out of the pains of the moment, and creator of new troubles, the ever-ready drug, the "doses of oblivion." It is very strange that independently, not influencing each other, two men in the same small circle, Coleridge and De Quincey, should both have been the victims of this living death. The Confessions of an Opium Eater, which were published in the London Magazine in 1821, is the most important of De Quincey's works. His disquisitions on the poets will always be interesting to the students of the period, and of that great brotherhood— but they are injured by many traces of that familiarity which breeds contempt. We want, indeed, to know the truth about the greatest representatives of the age, but not to have a piece of adverse gossip, or the repetition of an ill-advised confidence. De Quincey's descriptions and bursts of poetic musing are often brilliant, exquisite in form and language. Nobody puts better on his canvas an aspect of nature, or gives us in more detailed and faithful circumstance the sur roundings of a human scene. He is not so happy with men, because, for one thing, of his habit of detractation, which forbade him from seeing into what Wordsworth prosaically calls "the very heart of the machine;" and finally, perhaps, from his own eccentricities and out-of-the-way thoughts. He wrote many volumes of essays, and criticisms of various kinds, and his best work has found a place among English classics. The delicate wit and irony of the essay upon "Murder as one of the Fine Arts" has moved many a reader to such a laugh, tempered with VOL. II. D a thrill of visionary excitement and horror, as is rare among the laughters of literature. It is an undue honour to this curious little monster in literature to place him by the side of Lamb; but the connection of both with the greater group of poets supplies an arbitrary link of association. CHARLES LAMB, born 1775; died 1834. Published Poems with Coleridge, 1797. Blank Verses (with Charles Lloyd), 1798. Tales from Shakspeare (with Mary Lamb), 1807. Essays of Elia, 1822. (Originally published in London Magazine.) Album Verses, 1830. THOMAS DE QUINCEY, born 1785; died 1859. Published Confessions of an English Opium Eater, 1822. (Originally published in London Magazine.) Essays under various titles. Essenism, The Cæsars, etc. Autobiography, Recollections of Lake Poets, etc. Suspiria de Profundis. (Originally published in various periodicals; reissued in complete and revised edition, 1862.) CHAPTER II. THE CRITICS. THE art of criticism can never be a heroic art. Of its nature and essence it is secondary, since until there is a literature to be judged, no tribunal of judgment can be formed. It is at best but the aftermath of every intellectual harvest, and it is often the very last and feeblest growth of an exhausted soil. But the more literature grows, and the more widely education is diffused, the more this secondary art will spread and flourish. It is not possible, when the world of readers is extended to the very limits of space, that they can all, or even a tithe of them, judge for themselves; it is not possible even that they should know the mere names of the books which are hurrying from all the printing-presses with a view to their edification; and thus the race of middlemen become indispensable in letters, as in so many other spheres. It has come in our own days to unparalleled importance, and is almost worthy to be counted as one of the learned professions at least, if not one of the learned professions, as a practical byway in which a large number of intelligences nominally belonging to these, get bread and get importance. It is a dangerous art dangerous to the public, who are often badly guided, though the perils in this respect are largely modified by a native instinct, which keeps the mass tolerably right whatever advice may be lavished on it; dangerous to authors, who are often injured and irritated, and sometimes embittered beyond redemption, by assaults made in pure gaiété de cœur; and, above all, dangerous to the critics themselves, who can hardly fail, in the long run, to feel themselves as superior in reality to the writers they discuss as they seem at the moment of discussion by means of the artificial platform to which their judgeship raises them. As the office is voluntary, and as it is most frequently anonymous, it is a most fruitful source of literary impertinence and flippancy, and very destructive to every natural sentiment of respect and veneration. When a young man, fresh from college, with no particular qualification but the gift of writing tolerable prose, finds himself set up on a veiled and visionary throne, from which he can throw forth his thunderbolts on the loftiest head, with the certainty of producing more amusement the more daring his strictures and the sharper his hits may be, he would be more than mortal if he did not yield to the temptation. Therefore, in all ages critics have been the natural enemies, the disgust, or the terror of authors; and in proportion as they have been wittily insolent and cleverly unjust, have they been relished by the keen appetite of the public and encouraged by the crowd. There are few things so amusing as to read a really "slashing article"-except perhaps to write it. It is infinitely easier and gayer work than a well-weighed and serious criticism, and will always be more popular. The lively and brilliant examples of the art which dwell in the mind of the reader are invariably of this class. If we remember with horror the article that was said. (but with very partial truth) to have killed poor Keats, we prepare ourselves for pleasure when we see Macaulay draw a book towards him and whet the knife which is "to cut it up." In the present day of critical newspapers, those which we know as illnatured are always the most popular. It affords opportunities for making fun of the finest genius to those who are acquainted with the way of it: and in no other way can a little faculty go so far. It is not our intention by these prefatory remarks to undervalue the wonderful new development of the art of criticism which took place in the beginning of the present century. We think, indeed, that, like so many other things, having been unduly celebrated to all the echoes as something more brilliant than was ever known before, it has fallen into somewhat unmerited shadow now. Those who desire to know what criticism was before its time, may judge by such productions as Gifford's Baviad and Maviad, in which, indeed, the authors criticised are of so small an order that it is scarcely necessary to name them in a history of literature, though they might afford an amusing chapter from their very foolishness, did space permit. The follies of Della Crusca, the Laura Matildas, the Julias, the Edwins and Annas, were all swept away, it is said, by Gifford's sharp birch |