CHARLES LAMB

HAZLITT in an appreciative passage remarks of Lamb's style that, despite its archaisms and its borrowings from Elizabethan and Jacobean writers, it is appropriate to its author and therefore genuine. What in another would seem affectation is in Lamb the dress peculiar to his genius. But Hazlitt notes also that Lamb's best work is in his more serious vein; and it is in this that Lamb is least peculiar and mannered. The criticisms are not, perhaps, wholly reconcilable. Hazlitt was not forgetful of Lamb's charm both as man and writer and his concession to it, a rare instance in his ever-just criticism, is, if a weakness, an amiable one. Much as

Lamb's literary friends, who were many and diverse, quarreled among themselves, him they loved and admired. He continued to remain the friend both of Southey and Hazlitt, with but one interval of coldness in each instance due to no fault of his.

The charm of Lamb's personality is manifest in his essays and even more, to my thinking, in his letters. With few authors does the reader feel so intimate; much of the pleasure one has in reading him is the sense of listening to the brilliant conversation of a gifted friend. Lamb could say harsh things of acquaintances now and again in letters to his friends. But his strictures are humorous or deliberately exaggerated and doubtless deserved. In few authors have essential kindness and charity been so blent with shrewd insight. Lamb, though he perceived the imperfections of his friends, bore with them. He was, therefore, in his own day, and has remained, greatly beloved. An anecdote is

characteristic: having expressed his hatred of someone and his auditor exhibiting surprise, Lamb remarked that of course he didn't know the man or he couldn't hate him.

The romantic qualities in Lamb are obvious. His harking back to his beloved Elizabethan and Jacobean writers, for whose rehabilitation he did much, is one. The personal autobiographical quality of his work is another. In his best essays Lamb draws much upon his memories of his childhood, of the Inns of Law, of the East India House, of odd characters he has known. His vein is narrow as was, in a sense, his life. He travelled little and his days were mostly spent in unattractive tasks. It was only in his reading and in the experiences of his friends that he wandered far. A confirmed cockney, he made slurring remarks upon the beauties of the mountains beloved of Wordsworth, largely, to be sure, that he might provoke Wordsworth. Yet it is true that he was never for long happy beyond the sight and sound of London where he had been born and bred. There is not in Lamb that hearty enjoyment of the out-of-doors which is one of the strains in Hazlitt's nature. But Hazlitt was happiest when alone, and Lamb when among his friends. He was a social being.

Lamb's fondness for old words, for recondite quotations, his faculty of exaggeration for humorous effect, his puns and jokes are all a part of his peculiar manner. A page of his writing declares its author unmistakably. No less characteristic is the genuine vein of pathos in his work. Dream Children is a moving and a tender thing. The memories with which so much of his work is crowded are touched with a delicate melancholy. In this respect his work has a wider range than Hazlitt's. There is little pathos in Hazlitt that I recall and his

melancholy is more robust. To Hazlitt, with his gusto for life and his delight in books and pictures, these more delicate shades of feeling are foreign. The differences in the two explain the greater popularity of Lamb's work despite the fact that, in my judgment, Hazlitt as critic, stylist, and observer of life is the greater of the two.

In a book so small as this the selections from Lamb's work are necessarily inadequate and do not represent his entire range. I have selected essays which seem to me among his best. Another choice might easily be defended as preferable. But if these few essays serve to send new readers to Lamb's works-unfortunately only too limited-they will have met the purpose for which they were chosen.

WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT-FEARS

WE are too hasty when we set down our ancestors in the gross for fools, for the monstrous inconsistencies (as they seem to us) involved in their creed of witchcraft. In the relations of this visible world we find them to have been as rational, and shrewd to detect an historic anomaly, as ourselves. But when once the invisible world was supposed to be opened, and the lawless agency of bad spirits assumed, what measures of probability, of decency, of fitness, or proportionof that which distinguishes the likely from the palpable absurd-could they have to guide them in the rejection or admission of any particular testimony?—that maidens pined away, wasting inwardly as their waxen images consumed before a fire-that corn was lodged and cattle lamed-that whirlwinds uptore in diabolic revelry the oaks of the forest—or that spits and kettles only danced a fearful-innocent vagary about some

rustic's kitchen when no wind was stirring-were all equally probable where no law of agency was understood. That the prince of the powers of darkness, passing by the flower and pomp of the earth, should lay preposterous siege to the weak fantasy of indigent eld-has neither likelihood nor unlikelihood â priori to us, who have no measure to guess at his policy, or standard to estimate what rate those anile souls may fetch in the devil's market. Nor, when the wicked are expressly symbolised by a goat, was it to be wondered at so much, that he should come sometimes in that body, and assert his metaphor.-That the intercourse was opened at all between both worlds was perhaps the mistake—but that once assumed, I see no reason for disbelieving one attested story of this nature more than another on the score of absurdity. There is no law to judge of the lawless, or canon by which a dream may be criticised.

I have sometimes thought that I could not have existed in the days of received witchcraft; that I could not have slept in a village where one of those reputed hags dwelt. Our ancestors were bolder or more obtuse. Amidst the universal belief that these wretches were in league with the author of all evil, holding hell tributary to their muttering, no simple Justice of the Peace seems to have scrupled issuing, or silly Headborough serving, a warrant upon them-as if they should subpoena Satan!-Prospero in his boat, with his books and wand about him suffers himself to be conveyed away at the mercy of his enemies to an unknown island. He might have raised a storm or two, we think, on the passage. His acquiescence is in exact analogy to the non-resistance of witches to the constituted powers.What stops the Fiend in Spenser from tearing Guyon to pieces—or who had made it a condition of his prey,

that Guyon must take assay of the glorious bait-we have no guess. We do not know the laws of that

country.

From my childhood I was extremely inquisitive My maid, and more

about witches and witch-stories. legendary aunt, supplied me with good store. But I shall mention the accident which directed my curiosity originally into this channel. In my father's bookcloset, the History of the Bible, by Stackhouse, occupied a distinguished station. The pictures with which it abounds—one of the ark, in particular, and another of Solomon's temple, delineated with all the fidelity of ocular admeasurement, as if the artist had been upon the spot-attracted my childish attention. There was a picture, too, of the Witch raising up Samuel, which I wish that I had never seen. We shall come to that hereafter. Stackhouse is in two huge tomes—and there was a pleasure in removing folios of that magnitude, which, with infinite straining, was as much as I could manage, from the situation which they occupied upon an upper shelf. I have not met with the work from that time to this, but I remember it consisted of Old Testament stories, orderly set down, with the objection appended to each story, and the solution of the objection regularly tacked to that. The objection was a summary of whatever difficulties had been opposed to the credibility of the history, by the shrewdness of ancient or modern infidelity, drawn up with an almost complimentary excess of candour. The solution was brief, modest, and satisfactory. The bane and antidote were both before you. To doubts so put, and so quashed, there seemed to be an end for ever. The dragon lay dead, for the foot of the veriest babe to trample on. But-like as was rather feared than realised from that slain monster in Spenser-from the womb of those