new name rose into the catalogue of kings; | Talfourd, the tragic shadow which darkened and when the essayists of our own century his home for years, one looks upon the porbegan to write, the world had changed, and trait of Elia with pity tempered with awe. they had changed with it.

Lamb extended the sphere of the essay, not The essayists who wrote in the early por- so much because he dealt with subjects tion of the present century-Lamb, Hazlitt, which till his day had been untouched, but and Hunt- are not only different from their because he imported into that literary form predecessors, as regards mental character; a fancy humor and tenderness which resemthey differ from them also in the variety of bled the fancy humor and tenderness of no the subjects that engaged their attention. other writer. The manifestations of these And this difference arises not only from the qualities were as personal and peculiar as greater number of subjects attracting public his expression of countenance, the stutter in interest in their day, but also from the im- his speech, his habit of punning, his love of mensely larger audience they had to address. black-letter and whiskey-punch. His essays They were not called upon to write for the are additions to English literature, just as town, but for town and country both. So- Potosi silver was an addition to the wealth ciety was reading in all its ranks, and each of Europe-something which it did not prerank had its special interests. The essay-viously possess. Whatever his subject, it ists' subject-matter had been vastly enlarged, becomes interpenetrated by his pathetic and great actors had trod the boards, great fanciful humor, and is thereby etherealized, painters had painted, the older poets had made poetic. Some of his essays have all come into fashion, outside nature had again the softness and remoteness of dreams. re-appeared in literature. The essayist could They are not of the earth earthy. They are weave an allegory, or criticise, or describe, floating islands asleep on serene shadows in or break a social enormity on the wheel, or a sea of humor. The essay on Roast Pig explode an ancient prejudice, with the cer- breathes a divine aroma. The sentences tainty of always finding a reader. Lamb, hush themselves around the youthful chimthe most peculiarly gifted of the three-who ney-sweep, "the innocent blackness," asleep thought Fleet Street worth all Arcadia- in the nobleman's sheets, as they might confined himself for the most part to the metropolis, its peculiar sights, its beggars, its chimney-sweeps, its theatres, its old actors, its book-stalls; and on these subjects he discourses with pathos and humor curiously blended. For him the past had an irresistible attraction: he loved old books, old houses, old pictures, old wine, old friends. His mind was like a Tudor mansion, full of low-roofed, wainscoted rooms, with pictures on the walls of men and women in antique garb; full of tortuous passages and grim crannies in which ghosts might lurk; with a garden with plots of shaven grass, and processions of clipped yews, and a stone dial in the corner, with a Latin motto anent the flight of time carved upon it, and a drowsy sound of rooks heard sometimes from afar. He sat at the India House with the heart of Sir Thomas Browne beating beneath his sables. He sputtered out puns among his friends from the saddest heart. He laughed that he might not weep. Misery, which could not make him a cynic nor a misanthrope, made him a humorist. And knowing, as now we all know from Sergeant

around the couch of the sleeping princess. Gone are all his troubles,-the harsh call of his master, sooty knuckle rubbed into tearful eyes, his brush, his call from the chimney-top. Let the poor wretch sleep! And then, Lamb's method of setting forth his fancies is as peculiar as the fancies themselves. He was a modern man only by the accident of birth; and his style is only modern by the same accident. It is full of the quaintest convolutions and doublings back upon itself; and ever and again a paragraph is closed by a sentence of unexpected rhetorical richness, like heavy golden fringe. depending from the velvet of the altar cover, -a trick which he learned from the "Religio Medici," and the "Urn Burial." As a critic, too, Lamb takes a high place. His essay on the Genius of Hogarth is a triumphant vindication of that master's claim to the highest place of honor in British art; and in it he sets forth the doctrine, that a picture must not be judged by externals of color, nor by manipulative dexterity-valuable as these unquestionably are-but by the number and value of the thoughts it con

tains; a doctrine which Mr. Ruskin has bor-pressing. He called one of his books, "A
rowed, and has used with results.
Book for the Parlor Window;" all his books
are for the parlor window.

Leigh Hunt was a poet as well as an essayist, and he carried his poetic fancy with him into prose, where it shone like some splendid bird of the tropics among the sobercoated denizens of the farmyard. He loved the country; but one almost suspects that his love for the country might be resolved into likings for cream, butter, strawberries, sunshine, and hay-swathes to tumble in. If he did not, like Wordsworth, carry in his heart the silence of wood and fell, he at all events carried a gillyflower jauntily in his button-hole. He was neither a town poet and essayist, nor a country poet and essayist; he was a mixture of both,- -a suburban poet and essayist. Above all places in the world, he loved Hampstead. His essays are gay and cheerful as suburban villas,-the piano is touched within, there are trees and flowers outside, but the city is not far distant; prosaic interests are ever intruding, visitors are constantly dropping in. His essays are not poetically conceived; they deal-with the exception of that lovely one on the "Death of Little Children," where the fancy becomes serious as an angel, and wipes the tears of mothers as tenderly away as an angel could-with distinctly mundane and commonplace matters; but his charm is this, be the subject what it may, immediately troops of fancies search land and sea and the range of the poets for its adornment -just as, in the old English villages on May morning, shoals of rustics went forth to the woods and brought home hawthorns for the dressing of door and window. Hunt is always cheerful and chatty. He defends himself against the evils of life with pretty thoughts. He believes that the world is good, and that men and women are good too. He would, with a smiling face, have offered a flower to a bailiff in the execution of his duty, and been both hurt and aston ished if that functionary had proved dead to its touching suggestions. His essays are much less valuable than Lamb's, because they are neither so peculiar, nor do they touch the reader so deeply; but they are full of color and wit. They resemble the arbors we see in gardens,-not at all the kind of place one would like to spend a life-time in, but exceedingly pleasant to withdraw to for an hour when the sun is hot and no duty is

Hazlitt, if he lacked Lamb's quaintness and ethereal humor, and Hunt's fancifulness, possessed a robust and passionate faculty which gave him a distinct place in the literature of his time. His feelings were keen and deep. The French Revolution seemed to him—in common with Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge—in its early stages an authentic angel rising with a new morning for the race upon its forehead; and when disappointment came, and when his friends sought refuge in the old order of things, he, loyal to his youthful hope, stood aloof, hating them almost as renegades; and never ceasing to give utterance to his despair: "I started in life with the French Revolution," he tells us ; "and I have lived, alas! to see the end of it. My sun arose with the first dawn of liberty, and I did not think how soon both must set. We were strong to run a race together, and I little dreamed that, long before mine was set, the sun of liberty would turn to blood, or sink once more in the night of despotism. Since then, I confess, I have no longer felt myself young, for with that my hopes fell." This was the central bitterness in Hazlitt's life; but around it were grouped lesser and more personal bitternesses. His early ambition was to be a painter, and in that he failed. Coleridge was the man whom he admired most in all the world, in whose genius he stood, like an Arcadian shepherd in an Arcadian sunrise, full of admiration,-every sense absorbed in that of sight; and that genius he was fated to see coming to nothing. Then he was headstrong, violent, made many enemies, was the object of cruel criticism, his financial affairs were never prosperous, and in domestic matters he is not understood to have been happy. He was a troubled and exasperated man, and this exasperation is continually breaking out in his writings. Deeply wounded in early life, he carried the smart with him to his death-bed. And in his essays and other writings it is almost pathetic to notice how he clings to the peaceful images which the poets love; how he reposes in their restful lines; how he listens to the bleating of the lamb in the fields of imagination. He is continually quoting Sidney's Arcadian image of the shepherd-boy under

the shade, piping as he would never grow old, tells how he was engaged for blissful days in -as if the recurrence of the image to his painting a portrait of his father; how he memory brought with it silence, sunshine, and imitated as best he could the rough texture waving trees. Hazlitt had a strong metaphys- of the skin, and the blood circulating beical turn; he was an acute critic in poetry and neath; how, when it was finished, he sat on art, but he wrote too much, and he wrote too a chair opposite, and with wild thoughts hurriedly. When at his best, his style is ex- enough in his head, looked at it through the cellent, concise, sinewy, laying open the long evenings; how with a throbbing heart stubborn thought as the sharp plowshare the he sent it to the exhibition, and saw it hung up glebe; while, at other times, it wants edge there by the side of a portrait "of the Honand sharpness, and the sentences resemble the orable Mr. Skeffington (now Sir George)." impressions of a seal which has been blunted Then he characteristically tells us, "that he with too frequent use. His best essays are, finished the portrait on the same day that the in a sense, autobiographical, because in them news of the battle of Austerlitz came." "I he recalls his enthusiasms and the passion- walked out in the afternoon, and as I reate hopes on which he fed his spirit. The turned, saw the evening star set over a poor essay entitled, "My First Acquaintance man's cottage, with other thoughts and feelwith Poets," is full of memorable passages. ings than I shall ever have again. Oh, for To Hazlitt, Coleridge was a divinity. They the revolution of the great Platonic year, walked from Wem to Shrewsbury on a win- that these times might come over again! I ter day, Coleridge talking all the while; and could sleep out the three hundred and sixtyHazlitt recalls it after the lapse of years: five thousand intervening years very con"A sound was in my ears as of a syren's tentedly." He was a passionate, melancholy, song: I was stunned, startled with it as keen-feeling, and disappointed man; and from deep sleep; but I had no notion then that I should ever be able to express my admiration to others in motley imagery and quaint allusion, till the light of his genius shone into my soul like the sun's rays glittering in the puddles of the road. soul has indeed remained in its original bondage, dark, obscure, with longings infinite and unsatisfied; my heart, shut up in the prison-house of this rude clay, has never found, nor will it ever find, a heart to speak to; but that my understanding also did not remain dumb and brutish, or at length found a language to express itself, I owe to Coleridge." This testimony, from a man like Hazlitt, to the worth of Coleridge's talk is interesting, and contrasts strangely with Carlyle's description of it, when, in later years, the silvery-haired sage looked down on the smoky London from Highgate. Nor the emperor. He passed from victory to is it without its moral. Talk, which in his early day came like a dawn upon another mind, illuminating dark recesses, kindling intellectual life, revealing itself to itself, became, through personal indulgence and the will's infirmity, mere glittering mists in which men were lost. Hazlitt's other essay, on the "Pleasures of Painting," is quite as personal as the one to which we have referred, and is perhaps the finest thing he has written. It is full of the love and the despair of art. He

...

those portions of his essays are the least valuable where his passion and his disappointment break out into spleen or irritability, just as those portions are the most valuable where bitter feelings are transfused My into poetry by memory and imagination. With perhaps more intellectual, certainly with more passionate force, than either Lamb or Hunt, Hazlitt's essays are, as a whole, inferior to theirs; but each contains passages, which not only they, but any man, might be proud to have written.

These men wrote in a period of unexampled literary activity, and in the thick of stupendous events: Scott, Moore, and Byron were writing their poems; Napoleon was shaking the thrones of the Continent. In our days the conquests of the poets seem nearly as astonishing as the conquests of

victory, and so did they. When quieter days came, and when the great men of the former generation had either passed away, or were reposing on the laurels they had earned so worthily, other writers arose to sustain the glory of the English essay. The most distinguished were Lord Macaulay and Mr. Carlyle. They began to write about the same time; Lord Macaulay's Essay on Milton appearing in the Edinburgh Review in 1825, and Mr. Carlyle's first Essay on Jean

Paul Richter in the same Review in 1827. | by allusion, suggestion, light touches of The writings of these men were different fancy, spurts of humor, grotesque exaggerafrom their predecessors. Mr. Carlyle's pri- tions of imagination; and these things so mary object was to acquaint his countrymen reduce one another, so tone one another with the great men which Germany had pro- down, that the final result is perfectly natuduced, and to interest them in the produc- ral and homogeneous. It is only by some tions of German genius. His plans widened, such combination of intellectual forces that however, as his way cleared; and the eye you can shadow forth the complexity of life which looked into the heart of Goethe, Schil- and character. In humanity there is no such ler, and Richter, was in course of time turned thing as a straight line or an unmixed color. on the Scottish Burns, the English Johnson, You see the flesh color on the cheek of a porand the French Voltaire. It is not too much trait: the artist will tell you that the consumto say that he has produced the best critical mately natural result was not attained by and biographical essays of which the Eng- one wash of paint, but by the mixture and lish language can boast. And it is in the reduplication of a hundred tints, the play of curious mixture of criticism and biography a myriad lights and shadows, no one of which in these papers-for the criticism becomes is natural in itself, although the blending of biography, and the biography criticism the whole is. These essays are the comthat their chief charm and value consist. pletest, the most characteristic portraits in Mr. Carlyle is an artist, and he knows ex- our literature. Mr. Carlyle is always at actly what and how much to put into his home when his subject was man. picture. He has a wonderful eye for what Lord Macaulay also wrote essays critical is characteristic. He searches after the se- and biographical, and has been perhaps more cret of a man's nature, and he finds it fre- widely popular than his great contemporary; quently in some trivial anecdote or careless but he is a different kind of thinker and saying, which another writer would have writer altogether. He did not brood over passed unnoticed, or tossed contemptuously the abysses of being as Mr. Carlyle continuaside. He hunts up every scrap of informa- ally does. The sense of time and death did tion, and he frequently finds what he wants not haunt him as they haunt the other. The in a corner. He judges a man by his poem, world, as it figured itself to Lord Macaulay, and the poem by the man. To his eye they was a comparatively commonplace world. are not separate things, but one and indivis He cared for man, but he cared for party ible. A man's work is the lamp by which quite as much. He recognized man as he reads his features. And then he so ap- Whigs and Tories. His idea of the uniportions praise and blame, so sets off the verse was a parliamentary one. His insight jocose and familiar with a moral solemnity, into man was not deep: he painted in posimakes anecdote and detail of dress and al- tive colors; he is never so antithetical as lusion to personal grace or deformity, to when describing a character; and character, subserve, by intricate suggestion, his ulti- if properly conceived, sets the measured mate purpose, and so presents to us life with antitheses of the rhetorician at defiance. eternity for background, that we not only It is constantly eluding them. His critifeel that the picture is the actual present- cism is good enough so far as it goes, but ment of the man as he lived, a veritable it does not go far; it deals more with the portrait, we feel also that he has worked accidents than the realities of things. Lord in no light or careless mood, that the poor Macaulay, as we have said, lived quite as est life is serious enough when seen against much for party as for man; and the men eternity, and that we ourselves, however who interested him were the men who were seldom we may remember it, are but mo-historical centres, around whom men and mentary shadows projected upon it. Mr. events revolved. He did not, as Mr. CarCarlyle does not write "scoundrel " on one lyle often does, take hold of an individual man's forehead, and "angel" on another's; he does not care sufficiently for man for he knows that pure scoundrel and pure an- that-and view him against immensity; he gel have their dwellings in other places than takes a man and looks at him in connection earth; he is too cunning an artist to use with contemporary events. When he writes these mercilessly definite lines. He works of Johnson, he is thinking all the while of

fluent and hasty moderns, but on Bacon and Jeremy Taylor, and such old men, and is about the best that has ever been written by poet.

Goldsmith and Garrick and Boswell and are but seldom manufactured at BirmingReynolds; when he writes of Clive and War- ham. The style has not been formed on the ren Hastings, he is more anxious to tell the story of their Indian conquests, than to enter into the secrets of their spirits. And for this, posterity are not likely to blame Lord Macaulay. He knew his strength. His pictorial faculty is astonishing: neither pomp nor circumstance cumbers it; it moves along like a triumphal procession, which no weight of insignia and banner can oppress. Out of the past he selects some special drama, which is vivified and held together by the life of a single individual, and that he paints with his most brilliant colors. He is the creator of the Historical Essay, and in that department is not likely soon to have a successor. His unfinished History is only a series of historical pictures pieced together into one imposing panorama, but throughout there is wonderful splendor and pomp of color. Every figure, too, is finished, down to the buttons and the finger nails.

Mr. Helps has the credit-apart from what may fairly attach to his exquisitely pellucid English, and the intrinsic value of his thinking-of introducing a novelty into essaywriting. Naturally subtle-minded and tolerant, most courteous to everything that comes to him in the name of truth, conscientious, disposed to listen to every witness, to hesitate and weigh, he does not take up an opinion suddenly; and when he does take up one, he does not cling to it as a shipwrecked sailor to his raft, said raft being his only chance of escape from drowning. Superficially at least, an unimpassioned man, fond of limitations and of suggesting "buts," knowing that a good deal may not only be said on both sides but on a dozen sides of a thing, Mr. Helps, when he began to write, found himself environed with an artistic difficulty. He had, of course, on subjects in which he was interested, and which he wished to write about, certain definite opinions; but as he was big enough and clear-eyed enough to see all round the matter in hand, he was conscious that each of the opinions, which. he accepted as a whole, was subject to limitations, that each of them was intersected and eaten into by its opposite, like the map of Scotland by branching sea-lochs, and that if he gave expression to all his doubts and hesitations in the work of essay-writing he would make no sort of direct progress. He would only be painting above his picture. His one footprint would obliterate the other. And yet to be faithful to himself and to the work in hand, these limitations of broad statements must be indicated in some way.

A generation has passed since Mr. Carlyle and Lord Macaulay wrote their essays, and during the interval new men have come into the field and won deserved laurels. "Notes from Life," by the author of "Philip Van Artevelde," is a volume every way remarkable. Mr. Taylor is a fine and thoughtful poet, and he has brought with him into the essay the poet's style and the poet's wisdom. In his essays you find no cheap and flashy sentiment, no running after the popular manias of the day; the eye is never offended by a glare of color; on the contrary, there is a certain ripeness about the thought as of autumn tints, a certain stillness and meditative repose as of an autumn evening, a certain remoteness and retiredness from modern strife and bustle, as of autumn woodlands. These essays are born of wisdom and experience, and of a wisdom and experience that has ripened in solitude and It is from this particular difficulty surroundself-communion. No sound reaches you ing Mr. Helps that we are indebted for the from the market-place-you cannot catch machinery of the "Friends in Council." the tang of any literary coterie. The style, From the necessity which lay on him of settoo, is peculiar in these days, from its lei- ting forth in fulness his views of things, he surely movement and old-fashioned elabo- was forced to the artistic device of creating rateness. It has an Elizabethan air about around the central essay a little drama-of it. It is far from being unornamented: the one character reading the essay which conornaments are worn proudly as heirlooms tains the broad view, and of other characters are worn, and these never glare-they are who listen and criticise, who suggest the far too precious for that, in price of gold subtle difficulty, point out the hazardous and gem and sacredness of memory, and spot, define the inevitable limitation. By