cation. Not to count upon these accidents of favor, we find that the regular toil of those in Lamb's situation began at ten in the morning and ended as the clock struck four in the afternoon. Six hours composed the daily contribution of labor, that is precisely onefourth part of the total day. Only that, as Sunday was exempted, the rigorous expression of the quota was one-fourth of six-sevenths, which makes six-twenty-eighths and not six twenty-fourths of the total time. Less toil than this would hardly have availed to deepen the sense of value in that large part of the time still remaining disposable. Had there been any resumption whatever of labor in the evening, though but for half an hour, that one encroachment upon the broad continuous area of the eighteen free hours would have killed the tranquillity of the whole day, by sowing it (so to speak) with intermitting anxieties anxieties that, like tides, would still be rising and falling. Whereas now, at the early hour of four, when day-light is yet lingering in the air, even at the dead of winter, in the latitude of London, and when the enjoying section of the day is barely commencing everything is left which a man would care to retain. A mere dilettante or amateur student, having no mercenary interest concerned, would, upon a refinement of luxury-would, upon choice, give up so much time to study, were it only to sharpen the value of what remained for pleasure. And thus the only difference between the scheme of the India House distributing his time for Lamb, and the scheme of a wise voluptuary distributing his time for himself, lay, not in the amount of time deducted from enjoyment, but in the particular mode of appropriating that deduction. An intellectual appropriation of the time, though casually fatiguing, must have pleasures of its own; pleasures denied to a task so mechanic and so monotonous as that of reiterating endless records of sales or consignments not essentially varying from each other. True, it is pleasanter to pursue an intellectual study than to make entries in a ledger. But even an intellectual toil is toil: few people can support it for more than six hours in a day. And the only question, therefore, after all, is, at what period of the day a man would prefer taking this pleasure of study. Now, upon that point, as regards the case of Lamb, there is no opening for doubt. He, amongst his Popular Fallacies, admirably illustrates the necessity of evening and artificial lights to the prosperity of studies. After exposing, with the perfection of fun, the savage unsociality of

those elder ancestors who lived (if life it was) before lamp-light was invented, showing that "jokes came in with candles," since "what repartees could have passed" when people were "grumbling at one another in the dark," and "when you must have felt about for a smile, and handled a neighbor's cheek to be sure that he understood it ?" he goes on to say, "this accounts for the seriousness of the elder poetry," viz., because they had no candle-light. Even eating he objects to as a very imperfect thing in the dark; you are not convinced that a dish tastes as it should do by the promise of its name, if you dine in the twilight without candles. Seeing is believing. The senses absolutely give and take reciprocally." The sight guarantees the taste. For instance,

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Can you tell pork from veal in the dark, or distinguish Sherries from pure Malaga?" To all enjoyments whatsoever candles are indispensable as an adjunct: but, as to reading, there is," says Lamb, " absolutely no such thing but by a candle. We have tried the affectation of a book at noon-day in gardens, but it was labor thrown away. It is a mockery, all that is reported of the influential Phoebus. No true poem ever owed its birth to the sun's light. The mild internal light, that reveals the fine shapings of poetry, like fires on the domestic hearth, goes out in the sunshine. Milton's morning hymn in Paradise, we would hold a good wager, was penned at midnight; and Taylor's rich description of a sunrise smells decidedly of the taper." This view of evening and candlelight as involved in literature may seem no more than a pleasant extravaganza, and no doubt it is in the nature of such gaieties to travel a little into exaggeration; but substantially it is certain that Lamb's feelings pointed habitually in the direction here indicated. His literary studies, whether taking the color of tasks or diversions, courted the aid of evening, which, by means of physical weariness, produces a more luxurious state of repose than belongs to the labor-hours of day, and courted the aid of lamp-light, which, as Lord Bacon remarked, gives a gorgeousness to human pomps and pleasures, such as would be vainly sought from the homeliness of day-light. The hours, therefore, which were withdrawn from his own control by the India House, happened to be exactly that part of the day which Lamb least valued and could least have turned to account.

The account given of Lamb's friends, of those whom he endeavored to love, because

he admired them, or to esteem intellectually because he loved them personally, is too much colored for general acquiescence by Sergeant Talfourd's own early prepossessions. It is natural that an intellectual man like the Sergeant, personally made known in youth to people whom from childhood he had regarded as powers in the ideal world, and in some instances as representing the eternities of human speculation, since their names had perhaps dawned upon his mind in concurrence with the very earliest suggestion of topics which they had treated, should overrate their intrinsic grandeur. Hazlitt accordingly is styled "the great thinker." But had he been such potentially, there was an absolute bar to his achievement of that station in act and consummation. No man can be a great thinker in our days upon large and elaborate questions without being also a great student. To think profoundly, it is indispensable that a man should have read down to his own starting-point, and have read as a collating student to the particular stage at which he himself takes up the subject. At this moment, for instance, how could geology be treated otherwise than childishly by one who should rely upon the encyclopædias of 1800? or comparative Physiology by the most ingenious of men unacquainted with Marshall Hall, and with the apocalyptic glimpses of secrets unfolding under the hands of Professor Owen ? In such a condition of undisciplined thinking, the ablest man thinks to no purpose. He lingers upon parts of the inquiry that have lost the importance which once they had, under imperfect charts of the subject; he wastes his strength upon problems that have become obsolete; he loses his way in paths that are not in the line of direction upon which the improved speculation is moving; or he gives narrow conjectural solutions of difficulties that have long since received sure and comprehensive ones. It is as if a man should in these days attempt to colonize, and yet through inertia or through ignorance, should leave behind him all modern resources of chemistry, of chemical agriculture, or of steam-power. Hazlitt had read nothing. Unacquainted with Grecian philosophy, with Scholastic philosophy, and with the recomposition of these philosophies in the looms of Germany, during the last sixty and odd years, trusting merely to the untrained instincts of keen mother-wit,-whence should Hazlitt have had the materials for great thinking? It is through the collation of many abortive voyages to Polar regions that

a man gains his first chance of entering the Polar basin, or of running ahead on the true line of approach to it. The very reason for Hazlitt's defect in eloquence as a lecturer, is sufficient also as a reason why he could not have been a comprehensive thinker. "He was not eloquent," says the Sergeant, "in the true sense of the term." But why? Because it seems "his thoughts were too weighty to be moved along by the shallow stream of feeling which an evening's excitement can rouse;"-an explanation which leaves us in doubt whether Hazlitt forfeited his chance of eloquence by accommodating himself to this evening's excitement, or by gloomily resisting it. Our own explanation is different. Hazlitt was not eloquent, because he was discontinuous. No man can be eloquent whose thoughts are abrupt, insulated, capricious, and (to borrow an impressive word from Coleridge) non-sequacious, Eloquence resides not in separate or fractional ideas, but in the relations of manifold ideas, and in the mode of their evolution from each other. It is not indeed enough that the ideas should be many, and their relations coherent: the main condition lies in the key of the evolution, in the law of the succession. The elements are nothing without the atmosphere that moulds, and the dynamic forces that combine. Now Hazlitt's brilliancy is seen chiefly in separate splinterings of phrase or image, which throw upon the eye a vitreous scintillation for a moment, but spread no deep suffusions of color, and distribute no masses of mighty shadow. A flash, a solitary flash, and all is gone. Rhetoric, according to its quality, stands in many degrees of relation to the permanencies of truth; and all rhetoric, like all flesh, is partly unreal, and the glory of both is fleeting. Even the mighty rhetoric of Sir Thomas Brown, or Jeremy Taylor, to whom only it has been granted to open the trumpet-stop on that great organ of passion, oftentimes leaves behind it the sense of sadness which belongs to beautiful apparitions starting out of darkness upon the morbid eye only to be reclaimed by darkness in the instant of their birth, or which belongs to pageantries in the clouds. But if all rhetoric is a mode of pyrotechny, and all pyrotechnics are by necessity fugacious, yet even in these frail pomps there are many degrees of frailty. Some fire-works require an hour's duration for the expansion of their glory; others, as if formed from fulminating powder, expire in the very act of birth. Precisely on that scale of duration. and of power stand the glitterings of rheto

ric that are not worked into the texture, but washed on from the outside. Hazlitt's thoughts were of the same fractured and discontinuous order as his illustrative imagesseldom or never self-diffusive; and that is a sufficient argument that he had never cultivated philosophic thinking.

Not however to conceal any part of the truth, we are bound to acknowledge that Lamb thought otherwise on this point, manifesting what seemed to us an extravagant admiration of Hazlitt, and perhaps even in part for that very glitter which we are denouncing at least he did so in a conversation with ourselves. But, on the other hand, as this conversation travelled a little into the tone of a disputation, and our frost on this point might seem to justify some undue fervor by way of balance, it is very possible that Lamb did not speak his absolute and most dispassionate judgment. And yet again, if he did, may we, with all reverence for Lamb's exquisite genius, have permission to say, that his own constitution of intellect sinned by this very habit of discontinuity. It was a habit of mind not unlikely to be cherished by his habits of life. Amongst these habits was the excess of his social kindness. He scorned so much to deny his company and his redundant hospitality to any man who manifested a wish for either by calling upon him, that he almost seemed to think it a criminality in himself if, by accident, he really was from home on your visit, rather than by possibility a negligence in you, that had not forewarned him of your intention. All his life, from this and other causes, he must have read in the spirit of one liable to sudden interruption; like a dragoon, in fact, reading with one foot in the stirrup, when expecting momentarily a summons to mount for action. In such situations, reading by snatches, and by intervals of precarious leisure, people form the habit of seeking and unduly valuing condensations of the meaning, where in reality the truth suffers by this short-hand exhibition, or else they demand too vivid illustrations of the meaning. Lord Chesterfield himself, so brilliant a man by nature, already therefore making a morbid estimate of brilliancy, and so hurried throughout his life as a public man, read under this double coercion for craving instantaneous effects. At one period, his only At one period, his only time for reading was in the morning, whilst under the hands of his hair-dresser: compelled to take the hastiest of flying shots at his author, naturally he demanded a very conspicuous mark to fire at. But the author

could not, in so brief a space, be always sure to crowd any very prominent objects on the eye, unless by being audaciously oracular and peremptory as regarded the sentiment, or flashy in excess as regarded its expression. "Come now, my friend," was Lord Chesterfield's morning adjuration to his author; "come now, cut it short-don't prose-don't hum and haw." The author had doubtless no ambition to enter his name on the honorable and ancient roll of gentlemen prosers: probably he conceived himself not at all tainted with the asthmatic infirmity of humming and hawing: but, as to "cutting it short," how could he be sure of meeting his Lordship's expectations in that point, unless by dismissing the limitations that might be requisite to fit the idea for use, or the adjuncts that might be requisite to integrate its truth, or the final consequences that might involve some deep arriere pensée, which, coming last in the succession, might oftentimes be calculated to lie deepest on the mind? To be lawfully and usefully brilliant after this rapid fashion, a man must come forward as a refresher of old truths, where his suppressions are supplied by the reader's memory; not as an expounder of new truths, where oftentimes a dislocated fraction of the true is more dangerous than the false itself.

To read therefore habitually, by hurried instalments, has this bad tendency that it is likely to found a taste for modes of composition too artificially irritating, and to disturb the equilibrium of the judgment in relation to the colorings of style. Lamb, however, whose constitution of mind was even ideally sound in reference to the natural, the simple, the genuine, might seem of all men least liable to a taint in this direction. And undoubtedly he was so as regarded those modes of beauty which nature had specially qualified him for apprehending. Else, and in relation to other modes of beauty, where his sense of the true, and of its distinction from the spurious, had been an acquired sense, it is impossible for us to hide from ourselves, that not through habits only, not through stress of injurious accidents only, but by original structure and temperament of mind, Lamb had a bias towards those very defects on which rested the startling characteristics of style which we have been noticing. He himself, we fear, not bribed by indulgent feelings to another, not moved by friendship, but by native tendency, shrank from the continuous, from the sustained, from the elaborate.

The elaborate, indeed, without which much truth and beauty must perish in germ, was by

name the object of his invectives. The instances are many in his own beautiful essays where he literally collapses, literally sinks away from openings suddenly offering themselves to flights of pathos or solemnity in direct prosecution of his own theme. On any such summons, where an ascending impulse, and an untired pinion were required, he refuses himself (to use military language) invariably. The least observing reader of Elia cannot have failed to notice that the most felicitous passages always accomplish their circuit in a few sentences. The gyration within which his sentiment wheels, no matter of what kind it may be, is always the shortest possible. It does not prolong itself, and it does not repeat itself. But in fact, other features in Lamb's mind would have argued this feature by analogy, had we by accident been left unaware of it directly. It is not by chance, or without a deep ground in his nature common to all his qualities, both affirmative and negative, that Lamb had an insensi- | bility to music more absolute than can have been often shared by any human creature, or perhaps than was ever before acknowledged so candidly. The sense of music, as a pleasurable sense, or any sense at all other than of certain unmeaning and impertinent differences in respect to high and low-sharp or flat-was utterly obliterated as with a sponge by nature herself from Lamb's organization. It was a corollary from the same large substratum in his nature, that Lamb had no sense of the rhythmical in prose composition. Rhythmus, or pomp of cadence, or sonorous ascent of clauses, in the structure of sentences, were effects of art as much thrown away upon him as the voice of the charmer upon the deaf adder. We ourselves, occupying the very station of polar opposition to that of Lamb, being as morbidly, perhaps, in the one excess as he in the other, naturally detected this omission in Lamb's nature at an early stage of our acquaintance. Not the fabled Regulus, with his eye-lids torn away, and his uncurtained eye-balls exposed to the noontide glare of a Carthaginian sun, could have shrieked with more anguish of recoil from torture than we from certain sentences and periods in which Lamb perceived no fault at all. Pomp, in our appréhension, was an idea of two categories; the pompous might be spurious, but it might also be genuine. It is well to love the simple: we love it; nor is there any opposition at all between that and the very glory of pomp. But, as we once put the case to Lamb, if as a musician, as the leader of a mighty orchestra, you had this

theme offered to you-" Belshazzar the king gave a great feast to a thousand of his lords -or this, "And on a certain day, Marcus Cicero stood up, and in a set speech rendered solemn thanks to Caius Cæsar for Quintus Ligarius pardoned, and for Marcus Marcellus restored,"-Surely no man would deny that, in such a case, simplicity, though in a passive sense not lawfully absent, must stand aside as totally insufficient for the positive part. Simplicity might guide, even here, but could not furnish the power; a rudder it might be, but not an oar or a sail. This, Lamb was ready to allow; as an intellectual quiddity, he recognized pomp in the character of a privileged thing; he was obliged to do so; for take away from great ceremonial festivals, such as the solemn rendering of thanks, the celebration of national anniversaries, the commemoration of public benefactors, &c., the element of pomp, and you take away their very meaning and life; but, whilst allowing a place for it in the rubric of the logician, it is certain that, sensuously, Lamb would not have sympathized with it, nor have felt its justification in any concrete instance. We find a difficulty in pursuing this subject, without greatly exceeding our limits. We pause, therefore, and add only this one suggestion as partly explanatory of the case. Lamb had the dramatic intellect and taste, perhaps in perfection; of the Epic, he had none at all. Here, as happens sometimes to men of genius preternaturally endowed in one direction, he might be considered as almost starved. A favorite of nature, so eminent in some directions, by what right could he complain that her bounties were not indiscriminate? From this defect in his nature it arose, that except by culture and by reflection, Lamb had no genial appreciation of Milton. The solemn planetary wheelings of the Paradise Lost were not to his taste. What he did comprehend, were the motions like those of lightning, the fierce angular coruscations of that wild agency which comes forward so vividly in the sudden EpiÉTTsia, in the revolutionary catastrophe, and in the tumultuous conflicts, through persons or through situations, of the tragic drama.

There is another vice in Mr. Hazlitt's mode of composition, viz., the habit of trite quotation, too common to have challenged much notice, were it not for these reasons:-1st, that Sergeant Talfourd speaks of it in equivocal terms, as a fault perhaps, but as a "felicitous" fault, "trailing after it a line of golden associations ;" 2dly, because the practice involves a dishonesty. On occasion of