder 
 reason that underlies our conventional beliefs. Cole- 
 ridge is an excellent case in point; in imaginative 
 literature the familiar example is Hamlet. If De 
 Quincey has left us nothing of high philosophic worth, 
 this is not so much because his intellect was less 
 acute than that of Coleridge or even because he had 
 less power of concentration ; but rather because he 
 could never bring himself to observe any just pro- 
 
 141 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 portion or relative value among the subjects of his 
 thought. He will often overlook all the obvious and 
 important phases of his theme to trace out some re- 
 mote or unfamiliar implication. He seems to care 
 more for novelty than for truth, and is more inter- 
 ested to surprise than to persuade. Nothing pleases 
 him better than to fasten to some familiar proposition 
 a long sorites, and then follow his sorites underground 
 till the conclusion emerges at last in some quite 
 unexpected quarter. He loves thus to disclose links 
 of cause we had never thought of, or show the inade- 
 quacy of some generally accepted notion. For ex- 
 ample, the great literature of Greece, he says, owes 
 many of its distinctive qualities to the fact that it 
 never could be, in the modern sense of the word, 
 published. But why was it not published? Why, 
 of course, you say, because the art of printing had not 
 then been invented. Oh, no, rejoins De Quincey, 
 that is not the reason; that is a foolish reply; the 
 art of printing had been invented and lost again half 
 a dozen times before the fifteenth century — witness 
 the beautiful inscriptions upon coins. It was not 
 printing that was lacking, but paper. And why 
 paper ? Because there were no cotton or linen rags. 
 And why no rags? Because people almost univer- 
 sally wore woollen clothing. And thus the fact that 
 the Greeks wore woollen clothes determines the liter- 
 ary style of their writing. 
 
 142 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 The humor of De Quincey, when it is genuine and 
 spontaneous, usually proceeds from this same liking 
 to trace remote or unexpected affiliations of thought. 
 Much of his humor, however, is neither genuine nor 
 spontaneous. I must confess I cannot find much 
 humor in the famous paper on Murder as a Fine Art. 
 The phrase that forms the title is witty, and had it 
 been used in conversation to point a satiric reference, 
 might have been a brilliant bon mot; but to work 
 the subject out, with laborious ingenuity into all its 
 grewsome details, preserving the while the temper 
 of the connoisseur, this is merely a forcible inversion 
 of our normal feeling. It is hardly to be called humor 
 at all ; certainly it is not a good humor. Nor is there 
 any purpose in it; there is no irony in the paper, 
 no satiric intent, no truth of any sort under the fool- 
 ing. De Quincey pleaded the example of Swift in 
 some of his grim jesting in Gulliver, or the famous 
 " Proposal" for eating the children in Ireland. But 
 there is no real similarity in the cases. Swift's papers 
 are examples of the most awful satire ; Swift is in sad 
 and terrible earnest. Similarly De Quincey might, 
 one thinks, have written a satire, for example, upon 
 the tendency of a certain school of dramatists to 
 treat the seventh commandment as he had treated 
 the sixth ; but he did not. He was aiming only to be 
 facetious; and neither Adultery nor Murder as a 
 Fine Art is matter for pure comedy. Another very 
 
 M3 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 dreary form of De Quincey's attempts at humor is 
 his heavy jocularity and vulgar slang, a sort of la- 
 bored gaucherie. Throughout a long essay he calls 
 the historian Josephus "Wicked Joseph," or "Mr. 
 Joe"; he tells at great length, in another essay, the 
 story of Bentley's famous lawsuit with Colbraith — 
 whom he terms a "malicious old toad" — and at the 
 end, or, as he puts it, "when the last round is over," 
 he calls out : " Well, Colbraith, how do you find your- 
 self by this time ? I think you'll not meddle with our 
 Dick again" — our Dick being, of course, the great 
 Richard Bentley. After quoting a passage from 
 Cicero, he goes on, "After such a statement as this 
 did Kikero not tumble downstairs and break three of 
 his legs in his haste to call a public meeting ? " When 
 he can no longer contain his astonishment or indig- 
 nation, he will occasionally relieve himself, not by 
 a good round "damn" — which would at least be 
 spontaneous — but by some such elegant expletive 
 as "O crimini!" This sort of thing from a man 
 of culture is certainly surprising; but most readers 
 will not deem it witty. He can now and then be 
 sprightly and diverting without descending to this 
 horse play, as, for example, in his banter upon Cole- 
 ridge's two friends, Ball and Bell — Sir Alexander 
 Ball who had no abstract ideas, and Dr. Andrew 
 Bell who had two, one on the moon and the other on 
 education. Yet even in such raillery he is never quite 
 
 144 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 safe from some slip into vulgarity. His deliberate at- 
 tempts at the facetious are always likely to be forced. 
 His best humor seems quite unconscious, some form 
 of that waywardness and whimsicality characteristic 
 of his thinking. Mr. Bagehot says somewhere that 
 there is humor in the thought of an immortal soul 
 tying his shoe-string. It is this contrast between the 
 infinite and the trivial, the strange immanence of the 
 sublime in the commonplace, that fascinates De 
 Quincey, and occasionally issues in passages of pe- 
 culiar and genuine humor. 
 
 But this sense of the infinite significance and sug- 
 gestion in common things is best seen in De Quin- 
 cey's many passages of pathos or sublimity. His 
 imagination had power to interpret the wide possi- 
 bilities latent in the present and the actual. He can 
 trace with marvellous skill the subtle links of thought 
 or feeling by which the simple incident, the passing 
 emotion, may draw into the study of our imagina- 
 tion a vast complex of experience, with all its contrasts 
 of good and evil, of joy and sorrow. Thus while 
 on a visit to Windsor he watches a group of young 
 men and women in a contra-dance. This suggests 
 to him, first, a protest against that tendency in all 
 the arts to substitute the difficult for the beautiful 
 which had almost pushed out of use this graceful, 
 old-fashioned dance ; then comes a discussion — 
 relegated to a page-long footnote — of the disputed 
 
 L 145 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 etymology of the term " contra-dance " ; after this 
 he gives a brief but subtle analysis of the emotion 
 of "passionate sadness" evoked by the spectacle of 
 the dance, and an explanation of the fact that all 
 our highest and most festal emotions are tinged with 
 melancholy; and then, at last, in a passage of lofty 
 rhetoric and solemn music he renders the large 
 imaginative significance of the scene with its vague 
 power over our emotions : — 
 
 "A sort of mask of human life, with its whole 
 equipage of pomps and glories, its luxury of sight and 
 sound, its hours of golden youth, and the intermin- 
 able revolution of ages hurrying after ages, and one 
 generation treading upon the flying footsteps of 
 another; whilst all the while the overruling music 
 attempers the mind to the spectacle, the subject to 
 the object, the beholder to the vision." 
 
 Any ordinary experience may suffice thus to set 
 his imagination at work, and produce one of those 
 purple patches that, everybody knows, are scattered 
 so thickly though his pages. 
 
 Closely akin to this feeling of indefinite emotional 
 meanings inherent in common things was De Quin- 
 cey's liking for mystery of every sort. He was used 
 to say he could not live without it. He relished any 
 tale of wonder, dreams, omens, popular superstitions, 
 any mere cock-and-bull story. He wrote papers on 
 146 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 Free Masonry, On the Order of the Rosy Cross, on 
 the Pagan Oracles. The opening lines of Macbeth 
 — the creepy chant of the witches — haunted him 
 all his days; and his paper on the Knocking Scene, 
 altogether apart from the characteristic subtlety of 
 its reasoning, shows what a shudder that eerie bit 
 of stage business gave to his imagination. But he 
 had, at the opposite extreme of sensibility, a deep, 
 half-mournful awe before the inscrutable mystery 
 in which our lives are rooted. Always restless 
 within the narrow limits of positive knowledge, he 
 loved to send his thoughts out beyond those confines 
 into that dim border-land of imagination and con- 
 jecture where knowledge shades into wonder and 
 loses itself in the dark profound. He had little of 
 Wordsworth's interest in the common face of nature, 
 but at times some sight or sound would lay sudden 
 awe upon him — as that summer wind which began 
 to blow while he stood by the corpse of his sister, 
 hollow, solemn, Memnonian, as if it had swept the 
 fields of mortality for centuries, the one audible sym- 
 bol of eternity ! All his readers will remember pas- 
 sages of speculation in which De Quincey is lifted 
 into sublimity by his solemn sense of the infinity of 
 all our human powers and affections. Like Sir 
 Thomas Browne, whom he so much admired, he 
 loved to pose his apprehension with mysteries, and 
 pursue his reason to an O altitudol 
 
 i47 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 After going over the whole body of De Quincey's 
 Works, one is constrained to admit they contain 
 rather surprisingly little of substantive and perma- 
 nent value. The most industrious of writers, his 
 energy was dissipated upon a multitude of curious 
 topics, and he never finished, or even attempted, any 
 work of signal importance. Of the practical, out- 
 ward life of men, such a shy and secluded bookworm 
 could have no real knowledge. He has really noth- 
 ing to say upon all the urgent political and social 
 questions that were agitating the minds of English- 
 men all his lifetime. You will get no aid from him 
 for the conduct of life. He lived in his own quiet 
 world of books, of dreams, of memories. 
 
 This statement suggests what is perhaps the sim- 
 plest and best classification of his writings. With 
 unimportant exceptions they fall into three groups, 
 as they are concerned with his reading, his imagina- 
 tion, or his personal reminiscences. In the first of 
 these groups would be placed his papers on literary 
 biography and history, on literary theory, and the 
 purely critical appreciations of individual writers. 
 The biographical sketches, like those of Shakespeare, 
 Pope, Bentley, are always interesting, but they lack 
 proportion. De Quincey cared little for the plain, 
 outward facts that make up the greater part of 
 every man's life, and was constantly drawn away to 
 the more curious but less important phases of char- 
 148 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 acter and action. Or, if his subject be one inviting 
 epic treatment, like Joan of Arc, he may omit all 
 historical detail and lift his essay into a kind of ode 
 or heroic declamation. His more characteristic 
 historical papers, however, are usually concerned 
 with some of the enigmas or curiosities of history, 
 The Essenes, The Pagan Oracles, The Character 
 of Cicero, The Casuistry of Roman Meals, Judas 
 Iscariot. But of the papers in this first group, 
 the most valuable are not biographical or historical. 
 Knowing far more of literature than of life, always 
 interested in questions of rhetorical form, it was 
 natural that De Quincey should put some of his 
 best thinking into the essays on literary theory. He 
 has perhaps nowhere written anything more thought- 
 ful and fertile than the Letters to a Young Man, and 
 the essays on Rhetoric, Style, and Conversation. 
 These papers do not, indeed, make any systematic 
 body of critical philosophy, but they abound in 
 detached statements of principle, always penetrat- 
 ing, and sometimes — like the distinction between the 
 literature of knowledge and the literature of power — 
 touching fundamental truth. It may be said, per- 
 haps, that this famous distinction doesn't go quite to 
 the root of the matter; De Quincey does not see 
 clearly that the dynamic element in writing which 
 he calls power is always emotion, and that he is 
 really distinguishing, not between two kinds of 
 
 149 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 literature, but between literature and science. Yet 
 the passage is one of the most suggestive in modern 
 critical writing; and you will hardly read a half- 
 dozen pages in these literary papers without getting 
 some such fillip to your thinking. 
 
 It must be admitted that De Quincey's literary 
 theory is frequently warped or narrowed by his 
 personal preferences. Every critic, I suppose, is 
 inclined to mistake the dictates of his own taste 
 for universal laws; De Quincey was especially 
 liable to this error. He too often assumes that the 
 forms of excellence he himself had attained or appre- 
 ciated are the standards of all good writing. For' 
 example, he pronounces the essential and preemi- 
 nent virtue of style to consist in the vital connection 
 of successive sentences, not merely the mechanical 
 linkings of grammar and rhetoric, but the way in 
 which each sentence seems to beget the next, so that 
 the thought seems growing before you as you read. 
 To use his own pet word — which be borrowed 
 from Coleridge — a good style is before all things 
 "sequacious." He thinks Lamb's writing lacks 
 this virtue ; he criticises Johnson for the want of it ; 
 while he finds it the secret of Burke's undoubted 
 mastery. Well, this is certainly a merit of good 
 writing ; and it is just the merit especially necessary 
 and especially difficult with a habit of thought like 
 De Quincey's. For to render the nice distinctions 
 150 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 of his analysis, the subtle blendings of his feeling, 
 the vague shapes of his fancy, and at the same time 
 to follow the devious course of his reflection, to call 
 back the digressions that dart out constantly to 
 either side of the line of his discussion, to herd the 
 wayward multitude of his thoughts into something 
 like unity and keep them moving in one direction, — 
 all this not only demands a vast vocabulary, but it 
 strains to the utmost the mechanics of rhetorical 
 connection. De Quincey was past-master in all 
 the arts of excursus, parenthesis, transition, what 
 the rhetoricians call " explicit reference." He uses 
 more dashes to the page than any other prose-writer 
 of equal eminence, and yet you never quite get 
 lost in his paragraph. He was pardonably proud 
 of having attained this particular virtue of style 
 in such high degree; but he forgot that an author 
 of different mental habit might have no need for it, 
 and that most delightful English may be written 
 which is not at all "sequacious." And what was 
 worse, his insistence upon this virtue blinded him 
 to the importance of some others. He blamed 
 Johnson for always looking backward upon his 
 thought, for framing his sentences mentally one by 
 one before he uttered them. But we may blame 
 De Quincey for an opposite and perhaps a worse 
 fault; his thought does grow under his handling, 
 but we never know whereunto it will grow. He 
 
 I 5 I 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 doesn't know himself. He has no foresight of the 
 end from the beginning. The result is that his 
 writing is often quite formless. His essay is seldom 
 a clear-cut, well-shaped thing. There is no outline 
 in his work, and hence no symmetry. 
 
 The authors he himself most admired and imi- 
 tated are early seventeenth-century prose men, 
 especially Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne. 
 He has their volume, their elaborate stateliness of 
 movement. Sometimes he reproduces, consciously 
 or unconsciously, the very imagery and rhythm of 
 some great passage in his models. Every one who 
 has read them will remember the solemn words 
 with which Walter Raleigh closes his History of 
 the World : — 
 
 "O eloquent, just, and mighty Death! Whom 
 none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what 
 none hath dared, thou hast done ; and whom all the 
 world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the 
 world and despised; thou hast drawn together all 
 the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, 
 and ambition of man, and covered it all over with 
 these two narrow words, 'Hie Jacet'!" 
 
 It is impossible to doubt that De Quincey had 
 these magnificent lines in memory when he wove 
 that famous purple patch which closes one section 
 of the Confessions : — 
 
 152 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 " O just, subtle, and all-conquering opium ! that 
 to the hearts of rich and poor alike, for the 
 wounds that will never heal, and for the pangs 
 of grief that tempt the spirit to rebel, bringest 
 an assuaging balm; eloquent opium! that with 
 thy potent rhetoric stealest away the purposes 
 of wrath, pleadest effectually for relenting pity, 
 and through one night's heavenly sleep callest 
 back to the guilty man the visions of his infancy 
 and hands washed pure from blood; O just and 
 righteous opium! that to the chancery of dreams 
 summonest, for the triumphs of despairing innocence, 
 false witnesses, and confoundest perjury, and dost 
 reverse the sentences of unrighteous judges ; — thou 
 buildest upon the bosom of darkness, out of the 
 fantastic imagery of the brain, cities and temples, 
 beyond the art of Phidias and Praxiteles, beyond 
 the splendors of Babylon and Hekatompylos ; and 
 'from the anarchy of dreaming sleep,' callest into 
 sunny light the faces of long-buried beauties, and 
 the blessed household countenances, cleansed from 
 the ' dishonors of the grave.' Thou only givest these 
 gifts to man; and thou hast the keys of Paradise, 
 O just, subtle, and mighty opium!" 
 
 This is De Quincey's best manner; every epithet 
 justly chosen, disclosing sudden glimpses of vast, 
 vague imagery, filled with a lofty melancholy, and 
 
 J 53 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 moving with a slow and solemn stepping rhythm. 
 And everybody knows that there are near a score of 
 such passages in De Quincey's pages. If they are 
 inferior to the best things in Taylor and Browne, — 
 and they are, — it is only because De Quincey is 
 just a little grandiose. It is art, not nature. He is 
 building the lofty line; whereas the rhetoric of 
 Taylor or Browne is natural, inevitable — they can 
 no other. And here again De Quincey falls into the 
 error of measuring all literature by the quality he 
 most admires. He pronounces this lofty, ornate 
 manner the supreme, distinctive rhetorical excellence. 
 Rhetoric, he says, is "the art of aggrandizing and 
 bringing out into strong relief, by means of various 
 and striking thoughts, some aspect of truth which 
 of itself is supported by no spontaneous feelings, 
 and therefore rests upon artificial aids." Such a 
 definition makes of rhetoric an artifice rather than 
 an art, a means of giving extrinsic interest to truth 
 rather than of disclosing its inherent power and 
 beauty. It describes pretty accurately much of 
 De Quincey's writing, but it does not apply with 
 any precision even to the elaborate manner of Taylor 
 and Browne, and still less is it a good definition of 
 rhetoric in general. And if it is said that De Quincey 
 is here using the term " rhetoric " in a technical sense, 
 as denoting a special form of literary effect, it must 
 still be urged that some such definition is assumed 
 
 i54 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 in his critical verdicts upon all sorts of writing. He 
 had no feeling for the charm or the strength of 
 simplicity. He complains of Lamb that "the 
 gyrations within which his sentiment wheels are the 
 briefest possible," and that he "sinks away from 
 openings suddenly offering themselves to flights of 
 pathos or solemnity"; forgetting that he, Thomas 
 De Quincey, might well have afforded to pay a 
 king's ransom if he could have written a single page 
 of such English as Lamb's Dream Children. His 
 remarks upon the style of Swift are absurd, assuming 
 as they do that the only form of English to be ad- 
 mired is that of the Opium-Eater. Any honest 
 skipper, he says, can write like Gulliver, but suppos- 
 ing Swift had been set to write a pendant to Raleigh's 
 great apostrophe to Death — quoted above — 
 "what sort of a ridiculous figure," cries he, "would 
 your poor, bald Jonathan have cut?" Yes, and 
 suppose, as Leslie Stephen suggests, Thomas De 
 Quincey had been set to write another Drapier's 
 Letter? If any man thinks himself able to write 
 as Jonathan Swift wrote, he may very easily convince 
 himself of his error by trying it. Swift meant busi- 
 ness. He wasn't writing in an opium revery. His 
 style is hard as nails. It was written for shop- 
 keepers; but it frightened kings and ministers, and 
 it will be found good stuff after most of De Quincey's 
 purple patches have gone to the rag-bag of oblivion. 
 
 155 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 These remarks may suggest De Quincey's limi- 
 tations as a critic. He has been much admired in 
 that capacity. His editor and biographer, Mr. 
 Masson, pronounces him facile princeps among the 
 critics of his generation; but this is extravagant, 
 even for. an admirer. He certainly gives us many 
 penetrating glimpses into the philosophy of criticism, 
 but in the ability to apply critical principles to the 
 interpretation or estimate of particular works, in 
 sanity of judgment and breadth of appreciation, 
 he is by no means the equal, I should hold, of 
 Coleridge, Hazlitt, or Lamb. Merely as a reviewer, 
 Jeffrey is the better man. For that kind of work 
 De Quincey had no liking. He preferred to study 
 the man rather than the book. In fact, he says in 
 the opening passage of his essay on Wordsworth's 
 poetry, 1845, that up to that time he had "never 
 attempted an examination of any man's writings." 
 He made no critical estimate of any of the great 
 poets contemporary with himself. Even of the 
 writers he admired most, the early seventeenth-cen- 
 tury men, he has left no careful critical study. 
 Milton, one thinks, is the English poet he might 
 have discussed with most sympathy and illumina- 
 tion; but he has no criticism on Milton's work 
 except two or three fragments of little value. In 
 his professed critical papers, as in the biographical, 
 he is on the hunt for something recondite, and loses 
 
 156 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 no opportunity to start a train of ingenious conjec- 
 ture. He overreaches himself by his own subtlety, 
 and often fails in the first requisite of the critic, a 
 sympathetic perception of the central quality of his 
 author. Acute and suggestive, he is nevertheless 
 always liable to sacrifice his grasp of a work as a 
 whole to the discussion of some finicky detail. And 
 occasionally his verdicts are simply perverse or 
 freakish ; the essay on Pope is full of such. 
 
 Moreover, the range of his critical appreciation 
 was sharply limited. He was as insular as the most 
 hide-bound Briton. The manners of all the Latin 
 races, he says, are based on a want of principle and 
 a want of moral sensibility. He never would admit 
 that anything good came out of France. In speak- 
 ing of the relations of French and English literature 
 he declares that "no section whatever of French 
 literature has ever availed to influence in the slight- 
 est degree or to modify our own"; a statement that 
 betrays either such ignorance or such obstinate 
 prejudice as to discredit whatever he has to say of 
 our eighteenth-century writers. Nor is it race 
 prejudice only that narrows his vision. As a critic 
 of poetry, he was deficient in the sense of form, and, 
 in spite of the pretensions of his own prose-poetry, 
 he was deficient in the sense of rhythm. The music 
 of verse appealed to him only when it was organ- 
 like, Miltonic. In truth, the only two elements 
 
 J 57 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 in literature he ever really cared much for were the 
 mysterious or recondite, and the sublime; and he 
 liked best that writing in which the two were some- 
 how combined. Those masterpieces of literature 
 which depict broad, simple action from obvious 
 motives had no interest for him. He lived half his 
 life in Edinburgh; but I find no positive evidence 
 that he ever read his Walter Scott. Even the sub- 
 lime he did not appreciate unless there were some- 
 thing grandiose or spectacular in it, something 
 more properly to be called magnificent. Milton 
 he thought sublime; Homer, not at all. I doubt 
 whether he thought the first verse of the first chapter 
 of Genesis sublime ; I can imagine what a rhetorical 
 bravura he would have written upon it. In short, 
 he narrowed greatly the range of his criticism by 
 renouncing at once half the material out of which 
 the best literature must be wrought — the lucid, 
 obvious truths of life; and then by holding per- 
 sistently to a conception of rhetoric which tended 
 to confound art with artifice. 
 
 But it is in the second of the three groups into 
 which all De Quincey's writing may be divided 
 that we shall find the work that he himself most 
 prized, and that is probably most interesting to 
 readers of to-day. Here we may place all those 
 passages that are the immediate product of his 
 
 158 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 imagination, — the dreams and visions of the 
 Confessions and the Suspiria de Profundis ; the 
 records of his childhood in which memory passes 
 so insensibly into revery that he cannot tell what 
 was fact and what was dream ; narratives like those 
 of the English Mail Coach, in which the story is 
 enveloped in an atmosphere half feeling and half 
 fancy; and those Dream Echoes in which some 
 of the intenser moments of experience repeated 
 themselves in image and music. This visionary 
 gift was not due chiefly to his opium. " Habitually 
 to dream magnificently," he says, "a man must have 
 a constitutional determination to revery." That is 
 what De Quincey always had. He was a dreamer 
 by nature. His imagination loved to luxuriate in 
 vast, dim-lighted spaces, in vague and awesome 
 revery. He himself accounted this faculty as one 
 of our most precious endowments, and lamented 
 its inevitable decline under the pressure and hurry of 
 our material age. 
 
 "Let no man think this a trifle. The machinery 
 for dreaming planted in the human brain was not 
 planted for nothing. That faculty, in alliance with 
 the mystery of darkness, is the one great tube through 
 which man communicates with the shadowy. And 
 the dreaming organ, in connection with the heart, 
 the eye, the ear, composes the magnificent apparatus 
 
 iS9 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 which forces the infinite into the chambers of a 
 human brain, and throws dark reflections from 
 eternities below all life upon the mirrors of that 
 mysterious camera obscura — the sleeping mind." 
 
 The Confessions, he averred, were written origi- 
 nally with a view to revealing the power of 
 dreaming that is latent in every man; and this 
 mood of lofty revery recurs frequently throughout 
 all his later writing. The most effective passages 
 of this sort are those most spontaneous, when the 
 imagination in solemn forms, touched with some 
 vague melancholy, rises directly out of some deep 
 or intense emotion; like that hollow Memnonian 
 sound heard at the bedside of his dead sister, or 
 those cloudy visions of palm trees and vanishing 
 faces in the far vault of heaven that haunted him 
 after his sister had gone. The Dream Echoes and 
 parts of the Suspiria are more artificial and hence 
 less impressive. One has a suspicion that De 
 Quincey is forcing his mood a little — at least 
 inviting it. 
 
 It is these more studied passages that best exem- 
 plify the peculiar literary form in which, by striking 
 imagery and especially by a certain imposing rhythm, 
 De Quincey attempted to secure the effects of poetry 
 without the use of metre. It is to be doubted, how- 
 ever, whether the attempt is altogether successful, 
 
 1 60 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 much as De Quincey prided himself upon it. Metre 
 is not an arbitrary accompaniment of poetry, a 
 separable ornament; it is the poet's natural voice. 
 The attempt, therefore, to dispense with it, while 
 retaining the imagery and heightened emotion of 
 poetry, inevitably produces a sense of artificiality. 
 You get a kind of bastard product, neither prose nor 
 verse and without the charm of either one. There 
 is, moreover, a special reason why such passages 
 as these should be in verse. It seems to be only the 
 musical element in speech that can lay the question- 
 ing intellect asleep and take us into the mood of 
 dream. Surprise — which is a sudden shock to 
 reason — is never known in dreamland. We are 
 terrified there, or delighted to the verge of ecstasy; 
 but nothing seems improbable to us until after we 
 have waked. It is in such a temper, if I mistake 
 not, that we read Shakespeare's Midsummer-Night 1 s 
 Dream or Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. And the 
 effect in either case would be impossible without 
 the exquisite music of the verse which enchants us 
 and deludes. But De Quincey's Dream Echoes 
 hardly produce any such sense of illusion. They 
 lay no spell upon our reason. They are evidently 
 composed. De Quincey says, "Go to, I will now 
 dream dreams. " We see how he does it; he is 
 making a re very. 
 
 From such strictures one passage must be excepted, 
 m 161 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 — and it is a great exception, — the vision of the 
 "Three Ladies of Sorrow." Cut away the intro- 
 ductory paragraphs about Levana and the needless 
 paragraph of personal application at the end, cut 
 away the rubbishy footnotes, and you leave these 
 three figures standing sad and stately in our imagina- 
 tion. This is not a dream begotten of opium upon 
 idle fancy; here the imagination of De Quincey 
 has wrought upon the deepest experiences of universal 
 humanity. These three — Mater Lachrymarum, 
 Mater Suspiriorum, Mater Tenebrarum — they 
 may not yet have crossed our path, we may not yet 
 have heard their voice; but some glimpse as from 
 a distance, some shadow of their awful forms, every 
 son of man has known or some day shall know. 
 As has been truly said, they are an addition to the 
 mythology of the human race, as solemn as the 
 Fates or the Furies. But nowhere else has De 
 Quincey done anything quite like this. 
 
 But after all, perhaps there is nothing in the whole 
 body of De Quincey's work more valuable than 
 his rambling papers of personal reminiscence; and 
 there is pretty certainly nothing more diverting. It 
 is to them we must look for a series of intimate 
 portraits of some of his most important contempo- 
 raries, in their habit as they lived. The shy and 
 retiring little man loved to study his friends in the 
 homely circumstance of their daily life, divested of 
 162 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 their robes of state or of song. He had an almost 
 feminine nicety of observation that nothing escaped, 
 and a quick eye for those slight peculiarities of 
 appearance and manner in which character uncon- 
 sciously reveals itself. Without his Recollections our 
 picture of the group of poets in the Lake District 
 would lose almost all its vivid details. It is gossip, 
 to be sure, but the gossip of a scholar and a thinker, 
 who sees the significance of what to others would 
 seem trifles. Doubtless the naive frankness with 
 which he put his gossip into print was sometimes 
 sufficiently annoying to the subjects of it. For he 
 could now and then descend to mere tittle-tattle, 
 flavored with a little half-conscious personal malice. 
 Like Mr. Boswell, De Quincey would probably 
 have declared himself unwilling to " mitigate the 
 asperity of his portraits" to please anybody; yet 
 I suspect it was not solely to his pure love of truth 
 that we owe the information that Mr. Wordsworth 
 had bad legs and drooping shoulders; that there 
 was a curious variation in the brilliancy of his eyes, 
 due probably to the condition of his stomach; that 
 he was constitutionally so rigid of nature that people 
 wondered how he could ever have condescended to 
 the humiliations of courtship; that in Mrs. Words- 
 worth's eyes — those " stars of twilight fair" — there 
 was considerable obliquity of vision, which ought to 
 have been repulsive and yet was not ; that Dorothy 
 
 163 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 Wordsworth had refused several offers of marriage, 
 one, to his personal knowledge, from Hazlitt (which 
 probably was not the fact) — and much other matter 
 of this sort, perhaps beneath the dignity of full- 
 dress biography. It is likely, however, that such 
 details, though doubtless censured by our superior 
 sense of propriety, add to our interest in De Quincey's 
 story. Of course it was wrong of him; but our 
 human curiosity often enjoys what our more rigid 
 judgment may not approve. And what a thoroughly 
 human, lifelike picture it is ! There was a Words- 
 worth the Stamp Distributor as well as a Wordsworth 
 the Poet; and I, for one, am glad to know both. 
 As to Dorothy Wordsworth, the most genuinely 
 poetic character in the group, De Quincey's account 
 of her is worth all the rest that has been written of 
 her. And Coleridge, to whom he was never quite 
 so just, Southey, Wilson, Charles Lloyd, the Simpsons, 
 and the rest, they are all real and living in his gar- 
 rulous page. 
 
 One closes an essay on De Quincey with some mis- 
 givings as to its justice. But a critic may plead, in 
 excuse for his imperfect appreciation, that there 
 are few writers of whom a just estimate is so diffi- 
 cult. Few have put so much thinking into their 
 work to so little purpose. He is certainly very full 
 of matter. What he might have accomplished if the 
 subtle spirit of opium that colored his dreams had 
 
 164 
 
THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 not robbed him of the power of systematic and fruit- 
 ful thinking, it is impossible to say. As it was, he 
 had no message to deliver; he did not influence in 
 any wise the thought of his age ; he left no work in 
 which vital truth takes on finished shape, or any of 
 the great forces of life are presented in the forms of 
 a healthy imagination. I should hold, therefore, 
 that, while he was a most curious personality and 
 a very remarkable writer, he can hardly rank with 
 such masters of modern prose as Thomas Carlyle 
 and John Ruskin. 
 
 165" 
 
JOHN WILSON 
 
 I 
 
 De Quincey, in his delightful recollections of 
 the English lakes, relates that one night, about 
 three hours past midnight, a young man, as yet 
 pretty nearly a stranger to the Lake Country, — but 
 I suppose it was the Opium-Eater himself, mooning 
 about after this custom, — had strolled up to White 
 Moss Common above Grasmere Lake, when he was 
 startled by a wild bull that came puffing and labor- 
 ing up the mountain road. A moment later there 
 appeared in chase three horsemen, and the bull 
 turned and plunged down to the marshy ground at 
 the head of the lake, but soon dislodged thence, 
 came forging up the hill again. The leading horse- 
 man, a towering figure crowned by a flood of yellow 
 hair, and grasping a wooden spear fourteen feet long, 
 now shouted, "Turn that villain, turn that villain, 
 or he will take to Cumberland!" De Quincey 
 turned the bull, — or says he did ; I always have had 
 my doubts about that, — and the cavalcade rushed 
 past in the dim light of the morning, leaving him 
 1 66 
 
JOHN WILSON 
 
 wondering whether they were not creatures of 
 vision and dream. 
 
 This, if .1 am right in thinking the "young man" 
 of the story to be De Quincey himself, was his first 
 meeting with John Wilson. It was a very char- 
 acteristic one; John Wilson was usually on some 
 high horse, and riding at a reckless pace. Only 
 about a year before, in 1807, twenty-two years of age 
 and just out of the University, he had come to live 
 at Elleray on Lake Windermere. He had made a 
 record for brilliant though desultory scholarship 
 in Oxford, had inherited from his father a handsome 
 fortune, had more health and high spirits than he 
 knew what to do with, and so now, with no very 
 definite purpose or career in mind, he selected one of 
 the loveliest spots in England and sat himself down to 
 enjoy the goods of life. Few men ever had a keener 
 relish for all the healthy pleasures of a rational 
 animal. A goodly man to look upon. Standing 
 full six feet, broad-chested, sinewy; shaking back 
 from his massive forehead his dishevelled mane of 
 tawny hair; a resonant voice and a resistless vigor 
 in his movements, — he seemed a big, good-natured 
 Goth. At the University he was remembered for 
 his prowess and a certain genial impudence rather 
 than for any more distinctively academic attainments. 
 He had measured twenty-three feet in a running 
 jump; after a dinner in London one night he had 
 
 167 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 covered the fifty-nine miles back to the college in 
 nine hours ; he had knocked out the toughest pugi- 
 list in Oxford. Here in his life at Elleray as a 
 country gentleman, he prided himself on keeping all 
 his manly accomplishments well in practice. "A 
 fine, gay, girt-hearted fellow," said one of his rustic 
 neighbors, "as Strang as a lion, and as lish as a 
 trout, an' he had sic antics as never man had." 
 
 But he was a very soft-hearted giant, whose exu- 
 berant sentiment was always running over into 
 sentimentality. From his earliest manhood his 
 emotions were effusive rather than steady, and his 
 actions were largely decided by impulse. During 
 his first college year he had formed an attachment 
 for a certain Margaret, which seems to have been 
 genuinely impassioned and lasted some seven years. 
 But his mother, for some unexplained reason, was 
 unalterably opposed to their union; and Wilson, 
 like Gibbon, sighed as a lover and obeyed as a son. 
 Which would seem to indicate, either that the 
 mother had an unusually strong will, or the son an 
 unusually weak one; it probably indicates both. 
 Wilson certainly sighed a good deal ; memory of his 
 early passion frequently gives a sentimental tinge to 
 his later writing — especially in the paper entitled 
 Streams. But not long after taking up residence at 
 Elleray, he met a high-spirited girl, the belle of the 
 Lake District, of a temperament well fitted to 
 1 68 
 
JOHN WILSON 
 
 sympathize with his own. John Wilson and Jane 
 Penny were married in 1811, and their domestic 
 life for twenty-five years exhibits all that is best in 
 Wilson's character. 
 
 These early years at the lakes, however, gave 
 little promise of public work of any sort. He had 
 cherished since his college days some literary aspira- 
 tions, and chose his residence at Elleray partly on 
 account of the neighborhood of Wordsworth, 
 Southey, and Coleridge. The year after his marriage 
 he published a thin volume of dilute, sentimental 
 verse, which most readers to-day will pronounce 
 hardly worth while. But the life at Elleray was too 
 full and satisfying to admit any strenuous ambitions ; 
 it was only a lucky stroke of misfortune that threw 
 him upon his own resources and forced him to show 
 what stuff there was in him. In 181 5, through the 
 mismanagement or treachery of a friend, he lost 
 practically the whole of his fortune. The blow, 
 however, was not crushing; his mother, whose for- 
 tune was not impaired, was living in her own house 
 in Edinburgh, and invited her son with his family 
 to take up residence with her. Wilson accepted 
 the invitation, and the same year was called to the 
 bar. His legal experience was neither very extended 
 nor very remunerative; but his year and a half of 
 "walking the Parliament House" served to bring 
 him into acquaintance with a little group of young 
 
 169 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 Edinburgh men, one of whom was that brilliant 
 and audacious genius soon to be associated with him 
 in the decisive work of his life, John Gibson Lock- 
 hart. 
 
 Another of Wilson's new acquaintances was young 
 William Blackwood, whose handsome new shop in 
 Princess Street was just then a favorite resort of 
 bookish people. Mr. Blackwood was a man of 
 energy and ideas. He had succeeded in building 
 up a prosperous business as a bookseller, and he 
 was Edinburgh agent for the great Mr. John Murray 
 of London; but his ventures as a publisher thus 
 far had not been so successful. His rival, Constable, 
 had captured the two most famous publications 
 of the early century, the Edinburgh Review and the 
 Waverley Novels. Nothing daunted, however, Black- 
 wood risked a new venture. He determined to have 
 a periodical of his own, Tory in politics to match the 
 Whig Edinburgh. He wisely decided not to com- 
 pete with the Edinburgh in its own field, but to 
 make his periodical a magazine rather than a re- 
 view, inviting the ablest and most brilliant contrib- 
 utors, but admitting a wider variety of composition 
 and more vivacity of treatment than would be appro- 
 priate in the staider pages of a review. Unfortu- 
 nately, he at first accepted as editors two men quite 
 incompetent to realize his ideal, who, much to his 
 vexation, termed his ambitious magazine " our 
 
 170 
 
JOHN WILSON 
 
 humble miscellany," and filled up its early numbers 
 with dull rubbish. Mr. Blackwood stood it for 
 six months, when he dismissed the incapables, took 
 the magazine into his own hands, and looked about 
 for some better editors. The two young fellows, 
 Wilson and Lockhart, had been in his shop almost 
 daily for a year, and he had observed their rampant 
 Toryism, their brilliant talk, their wide acquaintance 
 with books and men. He determined to secure 
 their services for his enterprise, and while retaining 
 general supervision of the magazine himself, to 
 intrust to them all details of its editorial conduct. 
 
 In October, 1817, appeared the first number under 
 the new management, the seventh of the series, but 
 the first real Blackwood's Magazine. It came upon 
 the decorum of Edinburgh like a thunderclap out of 
 a clear sky. The public, that for six months had 
 found in Mr. Blackwood's innocent periodical little 
 more exciting than the price of pigs and poultry, 
 was surprised to see this harmless thing changed into 
 the most audacious of journals, that scattered per- 
 sonalities right and left and had no fear of dignities. 
 Edinburgh society was especially scandalized by 
 the last article in the number. Few people nowa- 
 days know or care anything about this once famous 
 "Chaldee Manuscript"; but seldom has any fugi- 
 tive magazine article created such a commotion. It 
 was a satirical account of Blackwood's quarrel with 
 
 171 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 his first editors and of his rivalry with Constable 
 and the Edinburgh; and it introduces under a thin 
 disguise not only Blackwood and his editors, old and 
 new, but Constable, Jeffrey, Walter Scott, and a 
 number of other prominent persons in the little 
 world of Edinburgh society. It is doubtless a 
 clever skit, but its humor — which is said to have 
 convulsed Scott with laughter — will hardly prove 
 irresistible to the modern reader. Its allusions are 
 purely local, and could not have been understood 
 outside the little circle of Edinburgh. The paper is 
 a curious proof at once of the purely provincial 
 character of Edinburgh literary society, and of the 
 spirit of local mischief, of a pure lark, rather than of 
 serious literary endeavor, with which these young 
 fellows entered upon the new enterprise of edit- 
 ing a magazine. The reader of to-day, moreover, 
 will be puzzled to know why it should have ruffled 
 the proprieties so much. Its satirical use of Scrip- 
 ture phrase probably displeased some good folk, 
 and it certainly treated the big-wigs of Edinburgh 
 with considerable levity; but there is nothing really 
 profane in it, nor are its personalities of a sort, one 
 thinks, to give serious offence. But in deference to 
 public sentiment it was withdrawn, — after it had 
 sold off the first edition of the magazine, — and is 
 not now to be found in most sets of Blackwood. 
 In fact, there were much worse things than the 
 
 172 
 
JOHN WILSON 
 
 " Chaldee Manuscript " in this first number of Black- 
 wood. The opening paper is a review of Coleridge's 
 Biographia Literaria, probably written by Wilson. 
 It has the boisterous manner and reckless epithet 
 always too characteristic of his critical writing. 
 The paper misses altogether the wealth of critical 
 principle contained in this certainly rather form- 
 less book, and is throughout only a vulgar, derisive 
 attack upon Coleridge himself. The author of the 
 Ancient Mariner, so the critic avers, has written 
 nothing worthy of remembrance save a few wild 
 and fanciful ballads, yet he is "so puffed up with a 
 miserable arrogance" that he seems to consider the 
 mighty universe itself "nothing better than a mirror 
 in which, with a grinning and Miotic self-compla- 
 cency, he may contemplate the physiognomy of 
 Samuel Taylor Coleridge." There are twenty 
 pages of such stuff as this, written, as the critic avers 
 with a pious smirk, not in the cause of literature 
 merely, but in the cause of morality and religion, 
 lest Mr. Coleridge should be held up as a model to 
 the coming generation. Later on in the same num- 
 ber is the first of that notorious series of articles 
 on "The Cockney School of Poets," the author- 
 ship of which has never been definitely determined, 
 but which were probably written in part by Wilson, 
 in part by Lockhart, and in part, also, by that swash- 
 buckling Irishman, William Maginn. The worst 
 
 *73 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 of them, the infamous paper on Keats, was published 
 in August of the next year; but they are all filled 
 with violent personalities, and as literary criticism 
 are practically worthless. 
 
 The utmost that can be said for much of the 
 writing in the early volumes of Blackwood is that it 
 was prompted by a certain boyish hilarity rather 
 than by any real malignity. Determined above all 
 things that their magazine should not be dull, the 
 two young editors laid about them recklessly, with 
 very little regard for precision or propriety. They 
 were always ready for a fight or a frolic, and liked 
 best some combination of the two. Mr. Blackwood, 
 repeatedly threatened by suits for libel, tried now and 
 then to put some check upon his riotous team; but 
 he was gratified to see his magazine making a stir 
 in the world, and usually gave them free rein. For 
 some eight years the practical conduct of the maga- 
 zine was in their hands. In 1822 they began that 
 famous series of papers in dialogue, the Nodes 
 AmbrosiatUB, which contains Wilson's best work. It is 
 not certain which of the two men is to be credited 
 with the original conception; they seem to have 
 contributed about equally to the earlier numbers, 
 sometimes writing together and sometimes separately. 
 Some assistance, though probably not much, was 
 given by James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, and 
 Maginn — who figuresas O'Doherty — seems to have 
 
 i74 
 
JOHN WILSON 
 
 had some part in a few of the more hilarious papers. 
 But from first to last the real author of the Nodes 
 was Wilson. Lockhart was never a jovial or even 
 a genial man ; there was too much gall in his humor 
 — "the scorpion that stings the faces of men," as 
 he was well characterized in the "Chaldee Manu- 
 script"; but Wilson's exuberant spirits, his effusive 
 comradeship, his profuse sentimental rhetoric, all 
 chimed exactly with the temper of the Nodes. After 
 1820, Lockhart's intimate relations with Scott — 
 whose daughter he had married — drew him some- 
 what away from the magazine; and in 1825 he went 
 to London to assume editorial control of the Quar- 
 terly Review, and left the conduct of Blackwood's 
 entirely to Wilson. For the next ten years it was 
 Wilson's magazine. He decided what contributors 
 should be admitted, and he put in whatever of his 
 own he wished. His biographer gives a list of two 
 hundred and thirty-nine articles written by him in 
 these ten years, aggregating about four thousand 
 pages. 
 
 With all his editorial work Wilson had given 
 much time, since 1820, to the duties of another 
 position, that, one thinks, should have called for 
 more dignity than the young fellows in Mr. Black- 
 wood's editorial rooms were accustomed to wear. 
 In that year he offered himself as a candidate for the 
 professorship of moral philosophy in Edinburgh 
 
 175 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 University. The chair had been occupied by such 
 eminent Scottish philosophers as Dugald Stewart and 
 Thomas Brown. Wilson's rival in the candidacy 
 was Sir William Hamilton, who had almost every 
 qualification for the place, while Wilson, to say the 
 truth, had almost none. He was, moreover, known 
 to be the leading spirit in the conduct of the periodical 
 that for nearly three years had scandalized grave 
 Edinburgh folk by its boisterousness and its auda- 
 cious personalities. But the election was a partisan 
 affair, and Wilson won, as a Tory — with "influ- 
 ence." He occupied the chair until 1852, two 
 years before his death. He was an entertaining, some- 
 times an eloquent, lecturer, and the charm of his 
 personality made him popular in the class room, as 
 everywhere else; but it cannot be said that, either 
 by speculation or research, he ever much widened the 
 bounds of knowledge in his department. His first 
 interest was always in literature; and although he 
 lectured for more than thirty years, he never cared 
 enough for his lectures to print anything from them, 
 save some few papers in the Blackwood, most of these 
 not of sufficient importance to be included in the 
 collected edition of his works. 
 
 The income from his professorship, together with 
 
 the liberal payments from Mr. Blackwood, soon 
 
 placed him beyond financial anxiety. His estate 
 
 at Elleray he had never sold, and after 1823 he was 
 
 176 
 
JOHN WILSON 
 
 able to spend his summers there regularly, with his 
 family about him. He genuinely loved the country; 
 only twice in the last thirty years of his life did he go 
 up to London. It is at Elleray that one likes best 
 to picture him, in his later as well as in his earlier 
 years — under the great sycamore that still spreads 
 its venerable arms over the little cottage that had been 
 his first and best-loved home there, watching his 
 game-cocks and rollicking with his dogs, rowing on 
 the lake or racing up the hill behind it with a crowd 
 of shouting children to watch the long panorama 
 of cloud and mountain from Orrest Head ; striding 
 with giant pace over the road to Rydal to look in upon 
 Wordsworth or upon that best-beloved of all the 
 Lakers, little Hartley Coleridge, at the Nab ; joining 
 with the lusty rustics in the annual Grasmere sports, 
 and proving himself still in the wrestling "a verra 
 hard un to lick " ; keeping the gamesome spirits of 
 youth quite down to the verge of age. He liked all 
 sorts and conditions of active men, and used to say 
 he thanked God he had never lost his taste for bad 
 company. The homely folk of the Lake Country, 
 who only knew Wordsworth as an odd party who 
 made verses, knew John Wilson as a "gert, good 
 feller." His memory is still green in all the Winder- 
 mere region. 
 
 The current of this joyous life flowed unbroken 
 till his wife died suddenly in 1837. He was never 
 n 177 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 the same man after that. His connection with the 
 magazine had not been so close since the death of 
 the elder Blackwood, in 1835, and his contributions, 
 though they continued till the very last year of his 
 life, now became much less frequent. Something 
 of the pathos of age was coming over him. Elleray 
 he found too lonely for summer residence. His 
 children married, and though still living near 
 him, went out of his Edinburgh home. He was 
 still the big, leonine man, but his temper was mel- 
 lowed very much. It is true he would never quite 
 give up his pet aversions; he could write of Keats 
 with unrepentant vulgarity years after Keats had 
 gone, and could jeer at Hazlitt in the old bitter 
 fashion. Yet the widening of the circle of his 
 personal acquaintance to include many of his old ad- 
 versaries, and the certainty that the measures he had 
 opposed were not working disaster to the state, com- 
 bined with the natural effect of age and sorrows to 
 soften the asperity of his opinions and make him 
 more tolerant and gentle. His one immortal sen- 
 tence is characteristic of those latest years: "The 
 animosities are mortal, but the humanities live for- 
 ever." His health, which he had doubtless drawn 
 on rather heavily, hardly fulfilled the extravagant 
 promise of his youth. In 1852 he was forced by 
 growing weakness to resign his chair, and two years 
 later he died, cheerful, if not buoyant, to the last. 
 
 178 
 
JOHN WILSON 
 
 It was shortly before his death that he met, after 
 long absence, his old associate Lockhart, now, 
 like himself, pathetically broken by sorrows and 
 bereavement, and, unlike Wilson, embittered and 
 cynical, " a weary old man," as he said, "fit now for 
 nothing but to shut myself up and be sulky." Four 
 months later he followed his friend. Little, withered 
 Mr. De Quincey, who for half a century had kept 
 his system in a pickle of laudanum, though born in 
 the same year as Wilson, outlived him five years, 
 dying at the riper age of seventy-four. 
 
 II 
 
 If we would estimate the literary work of Wilson, 
 we must credit him, first of all, with having found 
 out how to edit a magazine. For the instant success 
 of Blackwood? s , as well as its continued prosperity 
 for more than twenty years, was due more largely 
 to Wilson than to Lockhart. There is doubtless 
 more finish in Lockhart's work; his keen and caustic 
 satire is cruelly effective, and he was, I think, an 
 abler critic than Wilson. But Wilson had a more 
 intimate sympathy with his readers, a quicker sense 
 of what would interest or amuse them at the moment ; 
 and above all he had an exuberant vitality, an 
 immense volume of good spirits that seemed to per- 
 vade the magazine. He may almost be said to have 
 
 179 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 introduced a new style into English periodical 
 writing; he shocked the proprieties hardly more by 
 his matter than by his manner. His style is collo- 
 quial to the last degree; it is the man himself. The 
 personal note is dominant, to be sure, in all the essay- 
 ists of the period; but the others, Hazlitt, Lamb, 
 De Quincey, as we have seen, recognized literary 
 standards, admired and imitated certain literary 
 models. Wilson, on the other hand, simply let 
 himself go. He is sentimental, or abusive, or hilari- 
 ous, as the mood takes him; but he is always rhetor- 
 ical, profuse, careless of decorum. Of course in 
 such writing you will not expect nicety of judgment, 
 chasteness or precision of phrase. Wilson writes 
 as the traditional Irishman played the violin, "by 
 main strength." But there is great personal force 
 in such a manner; it is big John Wilson talking, 
 declaiming, jesting, shouting from the page. The 
 unpardonable sin in the columns of a magazine is 
 dulness; and Wilson is never dull. 
 
 As to the permanent literary value of his work, 
 that is another matter. For one thing it was usually 
 done in too much haste to be lasting. Acting on 
 the convenient motto, "Never do to-day what you 
 can put off till to-morrow," he would postpone his 
 writing to the last moment, and then, locking him- 
 self in his study, turn off sheet after sheet, with amaz- 
 ing rapidity, sometimes writing a whole number of 
 1 80 
 
JOHN WILSON 
 
 the Nodes at a sitting. His biographer says he once 
 wrote fifty-six double-column pages of print for 
 Blackwood 1 s in forty-eight hours. But it is art that 
 tells in the long run; extempore writing thrown off 
 at such a dizzy rate could not have received much 
 artistic care. Such a rush of manner, though it may 
 carry you away at the moment, is likely to weary 
 after a little. We crave some repose, some tem- 
 perance of feeling, delicacy of sentiment. The 
 very qualities that gave its buoyancy to this writing 
 at the time are peculiarly liable to evaporate in the 
 course of a century. The effervescent humor has 
 lost its bubble now, and tastes a little flat on the 
 palate. A style so highly exhilarated doesn't keep 
 well. And what is worse, this exaggerated animation 
 suggests something factitious; we suspect it to be 
 got up to order, like the devotional moods some 
 pious people induce by rubbing their hands together. 
 The man, we say, makes too much fuss over expres- 
 sion, and although going at full speed, doesn't seem 
 to get on. Nor is it only his form that suffers; 
 his opinions are often ill-considered, his critical 
 verdicts hasty and sometimes contradictory, his 
 rough-and-ready censure of men and measures rash 
 and indiscriminate. His energy has too little intel- 
 lectual quality; it often seems nothing but the 
 expression of a full and healthy physical life. We 
 shall have to admit that in all respects Wilson was 
 
 181 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 a good deal of a Philistine. I should like to have 
 heard the late Mr. Matthew Arnold express his opinion 
 of him — and I should like to have heard him express 
 his opinion of the late Mr. Matthew Arnold. The 
 amenity, the fine reserve, the urbane superiority, 
 the distrust of enthusiasms, the aversion for the raw 
 and the hasty — all those qualities that went to the 
 making of our great critic would have been shocked 
 by every page that Wilson ever wrote. One can 
 imagine, for example, Arnold's fine contempt for the 
 horse-play of this passage in which Wilson is com- 
 menting on that amazing critical opinion of Jeffrey's 
 — quoted on a previous page — which puts Rogers 
 and Campbell above all their contemporaries : — 
 
 " Two living poets, however, it seems there are who, 
 according to Mr. Jeffrey, are never to be dead ones — 
 two who are unforgettable, and who owe their immor- 
 tality, — to what, think ye ? — their elegance ! That 
 gracilis puer, Samuel Rogers, is one of the dual 
 number. His perfect beauties will never be brought 
 to decay in the eyes of an enamoured world. He is 
 so polished that time can never take the shine out 
 of him ; so classically correct are his charms that to 
 the end of time they will be among the principal 
 Pleasures of Memory. Jacqueline in her immortal 
 loveliness seeming Juno, Minerva, and Venus all 
 in one, will shed in vain ' such tears as angels weep ' 
 182 
 
JOHN WILSON 
 
 over the weeds that have in truth ' no business there ' 
 on the forgotten grave of Childe Harold! Very 
 like a whale ! Thomas Campbell is the other pet- 
 poet — the last of all the flock. Ay — he, we allow, 
 is a star that will know no setting; but of this we 
 can assure the whole world, not excluding Mr. 
 Jeffrey, that were Mr. Campbell's soul deified, and a 
 star in the sky, and told by Apollo, who placed him 
 in the blue region, that Scott and Byron were both 
 buried somewhere between the Devil and the Deep 
 Sea, he, the author of "Lochiel's Warning," would 
 either leap from heaven in disdain, or insist on there 
 being instanter one triple constellation. What to 
 do with his friend Rogers, it might not be easy for 
 Mr. Campbell to imagine or propose at such a criti- 
 cal juncture; but we think it probable that he would 
 hint to Apollo, on the appearance of his Lordship 
 and the Baronet, that the Banker, with a few other 
 pretty poets, might be permitted to scintillate away 
 to all eternity as their — tail!" 
 
 Not unamusing, and very characteristic of Wilson 
 in its contempt for mere elegance; but it hardly 
 has that high seriousness Mr. Arnold used to exact 
 of the critic. 
 
 But the most serious discount from the permanent 
 value of Wilson's work is the lack of any central 
 purpose. The great masters of prose, Burke, Car- 
 lyle, Newman, Ruskin, Arnold, even the novelists 
 
 183 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 as Thackeray and George Eliot, have been very 
 much in earnest over something. You can see in 
 all their work certain dominating ethical ideas which 
 they are bent on imparting or enforcing. Even a 
 Philistine with a message is likely to make the world 
 listen to him. But Wilson, so far as I can discover, 
 had no message. For some thirty years he read 
 lectures on ethics — I judge pretty much the same 
 lectures — to classes in Edinburgh University ; for 
 the rest, he wrote for Blackwood's Magazine. He 
 had to keep the printer's devil in copy, and he took 
 care that what he furnished should not be dull ; but 
 it is vivacity rather than earnestness that his writing 
 shows. As leading editor of a pronounced Tory 
 magazine, he was bound to observe a journalist's 
 consistency; but while we need not question the 
 sincerity of his views, the eagerness of his political 
 writing seems to proceed rather from partisan feeling 
 than from any profound conviction. He loved the 
 stir and warmth of controversy, and with his cock- 
 sure opinions and his command of imaginative epi- 
 thet, controversy was certain to be both spirited and 
 picturesque ; but he cannot be called the consistent 
 and resolute advocate of any cause. In his mis- 
 cellaneous, discursive papers, like the Nodes, he 
 touches a wide variety of topics without special 
 personal interest in any, or seeming to feel a call to 
 convince or persuade us of anything. There is 
 
 184 
 
JOHN WILSON 
 
 no real urgency in the man. Even in his critical 
 verdicts it is difficult to trace any consistent prin- 
 ciples. As a result, his taste was never sure. In his 
 own writing he never quite perceived the difference 
 between the humorous and the hilarious, between 
 comedy and buffoonery, between pathos and bathos. 
 He records his impressions of men and books in 
 lively, often in very emphatic, language; but they 
 are capricious and sometimes conflicting. When 
 in his moods he is liable to damn his most favorite 
 idol. If there were two authors whom he intelli- 
 gently and consistently admired, they were William 
 Wordsworth and Walter Scott. Yet one day, writ- 
 ing for the Nodes, in a freakish mood, 1 not content 
 with calling a certain Mr. Martin "a jackass," — 
 which perhaps he was, — he went on to relieve his 
 gall yet further by remarking that Wordsworth often 
 wrote like an idiot, and never more so than in his 
 great sonnet on Milton; that he was becoming less 
 known every day; that he ludicrously overrated 
 himself; that he had thrown no light on man's 
 estate; that Crabbe stood immeasurably above him 
 as a poet of the poor ; and that the Excursion was the 
 very worst poem of any sort in the English language. 
 And then, as if that were not enough for one fit, a 
 little later in the same paper — and remember this 
 was in 1825, when the great Sir Walter was the god 
 1 Nodes, No. 22, September, 1825. 
 
 18s 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 of the literary world's idolatry — he declares that 
 Scott's poetry is often very bad, and that, except when 
 his martial spirit is up, Scott is "only a tame and 
 feeble writer." But the week after, when his paper 
 got into print, he was in a blue, shivering terror over 
 what he had done, and averred in a letter to Black- 
 wood * that he would rather die that night than own 
 those passages to be his. In truth, while Wilson had 
 physical courage in abundance, of moral courage he 
 seems to have had very little, and when a bit fright- 
 ened he could roar you as gently as any sucking dove. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Wilson dabbled in so many varieties of composi- 
 tion that it is a little difficult to classify his work. 
 The collected edition of his writings includes, besides 
 the Nodes, a volume of verse, a volume of Tales 
 and Sketches, two volumes of papers called Recrea- 
 tions, but best described as Out-of-Door Sketches, 
 and four volumes of critical and miscellaneous 
 writing in great part culled from his contributions to 
 Blackwood's. The verse need not long detain us. 
 His longest poem, The Isle of Palms, which was 
 planned and in part written as early as 1805, is in- 
 teresting as being, at least in conception, an early 
 specimen of the romantic school of poetry. It was 
 
 a See the correspondence in Mrs. Oliphant's William Black- 
 wood and his Sons, Vol. I, Chap. 6. 
 
 186 
 
JOHN WILSON 
 
 probably suggested by some of Southey's big ro- 
 mances ; the metre, at all events, is clearly reminis- 
 cent of Southey. It is an odd mixture of wildly 
 improbable incident and very sweet sentiment. On 
 the deck of a great ship, bound we know not whither, 
 are a lover and a lady ; when suddenly the ship is a 
 wreck, and all on board are lost save those two. A 
 kindly fortune washes them together on some shore 
 where it seems inconvenient to stay, and then provides 
 a boat to waft them to the Isle of Palms. In this 
 tropic paradise they live for years, wedded by fate, 
 the only inhabitants of the isle. A child is born to 
 them, and grows to young maidenhood, a sylvan 
 sprite, with no knowledge of the wide world's wicked- 
 ness. But at last a passing ship takes them off, and 
 brings them safely back to Liverpool and prose, when 
 the husband and family, we are left to infer, settle 
 down comfortably with his mother-in-law in Wales. 
 To tell us this precious tale takes some four thousand 
 lines ; but it is hardly exaggeration to say that Wilson 
 never wrote a line of genuine poetry. He lacked the 
 gift of compression and the gift of melody, and uni- 
 formly diluted his passion into a gush of lukewarm 
 sentiment. 
 
 Nor are the Tales much better. They are stories 
 of humble life, and most of them are meant to be 
 very pathetic. Their subjects are not cheerful, as 
 may be inferred from some of the titles — The 
 
 187 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 Lover's Last Visit, The Headstone, The Elder's 
 Death Bed, Consumption, and others of the same 
 complexion. Running through them again recently, 
 I computed that they average almost exactly two and 
 one-half deaths to each tale — which is depressing. 
 Besides this high mortality there is a large assort- 
 ment of childless widows, broken hearts, forsaken 
 maidens, family Bibles, churchyards, and deserted 
 cottages. When Wilson makes an attempt upon our 
 sensibilities he is not to be satisfied with any halfway 
 effects. The obverse of any healthy pathos is usu- 
 ally humor ; but Wilson seems afraid of mixing them, 
 and there is hardly a gleam of humor in these Tales. 
 It is to be feared, however, that to see this boisterous 
 sentimentalist grow willowy and lachrymose some- 
 times does provoke from the irreverent reader a 
 smile. His style, too, is not realistic or natural, but 
 rhetorical and melodramatic. Fancy a peasant 
 girl as she meets a friend she has not seen for some 
 time breaking out after this fashion : — 
 
 "For mercy's sake ! Sit down, Sarah, and tell me 
 what evil has befallen you ! For you are white as a 
 ghost. Fear not to confide anything to my bosom; 
 we herded sheep together on the lonesome braes — 
 we have stripped the bark together in the more 
 lonesome woods; we have played, laughed, sung, 
 danced together; we have talked merrily and 
 1 88 
 
JOHN WILSON 
 
 gayly, but innocently enough surely, of sweethearts 
 together ; and, Sarah, graver thoughts, too, have we 
 shared, for when your poor brother died away like a 
 frosted flower, I wept as if I had been his sister; nor 
 can I ever be so happy in this world as to forget him. 
 Tell me, my friend, why are you here, and why is 
 your face so ghastly?" 
 
 "A plague upon sighing and grief," says FalstafT, 
 "it blows a man up like a bladder!" Wilson's 
 sentimental style seems to have suffered in that way. 
 It is not full; it is inflated, dropsical. There is 
 none of the strength of reticence in it, none of the 
 simplicity of nature. All his sentimental writing, 
 indeed, is lush ; the Scotch have a word that often 
 fits it still better — it is "wersh." 
 
 Among the miscellaneous writings are several 
 papers of a purely critical character, of which the 
 most important are those on Burns, on Coleridge, on 
 Wordsworth (made up of several shorter notices 
 fused into one) on Macaulay's Lays of Ancient 
 Rome, and the once famous — or notorious — 
 review of Tennyson's first volume. None of these 
 can be given a very high place in the body of English 
 critical literature. Wilson's opinions, as we have 
 seen, depended greatly on his moods, and we never 
 can be quite sure that the verdict of to-day is not to 
 
 189 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 be contradicted by the verdict of to-morrow. His 
 criticism is based on no defined principles, and of 
 necessity, therefore, is often arbitrary and capricious. 
 Indeed, he seldom makes any attempt at systematic 
 and reasoned estimate of the work under examina- 
 tion ; he simply sets down — usually in very pro- 
 nounced fashion — his own impulsive feeling about 
 his author. His criticism is the record of John Wil- 
 son's likes and dislikes. Hence it is likely to be very 
 exaggerated and very diffuse. In the 1834 paper on 
 Coleridge — which may have been designed as a 
 kind of apology for the scurrilous article that opened 
 the first number of Blackwood's — he occupies near a 
 score of pages with quotations and mere rhapsodical 
 eulogy thereon. Two-thirds of the paper on Ma- 
 caulay's Lays of Ancient Rome, one of the best 
 of his reviews, is taken up with rambling talk about 
 the younger contemporary poets. Everywhere he 
 gossips and comments, rather than interprets. But, 
 at all events, his criticism, though sometimes wrong- 
 headed, is sincere and hearty. It is never the dry, 
 technical jargon of the professional critic. Wilson's 
 appreciation was certainly limited. He liked senti- 
 ment and action in their pronounced forms ; he dis- 
 liked weakness, prettiness, over-refinement. It was 
 inevitable that this big-chested critic with a voice 
 like a megaphone, who admired Macaulay's drum- 
 and-trumpet Lays, should think little of John 
 190 
 
JOHN WILSON 
 
 Keats, and should deride the owls and mermen, and 
 "airy, fairy Lillians" of young Mr. Alfred Tenny- 
 son. Yet within his limits, if we will make allow- 
 ance for occasional personal prejudice, Wilson's 
 appreciations and aversions are quite intelligible, 
 and command our interest if not always our agree- 
 ment. When he heartily enjoys a book, his com- 
 ments are sure to be stimulating, and are sometimes 
 really incisive. And even when he has a mind to 
 scourge, so long as he is only recounting his own 
 genuine feeling, and not feeding some personal or 
 political spite, he seldom goes far wrong. Tenny- 
 son not unnaturally took umbrage at the roughness 
 with which Blackwood handled his maiden volume; 
 but it may be noticed that the ripening taste of the 
 poet removed from the second edition of the volume 
 most of the poems on which "crusty Christopher" 
 had laid his big ringer. In a word, Wilson is a pleas- 
 ant commentator, but not a great critic. His spon- 
 taneous judgments are usually well enough ; he is not 
 always wise when he attempts to justify them. In- 
 deed, much of his best literary criticism is to be found 
 in the brief, incidental comment and opinion scattered 
 through his miscellaneous writings. There are many 
 of these excellent obiter dicta in the Nodes. 
 
 Far better than the tales or the criticism are the 
 out-of-door papers. In them Wilson is nearly at his 
 very best. To be sure, here as everywhere, Chris- 
 
 191 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 topher seems in a state of over-exhilaration. His 
 fancy is too flamboyant, and his manner vagarious 
 to the last degree. In the course of half an hour's 
 walk his remarks will range from the nature of Deity 
 to the best breed of game-cocks, and leave you hardly 
 a moment to look about you. In the midst of a 
 hunting excursion in the wild Highland Glen Etive 
 he cannot repress a full quarter-hour sermon — 
 apparently to his dogs. Yet in these papers there is 
 nothing factitious; the enthusiasm is not forced. 
 They are full of space and breeziness. Christopher 
 is in the open, where he was born to be, and the fresh 
 air goes to his head. Mr. Saintsbury pronounces 
 Wilson's descriptions of scenery better than anything 
 of the kind in English prose; but I think he must 
 have forgotten a good deal to say that. I should 
 rather say that Wilson had not in any high degree the 
 gift of description proper. There are, to be sure, 
 many vivid and beautiful glimpses in his pages ; but, 
 as a rule, he does not set the landscape before you. 
 What he can do is to make you feel his own joy in 
 it. In reality he is not describing the scene, he is 
 relating his own experience. Any one who had never 
 taken the walk from Ambleside to Grasmere by the 
 west bank of Rydal would hardly be able to form any 
 picture of it from Wilson's paper, A Stroll to Gras- 
 mere; but to one who knows and loves that loveliest 
 of English walks, the paper will be a delight, recall- 
 192 
 
JOHN WILSON 
 
 ing at every sentence some fair glimpse or cherished 
 memory. Similar comment might be made upon the 
 fancy-touched picture of Edinburgh in The Moors, 
 or the various scenes in the Day on Windermere. 
 And, although Wilson was an out-of-door man, he 
 never had the keen eye of the naturalist, or the love 
 for particular forms and phases of nature. He was 
 no Thoreau, who could " name all the birds without 
 a gun," and was in league with the trees of the field. 
 Wilson always loved nature in her larger masses and 
 more striking aspects. Moreover, he never cared 
 much for still life. His scene is usually the setting 
 for some form of strenuous activity. He must have 
 walking, and riding, and rowing, and swimming, 
 and hunting, and fighting, — all the joys of healthy 
 animal life. His love for horses and dogs makes 
 many pages of very good reading. I don't know 
 whether this generation reads any longer Christo- 
 pher's account of his ride on Colonsay; but if it 
 doesn't, more's the pity. Old Colonsay is one of 
 the best horses that have ever got into books. While 
 as to the dog Flo, his glorious encounter with the 
 drunken carter's mastiff, and the general engagement 
 that followed between the schoolmaster with his boys 
 and the village tradesmen on the one side, and the 
 infuriated carters with a gang of gypsies and a band 
 of brawny Irishmen on the other — that is a classic, 
 one of the best fights in literature. In all these 
 o i 93 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 outdoor papers Wilson's animation is contagious. 
 You shall not read a dozen pages without an access 
 of health, a tightening of muscle, a new realization 
 
 " How good is man's life, the mere living ! How fit to employ 
 All the heart, and the soul, and the senses forever in joy ! " 
 
 But it is in the Nodes that we must look for the 
 fullest display of Wilson's powers. Here his imagi- 
 nation, his wisdom, his satire, his pathos, his exuber- 
 ant humor, are all seen at their best. Nothing else 
 so well shows his almost marvellous affluence and 
 volubility. It can hardly be necessary to explain 
 that the Nodes are a series of papers in dialogue, 
 recounting the converse of a jovial company of 
 Blackwood's men who are supposed to meet for an 
 occasional night of good fellowship around the table 
 of a famous Edinburgh tavern, Ambrose's — whence 
 the name, Nodes Ambrosiance. It is not certain 
 with whom the plan of the series originated. His 
 friends were inclined to claim that credit for William 
 Maginn, the boisterous Irishman who figures, as 
 Ensign O'Doherty, rather more prominently than 
 any one else in the first eight or ten numbers. Pro- 
 fessor Ferrier, Wilson's editor, on the other hand, is 
 confident that the suggestion came from Wilson, 
 though he will not admit the first eighteen papers to 
 the collected edition of the Works. Whoever planned 
 the Nodes, the first half-dozen numbers give scanty 
 194 
 
JOHN WILSON 
 
 evidence of Wilson's genius. After that there are, 
 I think, increasing marks of his hand, and when, 
 about 1825, he took the series entirely under his 
 control, the papers gain immensely both in manner 
 and content. After about that time most of them 
 were written entirely by him, and his temper domi- 
 nates them all. He also changed the plan of the 
 series so as to give it greater unity, and some individu- 
 ality to the speakers. The early papers introduced 
 a considerable number of persons, of various sorts 
 and conditions, and the speech and manner of each 
 were imitated with only very moderate success. 
 Wilson wisely abandoned this attempt to represent 
 with dramatic fidelity many different persons, and 
 reduced the speakers to three: Christopher North, 
 who stands for Wilson himself ; Tickler, who is said 
 to have been suggested by an uncle of Wilson, Robert 
 Sym ; and the Ettrick Shepherd, James Hogg. There 
 is, indeed, no very distinct individuality in these 
 three; they are only three persons in one John 
 Wilson. But they enabled Wilson to express dif- 
 ferent sides of his character, different phases of his 
 feeling. Christopher North, who speaks chiefly as a 
 kind of interlocutor to suggest or guide the talk, is 
 Wilson in his staider moods, with a tendency to 
 philosophic reflection in rhetorical forms; Tickler 
 is Wilson in his occasional moods of prosaic common 
 sense, trying to be a man of affairs with a vein of 
 
 i95 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 cynicism; the Shepherd is Wilson the poet and 
 humorist letting himself go. Naturally, therefore, 
 the Shepherd is the most interesting of the trio, and 
 comes nearest to being an independent character. 
 He was doubtless studied directly, though very freely, 
 from the original. Hogg had been an occasional 
 contributor to Blackwood's ever since the famous 
 " Chaldee Manuscript," — of which he claimed to 
 be the author, — and by 1825 was one of the most 
 picturesque figures in Edinburgh literary society. 
 The real Hogg, however, was clearly very much ideal- 
 ized in the Shepherd of the Nodes, and in some of 
 his letters shows an odd mixture of vanity and vexa- 
 tion at seeing himself translated into so large a type. 
 The colloquy as a literary form has some manifest 
 advantages. It enables you to prove anything, by 
 making one of the disputants a man of straw. It is 
 also an excellent device for self-flattery. You have 
 only to divide yourself into two persons and then let 
 each flatter the other. North is forever admiring 
 the Shepherd's rhapsodies or dissolving in tears at 
 his pathos; while the Shepherd is forever holding 
 up his hands in awe at North's eloquence. "O 
 man, man ! but ye're an orator — the orator o' the 
 human race!" Certainly a manner so discursive 
 and rambling as Wilson's found in the Nodes the 
 best possible form of expression. Impulsive, senti- 
 mental, he had little power of connected thinking, 
 196 
 
JOHN WILSON 
 
 and could rarely keep himself to one theme for ten 
 minutes together. But in the jovial evenings around 
 the board at Ambrose's, connected thinking would 
 be only another name for dulness. Politics, criti- 
 cism, philosophy, sentiment, fancy, are mixed in this 
 rushing flow of talk and enlivened by jest, and story, 
 and song. Within a half-dozen pages you may come 
 upon a resume* of German contemporary philosophy, 
 an account of a dog fight, an estimate of Wordsworth's 
 poetry, a scathing denunciation of the Cockney school 
 of poetry, a bravura of sentimental rhetoric over a 
 Scotch moonrise, and a comic song; and the whole 
 fairly boiling and bubbling with good spirits. Possi- 
 bly the modern reader may suggest that something 
 of the exhilaration of the Nodes is due to spirits of 
 another brew. Wilson, like old Ben Jonson, was 
 no man to sing 
 
 " My mind to me a kingdom is, 
 While the lank hungry belly cries for food," 
 
 and the amount swallowed, both of solids and 
 liquids, at each of the Nodes is certainly something 
 enormous. I believe Mr. Saintsbury (who rather 
 prides himself as an authority upon such matters) 
 pronounces the Gargantuan exploits at Ambrose's 
 table quite within the limits of possibility, only sug- 
 gesting that there were too many oysters for the 
 Glenlivet. On these questions I pretend to no 
 
 197 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 opinion; but I well remember the shock of mild 
 surprise my callow youth received on first reading the 
 Nodes, on the recommendation of a worthy doctor 
 of divinity much enamoured of them. And I still 
 incline to doubt whether the less valorous appetites 
 of to-day will quite assent to the confident assertion 
 of the Shepherd* " There does not at this blessed 
 moment breathe on the earth's surface ae human body 
 that doesna prefer eating and drinking to all ither 
 pleasures o' body or soul. . . . Eat an drink wi' 
 all your powers — moral, intellectual, and spiritual. 
 This is the rule." The Shepherd follows his rule 
 very closely. On a fair computation, about a quarter 
 of all the talk in the Nodes is devoted to meats and 
 drinks and the effects thereof. 
 
 Of course all this is a Barmecide feast — only a 
 device to afford expression for Wilson's extravagant 
 high spirits. Ambrose's was, in fact, not at all the 
 abode of oriental splendor it appears in Wilson's 
 pages, but only a plain Edinburgh tavern; and if 
 Wilson and Sym and Hogg ever did foregather 
 there, their potations were doubtless very moderate. 
 Their talk in the Nodes is by no means the talk of half- 
 befuddled men, whose god is their belly and who mind 
 earthly things. It is mostly very good talk indeed, 
 playing over all sorts of subjects with quick intelli- 
 gence, and glowing with fun and fancy. There are 
 198 
 
JOHN WILSON 
 
 bits of excellent criticism in it, not quite dissolved 
 in a wide welter of words. In fact, as already re- 
 marked, Wilson's literary criticism is often at its 
 best in these incidental comments struck out in the 
 heat of conversation. There is hardly a paper in 
 which the Shepherd does not inquire after "ony thing 
 gude in literature." The verdicts are usually very 
 positive ; books, new or old, are praised and damned 
 without any nice qualifications of sentence. More- 
 over, the plan of the Nodes serves to disguise Wil- 
 son's frequent inconsistencies; for on such jovial 
 occasions the opinions of the critics will naturally 
 vary with their moods, and Wilson as Christopher 
 must inevitably often disagree with Wilson as the 
 Shepherd. But, taken together, the papers afford 
 an interesting conspectus of literary news and criti- 
 cism for some ten years. And there is a deal of sound 
 sense — of a rather high Tory sort — on a great 
 variety of other matters, on current politics and states- 
 men, on social questions, on education, on religion, 
 on public morals — on all topics in which a well-fed 
 Scot might be expected to take interest. But, of 
 course, the suppers at Ambrose's were not intended 
 primarily as Aids to Reflection. The great charm of 
 the Nodes is the buoyant, ebullient life that pulses 
 all through them. These men have the gift, not 
 very common in colloquial writing, of " making you 
 of their company anon," as Chaucer says. And if 
 
 199 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 they are a little boisterous in tone, and their humor, 
 now and then — as the Shepherd owns — "a bit 
 coorse," yet it is the clean mirth of robust and 
 healthy men. In these days when so much hectic, 
 morbid, neurotic literature is offered for our recrea- 
 tion, it is pleasant to join sometimes the company of 
 these red-blooded persons who don't enjoy poor 
 health. 
 
 The Shepherd, in particular, is delightful. In his 
 talk you get Wilson's humor, sentiment, and imagi- 
 nation in their superlative forms. The humor 
 cannot be called quiet or delicate ; yet the Shepherd 
 has store of neat quips and jests, and now and then 
 strikes out a vivid portrait in few words — as of 
 Lockhart, "a pale face an' a black touzy head, but 
 an ee like an eagle's, an' a sort o' lauch about the 
 screwed-up mouth o' him that fules ca'd no canny, 
 for they could na thole the meanin' o' 't." Some of 
 his satiric hits are very good, as when he hopes there's 
 many an incident in the Excursion he has forgotten, 
 "for I canna say I reclet ony incident at all in the 
 haill poem, but the Pedlar's refusin' to tak a tumbler 
 o' gin an' water wi' the solitary. That did mak a 
 deep impression on my memory, for I thocht it a most 
 rude an' heartless thing to decline drinkin' wi' a 
 gentleman in his ain house; but I hope it wasna 
 true, an' that the whole is a meleegnant invention o' 
 200 
 
JOHN WILSON 
 
 Mr. Wordsworth." The Shepherd's anger, too, 
 sometimes inspires passages of hearty Scottish male- 
 diction that are animating reading. But best of all 
 are his passages of flamboyant, full-length descrip- 
 tion or narrative. The Shepherd's imagination, 
 like his humor, is very profuse; it revels in details 
 and lavishes adjectives. Yet the resulting picture is 
 always real and glowing. His account of the Ex- 
 plosion of a Haggis, of his Robbing of an Eagle's 
 Nest, of Christopher's Fishing, of the Glasgow 
 Dog Fight, his contrasted description of the squalor 
 of Morning in Old Edinburgh, and Daybreak 
 in the Ettrick Valley, his delightful defence of 
 Sleeping in Church, — these, with half a hundred 
 other passages, will occur to all lovers of the Nodes 
 as striking examples of the union of effusive senti- 
 ment or humor with vivid and realistic detail. They 
 are better than the similar rhetorical fantasies and 
 elaborate pathetic passages in Wilson's other works, 
 because they seem more spontaneous. And, al- 
 though his characteristic manner fairly runs riot in 
 them, the Scottish dialect gives them a homely natu- 
 ralness and keeps their sentiment from getting 
 mawkish. 
 
 On the whole, we may admit that Wilson could not 
 add much to the world's knowledge, and that he did 
 little to champion any reform or advance. His 
 prejudices were obstinate, his judgments often ca- 
 
 201 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 pricious or perverse. He lacked fixed and reasoned 
 convictions; he lacked steadfast earnestness of re- 
 solve. We distrust the sanity of his opinions and the 
 consistency of his conduct. Moreover, his mind 
 would not work steadily at low pressure. As a re- 
 sult, his writing has no repose, no quiet certainty of 
 manner; he is liable to fatigue us, after a little, by 
 the very noise of his enthusiasm. Yet it is assuredly 
 one of the offices of good literature to cheer and in- 
 vigorate, even to amuse, as well as to inform or in- 
 spire. And few writers of his generation contributed 
 more to the literature of cheer than Wilson. It was 
 no slight service to keep before the public for a score 
 of years a personality so healthy, a temperament so 
 optimistic and joyous. His humor, to be sure, is not 
 of the gentle variety that enlivens five o'clock tea, 
 but it is never merely bacchanalian — which makes 
 the dreariest of all writing. Even in the most ex- 
 hilarated passages of what Carlyle unjustly calls 
 "his drunken Nodes" there is far more of cheer 
 than of inebriation. If Wilson, on the Moors or at 
 the table of Ambrose, does not forget that man is an 
 animal, he always remembers that he is a rational and 
 spiritual animal. He has a healthy appreciation not 
 only of the joys of sense, but of all the beauty of the 
 world, and of all the manifold humors of man and 
 womankind. It is impossible to rise from an hour 
 with him without feeling that life is worth living, that 
 
 202 
 
JOHN WILSON 
 
 "A merry heart goes all the day, 
 Your sad tires in a mile-a." 
 
 In the merciless winnowing of time all of his verse, 
 all the Tales, and most of the criticism will doubtless 
 fall into oblivion — nay, have already descended 
 thither. But the wholesome Out-of-Door Papers 
 and the Nodes ought to live at least another century 
 as part of the literature of invigoration. In them 
 Christopher and the Shepherd are too much alive 
 soon to die out of the memory of men who love good 
 fellowship and hearty cheer. 
 
 203 
 
LEIGH HUNT 
 
 Leigh Hunt was certainly not a great writer nor a 
 great man. One short poem, familiar to everybody, 
 — the Abou ben Adhern, — and two or three other 
 short poems that deserve to be familiar are all the 
 verse he ever wrote of any real merit; while as to 
 the prose, though much of it is entertaining and some 
 of it of real value as criticism, there is no passage 
 in the whole body of it that, either for weight of 
 thought or finish of style, can be called classic. 
 Much of his writing, perhaps most of it, belongs 
 rather to journalism than to literature, entertaining 
 to-day, forgotten to-morrow. No uniform edition 
 of his works has ever been issued ; many of the books 
 have already fallen so far into obscurity that it is 
 difficult to get a complete set of them together. If 
 his reputation is to be measured by the permanent 
 value of the writing he has left us, he can hardly be 
 sure of a place in our literary history. That, doubt- 
 less, is the only ultimate measure of fame for any 
 author; but meantime Leigh Hunt deserves to be 
 204 
 
LEIGH HUNT 
 
 remembered another century, not only as a pleasing 
 writer, but as a man of original though limited genius, 
 and of a personality that, in spite of its blemishes, 
 certainly had a peculiar attraction for many greater 
 men than himself. With a most hearty love for 
 books and all bookish things, he always sought the 
 companionship of men of letters, and his genuine 
 kindliness, his sprightly converse, his taste, keen and 
 delicate, if not broad or sound, always made him 
 welcome. The cheery, chirruping, effervescent little 
 optimist was the friend of two generations of literary 
 men, and seems omnipresent in literary society for 
 fifty years. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, 
 Keats, Moore, Lamb, Hazlitt, Crabb Robinson, 
 Haydon, Talfourd, Charles and Mary Cowden 
 Clarke, Wilson, Lockhart, Murray, Macaulay, 
 Forster, Dickens, Thackeray, Browning, Mrs. 
 Browning, Lord Houghton, the Carlyles, Rossetti, 
 William Bell Scott, Lowell, Hawthorne, Motley, — 
 Leigh Hunt knew every one of them, and turns up 
 somewhere in the memoirs or correspondence of 
 every one. His own letters are perhaps quite as 
 interesting as his other prose writing, yet it is evident 
 that they miss the vivacity of his presence and con- 
 verse. A reputation like this, based not so much 
 upon the value of a writer's work as upon the breadth 
 of his acquaintance and the elusive charm of his 
 personality, is likely to leave the literary critic some- 
 
 205 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 what at a loss, or to beguile him into gossip and 
 reminiscence. 
 
 The account of his parentage which Hunt gives 
 in his Autobiography makes it evident that he came 
 honestly by his characteristic traits both of temper 
 and of belief. His father, Isaac Hunt, was a West 
 Indian sent from the Barbados in his boyhood to 
 be educated in Philadelphia. He took the degree of 
 Master of Arts both in Philadelphia and in New 
 York, — so his son says, — and then decided not to 
 return to the Barbados, but to remain in America 
 and enter the profession of law. His commencement 
 oration in Philadelphia must have been of an elo- 
 quence rather unusual in that variety of address; 
 for two young ladies fell in love with him on hearing 
 it — which may have had something to do with his 
 decision to remain in America. At all events, he 
 married the younger of the two. The other one, 
 by the way, married the artist, Benjamin West, and 
 showed very substantial friendship for the Hunts 
 in their later seasons of adversity. When the Revo- 
 lutionary War broke out, Isaac Hunt's loud-spoken 
 British loyalty exposed him to rough handling in 
 Philadelphia, and he escaped to London, leaving 
 his wife and child to follow some months later. 
 Once there, he speedily exchanged law for divinity, 
 and on her arrival in London Mrs. Hunt found her 
 husband an eloquent preacher, with crowds of 
 
 206 
 
LEIGH HUNT 
 
 carriages at his church door and throngs of delighted 
 ladies hanging on his utterances. But it was soon 
 noticed that the eloquent preacher drank too much 
 claret, and owed too much money. In truth, he had 
 no depth or steadiness of character. He could never 
 understand the nature of a financial obligation, — 
 a weakness that he bequeathed unimpaired to his 
 son, — and after the first flush of prosperity, was 
 always running behind the constable. Leigh Hunt * 
 says the first room he himself remembers being 
 inside of was a debtor's jail. But nothing could 
 depress Isaac Hunt's easy good nature; he was al- 
 ways vivacious and hopeful, even unconcerned. As 
 to his religious beliefs, if he had any, they must have 
 been of a very gelatinous sort ; he seems to have slid 
 easily down the scale of heterodoxy from one ism to 
 another, till he landed in a sort of benevolent indiffer- 
 entism. His son, who always showed an amiable 
 charity for his father's failings, says with delightful 
 naivete, " While he was not a hypocrite, my father 
 was not, I must confess, remarkable for being ex- 
 plicit about himself." 
 
 But Hunt's picture of his mother, in the early 
 chapters of the Autobiography, is one of the most 
 beautiful tributes of filial affection in our literature; 
 it is impossible not to have a kindly feeling for the 
 man who could write it. She was a gentle, sad- V 
 faced woman, with a liking for a little music and all 
 
 207 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 the gracious domesticities of life, and with a tempera- 
 ment as pensive as her husband's was mercurial. 
 She could not sympathize with his cheerful incapacity ; 
 and the long struggle with poverty early wore out her 
 strength and her spirits. Hunt could not remember 
 to have seen her smile, "save in sorrowful tender- 
 ness." But she was full of pity for the hardships of 
 others ; it was the taking off her flannel petticoat to 
 clothe a freezing woman she met on the street that 
 fixed upon her a rheumatic affection for life. As her 
 son truly says, "Saints have been made for charities 
 no greater." She imparted to her children — at all 
 events to Leigh — something of her own extreme 
 • sympathy for all pain, and her own dislike of any- 
 thing violent or overstrenuous, even in language. 
 Hunt says that when his childish anger once found 
 relief in a word that probably did not give the record- 
 ing angel much concern, he himself was tormented 
 by conscience for a week, and couldn't receive a bit 
 of praise or a pat of encouragement without thinking 
 to himself, " Ah, they little suspect I am the boy who 
 said, 'Damn it!'" 
 
 The young Leigh Hunt got his temperament 
 mostly from his father, and his training from his 
 mother. The results were not altogether fortunate. 
 At the age of eight he was entered at Christ's Hospital 
 School — just after Coleridge and Lamb had left it. 
 Old Dr. Bowyer — whom Coleridge declared to be 
 208 
 
LEIGH HUNT 
 
 ready to flog anybody except a cherub, all head and 
 wings, whom he couldn't flog — was still master 
 there, and it might have been supposed that his 
 vigorous discipline, with the rough experiences of an 
 English boys' school, would have knocked a little 
 robustness into Hunt; but, on the contrary, it de- 
 veloped a sort of priggish gentleness not altogether 
 becoming a genuine boy. A square, good-natured 
 fight now and then would probably have been good 
 for him ; but he refused to strike. He plumed him- 
 self on saying what he chose in any quarrel, and then 
 quietly taking the consequences. That was what 
 he called a moral victory. He said with evident 
 satisfaction, fifty years afterward, "I gained the 
 reputation of a romantic enthusiast whose daring in 
 behalf of a friend or a good cause nothing could 
 put down." It is clear enough that, even in his 
 school days, he began to show that jaunty humility 
 and pride of martyrdom which his critics later found 
 so exasperating. To provoke your enemy to smite i 
 you on the one cheek in order that you may have the 
 proud satisfaction of meekly turning to him the other, 
 is not exactly the conduct enjoined by Scripture; 
 but Hunt dearly loved to do it, and began the practice 
 very early. 
 
 On leaving school at sixteen Hunt did not go on " 
 to the University, but drifted for a time. The only 
 ambition he had thus far developed was to put his 
 p 209 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 name in the roll of English poets. He confesses 
 that he had not yet learned the multiplication 
 table, — indeed, I don't think he ever did quite 
 master that mystery, — but he had written a good 
 many verses; about a year and a half after leaving 
 school he published a thin volume of them. His 
 father got him a handsome list of subscribers, and 
 the verses were thought by some less partial critics 
 to be rather clever. The generous public, I believe, 
 bought rather more copies of them than of a volume 
 of Lyrical Ballads issued about a year before. The 
 success of his venture confirmed his poetical inclina- 
 tions, and he contributed occasional verse to various 
 periodicals during the next half-dozen years. But 
 his literary aspirations was soon turned in another 
 and more fortunate direction. His father gave him 
 — he does not say just when — a set of the eighteenth- 
 century essayists, of whom he had hitherto been 
 almost entirely ignorant. He devoured them all. 
 Goldsmith's papers in the Bee and Citizen of the 
 World, and the rather mild humor of Colman and 
 Thornton in the Connoisseur, gave him, he says, all 
 the transports of a first love. He set himself to 
 imitate these models in a series of papers for a Lon- 
 don journal; he began to write theatrical notices; he 
 lost no opportunity to get himself naturalized in 
 Bohemia by cultivating the acquaintance of journal- 
 ists, critics, and men about town; he diligently ex- 
 
 210 
 
LEIGH HUNT 
 
 tended his reading in that kind of prose in which he 
 was ambitious to excel. He was especially attracted 
 by the brilliant satire and caustic wit of Vol- 
 taire; and as he could not read him in the original, 
 went through the greater part of his writings in trans- 
 lation. He was not frightened, he remarks inciden- 
 tally, by Voltaire's attacks on orthodoxy; as, indeed, 
 it was impossible he should be. For before he was 
 out of his teens, Hunt had reduced his theological 
 creed to the one proposition that every created being 
 is destined to eternal happiness — or, as he some- 
 times puts it, everything that happens must, in the 
 long run, be best for everybody; and he rejected 
 without much consideration any doctrines that con- 
 flicted, or even seemed to conflict, with this comfort- 
 able belief. His political creed was hardly more 
 definite or more well considered. He only knew he 
 was in favor of change and reform everywhere, 
 and opposed to all institutions intrenched in privi- 
 lege. This was the training and equipment he 
 brought to his first important enterprise, the edit- 
 ing of a radical journal. 
 
 It was in 1808 that, in concert with his elder 
 brother John, who was a printer, he set up a weekly 
 paper, of which the two brothers were to be joint 
 editors and proprietors. It will be remembered 
 that this was the time when Austerlitz, Jena, and 
 Friedland had carried Napoleon almost to the sum- 
 
 211 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 mit of his resistless career; when those sanguine 
 young Englishmen who, some twenty years before, 
 had hailed with joyful anticipation the revolutionary 
 movement in France, had now long since given up 
 those early hopes and gone over to the majority; 
 when conservatism in England was having everything 
 its own way, and to utter liberal opinions was to incur 
 the suspicion of disloyalty to the British constitution 
 and even risk of personal arrest. To set up a liberal 
 paper at such a moment implied a little courage; 
 but it also involved just that defiance of authority 
 and chance of persecution always attractive to 
 Hunt. The Examiner was not to be a dangerously 
 radical sheet. It upheld the British constitution. 
 It regarded the later stages of the French Revolution 
 with abhorrence. It did not — as Hazlitt did — 
 admire Napoleon; it rather advised England to let 
 him alone and mind her own business — advice 
 that England has never been very ready to take, and 
 that was especially impracticable just then. The 
 Examiner was to stand for independence and political 
 reform at home, just when the frightened conserva- 
 tism of England would hear nothing of reform. Its 
 purposes were wise enough, but the temper in which 
 it advocated them was sometimes a little sentimental, 
 and usually not a little lofty. The magisterial assur- 
 ance with which these young fellows — Hunt was 
 twenty-four — rebuked and instructed statesmen 
 
 212 
 
LEIGH HUNT 
 
 and philosophers was certainly very superior. Hunt 
 himself said, many years afterward, that he blushed 
 at remembering the contrast between the simpleton 
 he was and the sage he tried to seem. Yet assurance 
 is a requisite of the editor, young or old; he must 
 assume that virtue if he have it not. And Hunt's 
 political writing in the Examiner will not, for the 
 most part, strike the reader of to-day as especially 
 dogmatic or impracticable. 
 
 To Hunt, however, the politics of the Examiner 
 was probably of less interest than its literature. 
 He confesses that in those days he cared more for 
 writing verses than he cared for the public good, 
 and would have been glad to devote himself entirely 
 to poetry and philosophy. As it was, he determined 
 to produce in the Examiner, to use his own phrase, 
 " a fusion of literary taste with all subjects whatever." 
 But the fusion of literary taste with radical politics 
 in the columns of a weekly newspaper is not always 
 easy. In 1811, after three years of success with the 
 Examiner, he set up beside it a quarterly journal 
 called the Reflector, which might serve as a repository 
 for longer and more distinctively literary articles 
 and for poetry. The Reflector shone only for four 
 numbers, and is not very brilliant. By far the 
 best things in it are three essays by Lamb, On 
 the Genius of Hogarth, On Shakespeare's Tragedies, 
 On the Behavior of Married People, and his 
 
 213 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 delightful Farewell to Tobacco. But among Hunt's 
 own contributions are three or four of those chatty, 
 sentimental papers on bookish subjects which form 
 so large a part of his best work in later years. One 
 of them, A Day by the Fire, is in his very best vein. 
 
 It was in the Reflector, also, that Hunt printed his 
 most ambitious attempt at poetry so far, a light 
 satire entitled The Feast of the Poets. Like all his 
 other early poetry, it is an echo ; indeed, as the title 
 implies, it is almost a parody of Sir John Suckling's 
 Session of the Poets. With a young man's audacity 
 he deals his censure right and left, and doubtless, as 
 he said, made almost every living poet and poetaster 
 his enemy. Only four contemporaries are found 
 worthy to sit at the feast of Apollo — Scott, Campbell, 
 Southey, and Moore; and the god lectures each of 
 these in turn very roundly for the deficiencies of his 
 work. He is especially severe upon Scott, just then, 
 it will be remembered, at the height of his poetic 
 fame, with all the world reading Marmion and the 
 Lady of the Lake. As for Coleridge and Words- 
 worth, Apollo contemptuously shows them the door, 
 laughing 
 
 "between anger and mirth, 
 And cried, 'Were there ever such asses on earth?'" 
 
 and when " Billy" and "Sam" are slow to go, the 
 god puts on all his splendors and fairly dazzles 
 
 214 
 
LEIGH HUNT 
 
 them out of his presence. But the verses, though 
 amusing, are not so clever as Suckling's; their 
 familiarity passes into vulgarity, and their critical 
 verdicts show no real insight. Hunt afterward 
 admitted that when he wrote them he had not read 
 Wordsworth at all, and knew next to nothing of 
 Coleridge. His attack on Scott was prompted by a 
 dislike of a single word in one of Scott's notes on 
 Dryden. Many years later he reworked the poem, 
 taking out the offending passages; but the new 
 version, though quite innocuous, is quite flat. It is 
 curious to note that Hunt's poem furnished the sug- 
 gestion for the plan of a much cleverer satire, Lowell's 
 Fable for Critics. 
 
 Meantime, fortune had been kind to Mr. Hunt. 
 In 1809, emboldened by the success of the Exam- . 
 iner, he ventured to marry and set up a modest home. 
 For with all his shiftlessness he was not a Bohemian 
 by nature, but liked a certain domestic snugness. 
 His marriage at twenty-five terminated an engage- 
 ment contracted when he was seventeen and the 
 lady was thirteen years of age; and through all 
 those eight years it would seem clear from his 
 letters that, in spite of other passing fancies, he had 
 been a devoted lover. Mrs. Hunt seems to have been 
 a nice young person — not pretty, her son rather un- 
 gallantly says, but with pretty tastes, for sketching, 
 and water-colors, and embroidery, and a little poetry, 
 
 215 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 and with a gift to read verses aloud quite remarkably 
 well. It is evident from their letters that Hunt was 
 anxious about her culture and during their engage- 
 ment gave her a good deal of superior advice. One 
 would think that during the fifty years of their 
 married life she might have had opportunity to 
 repay that obligation. Certainly we need not with- 
 hold our sympathy from the woman who, in constant 
 illness and with a large family of children, main- 
 tained for half a century something like order and 
 cheer in the household of a man of such varied 
 ineptitude as Leigh Hunt. The two or three sayings 
 recorded of her show that she must have had some 
 imagination and some spirit — she said when first 
 she saw a grove of olive trees in Italy that they 
 "looked as if they only grew by moonlight," which 
 is very pretty and very true; and when Byron said 
 in her presence one day that Trelawney had been 
 speaking against his morals, she quietly remarked, 
 "It is the first time I ever heard of them." * 
 
 But it was in February, 1813, that the first great 
 
 ^letter written in 1899, by Hunt's physician, Dr. George 
 Bird, and recently published {The Nation (London) Vol. V, No. 8, 
 page 724, Saturday, May 22, 1909). charges Mrs. Hunt not only 
 with feebleness and fretf ulness, but with mendacity and intemper- 
 ance, and ascribes to her influence most of Hunt's financial and 
 other troubles. But I find it impossible to believe these charges 
 in the face of Hunt's own statements in loving praise of his wife. 
 His remarkable frankness never could conceal the weaknesses 
 even of his nearest friends. 
 
 2l6 
 
LEIGH HUNT 
 
 piece of good luck befell Hunt ; he was sent to jail. 
 The Examiner had from the start earned the reputa- 
 tion of being a very outspoken journal. It had been 
 prosecuted three times in two years, but had thus far 
 escaped conviction, when in 1812 appeared the famous 
 article on the Prince Regent. Hunt had criticised 
 this "first gentleman of England" very freely in 
 an article of the Reflector; but the paper in the 
 Examiner was much more caustic. Apropos of some 
 fulsome eulogies of the Prince in the Chronicle and 
 Post, the Examiner broke loose after this fashion : — 
 
 " What person unacquainted with the true state of 
 the case would imagine, in reading these astound- 
 ing eulogies, that this ' glory of the people ' was the 
 subject of millions of shrugs and reproaches; that 
 this ' protector of the arts ' had named a wretched 
 foreigner his historical painter in disparagement or 
 in ignorance of the merits of his own countrymen; 
 that this 'Maecenas of the age' patronized not a 
 single deserving writer; that this 'breather of elo- 
 quence' could not say a dozen decent words, if we 
 are to judge at least from what he said to his regi- 
 ment on its embarkation for Portugal; that this 
 1 conqueror of hearts ' was the disap pointer of hopes ; 
 that this ' exciter of desire ' (Bravo, messieurs of 
 the Post!), this Adonis in loveliness was a corpulent 
 man of fifty, — in short, this delightful, blissful, wise, 
 
 217 
 
 v/ 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 pleasurable, honorable, virtuous, true, and immortal 
 prince was a violater of his word, a libertine over 
 head and ears in disgrace, a despiser of domestic 
 ties, the companion of gamblers, and demireps, a 
 man who has just closed half a century without one 
 single claim on the gratitude of his country or the 
 respect of posterity.' ' 
 
 All which, though he most potently and power- 
 fully believed, Hunt should have seen it not 
 honesty thus to have set down. Certainly no gov- 
 ernment, then or now, that would save a shred of 
 the divinity that doth hedge a king could let such 
 language go unpunished. After some months of 
 the law's delay Hunt and his brother John were 
 both sentenced to two years' imprisonment, John in 
 Clerkenwell, and Leigh in Horsemonger Lane. 
 
 But the two years that followed were far from 
 being the most unpleasant years of Hunt's life. He 
 used to like to think that his imprisonment had 
 impaired his health; but as he never had any very 
 serious illness and lived to the ripe age of seventy- 
 five, I think he was mistaken about that. After a few 
 days he was given a pleasant suite of two rooms, one 
 of which he proceeded to decorate with a wall- 
 paper showing a lattice of roses climbing up the 
 sides of the room, and blue sky and clouds on the 
 ceiling, so that — like a good deal of his other work 
 
 218 
 
LEIGH HUNT 
 
 — it must have been all very pretty and in very 
 bad taste. He brought into this room a choice 
 library — largely made up of the Parnaso Italiano — 
 with busts, and pictures, and his piano. His wife 
 was with him, so that neither his literary nor his do- 
 mestic life suffered any serious interruption. In 
 fact, his eldest daughter and his longest poem were 
 both born inside the jail. He had a garden, too, 
 that furnished him with flowers of his own raising, 
 and gave him about as much exercise and as much 
 scenery as he ever really cared for. His friends 
 were allowed to write him freely. He enjoyed 
 enforced regularity of habit; he was boarded and 
 lodged — perhaps for the only time in his life — 
 without any anxiety from creditors; and with read- 
 ing and writing and music and little dinners sent in 
 by friends over the way, he made it a life of elegant 
 retirement. On the whole, one thinks it was not a 
 heavy price to pay for the privilege of writing a very 
 telling libel and wearing a faint halo of martyrdom 
 in the cause of civil liberty ever after. And of 
 course it widened his reputation instantly. A good 
 many people of influence, hitherto strangers to him, 
 took occasion to manifest in various ways their sym- 
 pathy with the persecuted champion of free speech. 
 Not only old friends like the Lambs and Cowden 
 Clarke came to visit him in prison, but Hazlitt came, 
 and Bentham, and James Mill, and Haydon, and 
 
 219 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 Shelley, and Byron, and Moore, and hosts of lesser 
 folk. And when he came out, young Keats, who had 
 not yet met him, wrote a sonnet to commemorate the 
 event. 
 
 After his liberation Hunt felt that he might with 
 some assurance of recognition turn his attention 
 more exclusively to literature. Though he con- 
 tinued to edit the Examiner with his brother until 
 1 82 1, he did not venture any further dangerous 
 meddling with politics, but made his paper more 
 largely a journal of criticism and letters. He had 
 published in 181 6 his most ambitious poem, The 
 Story of Rimini, and three years later issued a 
 collected edition of all his verse. He changed his 
 residence — probably for reasons easily guessed — 
 a half-dozen times in a half-dozen years ; but where- 
 ever he was, his modest home was always open to 
 his friends, and there were flowers and music and 
 books and endless literary chat. All lovers of Keats 
 will remember his pleasant sonnet 
 
 "Brimful of the friendliness 
 That in a little cottage I have found" — 
 
 that little cottage in the Vale of Health where he 
 wrote that other and better sonnet The Grasshopper 
 and the Cricket and the characteristic lines Sleep 
 and Poetry. Shelley, then living at Great Marlow, 
 was through those years Hunt's close friend, and 
 220 
 
LEIGH HUNT 
 
 often came over to Hampstead to stay for days 
 together. Byron condescended to call several 
 times upon him. And Hunt's correspondence from 
 1816 to 1820 gives glimpses of many other pleasant 
 people of more or less note in the world of literature, 
 some of them old friends and some of them new, that 
 often looked in upon him. In those days he was at 
 his best as a companion — sprightly, vivacious, quick- 
 witted, with a certain courtly grace of manner. 
 He was an excellent reader and mimic, told a story 
 capitally, sang a simple song neatly, was ready with 
 some pert remark or pretty fancy, and had a head 
 full of superficial ideas that he had never taken much 
 pains to assert. Charles Cowden Clarke, who knew 
 a great many charming people in his day, declared 
 that Hunt was " fascinating, animated, and winning, 
 to a degree of which I have never seen the parallel " ; 
 and the more impartial Hazlitt gives a picture of him 
 in those days which seems as truthful as it is vivid : 
 
 "Hunt has a fine vinous spirit and tropical blood 
 in his veins; but he is better at his own table. He 
 has a great flow of pleasantry and delightful animal 
 spirits, but his hits do not tell like Lamb's; you 
 cannot repeat them the next day. He requires not 
 only to be appreciated, but to have a select circle 
 of admirers and devotees, to feel himself quite at 
 home. ... He manages an argument adroitly, 
 
 221 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 is genteel and gallant, and has a set of by-phrases 
 and quaint allusions always at hand to produce a 
 laugh. If he has a fault, it is that he does not listen 
 so well as he speaks, is impatient of interruption, and 
 is fond of being looked ^up to without considering 
 by whom. I believe, however, he has pretty well 
 seen the folly of this." 
 
 This fault, however, in spite of Hazlitt's generous 
 judgment, I think Hunt had not then outgrown — 
 nor ever did outgrow. He was ambitious of the 
 fame of a literary patron. He defended in the 
 Examiner the character and the writings of Shelley. 
 He commended without reservation the early volumes 
 of Keats, that everybody else neglected or derided. 
 But, though his praise was very genuine, it was a 
 positive injury to both Shelley and Keats; for it 
 was given in such a tone of patronizing personal 
 friendship as to make it possible for the hostile critics 
 to represent these two great poets as merely the 
 disciples and imitators of Mr. Leigh Hunt. The 
 abusive articles on The Cockney School of Poets 
 that defiled the pages of Blackwood's were provoked 
 chiefly by Hunt, and their bitterest denunciations 
 levelled at him. Yet I think that Hunt, while 
 justly angered by them, took a secret satisfaction at 
 being recognized as the head and sponsor of a new 
 school of poets. It pleased him to believe that he 
 
 222 
 
LEIGH HUNT 
 
 was now suffering as the leader of a new and liberal 
 movement in poetry as well as in politics. 
 
 The cool reception given to his own verses even 
 by the partial judgment of his friends ought to have 
 shaken his conviction that he was himself a poet. 
 Perhaps it did. At all events, after 1819, he aban- 
 doned poetry for a number of years, and, indeed, 
 never after attempted anything ambitious in verse. 
 Late in that year 181 9, however, he tried his hand 
 at something he had found he could do much better. 
 He set up a paper made up mostly of essays 
 written by himself with occasional contributions 
 from others, and now and then some choice passages 
 selectedjirom an old or little known author. The 
 Indicator, as he called this periodical, was issued 
 weekly, and ran for sixty-six numbers. It contains 
 the best specimens of that familiar, chatty essay 
 which Hunt had begun to write in the Reflector, and 
 which he wrote better than any one else. He always 
 looked back upon it with peculiar fondness, and 
 loved to remember that such a paper had pleased 
 Lamb, and another Shelley, and yet another Hazlitt. 
 
 Through all these years, as always, Hunt was 
 sadly in need of money. At some time not long after 
 his liberation from prison Shelley had given him 
 outright fourteen hundred pounds to extricate him 
 from his debts; but, as he naively says, "I was not 
 extricated, for I had not yet learned to be careful.' ' 
 
 223 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 Harassed by these difficulties, increased now by the 
 needs of a growing family and the ill-health of his 
 wife, and finding the strain upon his own energies 
 caused by writing nearly the whole of the Examiner 
 and the Indicator was getting unendurable, he gave 
 . up both papers in 1821, and entered upon a new and 
 very ill-starred enterprise. He accepted the invi- 
 tation of Shelley, then in Italy, to join him and 
 Byron there in the conduct of a new review, called 
 % the Liberal, to be edited in Italy but printed by John 
 Hunt in London. It is easy to see that the scheme 
 must have been attractive to Hunt. He accounted 
 Shelley his best friend — with good reason. He had 
 longed for years to see Italy. And as for the pro- 
 posed review, he thought the name of Byron, then at 
 the height of his fame, would assure its success. But 
 the plan was unlucky from the start. A week after 
 his arrival, Shelley met his tragic death, and Hunt, 
 practically penniless, was thrown upon the rather 
 cool generosity of Byron. Byron was then living 
 at Pisa with La Guiccioli and his very nondescript 
 menage; and for a time the Hunts attempted to 
 lodge under the same roof. But Byron found Hunt 
 limp and helpless, Mrs. Hunt and the children 
 vulgar; while Hunt found Byron exacting and 
 penurious, and Mrs. Hunt would have nothing to do 
 with his odious establishment. Obviously the rela- 
 tions were impossible. The Liberal was started; 
 224 
 
LEIGH HUNT 
 
 but Byron, never having cared much for it, now 
 cared nothing, and would contribute nothing save 
 matter that Murray didn't dare to publish, and John 
 Hunt got into prison again for publishing. The first 
 three numbers contained Shelley's fine translation 
 of Goethe's Walpurgis Nacht and some other 
 beautiful fragments he had left, and Hazlitt's 
 inimitable paper My First Acquaintance with Poets; 
 but Hunt was left without further assistance, and 
 with the fourth number the Liberal died. Not long 
 after Byron started on his Greek expedition, and 
 Hunt was left to shift for himself. He had not money 
 enough to take his large family back to England, and 
 stayed on two years more in Florence, supported — 
 Heaven knows how ! Probably by his contributions 
 to London papers, with generous contributions from 
 Mrs. Shelley. Finally, in 1825, a London publisher 
 advanced money enough to bring him back, and the 
 homesick wanderer found himself again in the fields 
 of his beloved Hampstead. 
 
 This chapter of his life would, however, not have 
 been so very unfortunate if it had ended there. But 
 two years later, finding it necessary to furnish some- 
 thing to the publisher, Colburn, in return for the 
 money advanced him, Hunt sat down to write the 
 story of his Italian life. He had intended at first to 
 make it only that ; but as all the world was full just 
 then of the fame of the great poet so recently dead, 
 Q 225 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 he decided to alter and enlarge his book into an 
 Account of Lord Byron and his Principal Contem- 
 poraries. And as this universal grief and praise 
 jarred a little on his own memories, he could not 
 resist the temptation to give the world a picture of 
 Lord Byron as he had known him. It was the worst 
 mistake he ever made. In the preface to the first 
 edition he confesses — or professes — that his first 
 inclination on finishing the book was to put it in the 
 fire; it would have been better for him had he fol- 
 lowed that inclination. Not that the book is not 
 true enough. Doubtless most of the things said in 
 it about Byron are entirely true, — there were 
 meannesses enough in Byron ; but it was not 
 necessary to say them, and it was peculiarly unbecom- 
 ing in Hunt to say them. For, however ungracious 
 his temper may have been, Byron had certainly laid 
 Hunt under very material obligation. By Hunt's 
 own confession he had paid Hunt's passage to 
 Italy, he had lodged him in his own palace, he had 
 paid him at one time or another three or four hun- 
 dred pounds, he had relinquished to him all share 
 in the profits of the Liberal. After this Hunt should 
 certainly not have felt at liberty to write a book full 
 of petty chatter and scandal — that Byron dreaded 
 getting fat, that Byron couldn't bear to see women 
 eat, that Byron had no beard, and some women 
 liked him better for it and some didn't like him so 
 226 
 
LEIGH HUNT 
 
 well, with infinitude of rubbish of that sort. And if 
 Byron in his moments of vexation had said some 
 nasty things to Hunt, Hunt now contrived to say 
 some very nasty things in reply. To charge Byron 
 with licentiousness was only to echo the charge of the 
 world; but to say that Byron was stingily careful 
 that his pleasures should not cost him too much, — 
 that "no Englishman ever contrived to practise 
 more rakery and more economy at one and the same 
 time," — this was ingeniously cruel. And for Mr. 
 Leigh Hunt to say that Lord Byron never liked to 
 pay a debt, — that was effrontery rising to the sub- 
 lime. No man is a hero to his valet ; but if the valet 
 attempt to write the life of the hero, we know it is 
 not the hero whose reputation is likely to suffer. It 
 should be said to the credit of Hunt, however, that 
 although he was at first very angry at the contemp- 
 tuous criticism the book received and talked back 
 badly in the preface to the second edition, he did 
 afterward come to see his error and acknowledged 
 it very handsomely in the Autobiography, twenty 
 years later. 
 
 The rest of his story may be passed over more 
 briefly. He had yet thirty years of life, but after 
 the publication of the Byron in 1828, he settled 
 down to the work of magazinist and reviewer. 
 In the next twenty-five years he set up several other 
 
 227 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 periodicals, — eight of them, — for which he fur- 
 nished most or all of the copy. His various books 
 issued from time to time, The Seer, The Town, 
 Table Talk, Men, Women, and Books, were made 
 up of essays selected from these and his earlier 
 journals. Although we think of him as an easy- 
 going dilettante, he must sometimes have toiled 
 terribly. For example, from September 4, 1830, 
 to February 13, 1832, he ran a daily paper, and wrote 
 it all himself. To be sure, it was of four pages only ; 
 but if any one will propose to himself the task of writ- 
 ing four small folio pages of print six days in a week, 
 for a year and a half, he will not be surprised that the 
 work, as Hunt says, "nearly killed me." But after 
 about this time the sky began to brighten. He did 
 not meddle with politics any longer; but after the 
 Reform measures of 1832, politics seemed to be 
 coming his way, and a good many younger men 
 remembered his services to liberalism in the days 
 when liberalism had been very unpopular. Even 
 his old enemies softened to him. Blackwood's, 
 the worst of them all, invited him to become a con- 
 tributor and made amends for the hard words of 
 fifteen years before in Wilson's famous sentence: 
 "The animosities are mortal, but the humanities 
 live forever." His own temper became more 
 mellowed, his judgments broader and more urbane. 
 The best of his old friends were gone, Shelley, 
 228 
 
LEIGH HUNT 
 
 Keats, Hazlitt, Lamb; but after about 1835 he 
 enjoyed the acquaintance of a new generation of 
 journalists and men of letters who all had a generous 
 feeling for him and didn't take him too seriously. 
 His best friends in this group were Macaulay, John 
 Forster, and Carlyle. It is a little strange that the 
 rugged sage of Chelsea, who had no patience with the 
 aesthetic type and regarded such a man as Keats 
 "a chosen vessel of hell," should have taken so 
 kindly to his shiftless neighbor in the next street. 
 Yet in spite of his contempt for Hunt's hugger- 
 mugger housekeeping, it is evident that his rigor 
 did thaw up before this vivacious little man, ''chat- 
 ting idly melodious as bird on bough," who came in 
 every other night to hear Mrs. Carlyle sing old Scotch 
 songs and share the evening oatmeal. "A man 
 of genius," says Carlyle, "in a very strict sense of 
 that word ... of graceful fertility, of clearness, lov- 
 ingness, truthfulness, of childlike open character." 
 And, in turn, better or truer thing was never said of 
 the real Thomas Carlyle than Leigh Hunt said: "I 
 believe that what Mr. Carlyle loves better than his 
 fault-finding with all its eloquence is the face of any 
 human creature that looks suffering and loving and 
 sincere." And though it has been both affirmed and 
 denied, I have little doubt that Jane Welsh Carlyle 
 is the Jenny of that most dainty and rememberable 
 bit of verse Hunt ever wrote, — 
 
 229 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 " Jenny kissed me when we met, 
 
 Jumping from the chair she sat in; 
 Time, you thief who love to get 
 
 Sweets into your list, put that in: 
 Say I'm weary, say I'm sad, 
 
 Say that health and wealth have miss'd me, 
 Say I'm growing old, but add, 
 Jenny kiss'd me!" 
 
 The last ten years of his life were passed in com- 
 parative ease. It is true he never gained any mas- 
 tery of the economies of life; but an annuity of a 
 hundred and twenty pounds from the Shelley family 
 and a pension of two hundred pounds from the 
 Civil List made that mastery needless. His bland 
 optimism grew on him in his declining years, and he 
 diffused a mild glow of universal benevolence and 
 hopefulness. He had made up all his old quarrels, 
 forgotten all his old resentments. The one ungener- 
 ous reference to him in those years, the too faithful 
 portrait of Harold Skimpole in Dickens' Bleak 
 House, it is said he alone of all readers did not 
 recognize until it was pointed out to him. His 
 fame, though far more lowly than the dreams of his 
 youth had promised, was assured. Everybody 
 knew him, and everybody liked him. There was 
 hardly an artist or man of letters among his con- 
 temporaries who had not some kindly word for the 
 sprightly, bright-eyed old poet and critic who, in this 
 present evil world, never lost his cheerful assurance 
 230 
 
LEIGH HUNT 
 
 that all things are turning out best for every- 
 body. He died August 28, 1839, at the age of 
 seventy-five. 
 
 II 
 
 After the lapse of half a century the man still 
 keeps a pleasant place in our memory. He advo- 
 cated good causes always, with however much un- 
 wisdom; he always thought well of human nature, 
 — too well, — and his easy, nonchalant cheerfulness 
 has doubtless contributed something to the gladness 
 of the world. On the other hand, it must be ad- 
 mitted that it is impossible to have the highest 
 respect either for his opinions or his temper. The 
 great man cannot take life so easily as Leigh Hunt 
 always took it. Optimism like his means that the 
 optimist cannot or will not see life as it is, and feel 
 all the weight of this unintelligible world. Hunt 
 says that once or twice in his career he was troubled 
 with hypochondria, which took the form of despon- 
 dent wrestling with insoluble moral problems, the 
 origin of evil being a nightmare that gave him 
 especial agony. But he soon decided that the 
 trouble was due to his liver; in his normal moods 
 he was quite indifferent to such disquieting questions. 
 The fundamental defect in Hunt's moral nature, 
 I take it, was an almost entire lack of the sense of 
 justice, in the relations of men to each other and to a 
 
 231 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 Higher Power. It was a matter of familiar comment 
 among his friends that he could not distinguish 
 between a loan and a gift, and never thought of re- 
 paying either one. A promissory note was an ever- 
 lasting mystery to him. He says in the Life of 
 Byron: "I have some peculiar notions on the sub- 
 ject of money . . . which will be found to involve 
 considerable differences of opinion with the commu- 
 nity. . . . Among other things in which I differ 
 in point of theory I have not that horror of being 
 under obligation which is thought an essential 
 refinement in money matters." Though he adds, 
 with unconscious humor, that in practice he has often 
 been obliged to conform to the usage of society. 
 But he seemed to have just as little conception of 
 obligation of every other sort. For lack of it, his 
 ethics were a muddle of mawkish sentiment and 
 lukewarm benevolence. He himself professed, in his 
 own words, " to partake of none of the ordinary 
 notions of merit and demerit with regard to any 
 one," and thought himself "neither a bit better or 
 worse than any other man." He who thinks so, 
 or pretends to think so, disqualifies himself at once 
 for any moral criticism or any just view of the great 
 facts of human life. A theologian would say he had 
 no sense of sin — and the theologian would be right. 
 He had, instead of that, a dread and hatred of all 
 pain, by whomsoever inflicted and for whatsoever 
 232 
 
LEIGH HUNT 
 
 reason. He disliked good old Izaak Walton be- 
 cause he found cruel pleasure in catching little 
 fishes; and he disliked the Jehovah of the Old 
 Testament because He threatens to punish thieves, 
 and murderers, and adulterers, and that sort of 
 folk. To punishment he was mildly but firmly 
 opposed ; it was a form of payment. Dante, though 
 a great poet, he conceived to be "one of the most 
 childishly mistaken men that ever lived, a bigoted 
 and exasperated man," and he chastises what he 
 calls the " infernal opinions " of the great Italian 
 with much ardor. He was often concerned over 
 the intemperate earnestness of good people, and in 
 his earlier years wrote for the Examiner a series of 
 papers on The Folly and Danger of Methodism 
 that are rather amusing. Later in life, he prepared 
 a little pocket volume — which John Forster got 
 printed for him — containing his own creed and 
 ritual, and entitled, Christianism, Belief and Un- 
 belief Reconciled. The title may perhaps remind 
 us of Carlyle's scornful proposal for a Heaven and 
 Hell Amalgamation Society; but Hunt's method 
 of reconciliation is very simple — you have only to 
 believe what you like and disbelieve everything else, 
 and the thing is done. All which, of course, only 
 proves that Hunt had no conception how infinitely 
 serious a thing is this human life of ours, and how 
 perplexed and difficult, in the face of all its mystery, 
 
 2 33 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 is any deep belief at all. He shared his friend 
 Shelley's refusal of all law and penalty, and Shelley's 
 confidence in the power of benevolent impulse; 
 but he never felt Shelley's pathetic despair, or 
 Shelley's tragic conviction that the world is out of 
 joint. 
 
 It was this very shallowness, both of opinion and 
 feeling, joined with a certain bland assurance of 
 manner, that made him often a difficult opponent 
 in controversy. His critics charged him, and with 
 some justice, of inability to understand the com- 
 plexity of the questions he decided so jauntily, of a 
 flippancy in the treatment of great passions that 
 often passed into vulgarity, of a lack of reverence 
 before great truths that often amounted to something 
 like blasphemy. Yet he always took himself very 
 seriously, and was sure, if possible, to assume the 
 attitude of amiable but injured virtue. "If I have 
 any two good qualities," he says complacently, 
 "to set off against my defects, it is that I am not 
 vindictive, and that I speak the truth." I think he 
 did mean to speak the truth, as far as he saw it, and 
 he was not vindictive; but he had a habit of mind 
 far more irritating than vindictiveness — the habit 
 of cheerful endurance of wrongs purely imaginary. 
 The most utterly exasperating thing a man can do 
 is to meekly forgive you for an injury you never com- 
 mitted ; and this treatment Hunt sometimes accorded 
 234 
 
LEIGH HUNT 
 
 to his critics as well as to those people who were 
 guilty of supposing he would pay the money he 
 owed. 
 
 The charge the enemies of Hunt used to make 
 oftenest was that both in his life and in his writings 
 he was an under-bred, vulgar person. "I wish," 
 said Napier, "that Hunt would write a gentlemanly 
 article for the Edinburgh" That was a charge 
 likely to be made against anybody of pronounced 
 democratic notions in the England of the early 
 nineteenth century; and as made against Hunt, it 
 was never exactly just. Yet Hunt's character 
 always did lack distinction. There was nothing 
 robust or severe about him. He was a great deal of 
 a sentimentalist. He notes that the first words 
 he heard in Italy were "fiore" and "donne" — 
 flowers and ladies. In Florence he congratulated 
 himself that he was lodged in the Via Belle Donne, 
 till he found it was very nasty and very noisy. The 
 one English prose-writer he admired most was 
 Sterne; my uncle Toby he pronounced the ideal 
 Christian, and Sterne himself the wisest man since 
 Shakespeare. Any man who could say that must 
 himself be something less than a gentleman. The 
 truth is, sentimentalism is always vulgar. No man 
 can live so largely among the mere prettinesses of 
 life, indifferent to its noblest joys and noblest pains, 
 without losing something of that power of vigorous 
 
 235 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 and manly judgment upon which good taste — I had 
 almost said good morals — depends. 
 
 Ill 
 
 If the critic is charged with paying too much atten- 
 tion to Hunt the man, he may reply there is no 
 better way of understanding Hunt the writer. For 
 all his literary work shows the same charm and the 
 same limitations that we have found in his character. 
 As to his poetry, there is no need to say much. He 
 was unable to portray or to appreciate genuine pas- 
 sion ; he had little sympathy with the more strenuous 
 forms of action and suffering. All the higher reaches 
 of poetry were, therefore, inaccessible to him. That 
 is the cause of his failure in the most ambitious of 
 his poems, The Story of Rimini. To retell that 
 story of Paolo and Francesca, told once for all with 
 the simplicity and reticence of extremest pathos, is 
 a daring venture for any poet; but for Leigh Hunt 
 to attempt it was the sheerest folly. He tried to 
 give to that most poignant of tragedies a certain 
 gentle tenderness and grace; the results, at the su- 
 preme points of the narrative, are nothing less than 
 astounding. For example, Hunt's version of that 
 scene where together the lovers read of Lancelot 
 begins thus : — 
 
 "So sat she fixed; and so observed was she 
 Of one who at the door stood tenderly, 
 236 
 
LEIGH HUNT 
 
 Paulo, — who from a window seeing her 
 
 Go straight across the lawn, and guessing where, 
 
 Had thought she was in tears, and found, that day, 
 
 His usual efforts vain to keep away. 
 
 'May I come in ?' said he: — it made her start — 
 
 That smiling voice ; she colored, pressed her heart 
 
 A moment, as for breath, and then with free 
 
 And usual tone said, 'O yes, certainly.'" 
 
 How any human being could first read his Dante and 
 then write such lines as these, is more than I can 
 comprehend. It is one of the most incredible lapses 
 into pure banality in English verse. And there are 
 other passages almost as bad. Wherever the feeling 
 should be intense and concentrated, he dilutes it 
 into sentimental commonplace. As Laertes says in 
 the play — 
 
 "Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself, 
 He turns to favor and to prettiness." 
 
 The only parts of the poem, therefore, that have 
 any merits are the unessential parts, descriptive and 
 decorative — gardens and processions, and that 
 sort of thing. The critics professed to be scandal- 
 ized by the immorality of the poem; which was 
 absurd, especially so in a public that could accept 
 with only mild and half-admiring expostulation 
 Byron's worst verses. Indeed, Hunt had changed 
 the story a little so that, as he said, he might teach 
 a useful lesson as to the fatal results, not of passion 
 
 237 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 in the lovers, but of deceit in the elder brother. The 
 poem is moral enough; but it does show instances 
 of a curious sort of offence against good taste found 
 too often in all Hunt's writing, prose as well as 
 verse. Like Sterne, whom he admired so much, 
 he had a kind of indelicate delicacy, an affectation 
 of innocence, that often passed into mawkishness 
 and sometimes into pruriency. 
 
 The most important thing, however, to be said 
 about the Story of Rimini is that it was the first 
 considerable attempt in the nineteenth century to 
 revive the rhyming ten-syllable couplet in an essen- 
 tially new form. The lines are run on, the pauses 
 are varied, the rigidity of the couplet is entirely 
 broken up. Hunt said that he owed the suggestion 
 of the verse to Dryden; it is obvious, too, that 
 he was influenced by Chaucer, whose fluency and 
 naivete he tried to reproduce. In the preface to the 
 collected edition of his poems, issued in 1832, he 
 remarks : " It seems to me that, beautiful as are the 
 compositions which the English language possesses 
 in the heroic couplet, both by deceased and living 
 writers, it remains for some poet hereafter to per- 
 fect the versification by making a just compromise 
 between the inharmonious freedom of our old poets 
 in general and the regularity of Dryden ; who, noble 
 as his management of it is, beats after all too much 
 upon the rhyme." This was what Hunt attempted 
 
 238 
 
LEIGH HUNT 
 
 to do. His attempt was not very successful ; it was 
 impossible it should be with a story of intense passion 
 like the Rimini. But he must be given the credit 
 of being the first to see and state the possibilities 
 of this essentially new metrical form. Keats, who 
 unquestionably learned it from Hunt, used it im- 
 mediately in all his early verses, and with signal 
 success, a little later, in the Lamia; and several 
 more recent poets — notably William Morris — have 
 proved how well it is adapted to easy, deliberate, 
 highly decorated narrative poetry. 
 
 Some of Hunt's other and less pretentious narrative 
 poems, like the Hero and Leander, are better than 
 the Rimini; but in them all he is at his best when 
 passion and action are at a mimimum, and he can 
 find opportunity for the play of a leisurely fancy. 
 Among English poets his favorite was Spenser, in 
 whose land of dreams there is no passion and no 
 real action. Throughout his work there are passages 
 of genuinely beautiful description, and occasionally 
 — not often — single lines of startling beauty of 
 image. But, on the other hand, he had a weakness 
 for sentimental and affected epithet, — which he very 
 unfortunately imparted to Keats, — and his taste is 
 never quite firm and sure. From his tempera- 
 ment and surroundings one might have expected 
 him to write more verse like the charming rondeau 
 quoted just now, Jenny Kissed Me, short occa- 
 
 239 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 sional lyrics of love, or compliment, or playful 
 satire. But he did not. His muse was too garru- 
 lous and gossiping for that. His satire lacks point; 
 his humor lacks sparkle ; his line lacks finish. Only 
 three of his shorter poems are now really alive, and 
 in each of these some serious feeling gives sincerity 
 and restraint to the phrase: the Abou ben Adhem, 
 his one familiar poem; the sonnet on the Nile, his 
 one noble poem; and the Lines to T. L. H., Six 
 Years Old, during a Sickness, beginning 
 
 "Sleep breathes at last from out thee, 
 My little patient boy." 
 
 This last poem is the best example of the character- 
 istic gentleness of Hunt, for once expressing itself 
 without any false note. It is enough to prove that 
 there was a genuine, if slender, vein of poetry in 
 the man. Of course T. L. H. is his son Thornton. 
 For Hunt as critic, there is much more to be said. 
 He had the first qualification of the critic, he was a 
 lover of books. Human life interested him chiefly 
 as stuff to be made up into literature. That was one 
 reason why he could not be a poet — he did not like 
 life at first hand. With reference to nature, also, he 
 had much the same feeling. It was Charles James 
 Fox, I believe, who once said, "There is only one 
 thing in life more pleasant than to lie under an apple 
 tree in June with a book ; and that is to lie under an 
 240 
 
LEIGH HUNT 
 
 apple tree in June without a book." Hunt would 
 always have wished the book. Indeed he seemed to 
 care for only so much of nature as might serve for 
 pleasant setting for his reading; he had no use for 
 the solitudes and solemnities. No doubt this liking 
 to look at all things through the spectacles of books 
 may have deprived him of that freshness of view 
 which comes from bringing everything to the test 
 of life ; but, at all events, it gave to his criticism the 
 zest of eager personal interest. He is in love with 
 his theme. He smacks his lips over some delicious 
 passage of verse as if taste were to him literally a 
 delight of sense. And he has in rather unusual 
 degree the gift to impart this delight to the reader. 
 Some paragraphs of his on Spenser, for example, are 
 among the best things ever said of Spenser. 
 
 His criticism is doubtless rambling and discur- 
 sive. He selects favorite passages and flits from 
 flower to flower. His appreciation, moreover, was 
 limited. He liked beauty, grace, luxuriance, repose ; 
 strenuous action, passion, anything rugged or sub- 
 lime disconcerted him. In style he was inclined to 
 prefer the ornate to the chaste, captivating beauty 
 of form rather than a more severe or interior charm. 
 Naturally, therefore, he was a better critic of manner 
 than of matter, of poetry than of prose. Further- 
 more, as he had no constructive ability himself, 
 so he had little sense of it in others. He takes his 
 s 241 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 literature piecemeal, and does not appreciate the 
 larger, more structural virtues of a great work of 
 literary art. Similarly, he is not always able to per- 
 ceive rightly the essential, distinguishing qualities 
 of an author's genius, or to see how the particular 
 excellences he points out so well are related to the 
 author's personality. For example, he says of the 
 poet he ought to have known best, Shelley, that if he 
 had lived, he would have been the greatest drama- 
 tist since Shakespeare. This is about as mistaken a 
 verdict as could possibly be pronounced on a genius 
 so thoroughly self-involved and lyrical as Shelley's. 
 But on the same page, speaking of Shelley's style, 
 Hunt says: "Nobody has a style so orphic and pri- 
 meval. His page is full of mountains, seas, and 
 skies, of light and darkness and the seasons and all 
 the elements of our being, as if Nature herself had 
 written it." Such a statement, though somewhat 
 over-rhetorical, certainly is admirably suggestive of 
 Shelley's manner; but Hunt should have seen that 
 this "orphic and primeval" style could never belong 
 to a dramatist; it is the style of the lyrist, whose 
 soul seems to lie open to every breath of inspiration 
 "that under heaven is blown." So Hunt says of 
 Keats that, had he lived, "he would doubtless have 
 written in the vein of Hyperion," rising superior to 
 the " languishments of love" that made the Eve of 
 St. Agnes so over-rich and languorous. But Hunt, 
 
 242 
 
LEIGH HUNT 
 
 who knew the whole course of Keats' life, from 
 its beginning to its end, ought to have remembered 
 that all his latest work, the Lamia, the Eve of 
 St. Mark, the La Belle Dame sans Merci, showed 
 no tendency to the development of a classic and 
 chastened imagination, but rather a preference for 
 the rich and melancholy studies of mediaevalism. 
 His genius, thoroughly romantic, would in all prob- 
 ability, like that of Rossetti, have grown more and 
 more in love with the mystic half-lights of the middle 
 
 But Hunt's detached critical remarks are almost 
 always incisive and illuminating. Thus he says 
 of Milton, "He had not that faith in things that 
 Homer and Dante had, apart from the intervention 
 of words;" that is excellent as a suggestion of the 
 mode of Milton's imagination when compared with 
 that of the two other great epic poets. He works 
 himself into a rage over the doctrines of Dante's 
 poem, declaring it (in a theological point of view) no 
 better than the dream of a hypochondriac savage; 
 yet he was acutely sensitive to the dramatic power of 
 Dante, and you will look far to find a better expres- 
 sion of the wonderful sense of reality above the 
 actual, the dream vividness of Dante, than Hunt 
 gives in these few words: — 
 
 "Whatever he paints he throws, as it were, upon 
 its own powers; as though an artist should draw 
 
 243 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 figures that started into life and proceeded to action 
 for themselves, frightening their creator. Every 
 action, word, and look of these creatures becomes 
 full of sensibility and suggestion. The invisible 
 is at the back of the visible; darkness becomes pal- 
 pable; silence describes a character, nay, forms the 
 most striking part of a story ; a word acts as a flash 
 of lightning, which displays some gloomy neighbor- 
 hood, where a tower is standing with dreadful faces 
 at the windows ; or where at your feet, full of eternal 
 voices, one abyss is beheld dropping out of another 
 in the lurid light of torment. . . . Dante has the 
 minute probabilities of a Defoe in the midst of the 
 loftiest poetry." 
 
 Hunt's critical writing, however, is not all desultory 
 and empirical. His contributions to literary theory 
 are by no means insignificant. He had considerable 
 power of analysis and definition, and he had thought 
 more carefully upon the grounds of literary excel- 
 lence than upon any other subject. He took espe- 
 cial interest in the essential nature and the technique 
 of poetry. The preface to the volume of 1832, 
 from which I just now quoted his statement as to the 
 modification of the heroic couplet, contains an ad- 
 mirable discussion of the essentials of poetic matter 
 and form; while his fuller treatment of the subject, 
 ten years later, in the essay entitled What is 
 Poetry ? is, on the whole, as satisfactory an answer 
 244 
 
LEIGH HUNT 
 
 to that difficult question as any more recent writer 
 has been able to give us. To be sure, Hunt does not 
 delve very deeply in his subject, and he is afraid of an 
 exhaustive treatment — for which we may be thank- 
 ful; but the essay is full of the most acute and dis- 
 criminating remark. His discussion of the value 
 of musical sensibility in verse, of the difference 
 between smoothness and sweetness, of the effect of 
 variety in accent, of alliteration and assonance, his 
 distinction between the natural and the prosaic, — 
 which very neatly punctures the fallacy in Words- 
 worth's famous preface, — these, among other pas- 
 sages, may be cited in proof of the delicacy and jus- 
 tice of his taste when dealing with general principles. 
 The whole paper is very suggestive; and it is very 
 entertaining. It serves as an introduction to the 
 volume he called Imagination and Fancy, the rest 
 of the book being made up of a body of selections 
 from our poetry illustrating the principles of the essay 
 with a running comment. It was natural for Hunt 
 to consider the imagination as the faculty that em- 
 bellishes and interprets, rather than in its higher 
 creative functions; indeed, it was almost inevitable 
 he should do so, if he was to exhibit it in brief selec- 
 tions. He is, therefore, led to lay perhaps undue 
 stress upon the imagery and music of poetry as com- 
 pared with its higher values of thought and feeling. 
 Yet, on the whole, I do not know any volume better 
 
 245 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 fitted to guide and stimulate a growing taste; there 
 is hardly anything better to put into the hands of a 
 young student of poetry. A companion volume, 
 made up in the same way, illustrating wit and hu- 
 mor, is almost as good. Both books were written 
 after Hunt was sixty years old; it is to be regretted 
 that he did not live to carry out his purpose of add- 
 ing to these volumes three more, treating respec- 
 tively of action and passion, of contemplation, and 
 of song. For his taste grew steadily broader and 
 sounder, and in his later years he lived to appreciate 
 very justly authors — Wordsworth and Scott, for 
 example — that in his youth he had sadly misjudged. 
 But far the greater part of Hunt's work was in the 
 fornf of the short periodical essay. He had fallen in 
 love, as we have seen, with the eighteenth-century 
 essayists while in his early teens ; and his first purely 
 literary venture, — if we except the juvenile poems, — 
 the Reflector, issued in 1810, was modelled closely 
 upon Addison and Goldsmith. Here, again, I think 
 Hunt may be credited with rejuvenating an old 
 literary form. For the Reflector was the first really 
 successful attempt in the nineteenth century to 
 revive the light periodical essay, after its ponderous 
 mishandling by Johnson in the Rambler and Idler. 
 We shall remember that Hunt's work of this kind 
 preceded that of Lamb and Hazlitt ; indeed it was in 
 periodicals set up by Hunt that both Lamb and Haz- 
 
 246 
 
LEIGH HUNT 
 
 litt found a medium for the publication of some of 
 their best work. When, a little later, the magazines 
 began to appear, there was a demand for this sort of 
 writing — as there has been ever since. We, perhaps, 
 in the twentieth century, think ourselves a little too 
 earnest for this kind of literature; yet if any man 
 can write it as well, for example, as Thackeray wrote 
 it in his Roundabout Papers, he will be sure of 
 readers to-day, if not of fame to-morrow. But no 
 kind of writing above mere journalism is more 
 ephemeral. Not only the Rambler and the Idler, but 
 the Bee and the Citizen of the World, and even the 
 Taller and the Spectator, it is to be feared, now repose 
 undisturbed upon the top shelves; and Hunt's Indi- 
 cators and Companions have doubtless joined them 
 there. It is only some remarkable dexterity of style 
 or some unique humor or force of personality that 
 can keep such work from oblivion. Hunt had neither 
 of these qualifications. His gossiping papers are 
 very pleasant reading, if you have time on your 
 hands; but they have no compelling charm. After 
 all we have been told of the fascinating converse of 
 the man, we are surprised to find his wit has so little 
 keenness, and his humor is only often a playful, half- 
 patronizing familiarity. Then, again, he is a little 
 too bookish. More than half his papers are nothing 
 but echoes of his reading — old stories retold, bits 
 of legend or romance, scraps from his favorite au- 
 
 247 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 thors. And even those drawn directly from the life 
 of the street or the fields seem to lack that humorous 
 observation of men and things at first hand that makes 
 the papers of Steele, for example, so racy. If Hunt 
 is writing on coaches, or May-day or London fog, 
 he is sure to tell you what the poets and historians 
 think about it, and may give you a score of quota- 
 tions in three pages. Nor has Hunt the power to 
 show by some sudden flash of imagination the subtle 
 connection of the simplest things with the most seri- 
 ous, as Lamb can do, or to pass almost insensibly 
 on any familiar occasion into a train of lofty and sol- 
 emn revery, as Hazlitt so frequently does. A com- 
 parison of his work in this respect with Hazlitt' s will 
 show how inferior is Hunt's. He never has Hazlitt's 
 marvellous acuteness of analysis; he never has 
 Hazlitt's serious, half-mournful, but large and in- 
 spiring tone of reflection, Hazlitt's imagination and 
 passion, Hazlitt's rhythm and distinction of manner. 
 Yet, after all, it is ungenerous to find fault with a 
 man for not doing better what he has done so well. 
 For, leaving out his second-hand stories, and admit- 
 ting that his humor is often insipid and his sentiment 
 wilted, we could still select from Hunt's writing a 
 goodly volume of essays hard to surpass in their kind. 
 They are made up of trifles; but then life is made 
 up of trifles. We need not withhold some cordial 
 liking from that kind of literature which does not 
 248 
 
LEIGH HUNT 
 
 attempt to arouse or inspire, but rather to express the 
 familiar pleasures that cheer, and the familiar trials 
 that chasten, the hours of every day. Hunt doesn't 
 show us new things, or even new meanings in the old 
 things. He talks with us as we talk with each other 
 around the fire on winter evenings, of our habits, our 
 likings, our prejudices, our tasks, our books, our 
 clothes; about taxes or the weather; about the last 
 play we have seen or the last pretty girl we have met, 
 — for Hunt at sixty, with nine children, was still a 
 youngster, — or, as the evening wears and our mood 
 grows a shade more serious, about our comforts, 
 our plans, our fancies, our friends, and — for Hunt 
 was always more a benedict than a bachelor — about 
 all the snug domesticities of home. He makes no 
 exactions upon your thought, and he seldom invades 
 your emotions beyond that outer circle friends may 
 approach but may not cross. Such papers do not 
 rank very high as literature. One has a comfortable 
 feeling that he can leave them alone, if he likes, 
 without endangering his reputation as a well-read 
 man. Yet you may turn over the pages of cur best 
 magazines of to-day without finding much editorial 
 writing that, for interest, might not well be exchanged 
 for these little papers of Leigh Hunt. 
 
 His name not unfitly closes the short list of writers 
 considered in this volume. His career was longer 
 than that of any other, for his first book appeared in 
 
 249 
 
A GROUP OF ENGLISH ESSAYISTS 
 
 1801 and his last in 1855. Perhaps in this long life 
 he had neither done nor suffered quite so much as he 
 himself, when near its close, was inclined to believe. 
 He was not of the stuff that scorns delights and lives 
 laborious days. He had solved no problems, in- 
 spired no heroisms, written no masterpieces. But he 
 did something in early life for the cause of civil 
 liberty; he did more, I think, in his later years to 
 quicken and widen the love of good literature. And 
 through all that half-century, by three generations of 
 friends, he was known as a genial, cheery man, who 
 never felt the tedium of life, was hopeful under all 
 its discouragements, impatient of all harshness, fond 
 of all gentle and beautiful things. Doubtless he was 
 too self-indulgent to be the ideal philanthropist; yet 
 we may, with no fulsome exaggeration, accord to him 
 the praise he himself would most have coveted, 
 phrased in his own best words : — 
 
 "Write me as one who loved his fellow-men." 
 
 250 
 
Essays on Modern Novelists 
 By WILLIAM LYON PHELPS, 
 
 M.A. Harvard, Ph.D. Yale ; formerly Instructor in English at 
 Harvard ; Lampson Professor of English Literature at Yale. 
 
 Ready in January, igio 
 
 Every reader of contemporary literature has found 
 at some time or other the need for critical guidance 
 in estimating the work of men still living. Critics 
 are rarely abreast of the time and there is nothing 
 so difficult to obtain as authoritative information on 
 events of the day. For this reason the brilliant book 
 in which Professor Phelps has devoted himself to the 
 writings of modern novelists will be of inestimable 
 service to all who desire to form a really sound 
 judgment upon the literature of the day. The 
 writers discussed by Professor Phelps are William 
 De Morgan, Thomas Hardy, William Dean Howells, 
 Bjornstjerne Bjornson, Mark Twain, Henryk Sienkie- 
 wicz, Hermann Sudermann, Alfred Ollivant, Robert 
 Louis Stevenson, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Rudyard 
 Kipling and the author of "Lorna Doone." 
 Of these writers Professor Phelps gives illuminating 
 criticisms, setting forth their essential qualities. 
 Many of them are still looking to the future more 
 than to the past, and all of them are the men and 
 women who have created the literature of the period. 
 The work also contains two essays, on " Novels as a 
 University Study" and "The Teacher's Attitude 
 toward Contemporary Literature," and concludes 
 with a comprehensive bibliography and appendix. 
 
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