We are both of us inclined to be a little too positive; and I have observed the result of our disputes to be almost uniformly this-that in matters of fact, dates, and circumstances, it turns out that I was in the right, and my cousin in the wrong. But where we have differed upon moral points-upon something proper to be done or let alone-whatever heat of opposition or steadiness of conviction I set out with, I am sure always in the long-run to be brought over to her way of thinking.

I must touch upon the foibles of my kinswoman with a gentle hand, for Bridget does not like to be told of her faults. She hath an awkward trick (to say no worse of it) of reading in company: at which times she will answer yes or no to a question without fully understanding its purport-which is provoking, and derogatory in the highest degree to the dignity of the putter of the said question. Her presence of mind is equal to the most pressing trials of life, but will sometimes desert her upon trifling occasions. When the purpose requires it, and is a thing of moment, she can speak to it greatly; but in matters which are not stuff of the conscience, she hath been known sometimes to let slip a word less seasonably.

Her education in youth was not much attended to; and she happily missed all that train of female garniture which passeth by the name of accomplishments. She was tumbled early, by accident or design, into a spacious closet of good old English reading, without much selection or prohibition, and browsed at will upon that fair and wholesome pasturage. Had I twenty girls, they should be brought up exactly in this fashion. I know not whether their chance in wedlock might not be diminished by it; but I can answer for it that it makes (if the worst come to the worst) most incomparable old maids.

In a season of distress she is the truest comforter; but in the teasing accidents and minor perplexities, which do not call out the will to meet them, she sometimes maketh matters worse by an excess of participation. If she does not always divide your trouble, upon the pleasanter occasions of life she is sure always to treble your satisfaction. She is excellent to be at a play with, or upon a visit; but best when she goes a journey with you.

We made an excursion together a few summers since, into Hertfordshire, to beat up the quarters of some of our less-known relations in that fine corn country.

The oldest thing I remember is Mackery End; or Mackarel End, as it is spelt, perhaps more properly, in some old maps of Hertfordshire; a farm-house, delightfully situated within a gentle walk from Wheathampstead. I can just remember having been there, on a visit to a great-aunt, when I was a child, under the care of Bridget, who, as I have said, is older than myself by some ten years. I wish that I could throw into a heap the remainder of our joint existences; that we might share them in equal division. But that is impossible. The house was at that time in the occupation of a substantial yeoman, who had married my grandmother's sister. His name was Gladman. My grandmother was a Bruton, married to a Field. The Gladmans and the Brutons are still flourishing in that part of the county, but the Fields are almost extinct. More than forty years had elapsed since the visit I speak of; and, for the greater portion of that period, we had lost sight of the other two branches also. Who or what sort of

persons inherited Mackery End-kindred or strange folk -we were afraid almost to conjecture, but determined some day to explore.

By somewhat a circuitous route, taking the noble park at Luton in our way from Saint Albans, we arrived at the spot of our anxious curiosity about noon. The sight of the old farm-house, though every trace of it was effaced from my recollection, affected me with a pleasure which I had not experienced for many a year. For though I had forgotten it, we had never forgotten being there together, and we had been talking about Mackery End all our lives, till memory on my part became mocked with a phantom of itself, and I thought I knew the aspect of a place, which, when present, O how unlike it was to that which I had conjured up so many times instead of it!

Still, the air breathed balmily about it; the season was in the heart of June,' and I could say with the poet, 'But thou, that didst appear so fair

To fond imagination,

Dost rival in the light of day

Her delicate creation!'

Bridget's was more a waking bliss than mine, for she easily remembered her old acquaintance again—some altered features, of course, a little grudged at. At first, indeed, she was ready to disbelieve for joy; but the scene soon reconfirmed itself in her affections, and she traversed every outpost of the old mansion, to the woodhouse, the orchard, the place where the pigeon-house had stood (house and birds were alike flown), with a breathless impatience of recognition, which was more pardonable perhaps than decorous at the age of fifty odd. But Bridget in some things is behind her years.

The only thing left was to get into the house-and that was a difficulty which to me singly would have been insurmountable; for I am terribly shy in making myself known to strangers and out-of-date kinsfolk. Love, stronger than scruple, winged my cousin in without me; but she soon returned with a creature that might have sat to a sculptor for the image of Welcome. It was the youngest of the Gladmans, who, by marriage with a Bruton, had become mistress of the old mansion. A comely brood are the Brutons. Six of them, females, were noted as the handsomest young women in the county. But this adopted Bruton, in my mind, was better than they all-more comely. She was born too late to have remembered me. She just recollected in early life to have had her cousin Bridget once pointed out to her, climbing a stile. But the name of kindred, and of cousinship, was enough. Those slender ties, that prove slight as gossamer in the rending atmosphere of a metropolis, bind faster, as we found it, in hearty, homely, loving Hertfordshire. In five minutes we were as thoroughly acquainted as if we had been born and bred up together; were familiar, even to the calling each other by our Christian names. So Christians should call one another. To have seen Bridget, and her it was like the meeting of the two scriptural cousins! There was a grace and dignity, an amplitude of form and stature, answering to her mind, in this farmer's wife, which would have shined in a palace-or so we thought it. We were made welcome by husband and wife equally-we, and our friend that was with us.-I had almost forgotten him-but B. F. will not so soon forget that meeting, if peradventure he shall read this on the far

distant shores where the kangaroo haunts. The fatted calf was made ready, or rather was already so, as if in anticipation of our coming; and, after an appropriate glass of native wine, never let me forget with what honest pride this hospitable cousin made us proceed to Wheathampstead, to introduce us (as some new-found rarity) to her mother and sister Gladmans, who did indeed know something more of us, at a time when she almost knew nothing.—With what corresponding kindness we were received by them also-how Bridget's memory, exalted by the occasion, warmed into a thousand half-obliterated recollections of things and persons, to my utter astonishment and her own; and to the astoundment of B. F., who sat by, almost the only thing that was not a cousin there,-old effaced images of more than half-forgotten names and circumstances still crowding back upon her, as words written in lemon come out upon exposure to a friendly warmth-when I forget all this, then may my country cousins forget me; and Bridget no more remember that in the days of weakling infancy I was her tender charge-as I have been her care in foolish manhood since-in those pretty pastoral walks, long ago, about Mackery End, in Hertfordshire. (From Essays of Elia.)

Lear.

So to see Lear acted,-to see an old man tottering about the stage with a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want to take him into shelter and relieve him. That is all the feeling which the acting of Lear ever produced in me. But the Lear of Shakspeare cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery by which they mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more inadequate to represent the horrors of the real elements than any actor can be to represent Lear: they might more easily propose to personate the Satan of Milton upon a stage, or one of Michael Angelo's terrible figures. The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual : the explosions of his passion are terrible as a volcano : they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea, his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare. This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be thought on; even as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage; while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear,we are in his mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his reason we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodised from the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind blows where it listeth, at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind. What have looks or tones to do with that sublime identification of his age with that of the heavens themselves, when, in his reproaches to them for conniving at the injustice of his children, he reminds them that they themselves are old'? What gesture shall we appropriate to this? What has the voice or the eye to do with such things? But the play is beyond all art, as the tamperings with it show: it is too hard and stony; it must have love-scenes, and a happy ending. It is not enough that Cordelia is a daughter, she must shine as a lover too. Tate has put his hook in the nostrils of this Leviathan for Garrick and his followers, the showmen of the scene, to draw the mighty beast

about more easily. A happy ending!-as if the living martyrdom that Lear had gone through, the flaying of his feelings alive, did not make a fair dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous thing for him. If he is to live and be happy after, if he could sustain this world's burden after, why all this pudder and preparation,-why torment us with all this unnecessary sympathy? As if the childish pleasure of getting his gilt robes and sceptre again could tempt him to act over again his misused station, as if at his years, and with his experience, anything was left but to die!

(From the Essay On the Tragedies of Shakspeare.')

Our chief authorities for Lamb are his own writings, and the Life and Letters and Final Memorials, by Mr Justice Talfourd. Later editions of these works have appeared, enlarged by Percy Fitzgerald and W. C. Hazlitt. There is a quite separate Memoir of Lamb, of considerable interest, by B. W. Procter ('Barry Cornwall'). Another Memoir, and a complete edition of Lamb's works and correspondence, by the writer of the present article, were published by Messrs Macmillan (6 vols. 1883-88). A new and enlarged edition of Lamb's letters by the same editor was in preparation in 1903. Lamb's Essays are the best commentary on his life; his father is the Lovel of the essay on the 'Old Benchers of the Middle Temple;' see also E. V. Lucas's Lamb and the Lloyds (1898). The present article has been revised and reprinted from that originally written for Chambers's Encyclopædia (new edition, vol. vi., 1890).

ALFRED AINGER.

William Hazlitt,

born at Maidstone on 10th April 1778, came of a family of Hazlitts who had settled in County Antrim at the Revolution. Shortly after Hazlitt's birth his father, who was a Unitarian minister, removed to Bandon near Cork, and in 1783 emigrated to America; but he returned with his family a few years later and settled in 1787 at Wem in Shropshire. At his father's desire Hazlitt studied in 1793 at the Unitarian College at Hackney, but even then his tastes lay rather in philosophy and politics. It was not till his meeting with Coleridge in 1798, which he has himself described in the essay 'My First Acquaintance with Poets,' that his interest in literature was fully awakened; though in this matter he has also recorded his debt to the friendship of Joseph Fawcett (see his essay 'On Criticism'). Following the example of his brother John, he first chose for himself the profession of artist, and in October 1802 went to Paris, where for four months he worked at the Louvre (see his essay 'On the Pleasure of Painting'). On his return he set up as a portrait-painter, and numbered Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Lamb among his sitters; but he could never satisfy himself, though judges such as Northcote believed in his ability. His first publication, An Essay on the Principles of Human Action, appeared in 1805, and was followed in 1806 by Free Thoughts on Public Affairs, or Advice to a Patriot; in 1807 by An Abridgment of the Light of Nature Pursued by A. Tucker, and a Reply to the Essay on Population by the Rev. T. R. Malthus; in 1808 by The Eloquence of the British Senate (a selection with biographical and critical notes); and in 1810 by A New and Improved Grammar of the English Tongue, for the Use of Schools. He was engaged

also in editing and completing the Memoirs of the late Thomas Holcroft, which was not published till 1816. In 1808 he had married Miss Sarah Stoddart and settled at Winterslow in Wiltshire, afterwards to be associated with some of his finest essays; but in 1812 he had to leave it for London. His literary career dates properly from his engagement at this time as theatrical and parliamentary reporter on the Morning Chronicle, for the miscellaneous nature of his earlier publications shows that up to his thirty-fourth year he was still in search of a definite line of work. In 1814 he became a contributor to the Edinburgh Review, and in 1817 he published his first book of literary sketches, The Round Table, a Collection of Essays on Literature, Men, and Manners (2 vols.), contributed originally to Leigh

WILLIAM HAZLITT.

After a Miniature on Ivory painted by his brother, John Hazlitt.

Hunt's Examiner. In the same year appeared his Characters of Shakspeare's Plays. The ruthless attack on it in the Quarterly by Gifford, who, like the Tory critics in Blackwood, was hostile to all Hazlitt's work because of his anti-monarchical views, brought from him in 1819 the scathing Letter to William Gifford, Esq. At the same time he continued his contributions to periodicals such as the Examiner, the Champion, the Yellow Dwarf, and the Scots Magazine, and published collections bearing the titles A View of the English Stage, or a Series of Dramatic Criticisms (1818), and Political Essays, with Sketches of Public Characters (1819); but his chief pieces of work were the three great courses of lectures, all delivered at the Surrey Institution and published immediately afterwards-the Lectures on the English Poets (1818), the Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819), and the Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth (1820). Continuing to contribute to magazines, and now

chiefly to the London and New Monthly, he brought out another collection of his essays in 1821, entitled Table Talk, or Original Essays, a second volume with the same title following in 1822. In 1823 appeared his Characteristics, in the Manner of La Rochefoucauld's Maxims; while to 1824 belong his Sketches of the Principal Picture Galleries in England, his Select British Poets (suppressed, and published in 1825 under the title Select Poets of Great Britain), and his article on the 'Fine Arts' in the Encyclopædia Britannica. Before this Hazlitt had won for himself an ugly notoriety by his Liber Amoris, or the New Pygmalion (1823), recording his infatuation for a girl named Sarah Walker, the daughter of his landlady, and the only woman that ever made me think she loved me.' His marriage had proved unhappy, and in June 1822 he was divorced at Edinburgh; but he was soon after disillusioned of the heroine of the Liber Amoris. In 1824 he married Mrs Bridgwater, a widow with some money. This marriage was likewise unhappy; he travelled for some months with his wife in France, Switzerland, and Italy, but in 1825 he returned to London alone, and his wife refused to rejoin him. While on this tour he contributed to the Morning Chronicle a series of letters, collected in 1826 under the title Notes of a Journey in France and Italy. At the same time there appeared in the New Monthly the series of articles which went to form the Spirit of the Age, or Contemporary Portraits (1825). The last collection of miscellaneous essays which he himself edited, The Plain Speaker, Opinions on Books, Men, and Things (2 vols.), was published in 1826. From this time onwards he devoted himself chiefly to the Life of Napoleon Buonaparte. Recognising the occasional nature of his earlier work, he now hoped to found his fame on a monumental biography of his life's hero, and he accordingly squandered the energies of his closing years on a work which could not but arouse animosity and for which he was hardly suited either by character or training. The first and second volumes appeared in 1828, and the third and fourth in 1830. The literary merits of the book are now, as at its appearance, too often ignored in hostility to its motive. Unfortunately Hazlitt was embarrassed financially by the failure of his publisher. He had to resort again to magazine articles; he brought out the Conversations of James Northcote, Esq., R.A. (1830), a collection of articles contributed in 1826-27, under the title 'Boswell Redivivus,' to the New Monthly; and he collaborated with Northcote on the Life of Titian (1830). But in this struggle he had no longer health on his side. He died at London on 18th September 1830. Three other collections of his essays were published posthumously by his son-Literary Remains (2 vols. 1836), Sketches and Essays (1839), and Winterslow: Essays and Characters written there (1850).

Hazlitt's political views prejudiced his reputa

tion as a critic and essayist to a wider public than that of the Quarterly and Blackwood he was best known as a wild Republican. Even his idiosyncrasies tended to make him unpopular. Unhappy in his married life, he was unhappy also in his friendships, for he quarrelled unaccountably with all his associates--even with Lamb, though he was afterwards reconciled. Tactless, but of downright honesty, though brilliant in conversation yet devoid of social instinct, he seemed to his friends to live in dread of hearing some remark with which he could not agree. The stimulating acuteness

and fine enthusiasm of his lectures did not conceal the fact that there was little sympathy between him and his audience. If his worth is better known now than it was in his own day, it is because his writings have lived down the personal prejudice which he too readily aroused.

With Coleridge and Lamb, Hazlitt marks the close of the short interregnum in criticism when the classical code of the eighteenth century had been replaced by the mere whim of the Edinburgh or Quarterly reviewer. Like Coleridge, he believed that the first requisite of a critic is intelligent sympathy, and that his duty is not so much to report on a work as to interpret it. Yet he can hardly be claimed as a member of the romantic school, for, though true to their principles, he had not their limitations; he laughed away their tenet that Pope was not a poet, and he would not be blinded to the merits of French literature by the new German cult and the crusade against the classical. In certain respects he preserves the eighteenth century attitude, as in his indifference to the Middle Ages and his appreciation of the elegant in literature, while he had not the enthusiasm of the new school for their own work. Personal and political considerations tended to warp his judgment on his contemporaries. Though eloquent in his praise of Scott, he discovers an objectionable political motive in the 'Scotch novels;' his dislike of Byron is based on the 'noble author's' peerage; Coleridge, to whom he owed so much, he came to despise for changing his political views; even his whole-hearted appreciations of Wordsworth are dashed with unfriendly references to the poet's foibles. But these prejudices were vented merely on the living: no political bias, for instance, could dull his enthusiasm for Burke. He himself confesses that his criticism of the living is in a different category from his appreciations of the older authors. "I have more confidence in the dead than the living,' he says; 'contemporary writers may generally be divided into two classes, one's friends and one's foes.' But it may be claimed for him that his prejudices, unlike those of the romanticists, were not literary. He was one of the first to recognise the impossibility of reconciling different tastes. The disagreement between French and English taste, he points out, is bound to remain till the French become English or the English French; and he

adds, with special reference to Shakespeare and Racine, that when we see nothing but grossness and barbarism or insipidity and verbiage in a writer that is the god of a nation's idolatry, it is we and not they who want true taste and feeling. Hazlitt's appreciations are more free from the distinguishing marks of a particular school than those of any of the great English critics before him.

Hazlitt characterised his own work when he said that 'a genuine criticism should reflect the colours, the light and shade, the soul and body of a work.' Whether he deals with painting or with literature, he pays little attention to matters of form or technique, and he always ignores the circumstances under which the works were produced. 'If,' he says, 'a man leaves behind him any work which is a model of its kind, we have no right to ask whether he could do anything else, or how he did it, or how long he was about it.' Uninterested in the development and interaction of literatures, he is indifferent even to the growth of the art of an individual author. He may tell us that in the Tempest Shakespeare has shown all the variety of his powers, and that Love's Labour's Lost is the play with which he would most readily part; but he never hints that the one was written at the end of Shakespeare's career and the other at the beginning. His indifference to such matters explains his inaccuracy in points of fact. Few of his many quotations are given correctly; his references are vague; and he knew nothing of the worries of accurate chronology. What alone interests him is the complete work in itself. He had not, and expressly disclaimed, a wide knowledge of literature; and latterly he would rather read the same book for the twentieth time than read a new one. His favourite authors, and Shakespeare in particular, he knew so well that he could hardly write without alluding to them, or quoting from them, or employing their phraseology. And this intense knowledge makes him as guiltless of a second-hand as of an off-hand opinion, though he is occasionally under some debt to the conversation of his friends. The writer from whom he borrows most is himself, for he indulges largely in the questionable habit of repeating, often in the same words, what he has said elsewhere. But this only points to that 'pertinacity of opinion' on which he prided himself, in literature as in politics. In no case would he revise his judgments; he would only repeat them and emphasise them.

He has spoken of his early difficulties in writing, but latterly he could say that he had merely to 'unfold the book and volume of the brain' and transcribe the characters he saw there as mechanically as any one might copy the letters in a sampler. It was fitting that a critic who was indifferent to technique should himself have no ambitions to be known by his style, and should expressly avoid formal method. What he desired above all was 'life, and spirit, and truth ;' and whether he writes on Cavanagh the Fives-Player, or the fight of

Neate and the Gas-man, or Gifford, or Mrs Siddons, or Napoleon, or his favourite pictures and authors, his easy vigour and enduring freshness prove the wisdom of his aim.

Shakespeare.

The striking peculiarity of Shakespeare's mind was its generic quality, its power of communication with all other minds-so that it contained a universe of thought and feeling within itself, and had no one peculiar bias or exclusive excellence more than another. He was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men. He was the least of an egotist that it was possible to be. He was nothing in himself; but he was all that others were, or that they could become. He not only had in himself the germs of every faculty and feeling, but he could follow them by anticipation, intuitively, into all their conceivable ramifications, through every change of fortune, or conflict of passion, or turn of thought. He had 'a mind reflecting ages past,' and present :-all the people that ever lived are there. There was no respect of persons with him. His genius shone equally on the evil and on the good, on the wise and the foolish, the monarch and the beggar: 'All corners of the earth, kings, queens, and states, maids, matrons, nay, the secrets of the grave,' are hardly hid from his searching glance. He was like the genius of humanity, changing places with all of us at pleasure, and playing with our purposes as with his own. He turned the globe round for his amusement, and surveyed the generations of men, and the individuals as they passed, with their different concerns, passions, follies, vices, virtues, actions, and motives-as well those that they knew as those which they did not know or acknowledge to themselves. The dreams of childhood, the ravings of despair, were the toys of his fancy. Airy beings waited at his call and came at his bidding. Harmless fairies nodded to him, and did him curtesies;' and the night-hag bestrode the blast at the command of 'his so potent art.' The world of spirits lay open to him, like the world of real men and women: and there is the same truth in his delineations of the one as of the other; for if the preternatural characters he describes could be supposed to exist, they would speak, and feel, and act as he makes them. He had only to think of any thing in order to become that thing, with all the circumstances belonging to it. When he conceived of a character, whether real or imaginary, he not only entered into all its thoughts and feelings, but seemed instantly, and as if by touching a secret spring, to be surrounded with all the same objects, subject to the same skyey influences,' the same local, outward, and unforeseen accidents, which would occur in reality. Thus the character of Caliban not only stands before us with a language and manners of his own, but the scenery and situation of the enchanted island he inhabits, the traditions of the place, its strange noises, its hidden recesses, 'his frequent haunts and ancient neighbourhood,' are given with a miraculous truth of nature, and with all the familiarity of an old recollection. The whole 'coheres semblably together' in time, place, and circumstance. In reading this author, you do not merely learn what his characters say,-you

see their persons. By something expressed or understood, you are at no loss to decipher their peculiar physiognomy, the meaning of a look, the grouping, the byplay, as we might see it on the stage. A word, an epithet paints a whole scene, or throws us back whole

...

years in the history of the person represented. . . . That which, perhaps, more than anything else distinguishes the dramatic productions of Shakespeare from all others is this wonderful truth and individuality of conception. Each of his characters is as much itself, and as absolutely independent of the rest, as well as of the author, as if they were living persons, not fictions of the mind. The poet may be said, for the time, to identify himself with the character he wishes to represent, and to pass from one to another, like the same soul successively animating different bodies. By an art like that of the ventriloquist, he throws his imagination out of himself, and makes every word appear to proceed from the mouth of the person in whose name it is given. His plays alone are properly expressions of the passions, not descriptions of them. His characters are real beings of flesh and blood; they speak like men, not like authors. One might suppose that he had stood by at the time, and overheard what passed. As in our dreams we hold conversations with ourselves, make remarks, or communicate intelligence, and have no idea of the answer which we shall receive, and which we ourselves make, till we hear it so the dialogues in Shakespeare are carried on without any consciousness of what is to follow, without any appearance of preparation or premeditation. The gusts of passion come and go like sounds of music borne on the wind. Nothing is made out by formal inference and analogy, by climax and antithesis: all comes, or seems to come, immediately from nature. Each object and circumstance exists in his mind, as it would have existed in reality; each several train of thought and feeling goes on of itself, without confusion or effort. In the world of his imagination, everything has a life, a place, and being of its own!

Chaucer's characters are sufficiently distinct from one another, but they are too little varied in themselves, too much like identical propositions. They are consistent, but uniform; we get no new idea of them from first to last; they are not placed in different lights, nor are their subordinate traits brought out in new situations; they are like portraits or physiognomical studies, with the distinguishing features marked with inconceivable truth and precision, but that preserve the same unaltered air and attitude. Shakespeare's are historical figures, equally true and correct, but put into action, where every nerve and muscle is displayed in the struggle with others, with all the effect of collision and contrast, with every variety of light and shade. Chaucer's characters are narrative, Shakespeare's dramatic, Milton's epic. That is, Chaucer told only as much of his story as he pleased, as was required for a particular purpose. He answered for his characters himself. In Shakespeare they are introduced upon the stage, are liable to be asked all sorts of questions, and are forced to answer for themselves. Chaucer we perceive a fixed essence of character. In Shakespeare there is a continual composition and decomposition of its elements, a fermentation of every particle in the whole mass, by its alternate affinity or antipathy to other principles which are brought in contact with it. Till the experiment is tried, we do not know the result, the turn which the character will take in its new circumstances. Milton took only a few simple principles of character, and raised them to the utmost conceivable grandeur, and refined them from every base alloy. His imagination, nigh sphered in Heaven,' claimed kindred only with what he saw from

In