his fugitive verse under the title Album Verses. Instinctive delicacy of workmanship, sincere pathos and pure and artless emotion, give Lamb a unique place among those poets who, in occasional verse of an unpretentious order, offer, from time to time, a clear and unruffled reflection of 'the light that never was on sea and land.' Alone of his lyrics, The Old Familiar Faces, written under severe emotional stress, is immortal; but Album Verses contains a number of sonnets and simple lyrics whose charm, less compelling than the poetic prose of Dream-Children, nevertheless springs from the same fount of reminiscence and consciousness of the mingled pleasure and pain of mortal joys. His sense of poetic style reaches a climax in the chiming and haunting lines of the sonnet The Gipsy's Malison. Less 'curiously and perversely elaborate,' to use his own phrase, are the triplets In the Album of Lucy Barton and In His Own Album, and the pieces in octosyllabic couplets, in which he was indebted to Marvell and other seventeenth century poets and happily imitated their natural fluency. It is a characteristic of Lamb's humour that he could indulge in doggerel without producing that sense of incongruity which is often the fate of the lighter efforts of the great masters of poetry. Verses like the famous Going or Gone do not rise from the merely formal point of view above the plane of Keats's lines on Teignmouth or Oxford; but they are filled with pathos and a sense of the irrevocable, and the union of laughter and tears, conspicuous in Elia, is fully achieved in this simple piece of verse.

Lamb's letters from his retirement at Edmonton refer with unabated interest to the chief alleviations of his life-books and pictures. He tells Cary, the translator of Dante, that, with the aid of his translation and Emma's knowledge of Italian, he and his sister have read the Inferno. These studies were interrupted by Emma's marriage in August 1833. On the evening of the wedding, Mary was restored to her senses, 'as if by an electrical stroke.' This was merely temporary. Lamb was content to be with her.

When she is not violent, her rambling chat is better to me than the sense and sanity of this world. Her heart is obscured, not buried; it breaks out occasionally; and one can discern a strong mind struggling with the billows that have gone over it.

Meanwhile, his brotherly devotion had undermined his health, and intemperance was overcoming his shattered nervous system. On this point, it is impossible to dwell too leniently. Lamb's habitual weakness was simply an incident in a life the key-note of which was the abandonment of selfish ease for a path of

unusual difficulty, and it neither hardened his heart nor dimmed his intellect. It is probable that the death of Coleridge, in July 1834, was a blow from which he never recovered. On 21 November, he wrote in the album of a London bookseller his famous tribute to the memory of his friend, 'the proof and touchstone of all my cogitations.' 'I grieved then that I could not grieve. But since, I feel how great a part he was of me. His great and dear spirit haunts me.' A month later, while out walking, he fell down and cut his face; erysipelas ensued, and, on 29 December, he died. Mary survived him for thirteen years; she died in 1847, and was buried in the same grave with him in the churchyard at Edmonton.

To the mind which estimates an author by his capacity for sustained masterpieces, the disconnected character of Lamb's writings offers some contrast to their reputation. A bundle of essays, a number of casual lyrics, one or two brief plays, a tale of striking pathos, a few narratives and adaptations of old authors for children and some critical notes on his favourite writersthese constitute the sum of his work. It was an age in which the journalist and essayist flourished, and the essays of Hazlitt contain more solid critical work, while those of De Quincey are more remarkable for their scholarship and for a highly-coloured eloquence the splendour of which faults of taste cannot dim. But, in play of fancy, in susceptibility to the varying shades of human emotion, in a humour which reflects clearly the perpetual irony of life, Lamb is without an equal. His essays, he wrote to John Taylor, 'want no Preface: they are all Preface. A Preface is nothing but a talk with the reader; and they do nothing else.' Through them shines the spirit of the man, alive to the absurdities of the world, tender to its sorrows, tolerant to its weaknesses. He courts the friendship, not the veneration, of his readers: he looks to them, not as disciples, but as fellow-men. By the candid revelation of himself in his essays and letters, by the light which they throw upon a union of heart and life between brother and sister unexampled in literature, he has won the affection of countless readers, even of those who have little care for the beauties of literary style. To all of these, the love and confidence which the Lambs inspired among their friends is still a living thing, and they can read with a sense of personal possession the touching words which Coleridge, at the end of a friendship of fifty years, inscribed in the margin of the poem written during a visit which they paid to Stowey, 'Charles and Mary Lamb, dear to me as my heart, yea as it were my heart.'

CHAPTER IX

THE LANDORS, LEIGH HUNT, DE QUINCEY

THE three writers who form the main subject of this chapter when regarded individually, may seem, at first sight, to have extremely little in common, except their date, the unusual length of time during which they were contemporaries and the closely connected fact that they survived all the greater men, and most of the smaller, of their own generation. But, when they come to be considered more narrowly and from the standpoint of strictly historical criticism, points of resemblance, or of that contrast which is often almost as much of a bond as resemblance for the purposes of such treatment, will rapidly emerge; and the advantage of treating them otherwise than as by three entirely disjoined articles in a dictionary will emerge likewise.

Two of them were ambidextrous in respect of the harmonies of written speech-employing prose and verse with equal facility, though not, in both cases, in equal measure. De Quincey was a prose-writer only—at least, his verse is small in quantity and quite unimportant in quality; though he had the weakness to hint1 that, an he would, he could have versed it with the best of them. But he had another cross-connection with Landor (this time Leigh Hunt stood out), that both were elaborate and deliberate writers of the most ornate prose that English had known since the seventeenth century. Leigh Hunt and De Quincey-again to cross the ties-were both eminent examples of 'the man-of-lettersof-all-work,' who, arising in the late seventeenth, and earlier eighteenth, century, had been promoted quite out of Grub street early in the nineteenth. Landor's circumstances, ill as he managed them, precluded him from following this occupation of necessity; and this was fortunate, for, otherwise, the cook whose legendary body crushed the violet bed at Florence would have found more hapless fellows in the persons of many editors on the harder couches

1 Autobiography, chap. vII (vol. xiv, p. 197 in the 16 vol. edn of 1862).

of Fleet street and Paternoster row. But, except in this ticklish point, he had all the ethos of the 'polygraph.' No special subject shows itself as exercising obsession, or receiving preference, in the vast exuberance of his Poems and Conversations and Miscellanies, except a strong tendency towards that criticism which is ever dominant, if not predominant, in the others. Even his classicism is a thing more of manner than of subject; and, though he shows it often in subject also, that is mainly because the one is germane to the other. Now, this polygraphic tendency is an essential characteristic of the new age.

Yet, further, though we may here enter on more disputable matter, the three resemble each other in a characteristic difficult. to formulate without making the field of dispute larger than it strictly should be. Although they all had talent-amounting, in Landor certainly, in De Quincey arguably, in Hunt scarcely, to genius-few critics accustomed to the taking of wide comparative views would put them in the first rank, absolutely, of their contemporaries. The mention of the names of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats, at once, if it does not dwarf, lessens them, though, perhaps, some would deny this in the case of Landor. Even Southey, who, no doubt, in many, if not most, judgments is regarded as the dark star of the new pleiad, is, in popular language, ‘a bigger man' than Leigh Hunt or De Quincey, though there may be individual things by De Quincey certainly, by Hunt perhaps, which Southey could not have done. Even Landor himself (who, be it remembered, though not much given to modesty, thought Southey at least his own equal) becomes artificial, academic, restricted to exquisite construction of sometimes rather lifeless form, beside his friend. Yet, if still keeping an eye on these general similarities and differences, we turn to more individual treatment, we shall find, if not primacy in them as wholes, such accomplishment in particulars and such distinction as, in some literatures, would make them actually supreme and, even in ours, assure them minor supremacies in detail.

Biography, almost always unnecessary here, is, in this special place, almost wholly negligible; and this is fortunate because, while nothing really important happened to any of them, all three are surrounded with a sort of anti-halo of gossip which it would be most unprofitable to discuss. Whether Landor was wholly or only partly Boythorn; whether Hunt was wholly, partly or not at all Skimpole; whether the former's dignity was really dignified or a mixture of the grandiose and the childish; whether Hunt, again,

was 'a noble fellow' or, at best, a good-natured Bohemian; whether De Quincey was an acute observer merely or a venomous carper on one side of his character, a deliberate mystifier or even falsifier of fact or a person with a marvellous gift for translating reality into romance on the other-these, and not a few more, are points upon which it is impossible for us to dilate. The reader whose curiosity is excited will find no difficulty, with the aid of the bibliography, in satisfying, and, perhaps, satiating, himself with accounts and discussions of the facts. He will also, one dare say, discover, later if not sooner, that the discussion, in almost every case, has very little to do with the literary appreciation of the exceedingly voluminous bodies of work added by them to English literature, which contain not a few instances of its finest work, which, in some cases, have exercised remarkable influence and which, though complete exploration of them is, in some cases, not easy, will never be explored by any affectionate and competent student of that literature without the discovery of treasures such as a student will revisit again and again.

The lack of ease just glanced at requires, even with the assistance of the bibliography itself, a few remarks. It exists least in the case of Landor, though, even in his case, the fullest collection— Forster's-is not quite complete and has not been for some time past very easy to obtain. It appears, however, to include all that is indispensable, though some additions recently made by Mr Stephen Wheeler are almost of importance, and amply provided with interest. With De Quincey, matters become, if not more recondite (for some of Landor's work seems almost inaccessible in the original editions), more complicated. To the completest edition of his collected works, by the late professor Masson, at least seven volumes of Miscellanea, printed since in different forms and shapes, have to be added; while his eccentric habit of leaving deposits of unpublished writing in his various abodes (sometimes merely lodgings) makes the discovery of yet more not very unlikely.

But Leigh Hunt's is the worst case of all. No attempt even at a complete edition has ever been made; and it may be doubted whether the materials for one exist together in any library. If the whole were assembled it would probably make a collection of works as large, at least, as that of Voltaire. For Hunt, though, as has been said, a good deal of a Bohemian, had little or nothing of the idleness ascribed to the citizens of the spiritual Prague; and, if he had not the knack of managing or keeping money, was