a time, the thought seems not to move. It is thrown into the air like balls by a juggler, and we catch reflections of it, and are thrilled and excited to pleasure in watching. One happy phrase after another-an old quotation in a new setting, a flash of sentiment, a bit of keen perceiving, a wise observation on life-all thrown together, carry us on with a rapidity and a stateliness that are not excelled in English literature.

The opening passage of his essay on poetry illustrates the movement of his expository writing. Here, we have Hazlitt thinking with overflowing zest upon a subject which was life to him. Because he is trying to write something on a subject which every critic or poet has discussed does not embarrass him. As a man of feeling, who cannot reduce poetry to mere formal words, he pours himself out with the richness and seriousness of the most unabashed romanticist.

Or we may turn to his essay, The Feeling of Immortality in Youth, to the passage beginning 'To see the golden sun, and the azure sky.' Observe the gusto with which he follows the thought until he is actually out of breath. Here is the elaborate stateliness of Sir Thomas Browne or Jeremy Taylor without the quaintness of the seventeenth century which allured Charles Lamb. In outline, it is formal and imposing; in meaning, it is concrete, vivid and personal.

The virility of his enthusiasm is best shown in his delight in outdoor life. No writer of today, after a century given to the study and enjoyment of open air life, writes of it with greater zest and more consistent inspiration. His essay, On Going a Journey, is a pleasure to all lovers of Stevenson and Thoreau.

In many respects, the most memorable piece of writing of William Hazlitt is the essay to which he has given the attractive title, My First Acquaintance with Poets, one of the fine, immortal essays in our language. The young man of twenty meets in 1798 the philosopher Coleridge and the poet Wordsworth. The man of forty looks back through the glamour of the intervening years and breaks forth with lyric enthusiasm at the thought of these rich experiences.

In these essays, we have some of the best of Hazlitt-an expression which is concrete, vivid, personal, vigorous; the voice of a manly and courageous seeker after truth, who sees nothing inconsistent in the combination of truth and sentiment, truth and beauty.

Hazlitt's habit of repeated quotation has caused irritation to

many readers. He used innumerable quotations, consisting of a mere phrase or of many lines, whenever he desired. If they do not serve him as they stand, he does not hesitate to change a word or phrase or to join two or more quotations together. He took supreme pleasure in an apt phrase, whether of his own coinage or whether he had picked it up long before in some source which he had taken no pains to remember. He sought justification in the manner in which he made his quotations convey his own ideas. Some of the lines which he liked best to quote are here given as he wrote them. Our life is of mingled yarn, good and ill together,' 'holds the mirror up to nature,' 'web of our life,' 'too much i' the sun,' 'comes home to the business of men,' 'the stuff of which our life is made,' 'sees into the life of things,' 'ever in the haunch of winter sings,' 'fate, fore-will, foreknowledge absolute,' 'come like shadows, so depart,' 'at one proud swoop,' 'with all its giddy raptures,' 'the witchery of the soft blue sky,' 'it smiled and it was cold,' 'sounding on his way,' 'men's minds are parcel of their fortunes.' A glance at this list will show the preponderance of quotations from Shakespeare. These he applied everywhere and in every possible connection. Next after Shakespeare, as sources, come Milton, the Bible, Spenser, Dryden, Pope, Gray, Cowper, Rousseau, Sterne, Fielding, Wordsworth. He had not the slightest reluctance to appropriate a phrase that he liked in any book which he read.

One characteristic marks his style especially, his use of the parallel construction and contrast. He liked to join his subjects in pairs; for example, Cant and Hypocrisy, Wit and Humour, Past and Future, Thought and Action, Genius and Common Sense, Patronage and Puffing, Writing and Speaking and so on ad infinitum. So, he was much accustomed to discussing his subject with the aid of contrast, as Wilkie and Hogarth, Shakespeare and Jonson, Chaucer and Spenser, Voltaire and Swift, Thomson and Cowper, Addison and Steele, Gray and Collins, Dryden and Pope. In this particular, he had an influence upon modern literary criticism, which has often used this means of defining the relative importance of English writers.

Some readers, nourished on the fare of the Victorians, have objected to Hazlitt on the ground that his writing shows mere feeling and no moral purpose. Certainly, one does not think of him as a moralist with a message like Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, or Browning, yet he, like all great English writers, was guided by certain principles and was consistently true to certain ideals.

E. L. XII. CH. VII.

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Hazlitt was as bitter against affectation and insipidity as Carlyle or Thackeray. Not more insistently than he, did Carlyle try to get beneath mere clothes and separate the symbol from the thing. Ruskin had no more genuine love of nature and saw not more clearly than Hazlitt the relation between life and the beauty of nature. In his efforts to think clearly upon life and to express himself with classic simplicity, there is a suggestion of Matthew Arnold. In his virility of expression and the hopefulness with which he wrote in continued adversity, we find something that suggests the optimism of Browning and Stevenson. Though he was not a moralist according to the general meaning of that word, he never turned from the serious problem of life. He was no shallow optimist or railing pessimist. There is, throughout his writing, an abiding faith in human nature, a devotion to beauty and an allegiance to ideals of square-dealing, honesty and truthfulness, that made his life happy when those who looked on-all save onecalled him of all men most lonely and miserable.

The influence of Hazlitt has been pervasive through the nineteenth century. Among his contemporaries, there were those who would have nothing to do with his idols, Rousseau and Napoleon, who did not share his radical views on politics, who despised his enthusiastic style as mere sentimental twaddle. On the other hand, there were those who, like Leigh Hunt, Lamb, Coleridge and De Quincey, recognised, in some measure, the worth of the man. Certain of the reviewers in the magazines, though they took delight in abusing him personally, had good cause for admiring his literary skill when they were the objects of his invective. Among the great writers of English since his day, he has found many admirers and imitators, many who have followed his lead in his appreciation of art and of literature. Macaulay had a fondness for the same balanced structure, the same tendency toward epigrammatic expression, the same persistent determination to write with unmistakable clearness. Newman's style bore ample testimony to the eloquence which Hazlitt displayed in his most stately writing. Thackeray wrote heartily in admiration:

Hazlitt was one of the keenest and brightest critics that ever lived. With partialities and prejudices innumerable, he had a wit so keen, a sensibility so exquisite, an appreciation of humour or pathos or even of the greatest act so lively, quick and cultivated, that it was always good to know what were the impressions made by books or men or pictures on such a mind; and that, as there were not probably a dozen men in England with powers so varied, all the rest of the world might be rejoiced to listen to the opinions of this accomplished critic.

In similar vein wrote Froude, Bagehot, Lowell, Stevenson and many other worthy judges of our best literature. Perhaps the surest comment which indicates the estimate of today is by William Ernest Henley in the concluding paragraph of his introduction to the complete edition of Hazlitt's works, already cited:

As a writer, therefore, it is with Lamb that I would bracket him: they are dissimilars, but they go gallantly and naturally together-par nobile fratrum. Give us these two, with some ripe Cobbett, a volume of Southey, some Wordsworth, certain pages of Shelley, a great deal of the Byron who wrote letters, and we get the right prose of the time. The best of it all, perhaps, is the best of Lamb. But Hazlitt's, for different qualities, is so imminent and shining a second that I hesitate as to the pre-eminency. Probably the race is Lamb's. But Hazlitt is ever Hazlitt; and at his highest moments Hazlitt is hard to beat, and has not these many years been beaten.

CHAPTER VIII

LAMB

By reason of its intimate nature and the colour which it took from the personal events of his life, the work of Charles Lamb is inseparable from the circumstances in which it came into being. This is peculiarly true of more than one of the great writers of the early nineteenth century. The biographies of Byron, Shelley and Coleridge are necessary complements to the understanding of their poetry. But, in none of these three cases is a succession of incidents so closely interwoven in prose and poetry as is the more peaceful life of Lamb in his writings. Those writings, inspired by the influence of the moment and by a lively remembrance of the past, take their place in the course of a story on which they form a running comment; and it is this story, chequered by the presence of sorrow and tragedy and beautified by the endurance of high human affection, which has given Lamb a special place in literary history. His genius matured in submission to its influence the experience of daily life was the source of the sympathy with humanity which pervades his style and lends to it an abiding charm.

Lamb's statement that his father came from Lincoln has never been proved positively, but is probably an exception to his usual habit of embroidering fiction upon fact. John Lamb, whose characteristics are known to us from his son's affectionate portrait of Lovel, ‘a man of an incorrigible and losing honesty,' with ‘a face as gay as Garrick's, whom he was said greatly to resemble,' was clerk and general factotum to Samuel Salt of the Inner Temple. The father, 'as brimful of rogueries and inventions as you could desire,' gave some proof of literary talent in a small volume entitled Poetical Pieces on Several Occasions, the best of which, an amusing description of the daily routine of a lady's footman, was probably drawn from his own early experience. He married Elizabeth Field, a member of a family of Hertfordshire farmers.