What he did for the
Elizabethan
dramatists was to rediscover their
excellences and find them an audience.
excellences and find them an audience.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v12 - Gre to Hen
His heart was so tender that he would
dismount from his horse in a forest to replace in their nest young
birds which had fallen by the roadside; he could not sleep at night
if he knew that a soldier-boy was under sentence of death; he
## p. 7105 (#503) ###########################################
JOHN HAY
7105
could not, even at the bidding of duty or policy, refuse the prayer
of age or helplessness in distress. Childern instinctively loved
him; they never found his rugged features ugly; his sympathies
were quick and seemingly unlimited. He was absolutely without
prejudice of class or condition. Frederick Douglass says he was
the only man of distinction he ever met who never reminded him,
by word or manner, of his color; he was as just and generous to
the rich and well-born as to the poor and humble-a thing rare
among politicians. He was tolerant even of evil: though no man
can ever have lived with a loftier scorn of meanness and selfish-
ness, he yet recognized their existence and counted with the
He said one day, with a flash of cynical wisdom worthy of a La
Rochefoucauld, that honest statesmanship was the employment of
individual meanness for the public good. He never asked per-
fection of any one; he did not even insist, for others, upon the
high standards he set up for himself. At a time before the word
was invented he was the first of opportunists. With the fire of a
reformer and a martyr in his heart, he yet proceeded by the ways
of cautious and practical statecraft. He always worked with
things as they were, while never relinquishing the desire and
effort to make them better. To a hope which saw the Delectable
Mountains of absolute justice and peace in the future, to a faith
that God in his own time would give to all men the things con-
venient to them, he added a charity which embraced in its deep
bosom all the good and the bad, all the virtues and the infirmi-
ties of men, and a patience like that of nature, which in its vast
and fruitful activity knows neither haste nor rest.
A character like this is among the precious heirlooms of the
republic; and by a special good fortune, every part of the coun-
try has an equal claim and pride in it. Lincoln's blood came from
the veins of New England emigrants, of Middle-State Quakers, of
Virginia planters, of Kentucky pioneers; he himself was one of
the men who grew up with the earliest growth of the Great West.
Every jewel of his mind or his conduct sheds radiance on each
portion of the nation. The marvelous symmetry and balance of
his intellect and character may have owed something to this
varied environment of his race, and they may fitly typify the
variety and solidity of the republic. It may not be unreasonable
to hope that his name and his renown may be forever a bond of
union to the country which he loved with an affection so impar-
tial, and served, in life and in death, with such entire devotion.
XII-445
## p. 7106 (#504) ###########################################
7106
JOHN HAY
[These poems are copyrighted, and are reprinted here by permission of Mr.
Hay]
WHEN PHYLLIS LAUGHS
THEN Phyllis laughs, in sweet surprise
WHE My heart asks if my dazzling eyes
Or if my ears take more delight
In luscious sound or beauty bright,
When Phyllis laughs.
In crinkled eyelids hid Love lies,
In the soft curving lips I prize
Promise of raptures infinite,
When Phyllis laughs.
Far to the Orient fancy flies.
I see beneath Idalian skies,
Clad only in the golden light,
Calm in perfection's peerless might,
The laughter-loving Venus rise,
When Phyllis laughs.
NIGHT IN VENICE
OVE, in this summer night, do you recall
Midnight, and Venice, and those skies of June
Thick-sown with stars, when from the still lagoon
We glided noiseless through the dim canal?
A sense of some belated festival
Hung round us, and our own hearts beat in tune
With passionate memories that the young moon
Lit up on dome and tower and palace wall.
We dreamed what ghosts of vanished loves made part
Of that sweet light and trembling, amorous air.
I felt in those rich beams that kissed your hair,
Those breezes warm with bygone lovers' sighs-
All the dead beauty of Venice in your eyes,
All the old loves of Venice in my heart.
## p. 7107 (#505) ###########################################
JOHN HAY
7107
A
[These poems are copyrighted, and are reprinted here by permission of Mr.
Hay and of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , publishers, Boston. ]
A WOMAN'S LOVE
SENTINEL angel sitting high in glory
Heard this shrill wail ring out from purgatory:—
"Have mercy, mighty angel,-hear my story!
"I loved, and blind with passionate love, I fell.
Love brought me down to death, and death to hell;
For God is just, and death for sin is well.
"I do not rage against his high decree,
Nor for myself do ask that grace shall be,
But for my love on earth who mourns for me.
"Great Spirit! Let me see my love again
And comfort him one hour, and I were fain
To pay a thousand years of fire and pain. "
Then said the pitying angel: "Nay, repent
That wild vow! Look, the dial finger's bent
Down to the last hour of thy punishment! "
But still she wailed: "I pray thee, let me go!
I cannot rise to peace and leave him so.
Oh, let me soothe him in his bitter woe! »
The brazen gates ground sullenly ajar,
And upward, joyous, like a rising star,
She rose and vanished in the ether far.
But soon adown the dying sunset sailing,
And like a wounded bird her pinions trailing,
She fluttered back, with broken-hearted wailing.
She sobbed, "I found him by the summer sea
Reclined, his head upon a maiden's knee -
She curled his hair and kissed him. Woe is me! "
She wept, "Now let my punishment begin!
I have been fond and foolish. Let me in
To expiate my sorrow and my sin. ”
The angel answered, "Nay, sad soul, go higher!
To be deceived in your true heart's desire
Was bitterer than a thousand years of fire! "
## p. 7108 (#506) ###########################################
7108
JOHN HAY
JIM BLUDSO, OF THE PRAIRIE BELLE
WALL
VALL, no! I can't tell whar he lives,
Becase he don't live, you see;
Leastways, he's got out of the habit
Of livin' like you and me.
Whar have you been for the last three year
That you haven't heard folks tell
How Jimmy Bludso passed in his checks
The night of the Prairie Belle?
He weren't no saint, - them engineers
Is all pretty much alike:
One wife in Natchez-under-the-Hill,
And another one here in Pike;
A keerless man in his talk was Jim,
And an awkward hand in a row,
But he never funked, and he never lied,-
I reckon he never knowed how.
And this was all the religion he had:
To treat his engine well;
Never be passed on the river;
To mind the pilot's bell;
And if ever the Prairie Belle took fire,—
A thousand times he swore
He'd hold her nozzle agin the bank
Till the last soul got ashore.
All boats has their day on the Mississip,
And her day come at last,—
The Movastar was a better boat,
But the Belle she wouldn't be passed.
And so she come tearin' along, that night-
The oldest craft on the line-
With a nigger squat on her safety-valve,
And her furnace crammed, rosin and pine.
The fire bust out as she clared the bar,
And burnt a hole in the night,
And quick as a flash she turned, and made
For the willer-bank on the right.
There was runnin' and cursin', but Jim yelled out,
Over all the infernal roar,
"I'll hold her nozzle agin the bank
Till the last galoot's ashore. "
## p. 7109 (#507) ###########################################
JOHN HAY
7109
Through the hot black breath of the burnin' boat
Jim Bludso's voice was heard,
And they all had trust in his cussedness,
And knowed he would keep his word.
And sure's you're born, they all got off
Afore the smoke-stacks fell,-
And Bludso's ghost went up alone
In the smoke of the Prairie Belle.
He weren't no saint-but at judgment
I'd run my chance with Jim,
'Longside of some pious gentlemen
That wouldn't shook hands with him.
He seen his duty, a dead-sure thing,—
And went for it thar and then;
And Christ ain't agoing to be too hard
On a man that died for men.
## p. 7110 (#508) ###########################################
7110
PAUL HAMILTON HAYNE
(1830-1886)
F REVOLUTIONARY ancestry, and the only son of an officer in
the United States naval service, Paul Hamilton Hayne was
born in Charleston, South Carolina, January 1st, 1830. Few
American poets have grown up with outward circumstances more
kindly toward a literary career and its practical risks. A name of
high local distinction, wealth, and associations with men of letters,
were part of Hayne's environment from the beginning. The literary
gatherings in the Hayne household, in which William Gilmore Simms,
PAUL H. HAYNE
John C. Calhoun, and Hugh S. Legaré were
prominent, drew all Charleston's intellectual
life at the time to a common centre.
Hayne was a graduate in 1850 of the col-
lege of his native city. For a time he studied
law. With the outbreak of the Civil War he
took service, and was on the staff of Gen-
eral Pickens. Broken health induced him
unwillingly to resign. With the bombard-
ment of Charleston and the advance of the
Federal army he suffered severe losses; his
costly house, his library, and pretty much
all his belongings being swept away by
fire or pillage. A ruined man pecuniarily,
he betook himself to the Pine Barrens of
Georgia. There he built himself a cottage at Copse Hill. There
he gardened, wrote verses, kept up his correspondence with the outer
world, corrected his proofs, and it is said "was perfectly happy" dur-
ing more than fifteen years, until his death in 1886. He was much
of an invalid by constitution; and with his frail vitality, his accom-
plishing so much is a striking example of the will to live and to do
what we wish to do.
Mr. Hayne's early literary work was connected with the Southern
Literary Messenger, to which so many of the South's poets were
contributors at one time or another. Later he became editor of the
Charleston Literary Gazette, and held a post on the Charleston Even-
ing News. In 1872 appeared his 'Legends and Lyrics,' one collection
of his poems; in 1873 his edition of the literary remains of his friend
## p. 7111 (#509) ###########################################
PAUL HAMILTON HAYNE
7111
Timrod, with a sympathetic biography; in 1875 he published 'The
Mountain of the Lovers,'-like The Wife of Brittany,' one of his
long poems,—and in later succession we have other titles; with his
poems in a complete edition in 1882.
Mr. Hayne's verse largely reflects aspects of nature in the South-
ern United States. There is a strong influence of Wordsworth in
much of his writing. In other descriptive poetry, and in that of a
reflective or dramatic spirit, he won a measurable success, occasion-
ally coming into obvious poetical touch with Robert Browning. His
sonnets are a large element of his writing; a species of verse in
which he delighted, his meditative humor finding it, over and over
again, a vehicle at once suitable and congenial.
All the citations following are from the Poems of Paul Hamilton Hayne,'
copyright 1882 by D. Lothrop & Co. , and are reprinted here by per-
mission of the family of Mr. Hayne, and of the publishers.
ODE TO SLEEP
EYOND the sunset and the amber sea
B
To the lone depths of ether, cold and bare,
Thy influence, soul of all tranquillity,
Hallows the earth and awes the reverent air;
Yon laughing rivulet quells its silvery tune;
The pines, like priestly watchers tall and grim,
Stand mute against the pensive twilight dim,
Breathless to hail the advent of the moon;
From the white beach the ocean falls away
Coyly, and with a thrill; the sea-birds dart
Ghostlike from out the distance, and depart
With a gray fleetness, moaning the dead day;
The wings of Silence, overfolding space,
Droop with dusk grandeur from the heavenly steep,
And through the stillness gleams thy starry face,-
Serenest Angel, Sleep!
Come! woo me here, amid these flowery charms;
Breathe on my eyelids; press thy odorous lips
Close to mine own; en-reathe me in thine arms,
And cloud my spirit with thy sweet eclipse;
No dreams! no dreams! keep back the motley throng,—
For such are girded round with ghastly might,
And sing low burdens of despondent song,
Decked in the mockery of a lost delight;
## p. 7112 (#510) ###########################################
PAUL HAMILTON HAYNE
7112
I ask oblivion's balsam! the mute peace
Toned to still breathings, and the gentlest sighs;
Not music woven of rarest harmonies
Could yield me such elysium of release:
The tones of earth are weariness,—not only
'Mid the loud mart, and in the walks of trade,
But where the mountain Genius broodeth lonely,
In the cool pulsing of the sylvan shade;
Then bear me far into thy noiseless land;
Surround me with thy silence, deep on deep,
Until serene I stand
Close by a duskier country, and more grand
Mysterious solitude, than thine, O Sleep!
As he whose veins a feverous frenzy burns,
Whose life-blood withers in the fiery drouth,
Feebly and with a languid longing turns
To the spring breezes gathering from the south,
So, feebly and with languid longing, I
Turn to thy wished nepenthe, and implore
The golden dimness, the purpureal gloom
Which haunt thy poppied realm, and make the shore
Of thy dominion balmy with all bloom.
In the clear gulfs of thy serene profound,
Worn passions sink to quiet, sorrows pause,
Suddenly fainting to still-breathed rest:
Thou own'st a magical atmosphere, which awes
The memories seething in the turbulent breast;
Which, muffling up the sharpness of all sound
Of mortal lamentation, solely bears
The silvery minor toning of our woe,
All mellowed to harmonious underflow,
Soft as the sad farewells of dying years,—
Lulling as sunset showers that veil the west,
And sweet as Love's last tears
When over-welling hearts do mutely weep:
O griefs! O wailings! your tempestuous madness,
Merged in a regal quietude of sadness,
Wins a strange glory by the streams of sleep!
Then woo me here, amid these flowery charms;
Breathe on my eyelids, press thy odorous lips
Close to mine own; enfold me in thine arms,
And cloud my spirit with thy sweet eclipse;
## p. 7113 (#511) ###########################################
PAUL HAMILTON HAYNE
7113
And while from waning depth to depth I fall,
Down lapsing to the utmost depths of all,
Till wan forgetfulness obscurely stealing
Creeps like an incantation on the soul,
And o'er the slow ebb of my conscious life
Dies the thin flush of the last conscious feeling,
And like abortive thunder, the dull roll
Of sullen passions ebbs far, far away,-
O Angel! loose the chords which cling to strife,
Sever the gossamer bondage of my breath,
And let me pass, gently as winds in May,
From the dim realm which owns thy shadowy sway,
To thy diviner sleep, O sacred Death!
ASPECTS OF THE PINES
TALL
ALL, sombre, grim, against the morning sky
They rise, scarce touched by melancholy airs,
Which stir the fadeless foliage dreamfully,
As if from realms of mystical despairs.
Tall, sombre, grim, they stand with dusky gleams
Brightening to gold within the woodland's core,
Beneath the gracious noontide's tranquil beams—
But the weird winds of morning sigh no more.
A stillness strange, divine, ineffable,
Broods round and o'er them in the wind's surcease,
And on each tinted copse and shimmering dell
Rests the mute rapture of deep-hearted peace.
Last, sunset comes the solemn joy and might
Borne from the west when cloudless day declines-
Low, flute-like breezes sweep the waves of light,
And lifting dark green tresses of the pines,
―――
Till every lock is luminous, gently float,
Fraught with hale odors up the heavens afar,
To faint when twilight on her virginal throat
Wears for a gem the tremulous vesper star.
## p. 7114 (#512) ###########################################
7114
PAUL HAMILTON HAYNE
POVERTY
NCE I beheld thee, a lithe mountain maid,
Embrowned by wholesome toils in lusty air;
Whose clear blood, nurtured by strong primitive cheer,
Through Amazonian veins flowed unafraid.
Broad-breasted, pearly-teethed, thy pure breath strayed,
Sweet as deep-uddered kine's curled in the rare
Bright spaces of thy lofty atmosphere,
O'er some rude cottage in a fir-grown glade.
Now, of each brave ideal virtue stripped,
Ο
O Poverty! I behold thee as thou art,-
A ruthless hag, the image of woeful dearth,
Of brute despair, gnawing its own starved heart.
Thou ravening wretch! fierce-eyed and monster-lipped,
Why scourge forevermore God's beauteous earth?
THE HYACINTH
Η
ERE in this wrecked storm-wasted garden close,
The grave of infinite generations fled
Of flowers that now lie lustreless and dead
As the gray dust of Eden's earliest rose,
What bloom is this, whose classical beauty glows
Radiantly chaste, with the mild splendor shed
Round a Greek virgin's poised and perfect head,
By Phidias wrought 'twixt rapture and repose?
Mark the sweet lines whose matchless ovals curl
Above the fragile stem's half-shrinking grace,
And say if this pure hyacinth doth not seem
(Touched by enchantments of an antique dream)
A flower no more, but the low drooping face
Of some love-laden, fair Athenian girl?
## p. 7115 (#513) ###########################################
7115
TO
WILLIAM HAZLITT
(1778-1830)
HE life of William Hazlitt, apart from his matrimonial infelici-
ties, is uneventful. He was born the 10th of April, 1778,
Cat Maidstone, England, where his father was a Unitarian
minister; not a Presbyterian, as the Encyclopædia Britannica has it.
Of him Hazlitt gives an interesting though pathetic picture. A
learned and a kindly man, he spent sixty years of his life in petty
squabbles over disputed texts of Scripture and in pleading the cause
of civil and religious liberty. "What dreams of philosophy and
poetry," says his son, were stifled in the
dreary tomes over which he sacrificed fancy
and imagination! For ease, half-play on
words, and a supine monkish pleasantry,"
he says of his letters, "I have never seen
his equal. "
<<
The boy was intended by his father for
the Unitarian ministry; but though he went
to a denominational college, he disliked the
idea of preaching. He was about twenty
when he heard the memorable sermon of
Coleridge which was said to have fixed his
career. Coleridge was visiting a neighbor-
ing minister, and Hazlitt walked twelve
miles through the mud before daylight to
hear him. The sermon set him to thinking, not of theology but of
metaphysics. He gave up his studies, and having some talent for
painting, devoted himself from this time forth to his two passions,
art and metaphysics. And although he was destined to succeed in
neither, yet to his knowledge of both he owed his pre-eminence in
the career which he entered only by accident. "Nowhere," says one
of his critics, "is abstract thought so picturesquely bodied forth by
concrete illustration. "
WILLIAM HAZLITT
At the end of seven years, having come to the conclusion that he
could not be a Titian, he published his first book, 'An Essay on the
Principles of Human Action'; a book as dry as his favorite biscuit.
Thenceforth, he wrote on any subject for any employer. From
the first he seems to have been fairly paid, and to have gained a
## p. 7116 (#514) ###########################################
7116
WILLIAM HAZLITT
hearing. He was at least sufficiently interesting to provoke the
implacable hostility of Blackwood and the Quarterly. For eighteen
years he was a regular contributor to the Edinburgh Review, the
London Review, and the New Monthly, while various daily and
weekly papers constantly employed him.
Hazlitt, like many persons of limited affections, had a capacity for
sudden passions; but finally, after many love affairs, he married at
the age of thirty a Miss Stoddard, with whom he lived for fourteen
unhappy years. He then met the somewhat mythical Sarah Walker,
the daughter of a lodging-house keeper, for whom he resolved to
leave his wife. As Mrs. Hazlitt was relieved to be rid of him, they
easily obtained a Scotch divorce. When, however, the mature lover
was free, Miss Walker had discreetly disappeared. Three months
afterwards he married a Mrs. Bridgewater, who took him on a Con-
tinental tour, but left him within the twelvemonth. Thackeray
describes the journey abroad as that of "a penniless student tramp-
ing on foot, and not made after the regular fashion of the critics of
the day, by the side of a young nobleman in a post-chaise »; but the
fact is that the bride of this second matrimonial venture paid the
bills. His other visit to the Continent was amply provided for by a
commission to copy pictures in the Louvre. Hazlitt lived only five
years after separating from his second wife. Pecuniary difficulties
and the failure of his publishers hastened his death, which occurred
in London September 18th, 1830. Only his son and his beloved
friend Charles Lamb were with him when he died.
The father of Coventry Patmore gives an interesting picture of
Hazlitt at thirty-five: "A pale anatomy of a man, sitting uneasily
on half a chair, his anxious, highly intellectual face looking upon
vacancy, emaciate, unstrung, inanimate. " But "the poor creature,"
as he used to call himself, was the launcher forth of the winged
word that could shake the hearts of princes and potentates. The
most unscrupulous biographer would hardly have dared to reveal Haz-
litt, the most reserved of men, as he reveals himself to the reader.
Every essay is autobiographical, and reflects his likes and dislikes.
In that strange book 'The New Pygmalion,' as in 'Liber Amoris,' he
invites the horrified British public to listen to his transports concern-
ing the lodging-house keeper's daughter. He abuses the Duke of
Wellington, idol of that public, as he abuses whoever may chance to
disagree with him on personal or impersonal subjects. The brilliant
iconoclast must have been the most uncomfortable of men to live
with. No wonder that Lamb used to sigh, pathetically, “I wish he
would not quarrel with everybody. " For he fell out with the amiable
Leigh Hunt, with the idol of his youth, Coleridge, whose poetry
he began at once to undervalue, and with Wordsworth and Southey,
## p. 7117 (#515) ###########################################
WILLIAM HAZLITT
7117
because they took a moderate view of the French Revolution. He
rated Shelley absurdly low for no better reason than that he was a
gentleman, and loaded Scott with bad names because he accepted
a baronetcy. De Quincey declared that "With Hazlitt, whatever is,
is wrong," and quotes an admirer of the critic who professed to
shudder whenever his hand went to his breast pocket, lest he should
draw out a dagger. What his politics were, except to worship the
genius of the French Revolution and abhor a something which he
called "the hag of legitimacy," no one knew. His heroes were the
first Napoleon and Rousseau.
Hazlitt says, with his usual indifference, that when he began to
write he left off reading. Much as he admired 'Waverley' and the
other "Scotch novels," as they were called, he never got through
more than half of any one, although it was his business to review
them. He gave a series of lectures on the Elizabethan dramatists,
and afterwards casually mentioned to Lamb that he had read only
about a quarter of Beaumont and Fletcher. And though he prided
himself on his metaphysics, he knew none of the metaphysicians but
the French and English philosophers of the eighteenth century. Pla-
tonists tell us that he went to Taylor the Platonist for his ideas. He
pretended to pride himself that he cared for no new book, and declared
that he neither corrected his own proof sheets nor read his work in
print. Of the beautiful 'Introduction to the Elizabethan Poets' Mr.
Saintsbury says, "All Hazlitt's faults to be found in it are due not
to prejudice, or error of judgment, but to occasional deficiency of
information. "
A bundle of inconsistencies, he had a sort of inexplicable con-
stancy, holding th same ideas at the end of his life that he had at
its beginning. While his egotism was as stupendous as that of Rous-
seau or Napoleon, he seemed to possess a double consciousness: with
one breath he blesses and curses. What he says of Burke sounds
like the ravings of a madman; yet he places Burke in his proper
place as the greatest of English political writers. He hacks and hews
the Lake School, while he discloses their choicest beauties.
« Were
the author of 'Waverley' to come into the room, I would kiss the
hem of his garment," he said; but Scott the man is to him "the
greatest, wisest, meanest of mankind. ” His judgment of an author
depended upon two circumstances: his private associations and his
sympathy with the writer.
Yet Hazlitt had something which is better than the capacity to
criticize fairly, to be consistent or learned, or to exercise the cardinal
virtues. He was an artist, and whatever he wrote is literature. His
choice of subject is of small importance if the reader is armed against
his prejudices. Some biographers rank him highest as a critic, others
## p. 7118 (#516) ###########################################
7118
WILLIAM HAZLITT
(
as an essayist; but it is not easy to classify his work. Essay or crit-
icism, it is Hazlitt and the world that Hazlitt sees. His criticisms
are scattered through the seven volumes of his writings edited by
his son, but they are collected in the three volumes entitled 'The
Characters of Shakespeare,' 'Elizabethan Literature,' and 'The Eng-
lish Poets and the English Comic Writers. ' His essays are classed in
the volumes The Spirit of the Age,' The Plain Dealer,' The Round
Table,' and 'Sketches and Essays. ' In the essays we find the famous
Going to a Fight,' the beautiful and pathetic 'Farewell to Essay-
Writing, the 'Going on a Journey,' 'My First Acquaintance with
Poets,' On Taste,' 'On the Indian Jugglers,' 'On Londoners and
Country People. ' These are named not because they are special
efforts, for Hazlitt seldom tried himself in any direct flight, but as
specimens of the range of his subjects.
His style is as varied as his themes: gay, semi-sentimental, hitting
hard like his own pugilists, judicious, gossipy, richly embroidered as
mediæval tapestry, grave, and chaste. It has been already said that
Hazlitt is a man of letters, and that all he touched became literature.
It is fair to go further, and suggest that a certain amount of literary
temperament is necessary to enjoy him, and perhaps a certain matur-
ity of taste. He is the essayist of the traveler who has reached the
Delectable Mountains of middle age, from whose calm heights he
takes a wide and reasonable view; the essayist for the drawn curtain
and the winter fireside after the leisurely meal, when his pungent talk
is the after-taste of some rare cordial.
Shakespeare scholars agree that he knows nothing of Shakespeare
but the text, and that he has added nothing to the explanation of
difficult passages; but ey, Iwell as the general reader, turn to
him for noble enthusiasm and calm judgment. It is of Shakespeare's
characters that he writes, not of his plays; and it is Timon, Othello,
Antony and Cleopatra, - the doers, not the dreamers,-who interest
him, and whom he hates and loves. Strange to say, though he rated
himself so highly as a metaphysician, Hamlet is one of his least
successful portraitures; his artist's eye saw Shakespeare played, not
written, and Kean, whom he first ridiculed and then praised, said
that Hazlitt had taught him more than his stage manager.
What he did for the Elizabethan dramatists was to rediscover their
excellences and find them an audience. He shows Congreve's merits
with a force not possible to a calmer judgment. How discriminat-
ing, on the contrary, is his praise of the sweetness of Dekker and of
the beauties of The Beggar's Opera'! and though personal in its vin-
dictiveness, what a splendid assault he makes on Sidney's 'Arcadia'!
Hazlitt is accused of reversing the counsel of the proverb, and
speaking good only of the dead. He was certainly unlike the little
## p. 7119 (#517) ###########################################
WILLIAM HAZLITT
7119
members of the little mutual-admiration societies who half a century
later take themselves so seriously. It was his art which he found
serious. Mr. Saintsbury makes the important point that his work
molded the genius of his literary juniors. In 'The Spirit of the Age'
there are distinct intimations of Carlyle.
"Where the devil did you
get that style ? " Jeffrey asked Macaulay. It is easy to see where,
when one reads Hazlitt's contributions to Jeffrey's own Review.
another way, he furnished a model to Dickens and Thackeray; and
no one who is familiar with the essay on 'Nicholas Poussin' will fail
to add Ruskin to his "fair herd of literary children. "
In
It is almost incredible that with his spirit and temperament, Haz-
litt's last words should have been, "I have had a happy life. " But
literature was to him the wife and children and friends of whom per-
haps she robbed him, while becoming, as the poet promises, the solace
reserved for him who loves her for herself alone.
―――――
OF PERSONS ONE WOULD WISH TO HAVE SEEN
From Table Talk'
"Come like shadows-so depart. "
L
AMB it was, I think, who suggested this subject, as well as the
defense of Guy Fawkes, which I urged him to execute. As
however he would undertake neither, I suppose I must do
both,
a task for which he would have been much fitter, no less
from the temerity than the felicity of his pen:-
"Never so sure our rapture to create
As when it touched the brink of all we hate. "
Compared with him I shall, I fear, make but a commonplace
piece of business of it; but I should be loth the idea was entirely
lost, and besides, I may avail myself of some hints of his in the
progress of it.
I am sometimes, I suspect, a better reporter of
the ideas of other people than expounder of my own. I pursue
the one too far into paradox or mysticism; the others I am not
bound to follow farther than I like, or than seems fair and
reasonable.
On the question being started, A
said, "I suppose the
two first persons you would choose to see would be the two
greatest names in English literature, Sir Isaac Newton and Mr.
Locke? " In this A- as usual, reckoned without his host.
Every one burst out a-laughing at the expression of Lamb's face,
?
## p. 7120 (#518) ###########################################
7120
WILLIAM HAZLITT
in which impatience was restrained by courtesy. "Yes, the great-
est names," he stammered out hastily, "but they were not per-
sons- not persons. " "Not persons? " said A—, looking wise
and foolish at the same time, afraid his triumph might be pre-
mature. "That is," rejoined Lamb, "not characters, you know.
By Mr. Locke and Sir Isaac Newton, you mean the 'Essay on
the Human Understanding' and the 'Principia,' which we have
to this day. Beyond their contents there is nothing personally
interesting in the men. But what we want to see any one bodily
for, is when there is something peculiar, striking in the individ-
uals; more than we can learn from their writings, and yet are
curious to know. I dare say Locke and Newton were very like
Kneller's portraits of them. But who could paint Shakespeare? "
"Ay," retorted A—, "there it is: then I suppose you would
prefer seeing him and Milton instead? » "No," said Lamb,
"neither. I have seen so much of Shakespeare on the stage and
on book-stalls, in frontispieces and on mantelpieces, that I am
quite tired of the everlasting repetition: and as to Milton's face,
the impressions that have come down to us of it I do not like,
-it is too starched and puritanical; and I should be afraid of
losing some of the manna of his poetry in the leaven of his
countenance and the precisian's band and gown. ”
"I shall guess no more," said A—. "Who is it, then, you
would like to see in his habit as he lived,' if you had your
choice of the whole range of English literature? " Lamb then
named Sir Thomas Browne and Fulke Greville, the friend of Sir
Philip Sidney, as the two worthies whom he should feel the
greatest pleasure to encounter on the door of his apartment in
their nightgown and slippers, and to exchange friendly greeting
with them. At this A laughed outright, and conceived Lamb
was jesting with him; but as no one followed his example, he
thought there might be something in it, and waited for an ex-
planation in a state of whimsical suspense. Lamb then (as well
as I can remember a conversation that passed twenty years ago
-how time slips! ) went on as follows:-
"The reason why I pitch upon those two authors is, that their
writings are riddles, and they themselves the most mysterious of
personages. They resemble the soothsayers of old, who dealt in
dark hints and doubtful oracles; and I should like to ask them
the meaning of what no mortal but themselves, I should sup-
pose, can fathom. There is Dr. Johnson,-I have no curiosity,
―――
## p. 7121 (#519) ###########################################
WILLIAM HAZLITT
7121
no strange uncertainty about him: he and Boswell together have
pretty well let me into the secret of what passed through his
mind. He and other writers like him are sufficiently explicit:
my friends whose repose I should be tempted to disturb (were it
in my power), are implicit, inextricable, inscrutable.
"When I look at that obscure but gorgeous prose composition
the Urn-Burial,' I seem to myself to look into a deep abyss, at
the bottom of which are hid pearls and rich treasure; or it is
like a stately labyrinth of doubt and withering speculation, and I
would invoke the spirit of the author to lead me through it.
Besides, who would not be curious to see the lineaments of a
man who, having himself been twice married, wished that man-
kind were propagated like trees?
"As to Fulke Greville, he is like nothing but one of his own
'Prologues spoken by the ghost of an old king of Ormus,' a
truly formidable and inviting personage: his style is apocalypti-
cal, cabalistical, a knot worthy of such an apparition to untie; and
for the unraveling a passage or two, I would stand the brunt of
an encounter with so portentous a commentator! "
"I am afraid in that case," said A————, "that if the mystery
were once cleared up the merit might be lost;" and turning to
me, whispered a friendly apprehension that while Lamb contin-
ued to admire these old crabbed authors he would never become
a popular writer.
Dr. Donne was mentioned as a writer of the same period, with
a very interesting countenance, whose history was singular, and
whose meaning was often quite as un-come-at-able without a per-
sonal citation from the dead, as that of any of his contemporaries.
The volume was produced; and while some one was expatiating
on the exquisite simplicity and beauty of the portrait prefixed to
the old edition, A got hold of the poetry, and exclaiming
"What have we here? " read the following:-
"Here lies a She-sun, and a He-moon there;
She gives the best light to his sphere,
Or each is both and all, and so
They unto one another nothing owe. "
There was no resisting this, till Lamb, seizing the volume,
turned to the beautiful 'Lines to his Mistress,' dissuading her
from accompanying him abroad, and read them with suffused
features and a faltering tongue.
XII-446
## p. 7122 (#520) ###########################################
7122
WILLIAM HAZLITT
His
Some one then inquired of Lamb if we could not see from
the window the Temple walk in which Chaucer used to take his
exercise; and on his name being put to the vote, I was pleased
to find that there was a general sensation in his favor in all but
A, who said something about the ruggedness of the metre, and
even objected to the quaintness of the orthography. I was vexed
at this superficial gloss, pertinaciously reducing everything to its
own trite level, and asked "if he did not think it would be worth
while to scan the eye that had first greeted the Muse in that dim
twilight and early dawn of English literature; to see the head
round which the visions of fancy must have played like gleams
of inspiration or a sudden glory; to watch those lips that 'lisped
in numbers, for the numbers came' as by a miracle, or as if the
dumb should speak? Nor was it alone that he had been the first
to tune his native tongue (however imperfectly to modern ears);
but he was himself a noble, manly character, standing before his
age and striving to advance it; a pleasant humorist withal, who
has not only handed down to us the living manners of his time,
but had no doubt store of curious and quaint devices, and would
make as hearty a companion as Mine Host of the Tabard.
interview with Petrarch is fraught with interest. Yet I would
rather have seen Chaucer in company with the author of the
'Decameron,' and have heard them exchange their best stories
together, the Squire's Tale against the Story of the Falcon, the
Wife of Bath's Prologue against the Adventures of Friar Albert.
How fine to see the high mysterious brow which learning then
wore, relieved by the gay, familiar tone of men of the world, by
the courtesies of genius! Surely, the thoughts and feelings which
passed through the minds of these great revivers of learning,
these Cadmuses who sowed the teeth of letters, must have
stamped an expression on their features as different from the
moderns as their books, and well worth the perusal! Dante," I
continued, "is as interesting a person as his own Ugolino, one
whose lineaments curiosity would as eagerly devour in order to
penetrate his spirit, and the only one of the Italian poets I should
care much to see. There is a fine portrait of Ariosto by no less
a hand than Titian's: light, Moorish, spirited, but not answering
our idea. The same artist's large colossal profile of Peter Are
tino is the only likeness of the kind that has the effect of con-
versing with the mighty dead,' and this is truly spectral, ghastly,
necromantic. "
## p. 7123 (#521) ###########################################
WILLIAM HAZLITT
7123
Lamb put it to me if I should like to see Spenser as well
as Chaucer; and I answered without hesitation: -"No; for his
beauties were ideal, visionary, not palpable or personal, and there-
fore connected with less curiosity about the man.
His poetry
was the essence of romance, a very halo round the bright orb
of fancy; and the bringing in the individual might dissolve the
charm. No tones of voice could come up to the mellifluous
cadence of his verse; no form but of a winged angel could vie
with the airy shapes he has described. He was (to our appre-
hensions) rather a creature of the element, that lived in the
rainbow and played in the plighted clouds,' than an ordinary
mortal. Or if he did appear, I should wish it to be as a mere
vision like one of his own pageants, and that he should pass by
unquestioned like a dream or sound-
'That was Arion crowned:
So went he playing on the wat'ry plain! '»
Captain Burney muttered something about Columbus, and
Martin Burney hinted at the Wandering Jew; but the last was
set aside as spurious, and the first made over to the New World.
"I should like," says Mrs. Reynolds, "to have seen Pope talk-
ing with Patty Blount; and I have seen Goldsmith. " Every one
turned round to look at Mrs. Reynolds, as if by so doing they
too could get a sight of Goldsmith.
"Where," asked a harsh croaking voice, "was Dr. Johnson in
the years 1745-6? He did not write anything that we know of,
nor is there any account of him in Boswell during those two
years. Was he in Scotland with the Pretender? He seems to
have passed through the scenes in the Highlands in company
with Boswell many years after, 'with lack-lustre eye,' yet as if
they were familiar to him, or associated in his mind with inter-
ests that he durst not explain. If so, it would be an additional
reason for my liking him; and I would give something to have
seen him seated in the tent with the youthful Majesty of Britain,
and penning the proclamation to all true subjects and adherents
of the legitimate government. "
>>
"I thought," said A—, turning short round upon Lamb, “that
you of the Lake School did not like Pope ? "Not like Pope!
My dear sir, you must be under a mistake: I can read him over
and over forever! "-"Why, certainly, the Essay on Man' must
be allowed to be a masterpiece. "—"It may be so, but I seldom
## p. 7124 (#522) ###########################################
7124
WILLIAM HAZLITT
(
look into it. "—"Oh! then it's his 'Satires' you admire? "-"No,
not his Satires,' but his friendly epistles and his compliments.
"Compliments? I did not know he ever made any. "-"The
finest," said Lamb, "that were ever paid by the wit of man.
Each of them is worth an estate for life
- nay, is an immortal-
ity. There is that superb one to Lord Cornbury: -
-
-
'Despise low joys, low gains;
Disdain whatever Cornbury disdains;
Be virtuous, and be happy for your pains. '
Was there ever more artful insinuation of idolatrous praise? And
then that noble apotheosis of his friend Lord Mansfield (however
little deserved), when, speaking of the House of Lords, he adds:
'Conspicuous scene! another yet is nigh
(More silent far) where kings and poets lie;
Where Murray (long enough his country's pride)
Shall be no more than Tully or than Hyde! '
And with what a fine turn of indignant flattery he addresses
Lord Bolingbroke:-
'Why rail they then, if but one wreath of mine,
O all-accomplished St. John, deck thy shrine ? >
Or turn," continued Lamb, with a slight hectic on his cheek and
his eye glistening, "to his list of early friends:
'But why then publish? — Granville the polite,
And knowing Walsh, would tell me I could write;
Well-natured Garth inflamed with early praise,
And Congreve loved and Swift endured my lays;
The courtly Talbot, Somers, Sheffield read,
Even mitred Rochester would nod the head;
And St. John's self (great Dryden's friend before)
Received with open arms one poet more.
Happy my studies, if by these approved!
Happier their author, if by these beloved!
From these the world will judge of men and books,
Not from the Burnets, Oldmixons, and Cooks. '»
Here his voice totally failed him, and throwing down the book
he said, "Do you think I would not wish to have been friends
with such a man as this? "
## p. 7125 (#523) ###########################################
WILLIAM HAZLITT
7125
"What say you to Dryden ? "-"He rather made a show of
himself, and courted popularity in that lowest temple of Fame,
a coffee-house, so as in some measure to vulgarize one's idea of
him. Pope, on the contrary, reached the very beau-ideal of what
a poet's life should be; and his fame while living seemed to be
an emanation from that which was to circle his name after death.
He was so far enviable (and one would feel proud to have wit-
nessed the rare spectacle in him) that he was almost the only
poet and man of genius who met with his reward on this side
of the tomb; who realized in friends, fortune, the esteem of the
world, the most sanguine hopes of a youthful ambition, and who
found that sort of patronage from the great during his lifetime
which they would be thought anxious to bestow upon him after
his death. Read Gray's verses to him on his supposed return
from Greece, after his translation of Homer was finished, and
say if you would not gladly join the bright procession that wel-
comed him home, or see it once more land at Whitehall stairs. "
"Still," said Mrs. Reynolds, "I would rather have
seen him
talking with Patty Blount, or riding by in a coronet coach with
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu! "
Erasmus Phillips, who was deep in a game of piquet at the
other end of the room, whispered to Martin Burney to ask if
Junius would not be a fit person to invoke from the dead.
"Yes," said Lamb, "provided he would agree to lay aside his
mask. "
We were now at a stand for a short time, when Fielding
was mentioned as a candidate; only one, however, seconded the
proposition. "Richardson? "-"By all means, but only to look
at him through the glass door of his back shop, hard at work
upon one of his novels (the most extraordinary contrast that ever
was presented between an author and his works): but not to let
him come behind his counter, lest he should want you to turn
customer; nor to go up-stairs with him, lest he should offer to
read the first manuscript of Sir Charles Grandison,' which was
originally written in eight-and-twenty volumes octavo, or get out
the letters of his female correspondents to prove that 'Joseph
Andrews' was low. "
There was but one statesman in the whole English history
that any one expressed the least desire to see,— Oliver Crom-
well, with his fine, frank, rough, pimply face, and wily policy; —
and one enthusiast, -John Bunyan, the immortal author of the
## p. 7126 (#524) ###########################################
7126
WILLIAM HAZLITT
'Pilgrim's Progress. ' It seemed that if he came into the room,
dreams would follow him, and that each person would nod under
his golden cloud, "nigh sphered in heaven," a canopy as strange
and stately as any in Homer.
Of all persons near our own time, Garrick's name was received
with the greatest enthusiasm, who was proposed by Baron Field.
He presently superseded both Hogarth and Handel, who had been
talked of; but then it was on condition that he should act in
tragedy and comedy, in the play and farce Lear' and 'Wildair'
and 'Abel Drugger. ' What a sight for sore eyes that would be!
Who would not part with a year's income at least, almost with a
year of his natural life, to be present at it? Besides, as he could
not act alone, and recitations are unsatisfactory things, what a
troop he must bring with him- the silver-tongued Barry, and
Quin, and Shuter, and Weston, and Mrs. Clive, and Mrs. Pritch-
ard, of whom I have heard my father speak as so great a favor-
ite when he was young! This would indeed be a revival of the
dead, the restoring of art; and so much the more desirable, as
such is the lurking skepticism mingled with our overstrained
admiration of past excellence, that though we have the speeches
of Burke, the portraits of Reynolds, the writings of Goldsmith,
and the conversation of Johnson, to show what people could do at
that period, and to confirm the universal testimony to the merits.
of Garrick, yet as it was before our time, we have our misgiv
ings, as if he was probably after all little better than a Bartlemy-
fair actor, dressed out to play Macbeth in a scarlet coat and laced
cocked hat. For one, I should like to have seen and heard with
my own eyes and ears. Certainly, by all accounts, if any was
ever moved by the true histrionic @stus, it was Garrick. When
he followed the Ghost in Hamlet' he did not drop the sword, as
most actors do, behind the scenes, but kept the point raised the
whole way round; so fully was he possessed with the idea, or so
anxious not to lose sight of his part for a moment. Once at a
splendid dinner party at Lord's they suddenly missed Gar-
rick, and could not imagine what was become of him till they
were drawn to the window by the convulsive screams and peals
of laughter of a young negro boy, who was rolling on the ground
in an ecstasy of delight to see Garrick mimicking a turkey-cock in
the court-yard, with his coat-tail stuck out behind, and in a seem-
ing flutter of feathered rage and pride. Of our party only two
persons present had seen the British Roscius; and they seemed as
## p. 7127 (#525) ###########################################
WILLIAM HAZLITT
7127
willing as the rest to renew their acquaintance with their old
favorite.
We were interrupted in the heyday and mid-career of this
fanciful speculation by a grumbler in a corner, who declared it
was a shame to make all this rout about a mere player and
farce-writer, to the neglect and exclusion of the fine old drama-
tists, the contemporaries and rivals of Shakespeare. Lamb said he
had anticipated this objection when he had named the author of
'Mustapha and Alaham'; and out of caprice insisted upon keep-
ing him to represent the set, in preference to the wild, hare-
brained enthusiast Kit Marlowe; to the sexton of St. Ann's,
Webster, with his melancholy yew-trees and death's-heads; to
Decker, who was but a garrulous proser; to the voluminous Hey-
wood; and even to Beaumont and Fletcher, whom we might
offend by complimenting the wrong author on their joint produc-
tions. Lord Brook on the contrary stood quite by himself, or in
Cowley's words, was "a vast species alone. "
a vast species alone. " Some one hinted at
the circumstance of his being a lord, which rather startled Lamb;
but he said a ghost would perhaps dispense with strict etiquette,
on being regularly addressed by his title. Ben Jonson divided
our suffrages pretty equally. Some were afraid he would begin
to traduce Shakespeare, who was not present to defend himself.
"If he grows disagreeable," it was whispered aloud, "there is
Godwin can match him. At length his romantic visit to Drum-
mond of Hawthornden was mentioned, and turned the scale in
his favor.
Lamb inquired if there was any one that was hanged that I
would choose to mention? And I answered, Eugene Aram. The
name of the "Admirable Crichton" was suddenly started as a
splendid example of waste talents, so different from the general-
ity of his countrymen. The choice was mightily approved by a
North-Briton present, who declared himself descended from that
prodigy of learning and accomplishment, and said he had family
plate in his possession as vouchers for the fact, with the initials.
A. C. -Admirable Crichton! Hunt laughed, or rather roared, as
heartily at this as I should think he has done for many years.
The last-named mitre-courtier then wished to know whether
there were any metaphysicians to whom one might be tempted
to apply the wizard spell? I replied, there were only six in
modern times deserving the name,- Hobbes, Berkeley, Butler,
Hartley, Hume, Leibnitz; and perhaps Jonathan Edwards, a
## p. 7128 (#526) ###########################################
7128
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Massachusetts man. As to the French, who talked fluently of
having created this science, there was not a tittle in any of their
writings that was not to be found literally in the authors I had
mentioned. Horne [Horne Tooke], who might have a claim to
come in under the head of Grammar, was still living. None of
these names seemed to excite much interest, and I did not plead
for the reappearance of those who might be thought best fitted
by the abstracted nature of their studies for their present spir-
itual and disembodied state, and who even while on this living
stage were nearly divested of common flesh and blood. As
A-
with an uneasy fidgety face, was about to put some ques-
tion about Mr. Locke and Dugald Stewart, he was prevented by
Martin Burney, who observed, "If J was here, he would
undoubtedly be for having up those profound and redoubted
scholiasts Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. " I said this might
be fair enough in him, who had read or fancied he had read the
original works; but I did not see how we could have any right
to call up those authors to give an account of themselves in per-
son, till we had looked into their writings.
"
By this time it should seem that some rumor of our whimsi-
cal deliberation had got wind, and had disturbed the irritabile
genus in their shadowy abodes; for we received messages from
several candidates that we had just been thinking of. Gray
declined our invitation, though he had not yet been asked; Gay
offered to come, and bring in his hand the Duchess of Bolton,
the original Polly; Steele and Addison left their cards as Captain
Sentry and Sir Roger de Coverley; Swift came in and sat down
without speaking a word, and quitted the room as abruptly;
Otway and Chatterton were seen lingering on the opposite side
of the Styx, but could not muster enough between them to pay
Charon his fare; Thomson fell asleep in the boat, and was rowed
back again; and Burns sent a low fellow, one John Barleycorn,
-an old companion of his who had conducted him to the other.
world, to say that he had during his lifetime been drawn out
of his retirement, as a show, only to be made an exciseman of,
and that he would rather remain where he was. He desired,
however, to shake hands by his representative; the hand thus
held out was in a burning fever, and shook prodigiously.
The room was hung round with several portraits of eminent
painters. While we were debating whether we should demand
speech with these masters of mute eloquence, whose features
――――――――
## p. 7129 (#527) ###########################################
WILLIAM HAZLITT
7129
were so familiar to us, it seemed that all at once they glided
from their frames, and seated themselves at some little distance
from us.
There was Leonardo, with his majestic beard and
watchful eye, having a bust of Archimedes before him; next him
was Raphael's graceful head turned round to the Fornarina; and
on his other side was Lucretia Borgia, with calm golden locks;
Michael Angelo had placed the model of St. Peter's on the table
before him; Correggio had an angel at his side; Titian was
seated with his Mistress between himself and Giorgioni; Guido
was accompanied by his own Aurora, who took a dice-box from.
him; Claude held a mirror in his hand; Rubens patted a beauti-
ful panther (led in by a satyr) on the head; Vandyke appeared
as his own Paris; and Rembrandt was hid under furs, gold
chains, and jewels, which Sir Joshua eyed closely, holding his
hand so as to shade his forehead. Not a word was spoken; and
as we rose to do them homage they still presented the same sur-
face to the view. Not being bond fide representations of living
people, we got rid of the splendid apparitions by signs and dumb
show. As soon as they had melted into thin air there was a
loud noise at the outer door, and we found it was Giotto, Cima-
bue, and Ghirlandaio, who had been raised from the dead by
their earnest desire to see their illustrious successors
"Whose names on earth
In Fame's eternal records live for aye! "
Finding them gone, they had no ambition to be seen after them,
and mournfully withdrew. "Egad! " said Lamb, "those are the
very fellows I should like to have had some talk with, to know
how they could see to paint when all was dark around them! "
"But shall we have nothing to say," interrogated G. J
"to the Legend of Good Women? " "Name, name, Mr. J—,"
cried Hunt in a boisterous tone of friendly exultation; "name
as many as you please, without reserve or fear of molestation! "
Jwas perplexed between so many amiable recollections that
the name of the lady of his choice expired in a pensive whiff of
his pipe; and Lamb impatiently declared for the Duchess of New-
castle. Mrs. Hutchinson was no sooner mentioned, than she car-
ried the day from the Duchess. We were the less solicitous on
this subject of filling up the posthumous lists of Good Women, as
there was already one in the room as good, as sensible, and in all
respects as exemplary, as the best of them could be for their
lives! "I should like vastly to have seen Ninon de l'Enclos, "
## p. 7130 (#528) ###########################################
7130
WILLIAM HAZLITT
said that incomparable person; and this immediately put us in
mind that we had neglected to pay honor due to our friends on
the other side of the Channel: Voltaire the patriarch of levity,
and Rousseau the father of sentiment; Montaigne and Rabelais,
great in wisdom and in wit; Molière, and that illustrious group
that are collected around him (in the print of that subject) to
hear him read his comedy of the 'Tartuffe' at the house of
Ninon; Racine, La Fontaine, Rochefoucauld, St. Evremont, etc.
dismount from his horse in a forest to replace in their nest young
birds which had fallen by the roadside; he could not sleep at night
if he knew that a soldier-boy was under sentence of death; he
## p. 7105 (#503) ###########################################
JOHN HAY
7105
could not, even at the bidding of duty or policy, refuse the prayer
of age or helplessness in distress. Childern instinctively loved
him; they never found his rugged features ugly; his sympathies
were quick and seemingly unlimited. He was absolutely without
prejudice of class or condition. Frederick Douglass says he was
the only man of distinction he ever met who never reminded him,
by word or manner, of his color; he was as just and generous to
the rich and well-born as to the poor and humble-a thing rare
among politicians. He was tolerant even of evil: though no man
can ever have lived with a loftier scorn of meanness and selfish-
ness, he yet recognized their existence and counted with the
He said one day, with a flash of cynical wisdom worthy of a La
Rochefoucauld, that honest statesmanship was the employment of
individual meanness for the public good. He never asked per-
fection of any one; he did not even insist, for others, upon the
high standards he set up for himself. At a time before the word
was invented he was the first of opportunists. With the fire of a
reformer and a martyr in his heart, he yet proceeded by the ways
of cautious and practical statecraft. He always worked with
things as they were, while never relinquishing the desire and
effort to make them better. To a hope which saw the Delectable
Mountains of absolute justice and peace in the future, to a faith
that God in his own time would give to all men the things con-
venient to them, he added a charity which embraced in its deep
bosom all the good and the bad, all the virtues and the infirmi-
ties of men, and a patience like that of nature, which in its vast
and fruitful activity knows neither haste nor rest.
A character like this is among the precious heirlooms of the
republic; and by a special good fortune, every part of the coun-
try has an equal claim and pride in it. Lincoln's blood came from
the veins of New England emigrants, of Middle-State Quakers, of
Virginia planters, of Kentucky pioneers; he himself was one of
the men who grew up with the earliest growth of the Great West.
Every jewel of his mind or his conduct sheds radiance on each
portion of the nation. The marvelous symmetry and balance of
his intellect and character may have owed something to this
varied environment of his race, and they may fitly typify the
variety and solidity of the republic. It may not be unreasonable
to hope that his name and his renown may be forever a bond of
union to the country which he loved with an affection so impar-
tial, and served, in life and in death, with such entire devotion.
XII-445
## p. 7106 (#504) ###########################################
7106
JOHN HAY
[These poems are copyrighted, and are reprinted here by permission of Mr.
Hay]
WHEN PHYLLIS LAUGHS
THEN Phyllis laughs, in sweet surprise
WHE My heart asks if my dazzling eyes
Or if my ears take more delight
In luscious sound or beauty bright,
When Phyllis laughs.
In crinkled eyelids hid Love lies,
In the soft curving lips I prize
Promise of raptures infinite,
When Phyllis laughs.
Far to the Orient fancy flies.
I see beneath Idalian skies,
Clad only in the golden light,
Calm in perfection's peerless might,
The laughter-loving Venus rise,
When Phyllis laughs.
NIGHT IN VENICE
OVE, in this summer night, do you recall
Midnight, and Venice, and those skies of June
Thick-sown with stars, when from the still lagoon
We glided noiseless through the dim canal?
A sense of some belated festival
Hung round us, and our own hearts beat in tune
With passionate memories that the young moon
Lit up on dome and tower and palace wall.
We dreamed what ghosts of vanished loves made part
Of that sweet light and trembling, amorous air.
I felt in those rich beams that kissed your hair,
Those breezes warm with bygone lovers' sighs-
All the dead beauty of Venice in your eyes,
All the old loves of Venice in my heart.
## p. 7107 (#505) ###########################################
JOHN HAY
7107
A
[These poems are copyrighted, and are reprinted here by permission of Mr.
Hay and of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , publishers, Boston. ]
A WOMAN'S LOVE
SENTINEL angel sitting high in glory
Heard this shrill wail ring out from purgatory:—
"Have mercy, mighty angel,-hear my story!
"I loved, and blind with passionate love, I fell.
Love brought me down to death, and death to hell;
For God is just, and death for sin is well.
"I do not rage against his high decree,
Nor for myself do ask that grace shall be,
But for my love on earth who mourns for me.
"Great Spirit! Let me see my love again
And comfort him one hour, and I were fain
To pay a thousand years of fire and pain. "
Then said the pitying angel: "Nay, repent
That wild vow! Look, the dial finger's bent
Down to the last hour of thy punishment! "
But still she wailed: "I pray thee, let me go!
I cannot rise to peace and leave him so.
Oh, let me soothe him in his bitter woe! »
The brazen gates ground sullenly ajar,
And upward, joyous, like a rising star,
She rose and vanished in the ether far.
But soon adown the dying sunset sailing,
And like a wounded bird her pinions trailing,
She fluttered back, with broken-hearted wailing.
She sobbed, "I found him by the summer sea
Reclined, his head upon a maiden's knee -
She curled his hair and kissed him. Woe is me! "
She wept, "Now let my punishment begin!
I have been fond and foolish. Let me in
To expiate my sorrow and my sin. ”
The angel answered, "Nay, sad soul, go higher!
To be deceived in your true heart's desire
Was bitterer than a thousand years of fire! "
## p. 7108 (#506) ###########################################
7108
JOHN HAY
JIM BLUDSO, OF THE PRAIRIE BELLE
WALL
VALL, no! I can't tell whar he lives,
Becase he don't live, you see;
Leastways, he's got out of the habit
Of livin' like you and me.
Whar have you been for the last three year
That you haven't heard folks tell
How Jimmy Bludso passed in his checks
The night of the Prairie Belle?
He weren't no saint, - them engineers
Is all pretty much alike:
One wife in Natchez-under-the-Hill,
And another one here in Pike;
A keerless man in his talk was Jim,
And an awkward hand in a row,
But he never funked, and he never lied,-
I reckon he never knowed how.
And this was all the religion he had:
To treat his engine well;
Never be passed on the river;
To mind the pilot's bell;
And if ever the Prairie Belle took fire,—
A thousand times he swore
He'd hold her nozzle agin the bank
Till the last soul got ashore.
All boats has their day on the Mississip,
And her day come at last,—
The Movastar was a better boat,
But the Belle she wouldn't be passed.
And so she come tearin' along, that night-
The oldest craft on the line-
With a nigger squat on her safety-valve,
And her furnace crammed, rosin and pine.
The fire bust out as she clared the bar,
And burnt a hole in the night,
And quick as a flash she turned, and made
For the willer-bank on the right.
There was runnin' and cursin', but Jim yelled out,
Over all the infernal roar,
"I'll hold her nozzle agin the bank
Till the last galoot's ashore. "
## p. 7109 (#507) ###########################################
JOHN HAY
7109
Through the hot black breath of the burnin' boat
Jim Bludso's voice was heard,
And they all had trust in his cussedness,
And knowed he would keep his word.
And sure's you're born, they all got off
Afore the smoke-stacks fell,-
And Bludso's ghost went up alone
In the smoke of the Prairie Belle.
He weren't no saint-but at judgment
I'd run my chance with Jim,
'Longside of some pious gentlemen
That wouldn't shook hands with him.
He seen his duty, a dead-sure thing,—
And went for it thar and then;
And Christ ain't agoing to be too hard
On a man that died for men.
## p. 7110 (#508) ###########################################
7110
PAUL HAMILTON HAYNE
(1830-1886)
F REVOLUTIONARY ancestry, and the only son of an officer in
the United States naval service, Paul Hamilton Hayne was
born in Charleston, South Carolina, January 1st, 1830. Few
American poets have grown up with outward circumstances more
kindly toward a literary career and its practical risks. A name of
high local distinction, wealth, and associations with men of letters,
were part of Hayne's environment from the beginning. The literary
gatherings in the Hayne household, in which William Gilmore Simms,
PAUL H. HAYNE
John C. Calhoun, and Hugh S. Legaré were
prominent, drew all Charleston's intellectual
life at the time to a common centre.
Hayne was a graduate in 1850 of the col-
lege of his native city. For a time he studied
law. With the outbreak of the Civil War he
took service, and was on the staff of Gen-
eral Pickens. Broken health induced him
unwillingly to resign. With the bombard-
ment of Charleston and the advance of the
Federal army he suffered severe losses; his
costly house, his library, and pretty much
all his belongings being swept away by
fire or pillage. A ruined man pecuniarily,
he betook himself to the Pine Barrens of
Georgia. There he built himself a cottage at Copse Hill. There
he gardened, wrote verses, kept up his correspondence with the outer
world, corrected his proofs, and it is said "was perfectly happy" dur-
ing more than fifteen years, until his death in 1886. He was much
of an invalid by constitution; and with his frail vitality, his accom-
plishing so much is a striking example of the will to live and to do
what we wish to do.
Mr. Hayne's early literary work was connected with the Southern
Literary Messenger, to which so many of the South's poets were
contributors at one time or another. Later he became editor of the
Charleston Literary Gazette, and held a post on the Charleston Even-
ing News. In 1872 appeared his 'Legends and Lyrics,' one collection
of his poems; in 1873 his edition of the literary remains of his friend
## p. 7111 (#509) ###########################################
PAUL HAMILTON HAYNE
7111
Timrod, with a sympathetic biography; in 1875 he published 'The
Mountain of the Lovers,'-like The Wife of Brittany,' one of his
long poems,—and in later succession we have other titles; with his
poems in a complete edition in 1882.
Mr. Hayne's verse largely reflects aspects of nature in the South-
ern United States. There is a strong influence of Wordsworth in
much of his writing. In other descriptive poetry, and in that of a
reflective or dramatic spirit, he won a measurable success, occasion-
ally coming into obvious poetical touch with Robert Browning. His
sonnets are a large element of his writing; a species of verse in
which he delighted, his meditative humor finding it, over and over
again, a vehicle at once suitable and congenial.
All the citations following are from the Poems of Paul Hamilton Hayne,'
copyright 1882 by D. Lothrop & Co. , and are reprinted here by per-
mission of the family of Mr. Hayne, and of the publishers.
ODE TO SLEEP
EYOND the sunset and the amber sea
B
To the lone depths of ether, cold and bare,
Thy influence, soul of all tranquillity,
Hallows the earth and awes the reverent air;
Yon laughing rivulet quells its silvery tune;
The pines, like priestly watchers tall and grim,
Stand mute against the pensive twilight dim,
Breathless to hail the advent of the moon;
From the white beach the ocean falls away
Coyly, and with a thrill; the sea-birds dart
Ghostlike from out the distance, and depart
With a gray fleetness, moaning the dead day;
The wings of Silence, overfolding space,
Droop with dusk grandeur from the heavenly steep,
And through the stillness gleams thy starry face,-
Serenest Angel, Sleep!
Come! woo me here, amid these flowery charms;
Breathe on my eyelids; press thy odorous lips
Close to mine own; en-reathe me in thine arms,
And cloud my spirit with thy sweet eclipse;
No dreams! no dreams! keep back the motley throng,—
For such are girded round with ghastly might,
And sing low burdens of despondent song,
Decked in the mockery of a lost delight;
## p. 7112 (#510) ###########################################
PAUL HAMILTON HAYNE
7112
I ask oblivion's balsam! the mute peace
Toned to still breathings, and the gentlest sighs;
Not music woven of rarest harmonies
Could yield me such elysium of release:
The tones of earth are weariness,—not only
'Mid the loud mart, and in the walks of trade,
But where the mountain Genius broodeth lonely,
In the cool pulsing of the sylvan shade;
Then bear me far into thy noiseless land;
Surround me with thy silence, deep on deep,
Until serene I stand
Close by a duskier country, and more grand
Mysterious solitude, than thine, O Sleep!
As he whose veins a feverous frenzy burns,
Whose life-blood withers in the fiery drouth,
Feebly and with a languid longing turns
To the spring breezes gathering from the south,
So, feebly and with languid longing, I
Turn to thy wished nepenthe, and implore
The golden dimness, the purpureal gloom
Which haunt thy poppied realm, and make the shore
Of thy dominion balmy with all bloom.
In the clear gulfs of thy serene profound,
Worn passions sink to quiet, sorrows pause,
Suddenly fainting to still-breathed rest:
Thou own'st a magical atmosphere, which awes
The memories seething in the turbulent breast;
Which, muffling up the sharpness of all sound
Of mortal lamentation, solely bears
The silvery minor toning of our woe,
All mellowed to harmonious underflow,
Soft as the sad farewells of dying years,—
Lulling as sunset showers that veil the west,
And sweet as Love's last tears
When over-welling hearts do mutely weep:
O griefs! O wailings! your tempestuous madness,
Merged in a regal quietude of sadness,
Wins a strange glory by the streams of sleep!
Then woo me here, amid these flowery charms;
Breathe on my eyelids, press thy odorous lips
Close to mine own; enfold me in thine arms,
And cloud my spirit with thy sweet eclipse;
## p. 7113 (#511) ###########################################
PAUL HAMILTON HAYNE
7113
And while from waning depth to depth I fall,
Down lapsing to the utmost depths of all,
Till wan forgetfulness obscurely stealing
Creeps like an incantation on the soul,
And o'er the slow ebb of my conscious life
Dies the thin flush of the last conscious feeling,
And like abortive thunder, the dull roll
Of sullen passions ebbs far, far away,-
O Angel! loose the chords which cling to strife,
Sever the gossamer bondage of my breath,
And let me pass, gently as winds in May,
From the dim realm which owns thy shadowy sway,
To thy diviner sleep, O sacred Death!
ASPECTS OF THE PINES
TALL
ALL, sombre, grim, against the morning sky
They rise, scarce touched by melancholy airs,
Which stir the fadeless foliage dreamfully,
As if from realms of mystical despairs.
Tall, sombre, grim, they stand with dusky gleams
Brightening to gold within the woodland's core,
Beneath the gracious noontide's tranquil beams—
But the weird winds of morning sigh no more.
A stillness strange, divine, ineffable,
Broods round and o'er them in the wind's surcease,
And on each tinted copse and shimmering dell
Rests the mute rapture of deep-hearted peace.
Last, sunset comes the solemn joy and might
Borne from the west when cloudless day declines-
Low, flute-like breezes sweep the waves of light,
And lifting dark green tresses of the pines,
―――
Till every lock is luminous, gently float,
Fraught with hale odors up the heavens afar,
To faint when twilight on her virginal throat
Wears for a gem the tremulous vesper star.
## p. 7114 (#512) ###########################################
7114
PAUL HAMILTON HAYNE
POVERTY
NCE I beheld thee, a lithe mountain maid,
Embrowned by wholesome toils in lusty air;
Whose clear blood, nurtured by strong primitive cheer,
Through Amazonian veins flowed unafraid.
Broad-breasted, pearly-teethed, thy pure breath strayed,
Sweet as deep-uddered kine's curled in the rare
Bright spaces of thy lofty atmosphere,
O'er some rude cottage in a fir-grown glade.
Now, of each brave ideal virtue stripped,
Ο
O Poverty! I behold thee as thou art,-
A ruthless hag, the image of woeful dearth,
Of brute despair, gnawing its own starved heart.
Thou ravening wretch! fierce-eyed and monster-lipped,
Why scourge forevermore God's beauteous earth?
THE HYACINTH
Η
ERE in this wrecked storm-wasted garden close,
The grave of infinite generations fled
Of flowers that now lie lustreless and dead
As the gray dust of Eden's earliest rose,
What bloom is this, whose classical beauty glows
Radiantly chaste, with the mild splendor shed
Round a Greek virgin's poised and perfect head,
By Phidias wrought 'twixt rapture and repose?
Mark the sweet lines whose matchless ovals curl
Above the fragile stem's half-shrinking grace,
And say if this pure hyacinth doth not seem
(Touched by enchantments of an antique dream)
A flower no more, but the low drooping face
Of some love-laden, fair Athenian girl?
## p. 7115 (#513) ###########################################
7115
TO
WILLIAM HAZLITT
(1778-1830)
HE life of William Hazlitt, apart from his matrimonial infelici-
ties, is uneventful. He was born the 10th of April, 1778,
Cat Maidstone, England, where his father was a Unitarian
minister; not a Presbyterian, as the Encyclopædia Britannica has it.
Of him Hazlitt gives an interesting though pathetic picture. A
learned and a kindly man, he spent sixty years of his life in petty
squabbles over disputed texts of Scripture and in pleading the cause
of civil and religious liberty. "What dreams of philosophy and
poetry," says his son, were stifled in the
dreary tomes over which he sacrificed fancy
and imagination! For ease, half-play on
words, and a supine monkish pleasantry,"
he says of his letters, "I have never seen
his equal. "
<<
The boy was intended by his father for
the Unitarian ministry; but though he went
to a denominational college, he disliked the
idea of preaching. He was about twenty
when he heard the memorable sermon of
Coleridge which was said to have fixed his
career. Coleridge was visiting a neighbor-
ing minister, and Hazlitt walked twelve
miles through the mud before daylight to
hear him. The sermon set him to thinking, not of theology but of
metaphysics. He gave up his studies, and having some talent for
painting, devoted himself from this time forth to his two passions,
art and metaphysics. And although he was destined to succeed in
neither, yet to his knowledge of both he owed his pre-eminence in
the career which he entered only by accident. "Nowhere," says one
of his critics, "is abstract thought so picturesquely bodied forth by
concrete illustration. "
WILLIAM HAZLITT
At the end of seven years, having come to the conclusion that he
could not be a Titian, he published his first book, 'An Essay on the
Principles of Human Action'; a book as dry as his favorite biscuit.
Thenceforth, he wrote on any subject for any employer. From
the first he seems to have been fairly paid, and to have gained a
## p. 7116 (#514) ###########################################
7116
WILLIAM HAZLITT
hearing. He was at least sufficiently interesting to provoke the
implacable hostility of Blackwood and the Quarterly. For eighteen
years he was a regular contributor to the Edinburgh Review, the
London Review, and the New Monthly, while various daily and
weekly papers constantly employed him.
Hazlitt, like many persons of limited affections, had a capacity for
sudden passions; but finally, after many love affairs, he married at
the age of thirty a Miss Stoddard, with whom he lived for fourteen
unhappy years. He then met the somewhat mythical Sarah Walker,
the daughter of a lodging-house keeper, for whom he resolved to
leave his wife. As Mrs. Hazlitt was relieved to be rid of him, they
easily obtained a Scotch divorce. When, however, the mature lover
was free, Miss Walker had discreetly disappeared. Three months
afterwards he married a Mrs. Bridgewater, who took him on a Con-
tinental tour, but left him within the twelvemonth. Thackeray
describes the journey abroad as that of "a penniless student tramp-
ing on foot, and not made after the regular fashion of the critics of
the day, by the side of a young nobleman in a post-chaise »; but the
fact is that the bride of this second matrimonial venture paid the
bills. His other visit to the Continent was amply provided for by a
commission to copy pictures in the Louvre. Hazlitt lived only five
years after separating from his second wife. Pecuniary difficulties
and the failure of his publishers hastened his death, which occurred
in London September 18th, 1830. Only his son and his beloved
friend Charles Lamb were with him when he died.
The father of Coventry Patmore gives an interesting picture of
Hazlitt at thirty-five: "A pale anatomy of a man, sitting uneasily
on half a chair, his anxious, highly intellectual face looking upon
vacancy, emaciate, unstrung, inanimate. " But "the poor creature,"
as he used to call himself, was the launcher forth of the winged
word that could shake the hearts of princes and potentates. The
most unscrupulous biographer would hardly have dared to reveal Haz-
litt, the most reserved of men, as he reveals himself to the reader.
Every essay is autobiographical, and reflects his likes and dislikes.
In that strange book 'The New Pygmalion,' as in 'Liber Amoris,' he
invites the horrified British public to listen to his transports concern-
ing the lodging-house keeper's daughter. He abuses the Duke of
Wellington, idol of that public, as he abuses whoever may chance to
disagree with him on personal or impersonal subjects. The brilliant
iconoclast must have been the most uncomfortable of men to live
with. No wonder that Lamb used to sigh, pathetically, “I wish he
would not quarrel with everybody. " For he fell out with the amiable
Leigh Hunt, with the idol of his youth, Coleridge, whose poetry
he began at once to undervalue, and with Wordsworth and Southey,
## p. 7117 (#515) ###########################################
WILLIAM HAZLITT
7117
because they took a moderate view of the French Revolution. He
rated Shelley absurdly low for no better reason than that he was a
gentleman, and loaded Scott with bad names because he accepted
a baronetcy. De Quincey declared that "With Hazlitt, whatever is,
is wrong," and quotes an admirer of the critic who professed to
shudder whenever his hand went to his breast pocket, lest he should
draw out a dagger. What his politics were, except to worship the
genius of the French Revolution and abhor a something which he
called "the hag of legitimacy," no one knew. His heroes were the
first Napoleon and Rousseau.
Hazlitt says, with his usual indifference, that when he began to
write he left off reading. Much as he admired 'Waverley' and the
other "Scotch novels," as they were called, he never got through
more than half of any one, although it was his business to review
them. He gave a series of lectures on the Elizabethan dramatists,
and afterwards casually mentioned to Lamb that he had read only
about a quarter of Beaumont and Fletcher. And though he prided
himself on his metaphysics, he knew none of the metaphysicians but
the French and English philosophers of the eighteenth century. Pla-
tonists tell us that he went to Taylor the Platonist for his ideas. He
pretended to pride himself that he cared for no new book, and declared
that he neither corrected his own proof sheets nor read his work in
print. Of the beautiful 'Introduction to the Elizabethan Poets' Mr.
Saintsbury says, "All Hazlitt's faults to be found in it are due not
to prejudice, or error of judgment, but to occasional deficiency of
information. "
A bundle of inconsistencies, he had a sort of inexplicable con-
stancy, holding th same ideas at the end of his life that he had at
its beginning. While his egotism was as stupendous as that of Rous-
seau or Napoleon, he seemed to possess a double consciousness: with
one breath he blesses and curses. What he says of Burke sounds
like the ravings of a madman; yet he places Burke in his proper
place as the greatest of English political writers. He hacks and hews
the Lake School, while he discloses their choicest beauties.
« Were
the author of 'Waverley' to come into the room, I would kiss the
hem of his garment," he said; but Scott the man is to him "the
greatest, wisest, meanest of mankind. ” His judgment of an author
depended upon two circumstances: his private associations and his
sympathy with the writer.
Yet Hazlitt had something which is better than the capacity to
criticize fairly, to be consistent or learned, or to exercise the cardinal
virtues. He was an artist, and whatever he wrote is literature. His
choice of subject is of small importance if the reader is armed against
his prejudices. Some biographers rank him highest as a critic, others
## p. 7118 (#516) ###########################################
7118
WILLIAM HAZLITT
(
as an essayist; but it is not easy to classify his work. Essay or crit-
icism, it is Hazlitt and the world that Hazlitt sees. His criticisms
are scattered through the seven volumes of his writings edited by
his son, but they are collected in the three volumes entitled 'The
Characters of Shakespeare,' 'Elizabethan Literature,' and 'The Eng-
lish Poets and the English Comic Writers. ' His essays are classed in
the volumes The Spirit of the Age,' The Plain Dealer,' The Round
Table,' and 'Sketches and Essays. ' In the essays we find the famous
Going to a Fight,' the beautiful and pathetic 'Farewell to Essay-
Writing, the 'Going on a Journey,' 'My First Acquaintance with
Poets,' On Taste,' 'On the Indian Jugglers,' 'On Londoners and
Country People. ' These are named not because they are special
efforts, for Hazlitt seldom tried himself in any direct flight, but as
specimens of the range of his subjects.
His style is as varied as his themes: gay, semi-sentimental, hitting
hard like his own pugilists, judicious, gossipy, richly embroidered as
mediæval tapestry, grave, and chaste. It has been already said that
Hazlitt is a man of letters, and that all he touched became literature.
It is fair to go further, and suggest that a certain amount of literary
temperament is necessary to enjoy him, and perhaps a certain matur-
ity of taste. He is the essayist of the traveler who has reached the
Delectable Mountains of middle age, from whose calm heights he
takes a wide and reasonable view; the essayist for the drawn curtain
and the winter fireside after the leisurely meal, when his pungent talk
is the after-taste of some rare cordial.
Shakespeare scholars agree that he knows nothing of Shakespeare
but the text, and that he has added nothing to the explanation of
difficult passages; but ey, Iwell as the general reader, turn to
him for noble enthusiasm and calm judgment. It is of Shakespeare's
characters that he writes, not of his plays; and it is Timon, Othello,
Antony and Cleopatra, - the doers, not the dreamers,-who interest
him, and whom he hates and loves. Strange to say, though he rated
himself so highly as a metaphysician, Hamlet is one of his least
successful portraitures; his artist's eye saw Shakespeare played, not
written, and Kean, whom he first ridiculed and then praised, said
that Hazlitt had taught him more than his stage manager.
What he did for the Elizabethan dramatists was to rediscover their
excellences and find them an audience. He shows Congreve's merits
with a force not possible to a calmer judgment. How discriminat-
ing, on the contrary, is his praise of the sweetness of Dekker and of
the beauties of The Beggar's Opera'! and though personal in its vin-
dictiveness, what a splendid assault he makes on Sidney's 'Arcadia'!
Hazlitt is accused of reversing the counsel of the proverb, and
speaking good only of the dead. He was certainly unlike the little
## p. 7119 (#517) ###########################################
WILLIAM HAZLITT
7119
members of the little mutual-admiration societies who half a century
later take themselves so seriously. It was his art which he found
serious. Mr. Saintsbury makes the important point that his work
molded the genius of his literary juniors. In 'The Spirit of the Age'
there are distinct intimations of Carlyle.
"Where the devil did you
get that style ? " Jeffrey asked Macaulay. It is easy to see where,
when one reads Hazlitt's contributions to Jeffrey's own Review.
another way, he furnished a model to Dickens and Thackeray; and
no one who is familiar with the essay on 'Nicholas Poussin' will fail
to add Ruskin to his "fair herd of literary children. "
In
It is almost incredible that with his spirit and temperament, Haz-
litt's last words should have been, "I have had a happy life. " But
literature was to him the wife and children and friends of whom per-
haps she robbed him, while becoming, as the poet promises, the solace
reserved for him who loves her for herself alone.
―――――
OF PERSONS ONE WOULD WISH TO HAVE SEEN
From Table Talk'
"Come like shadows-so depart. "
L
AMB it was, I think, who suggested this subject, as well as the
defense of Guy Fawkes, which I urged him to execute. As
however he would undertake neither, I suppose I must do
both,
a task for which he would have been much fitter, no less
from the temerity than the felicity of his pen:-
"Never so sure our rapture to create
As when it touched the brink of all we hate. "
Compared with him I shall, I fear, make but a commonplace
piece of business of it; but I should be loth the idea was entirely
lost, and besides, I may avail myself of some hints of his in the
progress of it.
I am sometimes, I suspect, a better reporter of
the ideas of other people than expounder of my own. I pursue
the one too far into paradox or mysticism; the others I am not
bound to follow farther than I like, or than seems fair and
reasonable.
On the question being started, A
said, "I suppose the
two first persons you would choose to see would be the two
greatest names in English literature, Sir Isaac Newton and Mr.
Locke? " In this A- as usual, reckoned without his host.
Every one burst out a-laughing at the expression of Lamb's face,
?
## p. 7120 (#518) ###########################################
7120
WILLIAM HAZLITT
in which impatience was restrained by courtesy. "Yes, the great-
est names," he stammered out hastily, "but they were not per-
sons- not persons. " "Not persons? " said A—, looking wise
and foolish at the same time, afraid his triumph might be pre-
mature. "That is," rejoined Lamb, "not characters, you know.
By Mr. Locke and Sir Isaac Newton, you mean the 'Essay on
the Human Understanding' and the 'Principia,' which we have
to this day. Beyond their contents there is nothing personally
interesting in the men. But what we want to see any one bodily
for, is when there is something peculiar, striking in the individ-
uals; more than we can learn from their writings, and yet are
curious to know. I dare say Locke and Newton were very like
Kneller's portraits of them. But who could paint Shakespeare? "
"Ay," retorted A—, "there it is: then I suppose you would
prefer seeing him and Milton instead? » "No," said Lamb,
"neither. I have seen so much of Shakespeare on the stage and
on book-stalls, in frontispieces and on mantelpieces, that I am
quite tired of the everlasting repetition: and as to Milton's face,
the impressions that have come down to us of it I do not like,
-it is too starched and puritanical; and I should be afraid of
losing some of the manna of his poetry in the leaven of his
countenance and the precisian's band and gown. ”
"I shall guess no more," said A—. "Who is it, then, you
would like to see in his habit as he lived,' if you had your
choice of the whole range of English literature? " Lamb then
named Sir Thomas Browne and Fulke Greville, the friend of Sir
Philip Sidney, as the two worthies whom he should feel the
greatest pleasure to encounter on the door of his apartment in
their nightgown and slippers, and to exchange friendly greeting
with them. At this A laughed outright, and conceived Lamb
was jesting with him; but as no one followed his example, he
thought there might be something in it, and waited for an ex-
planation in a state of whimsical suspense. Lamb then (as well
as I can remember a conversation that passed twenty years ago
-how time slips! ) went on as follows:-
"The reason why I pitch upon those two authors is, that their
writings are riddles, and they themselves the most mysterious of
personages. They resemble the soothsayers of old, who dealt in
dark hints and doubtful oracles; and I should like to ask them
the meaning of what no mortal but themselves, I should sup-
pose, can fathom. There is Dr. Johnson,-I have no curiosity,
―――
## p. 7121 (#519) ###########################################
WILLIAM HAZLITT
7121
no strange uncertainty about him: he and Boswell together have
pretty well let me into the secret of what passed through his
mind. He and other writers like him are sufficiently explicit:
my friends whose repose I should be tempted to disturb (were it
in my power), are implicit, inextricable, inscrutable.
"When I look at that obscure but gorgeous prose composition
the Urn-Burial,' I seem to myself to look into a deep abyss, at
the bottom of which are hid pearls and rich treasure; or it is
like a stately labyrinth of doubt and withering speculation, and I
would invoke the spirit of the author to lead me through it.
Besides, who would not be curious to see the lineaments of a
man who, having himself been twice married, wished that man-
kind were propagated like trees?
"As to Fulke Greville, he is like nothing but one of his own
'Prologues spoken by the ghost of an old king of Ormus,' a
truly formidable and inviting personage: his style is apocalypti-
cal, cabalistical, a knot worthy of such an apparition to untie; and
for the unraveling a passage or two, I would stand the brunt of
an encounter with so portentous a commentator! "
"I am afraid in that case," said A————, "that if the mystery
were once cleared up the merit might be lost;" and turning to
me, whispered a friendly apprehension that while Lamb contin-
ued to admire these old crabbed authors he would never become
a popular writer.
Dr. Donne was mentioned as a writer of the same period, with
a very interesting countenance, whose history was singular, and
whose meaning was often quite as un-come-at-able without a per-
sonal citation from the dead, as that of any of his contemporaries.
The volume was produced; and while some one was expatiating
on the exquisite simplicity and beauty of the portrait prefixed to
the old edition, A got hold of the poetry, and exclaiming
"What have we here? " read the following:-
"Here lies a She-sun, and a He-moon there;
She gives the best light to his sphere,
Or each is both and all, and so
They unto one another nothing owe. "
There was no resisting this, till Lamb, seizing the volume,
turned to the beautiful 'Lines to his Mistress,' dissuading her
from accompanying him abroad, and read them with suffused
features and a faltering tongue.
XII-446
## p. 7122 (#520) ###########################################
7122
WILLIAM HAZLITT
His
Some one then inquired of Lamb if we could not see from
the window the Temple walk in which Chaucer used to take his
exercise; and on his name being put to the vote, I was pleased
to find that there was a general sensation in his favor in all but
A, who said something about the ruggedness of the metre, and
even objected to the quaintness of the orthography. I was vexed
at this superficial gloss, pertinaciously reducing everything to its
own trite level, and asked "if he did not think it would be worth
while to scan the eye that had first greeted the Muse in that dim
twilight and early dawn of English literature; to see the head
round which the visions of fancy must have played like gleams
of inspiration or a sudden glory; to watch those lips that 'lisped
in numbers, for the numbers came' as by a miracle, or as if the
dumb should speak? Nor was it alone that he had been the first
to tune his native tongue (however imperfectly to modern ears);
but he was himself a noble, manly character, standing before his
age and striving to advance it; a pleasant humorist withal, who
has not only handed down to us the living manners of his time,
but had no doubt store of curious and quaint devices, and would
make as hearty a companion as Mine Host of the Tabard.
interview with Petrarch is fraught with interest. Yet I would
rather have seen Chaucer in company with the author of the
'Decameron,' and have heard them exchange their best stories
together, the Squire's Tale against the Story of the Falcon, the
Wife of Bath's Prologue against the Adventures of Friar Albert.
How fine to see the high mysterious brow which learning then
wore, relieved by the gay, familiar tone of men of the world, by
the courtesies of genius! Surely, the thoughts and feelings which
passed through the minds of these great revivers of learning,
these Cadmuses who sowed the teeth of letters, must have
stamped an expression on their features as different from the
moderns as their books, and well worth the perusal! Dante," I
continued, "is as interesting a person as his own Ugolino, one
whose lineaments curiosity would as eagerly devour in order to
penetrate his spirit, and the only one of the Italian poets I should
care much to see. There is a fine portrait of Ariosto by no less
a hand than Titian's: light, Moorish, spirited, but not answering
our idea. The same artist's large colossal profile of Peter Are
tino is the only likeness of the kind that has the effect of con-
versing with the mighty dead,' and this is truly spectral, ghastly,
necromantic. "
## p. 7123 (#521) ###########################################
WILLIAM HAZLITT
7123
Lamb put it to me if I should like to see Spenser as well
as Chaucer; and I answered without hesitation: -"No; for his
beauties were ideal, visionary, not palpable or personal, and there-
fore connected with less curiosity about the man.
His poetry
was the essence of romance, a very halo round the bright orb
of fancy; and the bringing in the individual might dissolve the
charm. No tones of voice could come up to the mellifluous
cadence of his verse; no form but of a winged angel could vie
with the airy shapes he has described. He was (to our appre-
hensions) rather a creature of the element, that lived in the
rainbow and played in the plighted clouds,' than an ordinary
mortal. Or if he did appear, I should wish it to be as a mere
vision like one of his own pageants, and that he should pass by
unquestioned like a dream or sound-
'That was Arion crowned:
So went he playing on the wat'ry plain! '»
Captain Burney muttered something about Columbus, and
Martin Burney hinted at the Wandering Jew; but the last was
set aside as spurious, and the first made over to the New World.
"I should like," says Mrs. Reynolds, "to have seen Pope talk-
ing with Patty Blount; and I have seen Goldsmith. " Every one
turned round to look at Mrs. Reynolds, as if by so doing they
too could get a sight of Goldsmith.
"Where," asked a harsh croaking voice, "was Dr. Johnson in
the years 1745-6? He did not write anything that we know of,
nor is there any account of him in Boswell during those two
years. Was he in Scotland with the Pretender? He seems to
have passed through the scenes in the Highlands in company
with Boswell many years after, 'with lack-lustre eye,' yet as if
they were familiar to him, or associated in his mind with inter-
ests that he durst not explain. If so, it would be an additional
reason for my liking him; and I would give something to have
seen him seated in the tent with the youthful Majesty of Britain,
and penning the proclamation to all true subjects and adherents
of the legitimate government. "
>>
"I thought," said A—, turning short round upon Lamb, “that
you of the Lake School did not like Pope ? "Not like Pope!
My dear sir, you must be under a mistake: I can read him over
and over forever! "-"Why, certainly, the Essay on Man' must
be allowed to be a masterpiece. "—"It may be so, but I seldom
## p. 7124 (#522) ###########################################
7124
WILLIAM HAZLITT
(
look into it. "—"Oh! then it's his 'Satires' you admire? "-"No,
not his Satires,' but his friendly epistles and his compliments.
"Compliments? I did not know he ever made any. "-"The
finest," said Lamb, "that were ever paid by the wit of man.
Each of them is worth an estate for life
- nay, is an immortal-
ity. There is that superb one to Lord Cornbury: -
-
-
'Despise low joys, low gains;
Disdain whatever Cornbury disdains;
Be virtuous, and be happy for your pains. '
Was there ever more artful insinuation of idolatrous praise? And
then that noble apotheosis of his friend Lord Mansfield (however
little deserved), when, speaking of the House of Lords, he adds:
'Conspicuous scene! another yet is nigh
(More silent far) where kings and poets lie;
Where Murray (long enough his country's pride)
Shall be no more than Tully or than Hyde! '
And with what a fine turn of indignant flattery he addresses
Lord Bolingbroke:-
'Why rail they then, if but one wreath of mine,
O all-accomplished St. John, deck thy shrine ? >
Or turn," continued Lamb, with a slight hectic on his cheek and
his eye glistening, "to his list of early friends:
'But why then publish? — Granville the polite,
And knowing Walsh, would tell me I could write;
Well-natured Garth inflamed with early praise,
And Congreve loved and Swift endured my lays;
The courtly Talbot, Somers, Sheffield read,
Even mitred Rochester would nod the head;
And St. John's self (great Dryden's friend before)
Received with open arms one poet more.
Happy my studies, if by these approved!
Happier their author, if by these beloved!
From these the world will judge of men and books,
Not from the Burnets, Oldmixons, and Cooks. '»
Here his voice totally failed him, and throwing down the book
he said, "Do you think I would not wish to have been friends
with such a man as this? "
## p. 7125 (#523) ###########################################
WILLIAM HAZLITT
7125
"What say you to Dryden ? "-"He rather made a show of
himself, and courted popularity in that lowest temple of Fame,
a coffee-house, so as in some measure to vulgarize one's idea of
him. Pope, on the contrary, reached the very beau-ideal of what
a poet's life should be; and his fame while living seemed to be
an emanation from that which was to circle his name after death.
He was so far enviable (and one would feel proud to have wit-
nessed the rare spectacle in him) that he was almost the only
poet and man of genius who met with his reward on this side
of the tomb; who realized in friends, fortune, the esteem of the
world, the most sanguine hopes of a youthful ambition, and who
found that sort of patronage from the great during his lifetime
which they would be thought anxious to bestow upon him after
his death. Read Gray's verses to him on his supposed return
from Greece, after his translation of Homer was finished, and
say if you would not gladly join the bright procession that wel-
comed him home, or see it once more land at Whitehall stairs. "
"Still," said Mrs. Reynolds, "I would rather have
seen him
talking with Patty Blount, or riding by in a coronet coach with
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu! "
Erasmus Phillips, who was deep in a game of piquet at the
other end of the room, whispered to Martin Burney to ask if
Junius would not be a fit person to invoke from the dead.
"Yes," said Lamb, "provided he would agree to lay aside his
mask. "
We were now at a stand for a short time, when Fielding
was mentioned as a candidate; only one, however, seconded the
proposition. "Richardson? "-"By all means, but only to look
at him through the glass door of his back shop, hard at work
upon one of his novels (the most extraordinary contrast that ever
was presented between an author and his works): but not to let
him come behind his counter, lest he should want you to turn
customer; nor to go up-stairs with him, lest he should offer to
read the first manuscript of Sir Charles Grandison,' which was
originally written in eight-and-twenty volumes octavo, or get out
the letters of his female correspondents to prove that 'Joseph
Andrews' was low. "
There was but one statesman in the whole English history
that any one expressed the least desire to see,— Oliver Crom-
well, with his fine, frank, rough, pimply face, and wily policy; —
and one enthusiast, -John Bunyan, the immortal author of the
## p. 7126 (#524) ###########################################
7126
WILLIAM HAZLITT
'Pilgrim's Progress. ' It seemed that if he came into the room,
dreams would follow him, and that each person would nod under
his golden cloud, "nigh sphered in heaven," a canopy as strange
and stately as any in Homer.
Of all persons near our own time, Garrick's name was received
with the greatest enthusiasm, who was proposed by Baron Field.
He presently superseded both Hogarth and Handel, who had been
talked of; but then it was on condition that he should act in
tragedy and comedy, in the play and farce Lear' and 'Wildair'
and 'Abel Drugger. ' What a sight for sore eyes that would be!
Who would not part with a year's income at least, almost with a
year of his natural life, to be present at it? Besides, as he could
not act alone, and recitations are unsatisfactory things, what a
troop he must bring with him- the silver-tongued Barry, and
Quin, and Shuter, and Weston, and Mrs. Clive, and Mrs. Pritch-
ard, of whom I have heard my father speak as so great a favor-
ite when he was young! This would indeed be a revival of the
dead, the restoring of art; and so much the more desirable, as
such is the lurking skepticism mingled with our overstrained
admiration of past excellence, that though we have the speeches
of Burke, the portraits of Reynolds, the writings of Goldsmith,
and the conversation of Johnson, to show what people could do at
that period, and to confirm the universal testimony to the merits.
of Garrick, yet as it was before our time, we have our misgiv
ings, as if he was probably after all little better than a Bartlemy-
fair actor, dressed out to play Macbeth in a scarlet coat and laced
cocked hat. For one, I should like to have seen and heard with
my own eyes and ears. Certainly, by all accounts, if any was
ever moved by the true histrionic @stus, it was Garrick. When
he followed the Ghost in Hamlet' he did not drop the sword, as
most actors do, behind the scenes, but kept the point raised the
whole way round; so fully was he possessed with the idea, or so
anxious not to lose sight of his part for a moment. Once at a
splendid dinner party at Lord's they suddenly missed Gar-
rick, and could not imagine what was become of him till they
were drawn to the window by the convulsive screams and peals
of laughter of a young negro boy, who was rolling on the ground
in an ecstasy of delight to see Garrick mimicking a turkey-cock in
the court-yard, with his coat-tail stuck out behind, and in a seem-
ing flutter of feathered rage and pride. Of our party only two
persons present had seen the British Roscius; and they seemed as
## p. 7127 (#525) ###########################################
WILLIAM HAZLITT
7127
willing as the rest to renew their acquaintance with their old
favorite.
We were interrupted in the heyday and mid-career of this
fanciful speculation by a grumbler in a corner, who declared it
was a shame to make all this rout about a mere player and
farce-writer, to the neglect and exclusion of the fine old drama-
tists, the contemporaries and rivals of Shakespeare. Lamb said he
had anticipated this objection when he had named the author of
'Mustapha and Alaham'; and out of caprice insisted upon keep-
ing him to represent the set, in preference to the wild, hare-
brained enthusiast Kit Marlowe; to the sexton of St. Ann's,
Webster, with his melancholy yew-trees and death's-heads; to
Decker, who was but a garrulous proser; to the voluminous Hey-
wood; and even to Beaumont and Fletcher, whom we might
offend by complimenting the wrong author on their joint produc-
tions. Lord Brook on the contrary stood quite by himself, or in
Cowley's words, was "a vast species alone. "
a vast species alone. " Some one hinted at
the circumstance of his being a lord, which rather startled Lamb;
but he said a ghost would perhaps dispense with strict etiquette,
on being regularly addressed by his title. Ben Jonson divided
our suffrages pretty equally. Some were afraid he would begin
to traduce Shakespeare, who was not present to defend himself.
"If he grows disagreeable," it was whispered aloud, "there is
Godwin can match him. At length his romantic visit to Drum-
mond of Hawthornden was mentioned, and turned the scale in
his favor.
Lamb inquired if there was any one that was hanged that I
would choose to mention? And I answered, Eugene Aram. The
name of the "Admirable Crichton" was suddenly started as a
splendid example of waste talents, so different from the general-
ity of his countrymen. The choice was mightily approved by a
North-Briton present, who declared himself descended from that
prodigy of learning and accomplishment, and said he had family
plate in his possession as vouchers for the fact, with the initials.
A. C. -Admirable Crichton! Hunt laughed, or rather roared, as
heartily at this as I should think he has done for many years.
The last-named mitre-courtier then wished to know whether
there were any metaphysicians to whom one might be tempted
to apply the wizard spell? I replied, there were only six in
modern times deserving the name,- Hobbes, Berkeley, Butler,
Hartley, Hume, Leibnitz; and perhaps Jonathan Edwards, a
## p. 7128 (#526) ###########################################
7128
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Massachusetts man. As to the French, who talked fluently of
having created this science, there was not a tittle in any of their
writings that was not to be found literally in the authors I had
mentioned. Horne [Horne Tooke], who might have a claim to
come in under the head of Grammar, was still living. None of
these names seemed to excite much interest, and I did not plead
for the reappearance of those who might be thought best fitted
by the abstracted nature of their studies for their present spir-
itual and disembodied state, and who even while on this living
stage were nearly divested of common flesh and blood. As
A-
with an uneasy fidgety face, was about to put some ques-
tion about Mr. Locke and Dugald Stewart, he was prevented by
Martin Burney, who observed, "If J was here, he would
undoubtedly be for having up those profound and redoubted
scholiasts Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. " I said this might
be fair enough in him, who had read or fancied he had read the
original works; but I did not see how we could have any right
to call up those authors to give an account of themselves in per-
son, till we had looked into their writings.
"
By this time it should seem that some rumor of our whimsi-
cal deliberation had got wind, and had disturbed the irritabile
genus in their shadowy abodes; for we received messages from
several candidates that we had just been thinking of. Gray
declined our invitation, though he had not yet been asked; Gay
offered to come, and bring in his hand the Duchess of Bolton,
the original Polly; Steele and Addison left their cards as Captain
Sentry and Sir Roger de Coverley; Swift came in and sat down
without speaking a word, and quitted the room as abruptly;
Otway and Chatterton were seen lingering on the opposite side
of the Styx, but could not muster enough between them to pay
Charon his fare; Thomson fell asleep in the boat, and was rowed
back again; and Burns sent a low fellow, one John Barleycorn,
-an old companion of his who had conducted him to the other.
world, to say that he had during his lifetime been drawn out
of his retirement, as a show, only to be made an exciseman of,
and that he would rather remain where he was. He desired,
however, to shake hands by his representative; the hand thus
held out was in a burning fever, and shook prodigiously.
The room was hung round with several portraits of eminent
painters. While we were debating whether we should demand
speech with these masters of mute eloquence, whose features
――――――――
## p. 7129 (#527) ###########################################
WILLIAM HAZLITT
7129
were so familiar to us, it seemed that all at once they glided
from their frames, and seated themselves at some little distance
from us.
There was Leonardo, with his majestic beard and
watchful eye, having a bust of Archimedes before him; next him
was Raphael's graceful head turned round to the Fornarina; and
on his other side was Lucretia Borgia, with calm golden locks;
Michael Angelo had placed the model of St. Peter's on the table
before him; Correggio had an angel at his side; Titian was
seated with his Mistress between himself and Giorgioni; Guido
was accompanied by his own Aurora, who took a dice-box from.
him; Claude held a mirror in his hand; Rubens patted a beauti-
ful panther (led in by a satyr) on the head; Vandyke appeared
as his own Paris; and Rembrandt was hid under furs, gold
chains, and jewels, which Sir Joshua eyed closely, holding his
hand so as to shade his forehead. Not a word was spoken; and
as we rose to do them homage they still presented the same sur-
face to the view. Not being bond fide representations of living
people, we got rid of the splendid apparitions by signs and dumb
show. As soon as they had melted into thin air there was a
loud noise at the outer door, and we found it was Giotto, Cima-
bue, and Ghirlandaio, who had been raised from the dead by
their earnest desire to see their illustrious successors
"Whose names on earth
In Fame's eternal records live for aye! "
Finding them gone, they had no ambition to be seen after them,
and mournfully withdrew. "Egad! " said Lamb, "those are the
very fellows I should like to have had some talk with, to know
how they could see to paint when all was dark around them! "
"But shall we have nothing to say," interrogated G. J
"to the Legend of Good Women? " "Name, name, Mr. J—,"
cried Hunt in a boisterous tone of friendly exultation; "name
as many as you please, without reserve or fear of molestation! "
Jwas perplexed between so many amiable recollections that
the name of the lady of his choice expired in a pensive whiff of
his pipe; and Lamb impatiently declared for the Duchess of New-
castle. Mrs. Hutchinson was no sooner mentioned, than she car-
ried the day from the Duchess. We were the less solicitous on
this subject of filling up the posthumous lists of Good Women, as
there was already one in the room as good, as sensible, and in all
respects as exemplary, as the best of them could be for their
lives! "I should like vastly to have seen Ninon de l'Enclos, "
## p. 7130 (#528) ###########################################
7130
WILLIAM HAZLITT
said that incomparable person; and this immediately put us in
mind that we had neglected to pay honor due to our friends on
the other side of the Channel: Voltaire the patriarch of levity,
and Rousseau the father of sentiment; Montaigne and Rabelais,
great in wisdom and in wit; Molière, and that illustrious group
that are collected around him (in the print of that subject) to
hear him read his comedy of the 'Tartuffe' at the house of
Ninon; Racine, La Fontaine, Rochefoucauld, St. Evremont, etc.
