great favorite was Edmund Kean, but he was equally an admirer of Mrs. Siddons. He also became a contributor to the Edinburgh Review, to Leigh Hunt's paper, the Examiner, and subsequently to the London Magazine, the periodical in which the "Essays of Elia" first appeared. He delivered several courses of lectures, in which his best criticisms appear. He wrote also much on

general topics, such as "On Going a Journey," "The Love of Life," "The Fear of Death," " On People With One Idea," "Of Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen." The latter is extremely entertaining, and relates the conversation on the subject that occurred at Lamb's one evening. The last essay he wrote is "The Sick Chamber," and was written a few weeks before his death in September, 1830. It concludes with this tribute to books: "I feel as I read, that if the stage shows us the masks of men and the pageant of the world, books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own. They are the first and last, the most homefelt, the most heartfelt of all our enjoyments!

His two principal and extended works are "Conversations with Northcote," and the "Life of Napoleon Bonaparte." Hazlitt was a great admirer of Napoleon, and sympathized keenly

with the revolution that produced him. Though well written, this work does not rank high.

Hazlitt's domestic life was not happy, owing partly to his own temper and partly to his wife's lack of sympathy and ignorance of household management. The ill-matched pair afterward separated and were divorced. Hazlitt was unjustly treated by the Quarterly and Blackwood's Magazine, and denounced as an incendiary, a radical, a Bonapartist and an immoral scribbler. That was the way literary criticism displayed itself in those days.

One of the singular passages in Hazlitt's life is related in his book entitled "Liber Amoris." It tells of his foolish infatuation for Sarah Walker, the daughter of his lodging-house keeper. De Quincey calls it "an explosion of frenzy. He threw out his clamorous anguish to the clouds and to the winds and to the air, caring not who might listen, who might sympathize, or who might sneer the sole necessity for him was to empty his over-burdened spirit." It was an absurd episode, and his divinity having married a younger and less imaginative lover, Hazlitt contracted a second marriage with, a widow of some means. This was in 1824. They traveled for a year on the Continent, and then Hazlitt returned to

London alone. His wife never rejoined him. It is evident that Hazlitt's temper and wayward and unmethodical habits made him a very uncomfortable companion. One of his most finished works is called "The Spirit of the Age; or Contemporary Portraits." It includes sketches of Coleridge, Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, Cobbett, Gifford, and a dozen others of the notable men of the time. Byron's portrait is a masterpiece of critical analysis.

The testimony of his friends-and they were many-is that Hazlitt possessed great qualities of head and heart worthy of respect and affection. He was unselfish and devoid of deception. He hated pretension, was never dishonest, nor cruel, nor treacherous. He has left a decided impress on English literature, for he was, with all his limitations, a very great critic.

CHARLES LAMB,

MOST GENIAL OF ESSAYISTS.

(1775-1834.)

SWINBURNE calls Lamb the "best beloved of English writers," and he certainly possesses a lovable quality, manifest in everything he has written, that draws his readers into closest sympathy with him. He shares also with Shakespeare the distinction of being called "gentle"; not in the sense of pity or commiseration, but as being kindly and full of sympathy with humanity.

His style is a marvel of ease, fulness, quaintness and beauty. It is formed upon the profoundest study of the Elizabethan dramatists, and yet it is modern and even new. There is the flavor of antiquity about it—a use of words often archaic, but just as often coined in imitation of the obsolete; but there are no conceits or farfetched allusions. He puts us under the spell of a literature which he knows, but which we only faintly know. Then come the turns of quaint

humor which excite our mirth and give him his perennial charms. He has, too, a robust sense, a hatred of shams, and a philosophy of life that remind one of Dr. Johnson. He loves the solid earth whereon he stands, and delights in the "visible, warm motion" of his being. He enjoys the world and its reasonable pleasures. He discourses on the advantages of being alive; not with levity, but as one who has been tried and ennobled by affliction, and yet sees the happiness that may come to him who does not seek too much. Who is there who has not at least heard of, if he has not read the immortal "Dissertation on Roast Pig"? Lamb likes to write about things good to eat. "I am no Quaker with my food," he says. "I confess I am not indifferent to the kinds of it. Those unctuous morsels of deer's flesh were not made to be received with dispassionate services. I hate a man who swallows it, affecting not to know what he is eating. I suspect his taste in higher matters. I shrink instinctively from one who professes to like minced veal. There is a physiognomical character in the taste for food. C- holds that a man cannot have a pure mind who refuses apple dumplings. I am not certain but he is right." And so he dwells from time to time on the pleasures of life,