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CHAPTER XL

WILLIAM HAZLITT

WILLIAM HAZLITT, as an essayist and critic, took a prominent place in the literature of the first quarter of the nineteenth century. No doubt he had certain prejudices, but even where we disagree with him we must acknowledge the ability with which he proffers his views.

To receive a proper impression of Hazlitt's powers requires the perusal of him in larger quotations than can be inserted in this book. One of his most fascinating essays, entitled "My First Acquaintance with Poets," occupied twenty-four pages of the journal in which it appeared, and to extract a portion of it would be an act of mutilation.

There is a short passage in one of his lectures on English poets, on Coleridge, which can with perfect propriety be quoted by itself:

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'He is the only person I ever knew who answered to the idea of a man of genius. He is the only person from whom I ever learnt anything.

"There is only one thing he could learn from me, but that he has not.

"He was the first poet I ever knew. His genius at that time (1798) had angelic wings and fed on manna. He talked on for ever; and you wished him to talk on for ever. His thoughts did not seem to come with labour or effort, but as if borne on the gusts of genius, and as if the wings of his imagination lifted him from off his feet.

"His voice rolled on the ear like the pealing organ, and its sound alone was the music of thought.

"His mind was clothed with wings; and raised on them, he lifted philosophy to heaven. In his description, you then saw the progress of human happiness and liberty in bright and never ended succession, like the steps of Jacob's ladder, with airy shapes ascending and descending, and with the voice of God at the top of the ladder."

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The essay on "Persons one would wish to have seen is, as it were, "a dream within a dream," for those who in the essay discuss whom they would wish to see are themselves shown us by Hazlitt as we would ourselves wish to see them.

"Lamb then named Sir Thomas Browne and Fulke Greville, the friend of Sir Philip Sidney, as the two worthies whom he should feel the greatest pleasure to encounter on the floor of his apartment in their nightgowns and slippers, and to exchange friendly greeting with them. Lamb then went on as follows:

"The reason why I pitch upon these two authors is, that their writings are riddles, and they themselves the most mysterious of personages.

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They resemble the soothsayers of old, who dealt in dark hints and doubtful oracles; and I should like to ask them the meaning of what no mortal but themselves, I should suppose, can fathom.

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There is Dr Johnson: I have no curiosity, no strange uncertainty about him; he and Boswell together have pretty well let me into the secret of what passed through his mind. He and other writers like him are sufficiently explicit my friends whose repose I should be tempted to disturb (were it in my power) are implicit, inextricable, inscrutable.

"When I look at the obscure but gorgeous prose composition of the "Urn-burial" I seem to myself to look into a deep abyss, at the bottom of which are hid pearls and rich treasure; or it is like a stately labyrinth of doubt and withering speculation, and I would invoke the spirit of the author to lead me through it.' ”

And at the end of this essay, in which many famous

persons are represented as joining in the discussion, Lamb once more intervenes thus:

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"There is only one other person I can ever think of after this,' continued Lamb, but without mentioning a name that once put on a semblance of mortality. If Shakespeare was to come into the room, we should all rise up to meet him; but if that person was to come into it, we should all fall down and try to kiss the hem of His garment.'

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As a lady present seemed now to get uneasy at the turn the conversation had taken, we rose up to go.

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The morning broke with that dim and dubious light by which Giotto, Cimabue, and Ghirlandaio must have seen to paint their earliest works; and we parted to meet again and renew similar topics at night, the next night, and the night after that, till that night overspread Europe which saw no dawn.

66 The same event, in truth, broke up our little congress that broke up the great one. But that was to meet again : our deliberations have never been resumed.”

To all those to whom intimate portraits of the great men living in Hazlitt's time afford peculiar delight, his pages are a mine of precious treasure.

"Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,
And did he stop and speak to you,
And did you speak to him again?'

Most of us have this insatiable curiosity about great men of letters who are dead and gone, and Hazlitt does much to gratify it.

Of the pleasures of a library, he says:

"I feel as I read that if the stage shows us the masks of men and the pageant of the world, Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.

"They are the first and last, the most home-felt, the most heart-felt of all our enjoyments."

CHAPTER XLI

CHARLES LAMB

I SUPPOSE that after Dr Johnson, the writer who most possesses the personal affection of men of letters is Charles Lamb.

By every one of his contemporaries he was beloved. He was full of quaintness, humour, geniality, and affection. His reading had been wide and his reflections penetrating, and among his intimates his talk was swiftly brilliant.

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"No one," said Hazlitt, ever stammered out such fine, piquant, deep, eloquent things in half a dozen half-sentences as Elia himself."

His wit was so tempered with loving-kindness that he could without a shade of offence jest at his friends' expense. As when Henry Crabb Robinson with pride announced the arrival at his chambers of his first brief, Lamb exclaimed, "Thou first great cause, least understood!"; or when he called Coleridge, his dearest friend, "an archangel, a little damaged." His letters are full of abandoned nonsense. "I am

flatter," he writes, "than a denial or a pancake, emptier than Judge 's wig when his head is in it, a cypher, an O." And when an old lady asked him how he liked babies, he replied, "Boiled, Madam."

The awful tragedy that hung like a dark cloud over his whole life and demanded, not in vain from him, a lifelong self-sacrifice, served only to sweeten and ennoble his character; and although it is said he was not particularly pleased by the description

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Coleridge gave of him in his poems as the " gentlehearted Charles," yet probably it very happily illustrated his disposition. Nothing can be more indicative of Lamb's attitude to his lost life that might have been than his reverie entitled “ Dream Children." Alice Winn, whom Lamb had loved in his youth, married a Mr Bartrum, and Lamb, sitting by his hearth, imagines that the little children "creep about him as they might have, had life been otherwise. The reverie ends thus:

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"Then I told how for seven long years, in hope sometimes, sometimes in despair, yet persisting ever, I courted the fair Alice W--n; and, as much as children could understand I explained to them what coyness, and difficulty, and denial meant in maidens-when suddenly turning to Alice, the soul of the first Alice looked out at her eyes with such a reality of representment, that I became in doubt which of them stood there before me, or whose that bright hair was: and while I stood gazing, both the children gradually grew fainter to my view, receding, and still receding till nothing at last but two mournful features were seen in the uttermost distance, which without speech, strangely impressed upon me the effects of speech:

"We are not of Alice, nor of thee, nor are we children at all. The children of Alice call Bartrum father. We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before we have existence and a name '—and immediately awaking, I found myself quietly seated in my bachelor arm-chair, where I had fallen asleep.

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For some reason, unfortunately hidden from my intelligence, Lamb's Dissertation upon Roast Pig has received the extravagant commendations of the critics and has been so extolled that the original MSS. of the essay was bought in America for a fabulous sum of money.1

Something is lacking in me that is required for the

1 Over £2000.

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