TYPES OF THE ESSAY SELECTED AND EDITED BY BENJAMIN A. HEYDRICK, A.M. HEAD OF ENGLISH DEPARTMENT, HIGH SCHOOL OF COMMERCE NEW YORK CITY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS NEW YORK CHICAGO BOSTON ATLANTA BAN FRANCISCO DALLAS COPYRIGHT, 1921, T CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS Printed in the United States of America, K CONTENTS INTRODUCTION FAQS WHAT Is AN ESSAY? vii THE HISTORY OF THE ESSAY viii THE TYPES OP ESSAYS xi How TO STUDY THESE ESSAYS xiii THE PERSONAL ESSAY A DAY IN LONDON Richard Steek . . 3 V . A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG . Charles Lamb ... 13 V- OLD CHINA Charles Lamb ... 25 MY FIRST ACQUAINTANCE WITH POETS William Hazlitt . . 35 ON GETTING UP ON COLD MORNINGS Leigh Hunt .... 63 ON A LAZY IDLE BOY W. M . Thackeray . 71 A COLLEGE MAGAZINE R. L. Stevenson . . 83 MY LAST WALK WITH THE SCHOOL- MISTRESS 0. W . Holmes . . 95 THE DESCRIPTIVE ESSAY THE SKY John Ruskin ... 105 THE SITE OF A UNIVERSITY . . . J.H. Newman . . 115 THE SEA FOGS R. L. Stevenson . . 125 BRUTE NEIGHBORS H. D. Thoreau . . 133 v M18OO4G vi CONTENTS THE CHAKACTEK SKETCH PAGE THE MAN IN BLACK Oliver Goldsmith . . 147 f THE HUNTER'S FAMILY R. L. Stevenson . . 153 THE SPIRIT OF THEODORE ROOSE- VELT Julian Street . . , 165 THE CRITICAL ESSAY WHAT AND How TO READ .... John Ruskin ... 175 BUNYAN'S "PILGRIM'S PROGRESS" T. B. Macaulay . . 193 , H. G. WELLS'S "OUTLINE OF HIS- TORY " J. Salwyn Schapiro 209 THE EDITORIAL ESSAY FEMALE ORATORS Joseph Addison . . 237 LIVING IN A PAIR OF SCALES . . Joseph Addison . . 245 THE STAGE COACH Richard Steek . . 253 THE REFLECTIVE ESSAY STUDIES; TRUTH; TRAVEL; RICHES; GREAT PLACE; FRIENDSHIP . . Francis Bacon . . 259 THE INFLUENCE OF BKS . . . Thomas Carlyle . . 283 SELF-RELIANCE . . R. W. Emerson . , 295 AMERICAN AND BRITON John Galsworthy . 329 Is THE WORLD GROWING BETTER? Henry van Dyke . . 349 READING LIST OF ESSAYS 371 INTRODUCTION WHAT IS AN ESSAY? When you write a letter to a friend, you tell him what you and others have been doing, what you have seen, and what you think about various things. People who write books do the same thing on a larger scale. A book that tells what you have done is an autobiography; a book telling what others have done is biography or his- tory, or if it deals with imaginary people, it is fiction. A book telling what you have seen is travel, and a book tell- ing what you think on various topics is a book of essays. Yet not all books giving people's thoughts are essays. If a man writes a book on religion or philosophy, for example, a book made up of various chapters, arrranged in such order as to form a systematic and complete treatment of the subject, that book would not be called an essay but a treatise. The word essay comes from the French essai, an attempt, an endeavor. So Francis Bacon, the first English essayist, said in the preface to his book: "To write just treatises requireth leisure in the writer and leisure in the reader, . . . which is the cause that hath made me choose to write certain brief notes, set down rather significantly than curiously, which I have called essays." This gives us the second characteristic of the essay: it is brief, and does not attempt to treat a subject either completely or systematically. In fact, an essay is a sort of literary go-as-you-please. An essayist may, like Montaigne, announce as his subject "Coaches," and proceed to write about sneezing, the entertainments of Roman emperors, and the conquest of Mexico, with only a brief mention of coaches. And yet while the essayist vii viii INTRODUCTION may seem to be careless how he begins or where he leaves off his subject, there is one thing that he is always careful about, his style. More than any other form of prose, the essay demands mastery of style. How the thing is said is as important often more important, than what is said. This style may take many forms, from the stately, thought-weighted sentences of Bacon to the whimsical turns of Charles Lamb; it may have the calm and beauty of a Newman, or the passionate eloquence of Carlyle: in each case we feel that the style is the perfect medium for the thought. In its lack of logical method, its freedom to stray hither and thither, the essay is like good conversation. It is like conversation again in its tone, which may be now serious, now humorous, now merely playful. Some essay- ists, like Ruskin, are always serious; some, like Lamb, are nearly always humorous; some, like Addison, are both by turns. And the same essay may be partly serious, partly humorous. As you read these essays, then, be on the watch for a twinkle of the eye. To sum up the characteristics of the essay, we may say that it is a short piece of prose, not attempting to treat its subject completely nor logically, but rather giving the author's opinions upon it; opinions which may or may not be serious, but which are set forth with a high degree of literary art. It usually reveals more or less of the per- sonality of the author, and in this respect corresponds in prose to the lyric in poetry. THE HISTORY OF THE ESSAY The essay as a form in modern literature began with a French writer, Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published two volumes entitled Essais. These dealt with such subjects as Fortune, Cannibals, Names, Smells, HISTORY OF THE ESSAY ix Liars, Virtue, and the like. The book was soon trans- lated into English, and had a marked influence upon Eng- lish writers. Francis Bacon, Lamb, Hazlitt, and Steven- son were readers of Montaigne, and acknowledge their debt to him. The first English writer of essays was Francis Bacon, whose Essays, or Counsels Civil and Moral appeared in 1625. This little volume contained sixty essays, in length from two to ten pages; the subjects were all general, such as Studies, Riches, Love, Great Place. The tone of the essays was grave; one seems to hear the voice of the Lord Chief Justice of England delivering his wise verdicts upon human affairs. And of all Bacon's works, which number fifteen large volumes, dealing with science and philosophy, written by the wisest man of his time, only this slender book of essays survives to be read to- day. From the time of Sir Francis Bacon to the beginning of the eighteenth century, occasional volumes of essays appeared. Such were the Religio Medici of Sir Thomas Browne; Several Discourses by Way of Essays, by Abra- ham Cowley, and the Miscellanea of Sir William Temple. But the great development of the essay came with the rise of periodical literature in England. In our day, with the newspapers thrust into our hands twice a day, and with newsstands piled with weekly and monthly journals, it is hard to imagine a time when neither newspaper nor magazine existed. Yet in 1688 this was exactly the situation in England. Newspapers were the first to appear; then in 1691 came the first maga- zine, the Athenian Gazette, a little sheet made up chiefly of questions and answers. In 1704 Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, began a journal called A Weekly Review of the Affairs of France, which contained, in addition to the news from Europe, a short essay or x INTRODUCTION editorial. This idea was still further developed by Richard Steele, who in 1709 began the publication of the Taller, a weekly paper consisting of a single large sheet printed on both sides, containing a paragraph of news and one or more essays. After a few numbers of the paper had appeared, Steele was aided by his friend Joseph Addison. The Toiler became popular; its editors saw an opportunity for improving it, and in 1711 they discontinued the Toiler and began the Spectator. This was published at first three times a week, then daily; it contained no news, merely a single essay, and a few adver- tisements. The essays covered a wide range of topics. They did not touch politics, but with this exception they treated almost every topic of interest to the Londoner of the day. There were papers on duelling, on the Italian opera, on fashionable slang, on style in women's dress, on the treatment of servants, on education, on courtship and marriage. And in practically all these essays the writers had the same aim as an editorial writer of to-day: to bring to public attention some wrong or folly that ought to be corrected. The editors did not deal with great public questions, or with crimes punishable by law, but with matters of behavior and the customs of the time. These papers thus show a new type of essay: that which is written to influence public opinion in some particular direction. This may be called the editorial essay. The success of the Spectator led to many imitations. Dr. Johnson wrote the Rambler and the Idler. Oliver Goldsmith wrote a series of papers called The Citizen of the World, and there were hundreds of others. But none of them equalled the work of Addison and Steele, the founders of the type. The next development of the essay was also a result of the development of periodical literature. The early journals were affairs of only a few pages. But with the THE TYPES OF ESSAYS xi beginning of the nineteenth century we have the ap- pearance of magazines, published monthly or quarterly, of a size to permit the publication of long articles. The Edinburgh Review was established in 1802; the Quarterly Review in 1809, Blackwood's Magazine in 1817, the London Magazine in 1820. The rivalry between these journals led them to pay contributors liberally, and to allow much freedom to these writers. Hence such authors as Ma- caulay, Lamb, De Quinoey, Hazlitt, and Hunt were stimulated to do their best. Macaulay, with his wide reading and his marvellous memory, could write for the Edinburgh a book review in which he discussed not only the book itself, and all the subjects mentioned in it, but other subjects which the author should have discussed, but did not. Charles Lamb, who by day was a book- keeper, by night read his favorite authors, and wrote his whimsical essays for the London Magazine. Hazlitt and De Quincey, both great readers and famous as talkers, could pour out their talk on paper at the rate of a guinea a printed page. So with the advent of the modern maga- zine came the full development of the critical and descrip- tive and personal essays as we know them to-day. The magazine has continued to be the medium for the first publication of almost all essays. Carlyle published his Sartor Resartus in Eraser's Magazine ; Thackeray's Round- about Papers were written for the Comhill; Stevenson's earlier essays appeared in the Comhill, his later ones in Scribner's; Holmes J s Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table was published in the Atlantic, and Van Dyke's essays in Scrib- ner's. THE TYPES OF ESSAYS When we read Lamb's essay on Old China, we do not learn very much about porcelain, but we learn a good deal about Charles Lamb, his likes and dislikes. Such essays, xii INTRODUCTION aiming primarily to entertain, and revealing the person- ality of the author, are called personal essays. To this group belong the writings of Thackeray, of Hazlitt, and most of Stevenson. As we read their essays we grow better and better acquainted with the writers. Mon- taigne, who was the first to write essays of this type, says in the introduction to his book, "It is myself I por- tray." So the personal essay, or, as it is sometimes called, the familiar essay, forms a distinct class, and in- cludes some of the most noted essays in English litera- ture. The descriptive essay is self-explanatory. It may deal with the larger aspects of nature, as Ruskin's description of the sky, or with animals, as Thoreau's Brute Neigh- bors, or indeed with any created thing. It differs from pure description in that you are always conscious of the author: he tells what he thinks as well as what he sees. Thus Thoreau begins by asking questions about nature, and Ruskin closes with an appeal to let the beauty of the sky strengthen our faith. Such touches mark the writ- ing as belonging to the essay type. The character sketch differs from the description in that while the description deals with the outward appear- ance, the character sketch deals with the inner man. It may have as its subject an imaginary individual, as Goldsmith's Man in Black, or real persons, as in Julian Street's portrait of Theodore Roosevelt. In the critical essay, the subject is usually a work of art. It^may be a book, a painting, an opera, a statue, or an architectural work. When Macaulay wrote a review of a new edition of the Pilgrim's Progress, or when a critic of to-day writes an account of a new book or play, each tells us something about the contents of the book,' and in addition gives his opinion, in the form of praise or blame. Or the critical essay may be general, as when HOW TO STUDY ESSAYS xiii Ruskm tells us how to choose books and how to read them. Another type is the editorial essay, or that which is published in a periodical with the aim of influencing pub- lic opinion. It is necessary to distinguish between the editorial and the editorial essay. Most editorials are really brief arguments: they are plain in style, they aim at convincing their readers and nothing more. Such articles cannot be called essays. But the writers of the Spectator aimed to entertain their readers quite as much as to persuade them; they gave careful attention to their style, and they so imbued what they wrote with their own personality that it has power to charm us yet. There are occasional articles of the essay type on the editorial pages of our newspapers: sometimes a column regularly appears, such as the "Topics of the Times" in the New York Times, made up of brief papers which in mood and form are true essays. The reflective essay differs from the others in two respects: its subjects are general, often abstract, and its tone is serious. Francis Bacon writing upon Studies, Emerson writing upon Self-Reliance, Carlyle writing upon the Influence of Books, John Galsworthy writing upon the differences between Americans and English- men, are examples of the reflective essay at its best. In each case the writer is a man with a philosophic mind, one who looks beneath the appearance of things to find realities; each has thought deeply upon an important sub- ject, and in the essay gives his matured conclusions. HOW TO STUDY THESE ESSAYS First, do not expect to find a story. Short stories are delightful and simple. Anybody can read them; a child can understand them. A taste for essays is like a taste XIV INTRODUCTION for olives: it must be cultivated. An essay requires more attention to read than a story, and it repays you by giving you more to think about. The essays in each group should be read with a different purpose. In the personal essays, ask yourself what each one shows about the man who wrote it. How many of these experiences are like your own? What bits of humor do you find? What ideas that are well ex- pressed? For the descriptive essays, read slowly and try to see with your imagination the pictures presented. Recall similar sights you have seen. Try to write something yourself in imitation of one of these descriptions. In reading a character sketch, ask yourself such ques- tions as these: What are the chief traits of the person portrayed? How are these made clear, by stating them or by giving instances to illustrate the point? Why did the writer choose this particular person as his subject? Does he give his opinion of the person directly, or does he let you infer it? In the critical essays, note how fully the writers tell about the books they discuss. Few books are reviewed at such length as Professor Schapiro's review of Wells's History, and few are reviewed so well. What qualifica- tions should one have to review a book? What should be his aim: to tell the contents of a book? to praise it so that it may sell? to attack it? to show his own cleverness? to point out its merits and faults without prejudice? Which of these aims is seen in Macaulay's review? in Schapiro's? Has either one an introduction? a conclusion? Point out the extent of each. Compare these reviews with other essays as regards logical arrangement. For the editorial essays, state in a sentence the point which the writer wished to make. Why did he introduce imaginary characters? What subjects might engage the HOW TO STUDY ESSAYS xv attention of the Spectator to-day? Try to treat one of them in the Spectator manner. The reflective essay demands careful reading, sentence by sentence, to get its meaning. As you read, note sen- tences that contain ideas new to you, or particularly well expressed, and copy them into a note-book. Form the habit of making quotations from what you read. As you finish each essay, ask yourself what new ideas you have gained. What do essays give you that fiction does not? The writers in this book represent the leading essayists of England and America. In the biographies of these au- thors, given in the notes, you will find the titles of various books of essays written by these men; other volumes of essays are given in the list at the end of the book. Some of these books you will read in the library, some of them you ought to own. THE PERSONAL ESSAY RICHARD STEELE A DAY IN LONDON Richard Steele (1672-1729) was born in Dublin. At twelve years of age he was sent to the Charterhouse School in London, where he met Joseph Addison and the two be- came fast friends. He entered Oxford, but left without a degree; soon afterward he entered the army. After some years Captain Steele of the Guards became inter- ested in writing. Several of his plays were produced at the Drury Lane Theatre: the best of these was a comedy, The Tender Husband. Encouraged by success, Steele re- signed from the army and devoted himself to literature. He knew Pope and Swift and most of the writers of the day, and still kept up his friendship with Addison. In 1709 he started a paper of his own, the Tatler, which was the beginning of the periodical essay. (See Introduction, p. x.) This was later followed by the Spectator ; to both periodicals Addison was a frequent contributor, but the plan was Steele's and he first sketched the members of the famous Spectator Club. In the first volume of the Tatler Steele thus set forth its purpose: "The general purpose of this paper is to expose the false arts of life, to pull off the disguises of cunning, vanity and affectation, and to recommend a general simplicity in our dress, our discourse and our behavior." But Steele was not always bent upon reforming society. In the paper here quoted, as in many others, he writes to entertain his readers, and at the end he tries desperately to find a moral. This essay gives an account of a day of his own life: reading between the lines, we learn not a little about lively Dick Steels. RICHARD STEELE A DAY IN LONDON (From the Toiler) It is an inexpressible pleasure to know a little of the world, and be of no character or significancy in it. To be ever unconcerned, and ever looking on new ob- jects with an endless curiosity, is a delight known only to those who are turned for speculation: nay, they who enjoy it must value things only as they are the objects of speculation, without drawing any worldly advantage to themselves from them, but just as they are what con- tribute to their amusement, or the improvement of the mind. I lay one night last week at Richmond; and being restless, not out of dissatisfaction, but a certain busy inclination one sometimes has, I rose at four in the morn- ing, and took boat for London, with a resolution to rove by boat and coach for the next four-and-twenty hours, till the many different objects I must needs meet with should tire my imagination, and give me an inclination to a repose more profound than I was at that time capa- ble of. I beg people's pardon for an odd humor I am guilty of, and was often that day, which is saluting any person whom I like, whether I know him or not. This is a particularity which would be tolerated in me, if they considered that the greatest pleasure I know I receive at my eyes, and that I am obliged to an agreeable person for coming abroad into my view, as another is for a visit of conversation at their own houses. 3 4 J/TH$ PERSONAL ESSAY The hours of the day and night are taken up in the cities of London and Westminster, by people as different from each other as those who are born in different cen- turies. Men of six o'clock give way to those of nine, they of nine to the generation of twelve; and they of twelve disappear, and make room for the fashionable world, who have made two o'clock the noon of the day. When we first put off from shore, we soon fell in with a fleet of gardeners, bound for the several market ports of London; and it was the most pleasing scene imaginable to see the cheerfulness with which those industrious people plied their way to a certain sale of their goods. The banks on each side are as well peopled, and beautified with as agreeable plantations, as any spot on the earth; but the Thames itself, loaded with the product of each shore, added very much to the landscape. It was very easy to observe by their sailing, and the countenances of the ruddy virgins, who were supercargoes, the parts of the town to which they were bound. There was an air in the purveyors for Covent-garden, who frequently con- verse with morning rakes, very unlike the seeming so- briety of those bound for Stocks-market. Nothing remarkable happened in our voyage; but I landed with ten sail of apricot-boats, at Strand-bridge, after having put in at Nine-Elms, and taken in melons, consigned by Mr. Cuffe, of that place, to Sarah Sewell and Company, at their stall in Covent-garden. We arrived at Strand-bridge at six of the clock, and were unloading, when the hackney-coachmen of the fore- going night took their leave of each other at the Dark- house, to go to bed before the day was too far spent. Chimney-sweepers passed by us as we made up to the market, and some raillery happened between one of the fruit-wenches and those black men about the Devil and Eve, with allusion to their several professions. I could RICHARD STEELE 5 not believe any place more entertaining than Covent- garden; where I strolled from one fruit-shop to another, with crowds of agreeable young women around me, who were purchasing fruit for their respective families. It was almost eight of the clock before I could leave that variety of objects. I took coach and followed a young lady, who tripped into another just before me, at- tended by her maid. I saw immediately she was of the family of the Vainloves. There are a set of these, who, of all things, affect the play of Blind-man's-buff, and leading men into love for they know not whom, who are fled they know not where. This sort of woman is usually a jaunty slattern; she hangs on her clothes, plays her head, varies her posture, and changes place incessantly, and all with an appearance of striving at the same time to hide herself, and yet give you to understand she is in humor to laugh at you. You must have often seen the coachmen make signs with their fingers, as they drive by each other, to intimate how much they have got that day. They can carry on that language to give intelli- gence where they are driving. In an instant my coach- man took the wink to pursue; and the lady's driver gave the hint that he was going through Long-acre toward St. James's; while he whipped up James-street, we drove for King-street, to save the pass at St. Martin's-lane. The coachmen took care to meet, jostle, and threaten each other for way, and be entangled at the end of New- port-street and Long-acre. The fright, you must believe, brought down the lady's coach-door, and obliged her, with her mask off, to inquire into the bustle, when she sees the man she would avoid. The tackle of the coach- window is so bad she cannot draw it up again, and she drives on sometimes wholly discovered, and sometimes half-escaped, according to the accident of carriages in her way. One of these ladies keeps her seat in a hackney- 6 THE PERSONAL ESSAY coach as well as the best rider does on a managed horse. The laced shoe on her left foot, with a careless gesture, just appearing on the opposite cushion, held her both firm, and in a proper attitude to receive the next jolt. As she was an excellent coach-woman, many were the glances at each other which we had for an hour and a half, in all parts of the town, by the skill of our drivers; till at last my lady was conveniently lost, with notice from her coachman to ours to make off, and he should hear where she went. This chase was now at an end: and the fellow who drove her came to us, and discovered that he was ordered to come again in an hour, for that she was a silk-worm. I was surprised with this phrase, but found it was a cant among the hackney fraternity for their best customers, women who ramble twice or thrice a week from shop to shop, to turn over all the goods in town without buying anything. The silk-worms are, it seems, indulged by the tradesmen; for, though they never buy, they are ever talking of new silks, laces, and ribbons, and serve the owners in getting them customers, as their common dunners do in making them pay. The day of people of fashion began now to break, and carts and hacks were mingled with equipages of show and vanity; when I resolved to walk it out of cheap- ness; but my unhappy curiosity is such, that I find it always my interest to take coach; for some odd adventure among beggars, ballad-singers, or the like, detains and throws me into expense. It happened so immediately: for at the corner of Warwick-street, as I was listening to a new ballad, a ragged rascal, a beggar who knew me, came up to me, and began to turn the eyes of the good company upon me, by telling me he was extremely poor, and should die in the street for want of drink, except I immediately would have the charity to give him sixpence to go into the next ale-house and save his life. He urged, RICHARD STEELE 7 with a melancholy face, that all his family had died of thirst. All the mob have humor, and two or three began to take the jest; by which Mr. Sturdy carried his point, and let me sneak off to a coach. As I drove along, it was a pleasing reflection to see the world so prettily checkered since I left Richmond, and the scene still filling with children of a new hour. This satisfaction increased as I moved toward the city; and gay signs, well-disposed streets, magnificent public structures, and wealthy shops adorned with contented faces, made the joy still rising till we came into the centre of the city, and centre of the world of trade, the Ex- change of London. As other men in the crowds about me were pleased with their hopes and bargains, I found my account in observing them, in attention to their sev- eral interests. I, indeed, looked upon myself as the richest man that walked the Exchange that day; for my benevolence made me share the gains of every bar- gain that was made. It was not the least of my satis- faction in my survey, to go upstairs, and pass the shops of agreeable females; to observe so many pretty hands busy in the folding of ribbons, and the utmost eagerness of agreeable faces in the sale of patches, pins, and wires, on each side of the counters, was an amusement in which I could longer have indulged myself, had not the dear creatures called to me, to ask what I wanted, when I could not answer, only "To look at you." I went to one of the windows which opened to the area below, where all the several voices lost their distinction, and rose up in a confused humming; which created in me a reflec- tion that could not come into the mind of any but of one a little too studious; for I said to myself with a kind of pun in thought, "What nonsense is all the hurry of this world to those who are above it?" In these, or not much wiser thoughts, I had like to have lost my place at 8 THE PERSONAL ESSAY the chop-house, where every man, according to the nat- ural bashfulness or sullenness of our nation, eats in a public room a mess of broth, or chop of meat, in dumb silence, as if they had no pretense to speak to each other on the foot of being men, except they were of each other's acquaintance. I went afterward to Robin's, and saw people, who had dined with me at the five-penny ordinary just before, give bills for the value of large estates; and could not but behold with great pleasure, property lodged in, and trans- ferred in a moment from, such as would never be masters of half as much as is seemingly in them, and given from them, every day they live. But before five in the after- noon I left the city, came to my common scene of Covent- garden, and passed the evening at Will's* in attending the discourses of several sets of people, who relieved each other within my hearing on the subjects of cards, dice, love, learning, and politics. The last subject kept me till I heard the streets in the possession of the bellman, who had now the world to himself, and cried, "Past two o'clock." This roused me from my seat; and I went to my lodgings, led by a light, whom I put into the dis- course of his private economy, and made him give me an account of the charge, hazard, profit, and loss of a family that depended upon a link, with a design to end my trivial day with the generosity of sixpence, instead of a third part of that sum. When I came to my chambers, I writ down these minutes; but was at a loss what instruction I should propose to my reader from the enumeration of so many insignificant matters and occurrences; and I thought it of great use, if they could learn with me to keep their minds open to gratification, and ready to re- ceive it from any thing it meets with. This one circum- * Will's, a famous coffee-house in Russell Street, London, fre- quented by literary men. RICHARD STEELE 9 stance will make every face you see give you the satis- faction you now take in beholding that of a friend; will make every object a pleasing one; will make all the good which arrives to any man, an increase of happiness to yourself. CHARLES LAMB A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG Charles Lamb (1775-1834) has been called the best loved of English writers. He was the son of a poor London clerk, and attended as a charity scholar the fa- mous boys' school Christ's Hospital. Here he learned the Latin which he is fond of introducing in his essays; here he met Coleridge, and they became lifelong friends. When school-days ended, Coleridge went to the uni- versity, and Lamb became a bookkeeper in a London office. His work in this place is described in two essays, The South Sea House, and The Superannuated Man. He lived with his sister Mary, who appears in the essays as Bridget Elia. With her he wrote the Tales from Shake- speare, which have introduced the plays to many young readers. His chief work is the Essays of Elia. These were contributed to the London Magazine, over the sig- nature of James Elia, a fellow-clerk in the office. Lamb's style is unique. He was a great reader of Elizabethan literature, especially plays, and frequently uses quaint old words from these books. He is fond of giving an un- expected turn to his sentences, and humor, a quiet, sly humor, peeps out everywhere. In connection with the essay on Roast Pig, it is interest- ing to read this letter of Lamb's, addressed to a farmer and his wife: Twelfth Day, '23. The pig was above my feeble praise. It was a dear pigmy. There was some contention as to who should have the ears; but in spite of his obstinacy, (deaf as these little creatures are to advice) I contrived to get at one of them. . . . He must have been the least of his race. His little foots would have gone into the silver slipper. I take him to have been a Chinese, and a female. He crackled delicately. I left a blank at the top of the page, not being deter- mined which to address it to: so farmer and farmer's wife will please to divide our thanks. May your gran- aries be full, and your rats empty, and your chickens plump, and your envious neighbors lean, and your la- rers busy, and you as idle and as happy as the day is Yours truly, C. LAMB. CHARLES LAMB A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG (From the Essays of Elia, First Series) Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M. was obliging enough to read and explain to me, for the first seventy thousand ages ate their meat raw, clawing or biting it from the living animal, just as they do in Abyssinia to this day. This period is not obscurely hinted at by their great Confucius in the second chapter of his Mundane Mutations, where he designates a kind of golden age by the term Cho-fang, literally the Cooks' Holiday. The manuscript goes on to say, that the art of roasting, or rather broiling (which I take to be the elder brother) was accidentally discovered in the manner following. The swine-herd, Ho-ti, having gone out into the woods one morning, as his manner was, to collect mast for his hogs, left his cottage in the care of his eldest son Bo-bo, a great lubberly boy, who being fond of play- ing with fire, as younkers of his age commonly are, let some sparks escape into a bundle of straw, which kin- dling quickly, spread the conflagration over every part of their poor mansion, till it was reduced to ashes. Together with the cottage (a sorry antediluvian makeshift of a building, you may think it), what was of much more importance, a fine litter of new-farrowed pigs, no less than nine in number, perished. China pigs have been esteemed a luxury all over the East, from the remotest periods that we read of. Bo-bo was in the utmost consternation, as you may think, not so much for the sake of the tenement, which his father and he could easily build up again with 13 14 THE PERSONAL ESSAY a few dry branches, and the labor of an hour or two, at any time, as for the loss of the pigs. While he was think- ing what he should say to his father, and wringing his hands over the smoking remnants of one of those untimely sufferers, an odor assailed his nostrils, unlike any scent which he had before experienced. What could it pro- ceed from? not from the burnt cottage he had smelt that smell before indeed, this was by no means the first accident of the kind which had occurred through the negligence of this unlucky young firebrand. Much less did it resemble that of any known herb, weed, or flower. A premonitory moistening at the same time overflowed his nether lip. He knew not what to think. He next stooped down to feel the pig, if there were any signs of life in it. He burnt his fingers, and to cool them he ap- plied them in his booby fashion to his mouth. Some of the crumbs of the scorched skin had come away with his fingers, and for the first time in his life (in the world's life indeed, for before him no man had known it) he tasted crackling! Again he felt and fumbled at the pig. It did not burn him so much now, still he licked his fingers from a sort of habit. The truth at length broke into his slow understanding, that it was the pig that smelt so, and the pig that tasted so delicious; and surrendering himself up to the new-born pleasure, he fell to tearing up whole handfuls of the scorched skin with the flesh next it, and was cramming it down his throat in his beastly fash- ion, when his sire entered amid the smoking rafters, armed with retributory cudgel, and finding how affairs stood, began to rain blows upon the young rogue's shoulders, as thick as hailstones, which Bo-bo heeded not any more than if they had been flies. The tickling pleasure, which he experienced in his lower regions, had rendered him quite callous to any inconveniences he might feel in those remote quarters. His father might lay on, but he could CHARLES LAMB 15 not beat him from his pig, till he had fairly made an end of it, when, becoming a little more sensible of his situa- tion, something like the following dialogue ensued. "You graceless whelp, what have you got there de- vouring ? Is it not enough that you have burnt me down three houses with your dog's tricks, and be hanged to you ! but you must be eating fire, and I know not what what have you got there, I say?" "O father, the pig, the pig ! do come and taste how nice the burnt pig eats." The ears of Ho-ti tingled with horror. He cursed his son, and he cursed himself that ever he should beget a Bon that should eat burnt pig. Bo-bo, whose scent was wonderfully sharpened since morning, soon raked out another pig, and fairly rend- ing it asunder, thrust the lesser half by main force into the fists of Ho-ti, still shouting out, "Eat, eat, eat the burnt pig, father, only taste O Lord!" with such-like barbarous ejaculations, cramming all the while as if he would choke. Ho-ti trembled in every joint while he grasped the abominable thing, wavering whether he should not put his son to death for an unnatural young monster, when the crackling scorching his fingers, as it had done his son's, and applying the same remedy to them, he in his turn tasted some of its flavor, which, make what sour mouths he would for a pretense, proved not altogether displeasing to him. In conclusion (for the manuscript here is a little tedious), both father and son fairly set down to the mess, and never left off till they had despatched all that remained of the litter. Bo-bo was strictly enjoined not to let the secret escape, for the neighbors would certainly have stoned them for a couple of abominable wretches, who could think of im- proving upon the good meat which God had sent them. 16 THE PERSONAL ESSAY Nevertheless, strange stories got about. It was observed that Ho-ti's cottage was burnt down now more frequently than ever. Nothing but fires from this time forward. Some would break out in broad day, others in the night- time. As often as the sow farrowed, so sure was the house of Ho-ti to be in a blaze; and Ho-ti himself, which was the more remarkable, instead of chastising his son, seemed to grow more indulgent to him than ever. At length they were watched, the terrible mystery discovered, and father and son summoned to take their trial at Pekin, then an inconsiderable assize town. Evidence was given, the obnoxious food itself produced in court, and verdict about to be pronounced, when the foreman of the jury begged that some of the burnt pig, of which the culprits stood accused, might be handed into the box. He handled it, and they all handled it; and burning their fingers, as Bo-bo and his father had done before them, and nature prompting to each of them the same remedy, against the face of all the facts, and the clearest charge which judge had ever given, to the surprise of the whole court, townsfolk, strangers, reporters, and all present- without leaving the box, or any manner of consultation whatever, they brought in a simultaneous verdict of Not Guilty. The judge, who was a shrewd fellow, winked at the manifest iniquity of the decision: and when the court was dismissed, went privily and bought up all the pigs that could be had for love or money. In a few days his lordship's town-house was observed to be on fire. The thing took wing, and now there was nothing to be seen but fires in every direction. Fuel and pigs grew enormously dear all over the district. The insurance- oflaces one and aU shut up shop. People built slighter and slighter every day, until it was feared that the very science of architecture would in no long time be lost to CHARLES LAMB 17 the world. Thus this custom of firing houses continued, till in process of time, says my manuscript, a sage arose, like our Locke, who made a discovery that the flesh of swine, or indeed of any other animal, might be cooked (burnt, as they called it) without the necessity of consum- ing a whole house to dress it. Then first began the rude form of a gridiron. Roasting by the string or spit came in a century or two later, I forget in whose dynasty. By such slow degrees, concludes the manuscript, do the most useful, and seemingly the most obvious, arts make their way among mankind. Without placing too implicit faith in the account above given, it must be agreed that if a worthy pretext for so dangerous an experiment as setting houses on fire (especially in these days) could be assigned in favor of any culinary object, that pretext and excuse might be found in ROAST PIG. Of all the delicacies in the whole mundus edibilis* I will maintain it to be the most delicate princeps 06- soniorumj I speak not of your grown porkers things between pig and pork these hobbledehoys but a young and ten- der suckling under a moon old guiltless as yet of the sty with no original speck of the amor immunditiw,]. the hereditary failing of the first parent, yet manifest his voice as yet not broken, but something between a childish treble and a grumble the mild forerunner or prceludium of a grunt. He must be roasted. I am not ignorant that our an- cestors ate them seethed, or boiled but what a sacrifice of the exterior tegument ! * Mundus edibilis, world of eatables, t Princeps obsoniorum, the chief of viands. | Amor immunditice, the love of dirt. $ Prceludium, prelude. 18 THE PERSONAL ESSAY There is no flavor comparable, I will contend, to that of the crisp, tawny, well-watched, not over-roasted, crackling, as it is well called the very teeth are invited to their share of the pleasure at this banquet, in over- coming the coy, brittle resistance with the adhesive oleaginous O call it not fat! but an indefinable sweet- ness growing up to it the tender blossoming of fat fat cropped in the bud taken in the shoot in the first innocence the cream and quintessence of the child- pig's yet pure food the lean, no lean, but a kind of ani- mal manna or, rather, fat and lean (if it must be so) so blended and running into each other, that both to- gether make but one ambrosian result or common sub- stance. Behold him while he is "doing" it seemeth rather a refreshing warmth, than a scorching heat, that he is so passive to. How equably he twirleth round the string! Now he is just done. To see the extreme sensibility of that tender age! he hath wept out his pretty eyes ra- diant jellies shooting stars. See him in the dish, his second cradle, how meek he lieth ! wouldst thou have had this innocent grow up to the grossness and indocility which too often accompany maturer swinehood ? Ten to one he would have proved a glutton, a sloven, an obstinate, disagreeable animal wallowing in all manner of filthy conversation from these sins he is happily snatched away Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade, Death came with timely care, his memory is odoriferous no clown curseth, while his stomach half rejecteth, the rank bacon no coal-heaver bolteth him in reeking sausages he hath a fair sepulchre in the grateful stomach of the judicious epicure and for such a tomb might be content to die. CHARLES LAMB 19 He is the best of sapors.* Pine-apple is great. She is indeed almost too transcendent a delight, if not sin- ful, yet so like to sinning, that really a tender-conscienced person would do well to pause, too ravishing for mortal taste, she woundeth and excoriateth the lips that ap- proach her like lovers' kisses, she biteth she is a plea- sure bordering on pain from the fierceness and insanity of her relish but she stoppeth at the palate she med- dleth not with the appetite and the coarsest hunger might barter her consistently for a mutton-chop. Pig let me speak his praise is no less provocative of the appetite than he is satisfactory to the criticalness of the censorious palate. The strong man may batten on him, and the weakling refuseth not his mild juices. Unlike to mankind's mixed characters, a bundle of virtues and vices, inexplicably intertwisted, and not to be unravelled without hazard, he is good throughout. No part of him is better or worse than another. He help- eth, as far as his little means extend, all around. He is the least envious of banquets. He is all neighbors' fare. I am one of those who freely and ungrudgingly impart a share of the good things of this life which fall to their lot (few as mine are in this kind) to a friend. I protest I take as great an interest in my friend's pleasures, his relishes, and proper satisfactions, as in mine own. "Pres- ents," I often say, "endear Absents." Hares, pheasants, partridges, snipes, barn-door chickens (those "tame villatic fowl"), capons, plovers, brawn, barrels of oysters, I dispense as freely as I receive them. I love to taste them, as it were, upon the tongue of my friend. But a stop must be put somewhere. One would not, like Lear, "give everything." I make my stand upon pig. Me- thinks it is an ingratitude to the Giver of all good flavors to extra-domiciliate, or send out of the house slightingly * Sapor, flavor, taste. 20 THE PERSONAL ESSAY (under pretext of friendship, or I know not what) a bless- ing so particularly adapted, predestined, I may say, to my individual palate. It argues an insensibility. I remember a touch of conscience in this kind at school. My good old aunt, who never parted from me at the end of a holiday without stuffing a sweetmeat, or some nice thing, into my pocket, had dismissed me one evening with a smoking plum-cake, fresh from the oven. In my way to school (it was over London Bridge) a gray-headed old beggar saluted me (I have no doubt at this time of day, that he was a counterfeit). I had no pence to console him with, and in the vanity of self-denial, and the very coxcombry of charity, schoolboy like, I made him a pres- ent of the whole cake ! I walked on a little, buoyed up, as one is on such occasions, with a sweet soothing of self-satisfaction; but, before I had got to the end of the bridge, my better feelings returned, and I burst into tears, thinking how ungrateful I had been to my good aunt, to go and give her good gift away to a stranger that I had never seen before, and who might be a bad man for aught I knew; and then I thought of the pleasure my aunt would be taking in thinking that I I myself, and not another would eat her nice cake and what should I say to her the next time I saw her how naughty I was to part with her pretty present! and the odor of that spicy cake came back upon my recollection, and the plea- sure and the curiosity I had taken in seeing her make it, and her joy when she sent it to the oven, and how disap- pointed she would feel that I had never had a bit of it in my mouth at last and I blamed my impertinent spirit of alms-giving, and out-of -place hypocrisy of goodness; and above all I wished never to see the face again of that insidious, good-for-nothing, old gray impostor. Our ancestors were nice in their method of sacrificing these tender victims. We read of pigs whipped to death CHARLES LAMB 21 with something of a shock, as we hear of any other obso- lete custom. The age of discipline is gone by, or it would be curious to inquire (in a philosophical light merely) what effect this process might have toward intenerating and dulcifying a substance naturally so mild and dulcet as the flesh of young pigs. It looks like refining a violet. Yet we should be cautious, while we condemn the inhu- manity, how we censure the wisdom of the practice. It might impart a gusto. I remember an hypothesis, argued upon by the young students, when I was at St. Omer's, and maintained with much learning and pleasantry on both sides, " Whether, supposing that the flavor of a pig who obtained his death by whipping (per flagellationem extremam*) superadded a pleasure upon the palate of a man more intense than any possible suffering we can conceive in the animal, is man justified in using that method of putting the animal to death?" I forgot the decision. His sauce should be considered. Decidedly, a few bread crumbs, done up with his liver and brains, and a dash of mild sage. But banish, dear Mrs. Cook, I be- seech you, the whole onion tribe. Barbecue your whole hogs to your palate, steep them in shalots, stuff them out with plantations of the rank and guilty garlic; you cannot poison them, or make them stronger than they are but consider, he is a weakling a flower. * Per flagellationem, through capital punishment by whipping. CHARLES LAMB OLD CHINA Few passages in the history of English literature are more touching than the story of Charles and Mary Lamb. She was ten years his senior; the mother was an invalid, so that as a child Charles was cared for by his sister. There was a trait of insanity in the family. When Charles was twenty-one, Mary, her mind affected by a long strain, became insane, and killed her mother. She was placed in an asylum, and although she regained her reason, she was only released upon the solemn pledge of her brother that he would watch over her. From time to time the affliction recurred, and the brother would take her to the asylum for a season. At other times she was an ideal companion, interested in books as Charles was, helping him to write his Tales from Shakespeare, making a pleasant home for him, where his friends Hazlitt, Coleridge, Godwin, Haydon the painter, and W r 4 s " worth formed a famous group. Yet over all their life hung the shadow. Charles, faithful to his sister, never sought to marry. They had been very poor, but as Charles's literary work gradually won recognition, their circumstances became easier, even allowing a few luxuries. They were both intensely fond of the theatre, and num* bered among their friends some of the best actors of the day. Such are the materials out of which Lamb made the essay on Old China. Mary appears there as Bridget; all their pleasures and the sweet intimacy of their lives are told, but the shadow is not there. Like Stevenson, Lamb resolutely carried his own burden; it might be heavy, but no whimper or groan escapes into his pages. CHARLES LAMB OLD CHINA (From the Essays of Elia, Second Series) I have an almost feminine partiality for old china. When I go to see any great house, I inquire for the china- closet, and next for the picture-gallery. I cannot de- fend the order of preference, but by saying that we have all some taste or other, of too ancient a date to admit of our remembering distinctly that it was an acquired one. I can call to mind the first play, and the first exhibition, that I was taken to; but I am not conscious of a time when china jars and saucers were introduced into my imagina- tion. I had no repugnance then why should I now have? to those little, lawless, azure-tinctured grotesques, that, under the notion of men and women, float about, uncir- cumscribed by any element, in that world before perspec- tive a china tea-cup. I like to see my old friends whom distance cannot diminish figuring up in the air (so they appear to our optics), yet on terra firma still for so we must in courtesy interpret that speck of deeper blue, which the decorous artist, to prevent absurdity, had made to spring up be- neath their sandals. I love the men with women's faces, and the women, if possible, with still more womanish expressions. Here is a young and courtly Mandarin, handing tea to a lady from a salver two miles off. See how distance seems to set off respect! And here the same lady, or another for likeness is identity on tea-cups is stepping 25 26 THE PERSONAL ESSAY into a little fairy boat, moored on the hither side of this calm garden river, with a dainty mincing foot, which in a right angle of incidence (as angles go in our world) must infallibly land her in the midst of a flowery mead a furlong off on the other side of the same strange stream ! Farther on if far or near can be predicated of their world see horses, trees, pagodas, dancing the hays.* Here a cow and rabbit couchant, and co-extensive so objects show, seen through the lucid atmosphere of fine Cathay. I was pointing out to my cousin last evening, over our Hyson (which we are old-fashioned enough to drink unmixed still of an afternoon), some of these spedosa miracida'f upon a set of extraordinary old blue china (a recent purchase) which we were now for the first time us- ing; and could not help remarking, how favorable circum- stances had been to us of late years, that we could afford to please the eye sometimes with trifles of this sort when a passing sentiment seemed to overshade the brows of my companion. I am quick at detecting these summer clouds in Bridget. "I wish the good old times would come again/' she said, "when we were not quite so rich. I do not mean that I want to be poor; but there was a middle state" so she was pleased to ramble on, "in which I am sure we were a great deal happier. A purchase is but a pur- chase, now that you have money enough and to spare. Formerly it used to be a triumph. When we coveted a cheap luxury (and, ! how much ado I had to get you to consent in those times !) we were used to have a debate two or three days before, and to weigh the for and against, and think what we might spare it out of, and what saving we could hit upon, that should be an equivalent. A * Hays, an old English dance, where the dancers stood in a ring, t Spedosa miracula, beautiful marvels. CHARLES LAMB 27 thing was worth buying then, when we felt the money that we paid for it. "Do you remember the brown suit, which you made to hang upon you, till all your friends cried shame upon you, it grew so threadbare and all because of that folio Beaumont and Fletcher, which you dragged home late at night from Barker's in Covent Garden? Do you re- member how we eyed it for weeks before we could make up our minds to the purchase, and had not come to a determination till it was near ten o'clock of the Saturday night, when you set off from Islington, fearing you should be too late and when the old bookseller with some grumbling opened his shop, and by the twinkling taper (for he was setting bedwards) lighted out the relic from his dusty treasures and when you lugged it home, wish- ing it were twice as cumbersome and when you presented it to me and when we were exploring the perfectness of it (collating, you called it) and while I was repairing some of the loose leaves with paste, which your impa- tience would not suffer to be left till daybreak was there no pleasure in being a poor man? or can those neat black clothes which you wear now, and are so careful to keep brushed, since we have become rich and finical give you half the honest vanity with which you flaunted it about in that overworn suit your old corbeau* for four or five weeks longer than you should have done to pacify your conscience for the mighty sum of fifteen or sixteen shillings was it? a great affair we thought it then which you had lavished on the old folio. Now you can afford to buy any book that pleases you, but I do not see that you ever bring me home any nice old pur- chases now. "When you came home with twenty apologies for lay- ing out a less number of shillings upon that print * Corbeau, a crow, a raven. 28 THE PERSONAL ESSAY after Lionardo,* which we christened the 'Lady Blanch'; when you looked at the purchase, and thought of the money and thought of the money, and looked again at the picture was there no pleasure in being a poor man? Now, you have nothing to do but to walk into Colnaghi's, and buy a wilderness of Lionardos. Yet do you? "Then, do you remember our pleasant walks to Enfield, and Potter's Bar, and Waltham, when we had a holiday holidays and all other fun are gone now we are rich and the little hand-basket in which I used to de- posit our day's fare of savory cold lamb and salad and how you would pry about at noontide for some decent house, where we might go in and produce our store only paying for the ale that you must call for and speculate upon the looks of the landlady, and whether she was likely to allow us a tablecloth and wish for such another honest hostess as Izaak Walton has described many a one on the pleasant banks of the Lea, when he went a-fish- ing and sometimes they would prove obliging enough, and sometimes they would look grudgingly upon us but we had cheerful looks still for one another, and would eat our plain food savorily, scarcely grudging Piscatorf his Trout Hall? Now when we go out a day's pleasuring, which is seldom, moreover, we ride part of the way, and go into a fine inn, and order the best of dinners, never debating the expense which, after all, never has half the relish of those chance country snaps, when we were at the mercy of uncertain usage, and a precarious welcome. "You are too proud to see a play anywhere now but in the pit. Do you remember where it was we used to sit, when we saw the Battle of Hexham, and the Surrender * Lionardo, Leonardo da Vinci; perhaps the picture referred to is the "Mona Lisa." t Piaoator, the name of the fisherman in Walton's Compleat Angler. CHARLES LAMB 29 of Calais, and Bannister and Mrs. Bland in the Children in the Wood when we squeezed out our shillings apiece to sit three or four times in a season in the one-shilling gallery where you felt all the time that you ought not to have brought me and more strongly I felt obligation to you for having brought me and the pleasure was the better for a little shame and when the curtain drew up, what cared we for our place in the house, or what mat- tered it where we were sitting, when our thoughts were with Rosalind in Arden, or with Viola at the Court of Illyria? You used to say that the gallery was the best place of all for enjoying a play socially that the relish of such exhibitions must be in proportion to the infre- quency of going that the company we met there, not being in general readers of plays, were obliged to attend the more, and did attend, to what was going on, on the stage because a word lost would have been a chasm which it was impossible for them to fill up. With such reflections we consoled our pride then and I appeal to you whether, as a woman, I met generally with less at- tention and accommodation than I have done since in more expensive situations in the house? The getting in, indeed, and the crowding up those inconvenient stair- cases, was bad enough but there was still a law of civility to woman recognized to quite as great an extent as we ever found in the other passages and how a little diffi- culty overcome heightened the snug seat and the play, afterwards ! Now we can only pay our money and walk in. You cannot see, you say, in the galleries now. I am sure we saw, and heard too, well enough then but sight, and all, I think, is gone with our poverty. "There was pleasure in eating strawberries, before they became quite common in the first dish of peas, while they were yet dear to have them for a nice supper, a treat. What treat can we have now? If we were to 30 THE PERSONAL ESSAY fcreat ourselves now that is, to have dainties a little above our means, it would be selfish and wicked. It is the very little more that we allow ourselves beyond what the actual poor can get at, that makes what I call a treat- when two people, living together as we have done, now and then indulge themselves in a cheap luxury, which both like; while each apologizes, and is willing to take both halves of the blame to his single share. I see no harm in people making much of themselves, in that sense of the word. It may give them a hint how to make much of others. But now what I mean by the word we never do make much of ourselves. None but the poor can do it. I do not mean the veriest poor of all, but persons as we were, just above poverty. "I know what you were going to say, that it is mighty pleasant at the end of the year to make all meet, and much ado we used to have every Thirty-first Night of December to account for our exceedings many a long face did you make over your puzzled accounts, and in contriving to make it out how we had spent so much or that we had not spent so much or that it was impossible we should spend so much next year and still we found our slender capital decreasing but then, betwixt ways, and projects, and compromises of one sort or another, and talk of curtailing this charge, and doing without that for the future and the hope that youth brings, and laughing spirits (in which you were never poor till now), we pocketed up our loss, and in conclusion, with ' lusty brimmers' (as you used to quote it out of hearty cheerful Mr. Cotton, as you called him), we used to welcome in the 'coming guest.' Now we have no reckoning at all at the end of the old year no flattering promises about the new year doing better for us." Bridget is so sparing of her speech on most occasions, that when she gets into a rhetorical vein, I am careful CHARLES LAMB 31 how I interrupt it. I could not help, however, smiling at the phantom of wealth which her dear imagination had conjured up out of a clear income of poor hun- dred pounds a year. "It is true we were happier when we were poorer, but we were also younger, my cousin. I am afraid we must put up with the excess, for if we were to shake the superflux into the sea, we should not much mend ourselves. That we had much to struggle with, as we grew up together, we have reason to be most thank- ful. It strengthened and knit our compact closer. We could never have been what we have been to each other, if we had always had the sufficiency which you now com- plain of. The resisting power those natural dilations of the youthful spirit, which circumstances cannot straiten with us are long since passed away. Com- petence to age is supplementary youth, a sorry supple- ment indeed, but I fear the best that is to be had. We must ride where we formerly walked: live better and lie softer and shall be wise to do so than we had means to do in those good old days you speak of. Yet could those days return could you and I once more walk our thirty miles a day could Bannister and Mrs. Bland again be young, and you and I be young to see them could the good old one-shilling gallery days return they are dreams, my cousin, now but could you and I at this moment, instead of this quiet argument, by our well-carpeted fireside, sitting on this luxurious sofa be once more struggling up those inconvenient staircases, pushed about and squeezed, and elbowed by the poorest rabble of poor gallery scramblers could I once more hear those anxious shrieks of yours and the delicious Thank God, we are safe, which always followed when the topmost stair, conquered, let in the first light of the whote cheerful theatre down beneath us I know not the fathom line that ever touched a descent so deep as I would be 32 THE PERSONAL ESSAY willing to bury more wealth in than Croesus had, or the great Jew R is supposed to have, to purchase it. And now do just look at that merry little Chinese waiter holding an umbrella, big enough for a bed-tester, over the head of that pretty insipid half Madonna-ish chit of a lady in that very blue summer-house." WILLIAM HAZLITT MY FIRST ACQUAINTANCE WITH POETS William Hazlitt (1778-1830) was the son of an English clergyman, and was himself educated for the ministry, but declined to enter it. An elder brother was a por- trait-painter; William tried for four years to learn the art, but without success. He went to London, where he became theatrical critic for a newspaper. Leigh Hunt, who was then editing the Examiner, asked him to write some essays for it. The result was The Round Table, a series of papers on books, manners, and social customs, written in a style of singular clearness and charm. Ste- venson says in one of his essays, "We are fine fellows, but we cannot write like Hazlitt." A course of lectures on literature which Hazlitt deliv- ered was later published in three volumes, English Comic Writers, English Poetry, and Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth. These contain some admirable literary criti- cism. But his chief fame rests upon his volumes of es- says, which include Table Talk, The Round Table, The Plain Speaker, Sketches and Essays, and Winterslow. Haz- litt was the friend of interesting people like Coleridge, Lamb, and Wordsworth; he was himself an interesting character, strong in his likes and dislikes, very apt to quar- rel with his friends. In this essay he shows himself as a true hero-worshipper. It was published in 1823, twenty- five years after the events which it relates. Note the fre- quency with which he quotes from his beloved poets; the ease of the style, and the vividness with which he de- scribes the appearance of Coleridge, and the impression made by him. WILLIAM HAZLITT MY FIRST ACQUAINTANCE WITH POETS (From Winterslow, a collection of Hazlitt's essays published after his death) My father was a Dissenting minister, at Wem, in Shropshire; and in the year 1798 (the figures that com- pose the date are to me like the "dreaded name of Demo- gorgon" *) Mr. Coleridge came to Shrewsbury, to suc- ceed Mr. Rowe in the spiritual charge of a Unitarian congregation there. He did not come till late on the Saturday afternoon before he was to preach; and Mr. Rowe, who himself went down to the coach, in a state of anxiety and expectation, to look for the arrival of his successor, could find no one at all answering the de- scription but a round-faced man, in a short black coat, (like a shooting jacket) which hardly seemed to have been made for him, but who seemed to be talking at a great rate to his fellow passengers. Mr. Rowe had scarce returned to give an account of his disappointment when the round-faced man in black entered, and dissipated all doubts on the subject by beginning to talk. He did not cease while he stayed; nor has he since, that I know of. He held the good town of Shrewsbury in delightful sus- pense for three weeks that he remained there, "flutter- ing the proud Salopians ,f like an eagle in a dove-cote"; and the Welsh mountains that skirt the horizon with their tempestuous confusion, agree to have heard no such mystic sounds since the days of "High-born Hoel's harp or soft Llewellyn's lay." t * Demogorgon, one of the fallen angels in Milton's Paradise Lost. t Salopians, inhabitants of Salop, an old name for Shropshire. J Quoted from Gray's "The Bard." 35 36 THE PERSONAL ESSAY As we passed along between Wem and Shrewsbury, and I eyed their blue tops seen through the wintry branches, or the red rustling leaves of the sturdy oak- trees by the roadside, a sound was in my ears as of a Siren's song; I was stunned, startled with it, as from deep sleep; butJ^had^no^-aertio^rEheii- that I should evr be able to express my admiration to others in motley imagery or quarat -allusion, till the light of his genius shone into my soul like the sun's rays glittering in the puddles of the road. I was at that time dumb, inarticulate, help- less, like a worm by the wayside, crushed, bleeding, life- less; but now, bursting the deadly bands that "bound them, "With Styx nine times round them," * my ideas float on winged words, and as they expand their plumes, catch the golden light of other years. My soul has indeed remained in its original bondage, dark, ob- scure, 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 nob remain dumb and brutish, or at length found a language to express itself, I owe to Coleridge. But this is not to my purpose. My father lived ten miles from Shrewsbury, and was in the habit of exchanging visits with Mr. Rowe, and with Mr. Jenkins of Whitchurch (nine miles farther on), according to the custom of Dissenting ministers in each other's neighborhood. A line of communication is thus established, by which the flame of civil and religious liberty is kept alive, and nourishes its smouldering fire unquenchable, like the fires in the Agamemnon of ^Eschy- lus, placed at different stations, that waited for ten long years to announce with their blazing pyramids the de- *From Pope's "Ode for St. Cecilia's Day." WILLIAM HAZLITT 37 struction of Troy. Coleridge had agreed to come over and see my father, according to the courtesy of the country, as Mr. Howe's probable successor; but in the meantime, I had gone to hear him preach the Sunday after his arrival. A poet and a philosopher getting up into a Unitarian pulpit to preach the gospel, was a ro- mance in these degenerate days, a sort of revival of the primitive spirit of Christianity, which was not to be resisted. It was in January of 1798, that I rose one morning before daylight, to walk ten miles in the mud, to hear this celebrated person preach. Never, the longest day I have to live, shall I have such another walk as this cold, raw, comfortless one, in the winter of the year 1798. II y a des impressions que ni le temps ni ks circonstances peuvent effacer. Dusse-je vivre des siecles entiers, le doux temps de ma jeunesse ne pent renaitre pour moi, ni s' effacer jamais dans ma memoir e* When I got there, the organ was playing the hundredth Psalm, and when it was done, Mr. Coleridge rose and gave out his text, "And he went up into the mountain to pray, himself, alone." As he gave out this text, his voice "rose like a steam of rich distilled perfumes," f and when he came to the two last words, which he pronounced loud, deep, and distinct, it seemed to me, who was then young, as if the sounds had echoed from the bottom of the human heart, and as if that prayer might have floated in solemn silence through the universe. The idea of St. John came into my mind, "of one crying in the wilderness, who had his loins girt about, and whose food was locusts and wild honey." * II y a, etc. "There are impressions which neither time nor cir- cumstances can efface. If I should live whole ages, the sweet days of my youth could never return to me, nor ever be effaced from my memory." Rousseau's Confessions. t Quoted from Milton's "Comus." 38 THE PERSONAL ESSAY The preacher then launched into his subject, like an eagle dallying with the wind. The sermon was upon peace and war; upon church and state not their alli- ance but their separation on the spirit of the world and the spirit of Christianity, not as the same, but as opposed to one another. He talked of those who had " inscribed the cross of Christ on banners dripping with human gore." He made a poetical and pastoral excursion and to show the fatal effects of war, drew a striking con- trast between the simple shepherd-boy, driving his team afield, or sitting under the hawthorn, piping to his flock, "as though he should never be old," and the same poor country lad, crimped,* kidnapped, brought into town, made drunk at an ale-house, turned into a wretched drummer boy, with his hair sticking on end with powder and pomatum, a long cue at his back, and tricked out in the loathsome finery of the profession of blood: "Such were the notes our once-loved poet sung."f And for myself, I could not have been more delighted if I had heard the music of the spheres. Poetry and Philos- ophy had met together. Truth and Genius had em- braced, under the eye and with the sanction of Religion. This was even beyond my hopes. I returned home well satisfied. The sun that was still laboring pale and wan through the sky, obscured by thick mists, seemed an emblem of the good cause; and the cold dank drops of dew, that hung half melted on the beard of the thistle, had something genial and refreshing in them; for there was a spirit of hope and youth in all nature, that turned * Crimped, entrapped in order to be forced into military or naval service. t From Pope's "Epistle to Oxford." WILLIAM HAZLITT 39 everything into good. The face of nature had not then the brand of Jus Divinum* on it: "Like to that sanguine flower inscribed with woe."f On the Tuesday following, the half-inspired speaker came. I was called down into the room where he was, and went half hoping, half afraid. He received me very graciously, and I listened for a long time without utter- ing a word. I did not suffer in his opinion by my silence. "For those two hours," he afterward was pleased to say, "he was conversing with William Hazlitt's forehead"! His appearance was different from what I had antici- pated from seeing him before. At a distance, and in the dim light of the chapel, there was to me a strange wild- ness in his aspect, a dusky obscurity, and I thought him pitted with the smallpox. His complexion was at that time clear, and even bright "As are the children of yon azure sheen." J His forehead was broad and high, light as if built of ivory, with large projecting eyebrows, and his eyes roll- ing beneath them, like a sea with darkened lustre. "A certain tender bloom his face o'erspread," a purple tinge as we see it in the pale thoughtful complexions of the Spanish portrait-painters, Murillo and Velasquez. His mouth was gross, voluptuous, open, eloquent; his chin good-humored and round; but his nose, the rudder of the face, the index of the will, was small, feeble, nothing, like what he has done. It might seem that the genius of his face as from a height surveyed and projected him (with sufficient capacity and huge aspiration) into the * Jus Divinum, the doctrine of the divine right of kings, i. e., that kings enjoyed their power by the sanction of God. t From Milton's "Lycidas." j From Thomson's "Castle of Indolence." 40 THE PERSONAL ESSAY world unknown of thought and imagination, with noth- ing to support or guide his veering purpose, as if Colum- bus had launched his adventurous course for the New World in a scallop, without oars or compass. So, at least, I comment on it after the event. Coleridge, in his person, was rather above the common size, inclining to the corpulent, or like Lord Hamlet, "somewhat fat and pursy." His hair (now, alas ! gray) was then black and glossy as the raven's, and fell in smooth masses over his forehead. This long pendulous hair is peculiar to enthu- siasts, to those whose minds tend heavenward; and is tra- ditionally inseparable (though of a different color) from the pictures of Christ. It ought to belong, as a charac- ter, to all who preach Christ crucified, and Coleridge was .at that time one of those ! It was curious to observe the contrast between him and my father, who was a veteran in the cause, and then de- clining into the vale of years. He had been a poor Irish lad, carefully brought up by his parents, and sent to the University of Glasgow (where he studied under Adam Smith*) to prepare him for his future destination. It was his mother's proudest wish to see her son a Dissent- ing minister. So, if we look back to past generations (as far as eye can reach), we see the same hopes, fears, wishes, followed by the same disappointments, throbbing in thft human heart; and so we may see them (if we look for- ward) rising up forever, and disappearing, like vaporish bubbles, in the human breast ! After being tossed about from congregation to congregation in the heats of the Unitarian controversy, and squabbles about the Ameri- can war, he had been relegated to an obscure village, where he was to spend the last thirty years of his life, far from the only converse that he loved, the talk about * Adam Smith, author of the Wealth of Nations, one of the most notable books on political economy. WILLIAM HAZLITT 41 disputed texts of Scripture, and the cause of civil and religious liberty. Here he passed his days, repining, but resigned, in the study of the Bible, and the perusal of the commentators huge folios, not easily got through, one of which would outlast a winter ! Why did he pore on these from morn to night (with the exception of a walk in the fields or a turn in the garden to gather broccoli-plants or kidney-beans of his own rearing, with no small degree of pride and pleasure)? Here were "no figures nor no fantasies" neither poetry nor philosophy nothing to dazzle, nothing to excite modern curiosity; but to his lack-lustre eyes there appeared within the pages of the ponderous, unwieldy, neglected tomes, the sacred name of JEHOVAH in Hebrew capitals: pressed down by the weight of the style, worn to the last fading thinness of the understanding, there were glimpses, glimmering notions of the patriarchal wanderings, with palm-trees hovering in the horizon, and processions of camels at the distance of three thousand years; there was Moses with the Burning Bush, the number of the Twelve Tribes, types, shadows, glosses on the law and the prophets; there were discussions (dull enough) on the age of Methuselah, a mighty speculation ! there were outlines, rude guesses at the shape of Noah's Ark and of the riches of Solomon's Temple; questions as to the date of the creation, predictions of the end of all things; the great lapses of time, the strange mutations of the globe were unfolded with the voluminous leaf, as it turned over; and though the soul might slumber with an hieroglyphic veil of inscrutable mysteries drawn over it, yet it was in a slumber ill exchanged for all the sharpened realities of sense, wit, fancy, or reason. My father's life was comparatively a dream; but it was a dream of infinity and eternity, of death, the resurrection, and a judgment to come ! 42 THE PERSONAL ESSAY No two individuals were ever more unlike than were the host and his guest. A poet was to my father a sort of nondescript; yet whatever added grace to the Unitarian cause was to him welcome. He could hardly have been more surprised or pleased, if our visitor had worn wings. Indeed, his thoughts had wings: and as the silken sounds rustled round our little wainscoted parlor, my father threw back his spectacles over his forehead, his white hairs mixing with its sanguine hue; and a smile of delight beamed across his rugged, cordial face, to think that Truth had found a new ally in Fancy ! * Besides, Cole- ridge seemed to take considerable notice of me, and that of itself was enough. He talked very familiarly, but agreeably, and glanced over a variety of subjects. At dinner time he grew more animated, and dilated in a very edifying manner on Mary Wollstonecraftt and Mackintosh. The last, he said, he considered (on my father's speaking of his Vindicice Gal- licce as a capital performance) as a clever, scholastic man a master of the topics or, as the ready warehouseman of letters, who knew exactly where to lay his hand on what he wanted, though the goods were not his own. He thought him no match for Burke, either in style or matter. Burke was a metaphysician, Mackintosh a mere logician. Burke was an orator (almost a poet) who reasoned in figures, because he had an eye for nature: Mackintosh, on the other hand, was a rhetorician, who had only an * My father was one of those who mistook his talent, after all. He used to be very much dissatisfied that I preferred his Letters to his Sermons. The last were forced and dry; the first came naturally from him. For ease, half -plays on words, and a supine, monkish, indolent pleasantry, I have never seen them equalled. (Hazlitt's note.) t Mary Wollstonecraft was the author of the Vindication of the Rights of Women, published in 1792. James Mackintosh's Vinditias Gallicce was a defense of the French Revolution. Both books were regarded as very radical in their day. WILLIAM HAZLITT 43 eye to commonplaces. On this I ventured to say that I had always entertained a great opinion of Burke, and that (as far as I could find) the speaking of him with con- tempt might be made the test of a vulgar, democratical mind. This was the first observation I ever made to Cole- ridge, and he said it was a very just and striking one. I remember the leg of Welsh mutton and the turnips on the table that day had the finest flavor imaginable. Cole- ridge added that Mackintosh and Tom Wedgewood* (of whom, however, he spoke highly) had expressed a very indifferent opinion of his friend Mr. Wordsworth, on which he remarked to them "He strides on so far before you, that he dwindles in the distance!" Godwin had once boasted to him of having carried on an argument with Mackintosh for three hours with dubious success; Coleridge told him "If there had been a man of genius in the room he would have settled the question in five minutes." He asked me if I had ever seen Mary Woll- stonecraft, and I said, I had once for a few moments, and that she seemed to me to turn off Godwin's objec- tions to something she advanced with quite a playful, easy air. He replied, that "this was only one instance of the ascendancy which people of imagination exercised over those of mere intellect." He did not rate Godwin very highf (this was caprice or prejudice, real or affected), but he had a great idea of Mrs. Wollstonecraft's powers of conversation; none at all of her talent for book-making. We talked a little about Holcroft. He had been asked if * Thomas Wedgewood was a famous maker of pottery. The works he established at Burslem grew into the Five Towns described in Arnold Bennett's novels. t He complained in particular of the presumption of his attempt- ing to establish the future immortality of man, "without" (as he said) "knowing what Death was or what Life was" and the tone in which he pronounced these two words seemed to convey a com- plete image of both. (Hazlitt's note.) 44 THE PERSONAL ESSAY he was not much struck with him, and he said, he thought himself in more danger of being struck by him. I com- plained that he would not let me get on at all, for he re- quired a definition of every the commonest word, ex- claiming, " What do you mean by a sensation, Sir ? What do you mean by an idea?" This, Coleridge said, was barricading the road to truth; it was setting up a turn- pike-gate at every step we took. I forget a great num- ber of things, many more than I remember; but the day' passed off pleasantly, and the next morning Mr. Cole- ridge was to return to Shrewsbury. When I came down to breakfast, I found that he had just received a letter from his friend, T. Wedge wood, making him an offer of 150 I. a year if he chose to waive his present pursuit, and devote himself entirely to the study of poetry and philosophy. Coleridge seemed to make up his mind to close with this proposal in the act of tying on one of his shoes. It threw an additional damp on his departure. It took the wayward enthusiast quite from us to cast him into Deva's winding vales, or by the shores of old romance. Instead of living at ten miles' distance, of being the pastor of a Dissenting congrega- tion at Shrewsbury, he was henceforth to inhabit the Hill of Parnassus, to be a Shepherd on the Delectable Moun- tains.* Alas ! I knew not the way thither, and felt very little gratitude for Mr. Wedgewood's bounty. I was presently relieved from this dilemma, for Mr. Coleridge, asking for a pen and ink, and going to a table to write something on a bit of card, advanced toward me with, undulating step, and giving me the precious document, said that that was his address, Mr. Coleridge, Nether Stowey, Somersetshire; and that he should be glad to see me there in a few weeks' time, and, if I chose, would * Delectable Mountains, described in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress as a place from which one may see the Celestial City. WILLIAM HAZLITT 45 come half-way to meet me. I was not less surprised than the shepherd-boy (this simile is to be found in Cassandra), when he sees a thunderbolt fall close at his feet. I stammered out my acknowledgments and acceptance of this offer (I thought Mr. Wedge wood's annuity a trifle to it) as well as I could; and this mighty business being settled, the poet-preacher took leave, and I accompanied him six miles on the road. It was a fine morning in the middle of winter, and he talked the whole way. The scholar in Chaucer is de- scribed as going "sounding on his way." So Coleridge went on his. In digressing, in dilating, in passing from subject to subject, he appeared to me to float in air, to slide on ice. He told me in confidence (going along) that he should have preached two sermons before he accepted the situation at Shrewsbury, one on Infant Baptism, the other on the Lord's Supper, show- ing that he could not administer either, which would have effectually disqualified him for the object in view. I observed that he continually crossed me on the way by shifting from one side of the footpath to the other. This struck me as an odd movement; but I did not at that tune connect it with any instability of purpose or invol- untary change of principle, as I have done since. He seemed unable to keep on in a straight line. He spoke slightingly of Hume (whose Essay on Miracles he said was stolen from an objection started in one of South's sermons Credat Judceus Appella!*) I was not very much pleased at this account of Hume, for I had just been reading, with infinite relish, that completest of all metaphysical chokepears, his Treatise on Human Nature, * Credat, etc. "Lot the Jew Appella believe it, I will not!" Quoted from Horace. 46 THE PERSONAL ESSAY to which the Essays in point of scholastic subtlety and close reasoning, are mere elegant trifling, light summer reading. Coleridge even denied the excellence of Hume's general style, which I think betrayed a want of taste or candor. He however made me amends by the manner in which he spoke of Berkeley. He dwelt particularly on his Essay on Vision as a masterpiece of analytical reason- ing. So it undoubtedly is. He was exceedingly angry with Dr. Johnson for striking the stone with his foot, in allusion to this author's theory of matter and spirit, and saying, "Thus I confute him, Sir." Coleridge drew a parallel (I don't know how he brought about the connec- tion) between Bishop Berkeley and Tom Paine. He said the one was an instance of a subtle, the other of an acute mind, than which no two things could be more distinct. The one was a shop-boy's quality, the other the charac- teristic of a philosopher. He considered Bishop Butler as a true philosopher, a profound and conscientious thinker, a genuine reader of nature and his own mind. He did not speak of his Analogy, but of his Sermons at the Rolls' Chapel, of which I had never heard. Coleridge somehow always contrived to prefer the unknown to the known. In this instance he was right. The Analogy is a tissue of sophistry, of wire-drawn, theological special- pleading; the Sermons (with the preface to them) are in a fine vein of deep, matured reflection, a candid appeal to our observation of human nature, without pedantry and without bias. I told Coleridge I had written a few re- marks, and was sometimes foolish enough to believe that I had made a discovery on the same subject (the Natural Disinterestedness of the Human Mind) and I tried to explain my view of it to Coleridge, who listened with great willingness, but I did not succeed in making myself understood. I sat down to the task shortly afterward for the twenti-- WILLIAM HAZLITT 47 eth time, got new pens and paper, determined to make clear work of it, wrote a few meagre sentences in the skele- ton style of a mathematical demonstration, stopped half- way down the second page; and, after trying in vain to pump up any words, images, notions, apprehensions, facts, or observations, from that gulf of abstraction in which I had plunged myself for four or five years pre- ceding, gave up the attempt as labor in vain, and shed tears of helpless despondency on the blank, unfinished paper. I can write fast enough now. Am I better than I was then? Oh no! One truth discovered, one pang of regret at not being able to express it, is better than all the fluency and flippancy in the world. Would that I could go back to what I then was! Why can we not revive past times as we can revisit old places? If I had the quaint Muse of Sir Philip Sidney to assist me, I would write a Sonnet to the Road between Wem and Shrewsbury, and immortalize every step of it by some fond enigmat- ical conceit. I would swear that the very milestones had ears, and that Harmer-hill stooped with all its pines, to listen to a poet, as he passed ! I remember but one other topic of discourse in this walk. He mentioned Paley, praised the naturalness and clearness of his style, but condemned his sentiments, thought him a mere time- serving casuist, and said that "the fact of his work on Moral and Political Philosophy being made a text-book in our universities was a disgrace to the national char- acter." We parted at the six-mile stone; and I returned home- ward, pensive, but much pleased. I had met with unex- pected notice from a person whom I believed to have been prejudiced against me. "Kind and affable to me had been his condescension, and should be honored ever with suitable regard." He was the first poet I had known, and he certainly answered to that inspired name. I had 48 THE PERSONAL ESSAY heard a great deal of his powers of conversation and was not disappointed. In fact, I never met with anything at all like them, either before or since. I could easily credit the accounts which were circulated of his holding forth to a large party of ladies and gentlemen, an evening or two before, on the Berkeleian Theory, when he made the whole material universe look like a transparency of fine words; and another story (which I believe he has somewhere told himself) of his being asked to a party at Birmingham, of his smoking tobacco and going to sleep after dinner on a sofa, where the company found him, to their no small surprise, which was increased to wonder when he started up of a sudden, and rubbing his eyes, looked about him, and launched into a three hours' description of the third heaven, of which he had had a dream, very different from Mr. Southey's Vision of Judg- ment, and also from that other "Vision of Judgment,"* which Mr. Murray, the Secretary of the Bridge-street Junta, took into his especial keeping. On my way back I had a sound in my ears it was the voice of Fancy; I had a light before me it was the face of Poetry. The one still lingers there, the other has not quitted my side ! Coleridge, in truth, met me half-way on the ground of philosophy, or I should not have been won over to his imaginative creed. I had an uneasy, pleasurable sensation all the time, till I was to visit him. During those months the chill breath of winter gave me a welcoming; the vernal air was balm and inspiration to me. The golden sunsets, the silver star of evening, lighted me on my way to new hopes and prospects. / was to visit Coleridge in the spring. This circumstance was never absent from my thoughts, and mingled with "Vision of Judgment," by Byron. This poem, which satirized George the Third, was sent to Byron's publisher, Murray, who re- fused to print it. WILLIAM HAZLITT 49 all my feelings. I wrote to him at the time proposed, and received an answer postponing my intended visit for a week or two, but very cordially urging me to com- plete my promise then. This delay did not damp, but rather increased my ardor. In the meantime, I went to Llangollen Vale, by way of initiating myself in the mys- teries of natural scenery; and I must say I was enchanted with it. I had been reading Coleridge's description of England in his fine Ode on the Departing Year, and I ap- plied it, con amore,* to the objects before me. That valley was to me (in a manner) the cradle of a new existence: in the river that winds through it, my spirit was baptized in the waters of Helicon ! I returned home, and soon after set out on my journey with unworn heart, and un tired feet. My way lay through Worcester and Gloucester, and by Upton, where I thought of Tom Jonesf and the adventure of the muff. I remember getting completely wet through one day, and stopping at an inn (I think it was at Tewkes- bury) where I sat up all night to read Paul and Virginia.l Sweet were the showers in early youth that drenched my body, and sweet the drops of pity that fell upon the books I read ! I recollect a remark of Coleridge's upon this very book that nothing could show the gross indeli- cacy of French manners and the entire corruption of their imagination more strongly than the behavior of the heroine in the last fatal scene, who turns away from a person on board the sinking vessel, that offers to save her life, because he has thrown off his clothes to assist him in swimming. Was this a time to think of such a circumstance ? I once hinted to Wordsworth, as we were * Con amore, earnestly, with love. t Tom Jones, the hero of the novel of that name, by Henry Field- ing. It was a great favorite of Hazlitt's. \ Paid and Virginia, a novel by Bernardin St. Pierre. 60 THE PERSONAL ESSAY sailing in his boat on Grasmere lake, that I thought he had borrowed the idea of his Poems on the Naming of Places from the local inscriptions of the same kind in Paul and Virginia. He did not own the obligation, and stated some distinction without a difference in defense to his claim to originality. Any, the slightest varia- tion, would be sufficient for this purpose in his mind; for whatever he added or altered would inevitably be worth all that any one else had done, and contain the marrow of the sentiment. I was still two days before the time fixed for my arrival, for I had taken care to set out early enough. I stopped these two days at Bridgewater; and when I was tired of sauntering on the banks of its muddy river, returned to the inn and read Camilla* So have I loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best. I have wanted only one thing to make me happy; but wanting that have wanted every- thing ! I arrived, and was well received. The country about Nether Stowey is beautiful, green and hilly, and near the seashore. I saw it but the other day, after an interval of twenty years, from a hill near Taunton. How was the map of my life spread out before me, as the map of the country lay at my feet ! In the afternoon, Coleridge took me over to Alfoxden, a romantic old family mansion of the St. Aubins, where Wordsworth lived. It was then in the possession of a friend of the poet's, who gave him the free use of it. Somehow, that period (the time just after the French Revolution) was not a time when noth- ing was given for nothing. The mind opened and a soft- ness might be perceived coming over the heart of individ- uals, beneath "the scales that fence" our self-interest. * Camilla, a novel by Madame D'Arblay, better known as Fanny Burney. WILLIAM HAZLITT 51 Wordsworth himself was from home, but his sister kept house, and set before us a frugal repast; and we had free access to her brother's poems, the Lyrical Ballads, which were still in manuscript, or in the form of Sybilline Leaves. I dipped into a few of these with great satisfaction, and with the faith of a novice. I slept that night in an old room with blue hangings, and covered with the round- faced family portraits of the age of George I. and II., and from the wooded declivity of the adjoining park that overlooked my window, at the dawn of day, could "hear the loud stag speak." In the outset of life (and particularly at this time I felt it so) our imagination has a body to it. We are in a state between sleeping and waking, and have indistinct but glorious glimpses of strange shapes, and there is always something to come better than what we see. As in our dreams the fulness of the blood gives warmth and reality to the coinage of the brain, so in youth our ideas are clothed, and fed, and pampered with our good spirits; we breathe thick with thoughtless happiness, the weight of future years presses on the strong pulses of the heart, and we repose with undisturbed faith in truth and good. As we advance, we exhaust our fund of enjoyment and of hope. We are no longer wrapped in lamb's-wool, lulled in Elysium. As we taste the pleasures of life, their spirit evaporates, the sense palls; and nothing is left but the phantoms, the lifeless shadows of what has been! That morning, as soon as breakfast was over, we strolled out into the park, and seating ourselves on the trunk of an old ash-tree that stretched along the ground, Coleridge read aloud with a sonorous and musical voice, the ballad of "Betty Foy."* I was not critically or * " Betty Foy " and the other poems here mentioned are by Words- worth. 52 THE PERSONAL ESSAY sceptically inclined. I saw touches of truth and nature, and took the rest for granted. But in the " Thorn," the "Mad Mother," and the "Complaint of a Poor Indian Woman," I felt that deeper power and pathos which have been since acknowledged, "In spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,' M as the characteristics of this author; and the sense of a new style and a new spirit in poetry came over me. It had to me something of the effect that arises from the turning up of the fresh soil, or of the first welcome breath of Spring: "While yet the trembling year is unconfirmed." f Coleridge and myself walked back to Stowey that eve- ning, and his voice sounded high "Of Providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate, Fix'd fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute," { as we passed through echoing grove, by fairy stream or waterfall, gleaming in the summer moonlight! He la- mented that Wordsworth was not prone enough to be- lieve in the traditional superstitions of the place, and that there was a something corporeal, a matter-of-fact- ness, a clinging to the palpable, or often to the petty, in his poetry, in consequence. His genius was not a spirit that descended to him through the air; it sprung out of the ground like a flower, or unfolded itself from a green spray, on which the goldfinch sang. He said, however (if I remember right), that this objection must be con- fined to his descriptive pieces, that his philosophic poetry had a grand and comprehensive spirit in it, so that his * From Pope's Essay on Man. f From Thomson's Seasons. J From Milton's Paradise Lost. WILLIAM HAZLITT 53 soul seemed to inhabit the universe like a palace, and to discover truth by intuition, rather than by deduction. The next day Wordsworth arrived from Bristol at Coleridge's cottage. I think I see him now. He an- swered in some degree to his friend's description of him, but was more gaunt and Don Quixote-like. He was quaintly dressed (according to the costume of that un- constrained period) in a brown fustian jacket and striped pantaloons. There was something of a roll, a lounge in his gait, not unlike his own Peter Bell. There was a severe, worn pressure of thought about his temples, a fire in his eye (as if he saw something in objects more than the outward appearance), an intense, high, narrow forehead, a Roman nose, cheeks furrowed by strong purpose and feeling, and a convulsive inclination to laughter about the mouth, a good deal at variance with the solemn, stately expression of the rest of his face. Chantrey's bust wants the marking traits; but he was teased into making it regular and heavy: Haydon's head of him, introduced into the Entrance of Christ into Jerusalem, is the most like his drooping weight of thought and expression. He sat down and talked very naturally and freely, with a mixture of clear, gushing accents in his voice, a deep guttural intonation, and a strong tinc- ture of the northern burr, like the crust on wine. He instantly began to make havoc of the half of a Cheshire cheese on the table, and said, triumphantly, that "his marriage with experience had not been so productive as Mr. Southey's in teaching him a knowledge of the good things of this life." He had been to see the Castk Specter by Monk Lewis, while at Bristol, and described it very well. He said "it fitted the taste of the audience like a glove." This ad captandum * merit was however by no means a recommendation of it, according to the severe * Ad captandum, to catch the crowd. 54 THE PERSONAL ESSAY principles of the new school, which reject rather than court popular effect. Wordsworth, looking out of the low, latticed window, said, "How beautifully the sun sets on that yellow bank!" I thought within myself, "With what eyes these poets see nature !" and ever after, when I saw the sunset stream upon the objects facing it, conceived I had made a discovery, or thanked Mr. Words- worth for having made one for me ! We went over to Alfoxden again the day following, and Wordsworth read us the story of Peter Bell in the open air; and the comment upon it by his face and voice was very different from that of some later critics ! What- ever might be thought of the poem, "his face was as a book where men might read strange matters," * and he announced the fate of his hero in prophetic tones. There is a ckaunt in the recitation both of Coleridge and Words- worth, which acts as a spell upon the hearer, and disarms the judgment. Perhaps they have deceived themselves by making habitual use of this ambiguous accompani- ment. Coleridge's manner is more full, animated, and varied; Wordsworth's more equable, sustained, and in- ternal. The one might be termed more dramatic, the other more lyrical. Coleridge has told me that he him- self liked to compose in walking over uneven ground, or breaking through the straggling branches of a copse wood; whereas Wordsworth always wrote (if he could) walking up and down a straight gravel walk, or in some spot where the continuity of his verse met with no col- lateral interruption. Returning that same evening, I got into a metaphysical argument with Wordswerth, while Coleridge was explaining the different notes of the nightingale to his sister, in which we neither of us suc- ceeded in making ourselves perfectly clear and intell'^i- Ue. Thus I passed three weeks at Nether Stowey f Vi * From Macbeth, I, v, 63. WILLIAM HAZLITT 55 in the neighborhood, generally devoting the afternoons to a delightful chat in an arbor made of bark by the poet's friend Tom Poole, sitting under two fine elm-trees, and listening to the bees humming round us while we quaffed our flip. It was agreed, among other things, that we should make a jaunt down the Bristol Channel, as far as Linton. We pet off together on foot, Coleridge, John Chester, and I. This Chester was a native of Nether Stowey, one of those who were attracted to Coleridge's discourse as flies are to honey, or bees in swarming- time to the sound of a brass pan. He "followed in the chase like a dog who hunts, not like one that made up the cry." * He had on a brown cloth coat, boots, and corduroy breeches, was low in stature, bow-legged, had a drag in his walk like a drover, which he assisted by a hazel switch, and kept on a sort of trot by the side of Coleridge, like a running foot- man by a state coach, that he might not lose a syllable or Bound that fell from Coleridge's lips. He told me his private opinion, that Coleridge was a wonderful man. He scarcely opened his lips, much less offered an opinion the whole way: yet of the three, had I to choose during that journey, I would be John Chester. He afterward fol- lowed Coleridge into Germany, where the Kantean philosophers were puzzled how to bring him under any of their categories. When he sat down at table with his idol, John's felicity was complete; Sir Walter Scott's, or Mr. Blackwood's, when they sat down at the same table with the king, was not more so. We passed Dunster on our right, a small town between the brow of a hill and the Bea. I remember eying it wistfully as it lay below us: contrasted with the woody scene around, it looked as clear, as pure, as embrowned and ideal as any landscape I have seen since, of Caspar Poussin's or Domenichmo'a. * From Othello, II, iii, 370. 56 THE PERSONAL ESSAY We had a long day's march (our feet kept time to the echoes of Coleridge's tongue) through Minehead and by the Blue Anchor, and on to Linton, which we did not reach till near midnight, and where we had some diffi- culty in making a lodgment. We, however, knocked the people of the house up at last, and we were repaid for our apprehensions and fatigue by some excellent rashers of fried bacon and eggs. The view in coming along had been splendid. We walked for miles and miles on dark brown heaths overlooking the Channel, with the Welsh hills beyond, and at times descended into little sheltered valleys close by the seaside, with a smuggler's face scowl- ing by us, and then had to ascend conical hills with a path winding up through a coppice to a barren top, like a monk's shaven crown, from one of which I pointed out to Coleridge's notice the bare masts of a vessel on the very edge of the horizon, and within the red-orbed disk of the setting sun, like his own spectre-ship in the Ancient Manner. At Linton the character of the seacoast becomes more marked and rugged. There is a place called the Valley of Rocks (I suspect this was only the poetical name for it), bedded among precipices overhanging the sea, with rocky caverns beneath, into which the waves dash, and where the sea-gull forever wheels its screaming flight. On the tops of these are huge stones thrown transverse, as if an earthquake had tossed them there, and behind these is a fretwork of perpendicular rocks, something like the Giant's Causeway. A thunder-storm came on while we were at the inn, and Coleridge was running out bare- headed to enjoy the commotion of the elements in the Valley of Rocks, but as if in spite, the clouds only mut- tered a few angry sounds, and let fall a few refreshing drops. Coleridge told me that he and Wordsworth were to have made this place the scene of a prose-tale, which WILLIAM HAZLITT 57 was to have been in the manner of, but far superior to, the Death of Abel, but they had relinquished the design. In the morning of the second day, we breakfasted luxuri- ously in an old-fashioned parlor on tea, toast, eggs, and honey, in the very sight of the beehives from which it had been taken, and a garden full of thyme and wild flowers that had produced it. On this occasion Coleridge spoke of Virgil's Georgics, but not well. I do not think he had much feeling for the classical or elegant.* It was in this room that we found a little worn-out copy of the Seasons, lying in a window-seat, on which Coleridge exclaimed, "That is true fame!" He said Thomson was a great poet, rather than a good one; his style was as meretricious as his thoughts were natural. He spoke of Cowper as the best modern poet. He said the Lyrical Ballads were an ex- periment about to be tried by him and Wordsworth, to see how far the public taste would endure poetry written in a more natural and simple style than had hitherto been attempted; totally discarding the artifices of poetical diction, and making use only of such words as had prob- ably been common in the most ordinary language since the days of Henry II. Some comparison was introduced between Shakespeare and Milton. He said "he hardly knew which to prefer. Shakespeare appeared to him a mere stripling in the art; he was as tall and as strong, with infinitely more activity than Milton, but he never appeared to have come to man's estate; or if he had, he * He had no idea of pictures, of Claude or Raphael, and at this time I had as little as he. He sometimes gives a striking account at present of the Cartoons at Pisa by Buffamalco and others; of one in particular, where Death is seen in the air brandishing his scythe, and the great and mighty of the earth shudder at his approach, while the beggars and the wretched kneel to him as their deliverer. He would, of course, understand so broad and fine a moral as this at any time. (Hazlitt's note.) 58 THE PERSONAL ESSAY would not have been a man, but a monster." He spoke with contempt of Gray, and with intolerance of Pope. He did not like the versification of the latter. He ob- served that "the ears of these couplet writers might be charged with having short memories, that could not re- tain the harmony of whole passages." He thought little of Junius as a writer; he had a dislike of Dr. Johnson; and a much higher opinion of Burke as an orator and politician, than of Fox or Pitt. He, however, thought him very inferior in richness of style and imagery to some of our elder prose-writers, particularly Jeremy Taylor. He liked Richardson, but not Fielding; nor could I get him to enter into the merits of Caleb Williams* In short, he was profound and discriminating with respect to those authors whom he liked, and where he gave his judgment fair play; capricious, pre verse, and prejudiced in his antipathies and distastes. We loitered on the "ribbed sea sands," in such talk as this a whole morning, and, I recollect, met with a curi- ous seaweed, of which John Chester told us the country name ! A fisherman gave Coleridge an account of a boy that had been drowned the day before, and that they had tried to save him at the risk of their own lives. He said "he did not know how it was that they ventured, but, Sir, we have a nature toward one another." This expres- sion, Coleridge remarked to me, was a fine illustration of that theory of disinterestedness which I (in common with Butler) had adopted. I broached to him an argument of mine to prove that likeness was not mere association of ideas. I said that the mark in the sand put one in mind of a man's foot, not because it was part of a former im- pression of a man's foot (for it was quite new), but be- cause it was like the shape of a man's foot. He assented to the justness of this distinction (which I have explained * Caleb Williams, a political novel by Godwin, famous in its day. \\LLLLAM HAZll'lT 59 at length elsewhere, for the benefit of the curious) and John Chester listened; not from any interest in the sub- ject, but because he was astonished that I should be able to suggest anything to Coleridge that he did not already know. We returned on the third morning, and Coleridge remarked the silent cottage-smoke curling up the valleys where, a few evenings before, we had seen the lights gleaming through the dark. In a day or two after we arrived at Stowey, we set out, I on my return home, and he for Germany. It was a Sunday morning, and he was to preach that day for Dr. Toulmin of Taunton. I asked him if he had pre- pared anything for the occasion? He said he had not even thought of the text, but should as soon as we parted. I did not go to hear him this was a fault but we met in the evening at Bridgewater. The next day we had a long day's walk to Bristol, and sat down, I recollect, by a well side on the road, to cool ourselves and satisfy our thirst, when Coleridge repeated to me some descriptive lines of his tragedy of Remorse ; which I must say became his mouth and that occasion better than they, some years after, did Mr. Elliston's and the Drury-lane * boards "Oh memory! shield me from the world's poor strife, And give those scenes thine everlasting life." I saw no more of him for a year or two, during which period he had been wandering in the Hartz Forest, in Germany; and his return was cometary, meteorous, un- like his setting out. It was not till some time after that I knew his friends Lamb and Southey. The last always appears to me (as I first saw him) with a commonplace book under his arm, and the first with a bon mot in his mouth. It was at Godwin's that I met him with Hoi- croft and Coleridge, where they were disputing fiercely * Drury Lane, a famous London theatre. Elliston acted there. 60 THE PERSONAL ESSAY which was the best M an as he was, or man as he is to be. "Give me," says Lamb, "man as he is not to be." This saying was the beginning of a friendship between us which I believe still continues. Enough of this for the present. "But there is matter for another rime, And I to this may add a second tale." LEIGH HUNT ON GETTING UP ON COLD MORNINGS Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) was a London boy ;~ fee received his early education in the Christ's Hospital School, as did Charles Lamb. He very early began to write verse, which his father published under the title, A Collection of Poems Written between the Ages of Twelve and Sixteen. In 1808 Leigh ^and his brother John started a newspaper called the Examiner. For certain articles in this criti- cising the Prince Regent, the editors were prosecuted and imprisoned for two years. Here they continued their writing and entertained their friends; Thomas Moore, Byron, and John Keats came to see them. After Hunt's release he continued his literary work, writing criticism, book reviews, essays, plays, and poems. In 1822 he went to Italy to edit The Liberal, at a safe distance from England. Charles Dickens in Bleak House carica- tured Hunt as Harold Skimpole, magnifying some of his weaknesses.^ 1 Hunt's best-known works are his Autobi- ography, an interesting book, and the volumes of essays entitled, Men, Women, and Books and Table Talk. While he does not rank among the greater English essayists, his writing has a freedom and spontaneity that make it very pleasant reading. LEIGH HUNT ON GETTING UP ON COLD MORNINGS (From the Examiner) An Italian author Giulio Cordara, a Jesuit has written a poem upon insects, which he begins by insist- ing, that those troublesome and abominable little animals were created for our annoyance, and that they were cer- tainly not inhabitants of Paradise. We of the north may dispute this piece of theology; but on the other hand, it is as clear as the snow on the housetops, that Adam was not under the necessity of shaving; and that when Eve walked out of her delicious bower, she did not step upon ice three inches thick. Some people say it is a very easy thing to get up of a cold morning. You have only, they tell you, to take the resolution; and the thing is done. This may be very true; just as a boy at school has only to take a flogging, and the thing is over. But we have not at all made up our minds upon it; and we find it a very pleasant exercise to