the tragic shadow which darkened his home for years, one looks upon the portrait of Elia with pity tempered with awe. Lamb extended the sphere of the Essay, not so much because he dealt with subjects which till his day had been untouched, but because he imported into that literary form a fancy, humour, and tenderness, which resembled the fancy, humour, and tenderness of no other writer. The manifestations of these qualities were as personal and peculiar as his expression of countenance, the stutter in his speech, his habit of punning, his love of black-letter and whisky-punch. His Essays are additions to English literature, just as Potosi silver was an addition to the wealth of Europe. Whatever his subject, it becomes interpenetrated by his pathetic and fanciful humour, and is thereby etherealised-made poetic. Some of his Essays have all the softness and remoteness of dreams. They are not of the earth, earthy. They are floating islands asleep on serene shadows in a sea of humour. The " Essay on Roast Pig" breathes a divine aroma. The sentences hush themselves around the youthful chimney-sweep-" the innocent blackness," asleep in the nobleman's sheets-as they might around the couch of the sleeping princess. Gone are all his troubles-the harsh call of his master, sooty knuckles rubbed into tearful eyes, his brush, his call from the chimney-top. Let the poor wretch sleep! And then, Lamb's method of setting forth his fancies is as peculiar as the fancies themselves. He was a modern man only by the accident of birth; and his style is only modern by the same accident. It is full of the quaintest convolutions and doublings back upon itself; and ever and again a paragraph is closed by a sentence of unexpected rhetorical richness, like heavy golden fringe depending from the velvet of the altar cover a trick which he learned from the "Religio Medici," and the "Urn Burial." As a critic, too, Lamb takes a high place. His "Essay on the Genius of Hogarth" is a triumphant vindication of that master's claim to the highest place of honour in British art; and in it he sets forth the doctrine, that a picture must not be judged by externals of colour, nor by manipulative dexterity-valuable as these unquestionably are-but by the number and value of the thoughts it contains; a doctrine which Mr Ruskin has borrowed, and has used with results.

Leigh Hunt was a poet as well as an Essayist, and he carried his poetic fancy with him into prose, where it shone like some splendid bird of the tropics among the sober-coated denizens of the farm-yard. He loved the country; but one almost suspects that his love for the country might be resolved into likings for cream, butter, strawberries, sunshine, and hayswathes to tumble in. If he did not, like Wordsworth, carry in his heart the silence of wood and fell, he at all events carried a gillyflower jauntily in his button-hole. He was neither a town poet and essayist, nor a country poet and essayist; he was a mixture of both-a suburban poet and essayist. Above all places in the world, he loved Hampstead. His Essays are gay and cheerful as suburban villas,-the piano is touched within, there are trees and flowers outside, but the city is not far distant, prosaic interests are ever intruding, visitors are constantly dropping in. His Essays are not poetically conceived; they deal -with the exception of that lovely one on the "Death of Little Children," where the fancy becomes serious as an angel, and wipes the tears of mothers as tenderly away as an angel could-with distinctly mundane and commonplace matters; but his charm is in this, that be the subject

what it may, immediately troops of fancies search land and sea and the range of the poets for its adornment-just as, in the old English villages on May morning, shoals of rustics went forth to the woods and brought home hawthorns for the dressing of door and window. Hunt is always cheerful and chatty. He defends himself against the evils of life with pretty thoughts. He believes that the world is good, and that men and women are good too. He would, with a smiling face, have offered a flower to a bailiff in the execution of his duty, and been both hurt and astonished if that functionary had proved dead to its touching suggestions. His Essays are much less valuable than Lamb's, because they are neither so peculiar, nor do they touch the reader so deeply; but they are full of colour and wit.

Hazlitt, if he lacked Lamb's quaintness and ethereal humour, and Hunt's fancifulness, possessed a robust and passionate faculty which gave him a distinct place in the literature of his time. His feelings were keen and deep. The French Revolution seemed to him-in common with Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge-in its early stages, an authentic angel rising with a new morning for the race upon its forehead; and when disappointment came, and his friends sought refuge in the old order of things, he, loyal to his youthful hope, stood aloof, hating them almost as renegades, and never ceasing to give utterance to his despair.

These men wrote in a period of unexampled literary activity, and in the thick of stupendous events: Scott, Moore, and Byron were writing their poems; Napoleon was shaking the thrones of the Continent. Looked back upon from our days, the conquests of the poets seem nearly as astonishing as the conquests of the emperor. He passed from victory to victory, and so did they. When quieter days came, and when the great men of the former generation had either passed away or were reposing on the laurels they had earned so worthily, other writers arose to sustain the glory of the English Essay. The most distinguished were Lord Macaulay and Carlyle. They began to write about the same time-Lord Macaulay's Essay on Milton appearing in the Edinburgh Review in 1825, and Carlyle's first Essay on Jean Paul Richter in the same Review in 1827. The writings of these men were different from those of their predecessors. Carlyle's primary object was to acquaint his countrymen with the great men whom Germany had recently produced, and to interest them in the productions of German genius. His plans widened, however, as his way cleared; and the eye which had looked into the heart of Goethe, Schiller, and Richter, was in course of time turned on the Scottish Burns, the English Johnson, and the French Voltaire. It is not too much to say that he has produced the best critical and biographical Essays of which the English language can boast. And it is in the curious mixture of criticism and biography in these papers-for the criticism becomes biography, and the biography criticism that their chief charm and value consist. Carlyle is an artist, and he knows exactly what and how much to put into his picture. He has a wonderful eye for what is characteristic. He searches after

the secret of a man's nature, and he finds it frequently in some trivial anecdote or careless saying, which another writer would have passed unnoticed, or tossed contemptuously aside. He hunts up every scrap of information, and he frequently finds what he wants in a corner. judges a man by his poem, and the poem by the man. To his eye, they

He

A man's work is the

are not separate things, but one and indivisible. lamp by which he reads his features. And then he so apportions praise and blame; so sets off the jocose and familiar with a moral solemnity; makes anecdote, and detail of dress, and allusion to personal grace or deformity, subserve, by intricate suggestion, his ultimate purpose, and so presents to us life with eternity for background, that we not only feel that the picture is the actual presentment of the man as he lived—a veritable portrait-we feel also that the writer has worked in no light. or careless mood, that the poorest life is serious enough when seen against eternity, and that we ourselves, however seldom we may remember it, are but momentary shadows projected upon it. Carlyle does not write "scoundrel" on one man's forehead, and "angel" on another's: he knows that pure scoundrel and pure angel have their dwellings in other places than earth; he is too cunning an artist to use these mercilessly definite lines. He works by allusion, suggestion, light touches of fancy, spurts of humour, grotesque imaginative exaggerations; and these things so reduce and tone one another down, that the final result is perfectly natural and homogeneous. It is only by some such combination of intellectual forces that you can shadow forth the complexity of life and character. In humanity there is no such thing as a straight line or an unmixed colour. You see the flesh-colour on the cheek of a portrait the artist will tell you that the consummately-natural result was not attained by one wash of paint, but by the mixture and reduplication of a hundred tints, the play of myriad lights and shadows, no one of which is natural in itself, although the blending of the whole is. These Essays are the completest, the most characteristic portraits in our literature. Carlyle is always at home when his subject is man in the

concrete.

He

Lord Macaulay also wrote Essays critical and biographical, and has been perhaps more widely popular than his great contemporary; but he is a different kind of thinker and writer altogether. He did not brood over the abysses of being as Carlyle continually does. The sense of time and death did not haunt him as they haunt the other. The world, as it figured itself to Lord Macaulay, was a comparatively commonplace world. He cared for man, but he cared for party quite as much. recognised men mainly as Whigs and Tories. His idea of the universe was a Parliamentary one. His insight into man was not deep. He painted in positive colours. He is never so antithetical as when describing a character; and character, if properly conceived, sets the measured antitheses of the rhetorician at defiance. It is constantly eluding them. His criticism is good enough so far as it goes, but it does not go far; it deals more with the accidents than with the realities of things. Lord Macaulay, as we have said, lived quite as much for party as for man ; and the men who interested him were the men who were historical centres, around whom men and events revolved. He did not, as Carlyle often does, take hold of an individual, and view him against immensity; he takes a man and looks at him in connection with contemporary events. When he writes of Johnson, he is thinking all the while of Goldsmith, and Garrick, and Boswell, and Reynolds; when he writes of Clive and Warren Hastings, he is more anxious to tell the story of their Indian conquests than to enter into the secrets of their spirits. And for this posterity is not likely to blame Lord Macaulay. He knew

his strength. His pictorial faculty is astonishing; neither pomp nor circumstance cumbers it; it moves along like a triumphal procession, which no weight of insignia and banner can oppress. Out of the past

he selects some special drama, which is vivified and held together by the life of a single individual, and that he paints with his most brilliant colours. He is the creator of the Historical Essay, and in that department is not likely soon to have a successor. His unfinished History is only a series of historical pictures pieced together into one imposing panorama, but throughout there is wonderful splendour and pomp of colour. Every figure, too, is finished down to the buttons and the finger nails.

Considered as a literary form, the Essay is comparatively of late growth. The first literary efforts of a people consist of song and narrative. First comes the poet or minstrel, who sings heroic exploits, the strength and courage of heroes. These songs pass from individual to individual, and are valuable, not on account of the amount of historic truth, but of the amount of passion and imagery, they contain. Explode to-morrow into mere myth and dream the incidents of the Iliad, and you do not affect in the slightest degree the literary merit of the poem. Still for all men Achilles shouts in the trenches, Helen is beautiful, the towers of Ilium flame to heaven. Prove that Chevy Chase cannot in any one particular be considered a truthful relation of events, and you do it no special harm. It stirs the blood like a trumpet all the same. After the poet comes the prose narrator of events, who presents his facts peering obscurely through the mists of legend, but who has striven, as far as his ability extends, to tell us the truth. When he appears, the history of a nation has become extensive enough and important enough to awaken curiosity; men are anxious to know how events did actually occur, and what relation one event bears to another. When he appears,

the national temper has cooled down-men no longer stand blinded by the splendours of sunrise. The sunrise has melted into the light of common day. The air has become emptied of wonder. The gods have deserted earth, and men only remain. Long after the poet and the historian comes the Essayist. Before the stage is prepared for him, thought must have accumulated to a certain point; a literature less or more must be in existence, and must be preserved in printed books. Songs have been sung, histories and biographies have been written; and to these songs, histories, and biographies he must have access. Then, before he can write, society must have formed itself, for in its complexity and contrasts he finds his food. Before the Essayist can have free play, society must have existed long enough to have become self-conscious, introspective; to have brooded over itself and its perplexities; to have discovered its blots and weak points; to have become critical, and, consequently appreciative of criticism. And as the Essay does not, like the poem, or the early history or narration of events, appeal to the primitive feelings, before it can be read and enjoyed, there must exist a class who have attained wealth and leisure, and a certain acquaintance with the accumulated stores of thought on which the Essayist works, else his allusions are lost, his criticism a dead letter, his satire pointless. All this takes a long time to accomplish, and it is generally late in the literary history of a country before its Essayists appear. Then, the Essay itself has its peculiar literary conditions. It bears the same

relation to the general body of prose that the lyric bears to the general body of poetry. Like the lyric, it is brief; and, like the lyric, it demands a certain literary finish and perfection. In a long epic, the poet may now and then be allowed to nod; in a history, it is not essential that every sentence should sparkle. But the Essayist, from the very nature of his task, is not permitted to be dull or slovenly. He must be alert, full of intellectual life, concise, polished. He must think clearly, and express himself clearly. His style is as much an element of his success as his thought. The narrow limit in which he works demands this. In

a ten-mile race it is not expected that the runners shall go all the way at the top of their speed; in a race of three hundred yards it is not unreasonably expected that they shall do so. Then, besides all this, the Essay must, as a basis or preliminary, be artistically conceived. It is neither a dissertation nor a thesis; properly speaking, it is a work of art, and must conform to artistic rules. It requires not only the intellectual qualities which we have indicated, but unity, wholeness, self-completion. In this it resembles a poem. It must hang together. It must round itself off into a separate literary entity. When finished, it must be able to sustain itself and live. The Essayists of whom we have spoken fulfil these conditions more or less; and the measure of their fulfilment is the measure of success. These writers indicate in what directions the Essay has manifested itself, and they may be roughly arranged in groups and clusters. There are the egotists-the most delightful of all-who choose for subjects themselves, their surroundings, their moods and phantasies, whose charm consists not so much in the value or brilliancy of thought as in revelation of personal character: these are represented by Montaigne and Lamb; the satirists of society, manners, and social phenomena, by Addison and Steele; the fanciful and ornamental Essayists-they who wreathe the human porch with the honeysuckles of poetry-by Hunt, and by Hazlitt to some extent; the critical and biographical Essay, by Carlyle; the historical Essay-the brilliant and many-coloured picture of which some single man's life is the frame-by Lord Macaulay; the moral and didactic Essay, by Bacon in old time, and recently by Sir Henry Taylor and Sir Arthur Helps. Of course, this is but an arrangement in the rough, and will not stand a too critical examination, for several of the writers mentioned belong now to one cluster and now to another. Essaywriting is a craft vigorously prosecuted in England at present; and generally the writers will be found to belong to one or other of the groups which we have indicated.