In prose satire, the inexhaustible yet kindly wit of Sydney Smith has furnished us with some incomparable productions; witness Peter Plymley's Letters,1 his articles on Christianity in Hindostan, and his letter to the Times on Pennsylvanian repudiation. In History, we have the Greek histories of Mitford, Thirlwall, and Grote, the unfinished Roman history of Arnold, (1840-3), the English histories of Lingard, Mackintosh (1831), and Hallam, and the work similarly named (though History of the Revolution and of the reign of William III.' would be an exacter title) by Lord Macaulay. Lord Mahon, afterwards Earl Stanhope, published in 1837 a useful History of England from the Peace of Utrecht to 1783. Mr. Hallam's View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages (1818) gave a stimulus to historical research, in more than one field which for ages had been, whether arrogantly or ignorantly, overlooked. In Biography-out of a countless array of works-may be particularised the lives of Scott, Wilberforce, and Arnold, compiled respectively by Lockhart, the brothers Archdeacon Wilberforce and the Bishop of Oxford, and Dr. Stanley (1844). Among other works subsidiary to history may be singled out Cardinal Newman's Church of the Fathers, containing brilliantly written sketches of St. Anthony and St. Gregory Nazianzen; and Mr. Hope's admirable Historical Essay on Architecture. Both works were published, the latter posthumously, in 1840. As to accounts of Voyages and Travels, their name is legion; yet perhaps none of their authors has achieved a literary distinction comparable to that which was conferred on Lamartine by his Voyage en Orient. In Theology, we have the works of Robert Hall, Richard Cecil, and Rowland Hill, representing the Dissenting and Low Church sections; those of Arnold, Whately, and Hampden, representing what are sometimes called Broad Church, or Liberal, opinions; those of Froude, Pusey, Davison, Keble, Sewell, &c., representing various sections of the great High Church party; and lastly, on the Catholic side, those of Milner, Dr. Doyle--the incomparable 'J.K.L.'-Wiseman, and Newman. In Philosophy, we have the metaphysical fragments of Coleridge, the ethical philosophy of Bentham, the logic of Whately and Mill, and the political economy of the two last-mentioned writers, and also of Ricardo and Harriet Martineau. An excellent contribution was made to the history of philosophy, when Sir James Mackintosh published (1831) his 1 See Crit. Sect. ch. II. § 11. Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy. Among the essay-writers must be singled out Charles Lamb, author of the Essays of Elia (1823), and Francis Jeffrey, who, as editor of the Edinburgh Review long wielded the critical baton with honest, but not always judicious, severity. In other departments of thought and theory, e.g., Criticism, we have the literary criticism of Hazlitt and Thackeray, and the art-criticism of Mr. Ruskin. Charles Lamb,2 a Londoner of Londoners, born in the Temple, the son of a lawyer's confidential servant, entered Christ's Hospital in 1782, and stayed there for seven years. One of his school-fellows was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and thus began a close friendship which lasted for life. His boyish years were thus spent between the Temple and Christ's Hospital, with occasional excursions to the old country-house of Blakesware, in Hertfordshire, where his grandmother held the post of housekeeper for over half a century. He has immortalised the old deserted place' in the essay entitled 'Blakesmoor, in H▬▬shire.' Within two years after leaving school Lamb obtained a post of some kind in the South Sea House, and shortly afterwards a clerkship in the accountant's office of the East India Company. Here Lamb stayed till he was pensioned off. Till 1795 he lived with his father and mother in the Temple. In that year the family moved to humble lodgings in Holborn, and there, in the following year, the event took place which had so profound an influence on all Lamb's after-life. His sister, Mary Lamb, in a paroxysm of mania, killed her own mother and wounded her father. was able to arrange for her release from confinement-her case being clearly one of intermittent mania-and devoted his life to taking care of her. He never married. While the two were living together in small London lodgings he made his first important literary venture with A tale of Rosamund Gray and old blind Margaret.' This was in 1798; in the previous year he had published a volume of poems in conjunction with S. T. Coleridge and Charles Lloyd. The little story is redolent,' says Mr. Ainger, of Lamb's native sweetness of heart, delicacy of feeling, and undefinable charm of style.' He In 1802 he published the drama of John Woodvil,' an ambitious effort chiefly remarkable for the closeness with which it reproduces the style and versification of Beaumont and Fletcher. Already, and indeed years before this period, Lamb's mind was steeped in the Elizabethan drama. In 1803 he wrote 1 Extract Book, art. 182. ? This notice on Lamb is contributed by W. T. Arnold. the lovely lines on 'Hester,' which, together with the mournful stanzas beginning, 'Where are they gone, the old familiar faces?' and perhaps the sonnet on the name of 'Edith,' constitute the only verses of Lamb that have become really popular. In 1806 Lamb's 'Mr. H,'a curious trivial farce, was produced at Drury Lane, and damned unmercifully. Luckily he got on to much safer ground later in the same year with the Tales from Shakespeare,' at which brother and sister worked together. These were published in 1807. Next year followed the 'Specimens of English Dramatic Poets,' on which Lamb's fame as a critic chiefly rests. The new criticism, which, divesting itself of all theories about what a work of art should be in the abstract, seeks mainly to penetrate, interpret, and suggest,-to quicken the reader's sense of beauty and clear his spiritual vision,—was here inaugurated. A modern poet, addressing one of the Elizabethans, says: 'Thy honey Takes subtler sweetness from the lips of Lamb.' Even those who know the Elizabethans well will learn to know them better under this modest, yet consummate guidance. But the full importance of Lamb's works can only be gauged by those who realise the general indifference to his subject eighty years ago, and the impulse it communicated to the nascent reaction against the classical literature of the eighteenth century. The next important work of Lamb was that by which he will be longest remembered. The Essays of Elia' were originally contributed to the London Magazine, where the first of them appeared in 1820, and were collected and published in 1823. The volume contained the famous 'Dissertation on Roast Pig,' the paper on 'Imperfect Sympathies,' and the account of Mrs. Battle's opinions on whist; all occur in this first volume of essays. They would not probably be quite what they are if there had been no 'Spectator,' but it is hardly possible to overrate their kindly humour, the keenness of observation they display, and the elaborate, yet easy perfection of the style, when at its best. The second series of Essays of Elia,' published ten years later, in 1833, shows no sign of falling off. In 1825 he retired from the India House on a pension amounting to two-thirds of his salary, and lived the rest of his life at Enfield and at Edmonton, without producing any more literary work of mark. 1 Extract Book, art. 185. 447 CHAPTER VII. NINETEENTH CENTURY CONTINUED. 1. Ir has been thought advisable to add to this work notes on English poets and novelists from 1850 to the present day, and others on some earlier names not included in the last chapter, together with special notices of three or four eminent authors, whose reputation was obtained in other fields. than this did not seem to be practicable, regard being had to the wide sweep which literary activity has taken in the last forty years. More Alfred Tennyson (now Lord Tennyson), the son of a Lincolnshire clergyman, of Trinity College, Cambridge, published a small volume of poems with his brother Charles in 1827. Others appeared in 1833, and again in 1842; In Memoriam belongs to the year 1850, and Idylls of the King to 1859. The works of the Laureate are now arranged (collected Poems, 1881) under sixteen heads. The second and third heads (The Lady of Shalott' and English Idylls,') contain most of those poems on which the force of the writer's genius seems to have been specially concentrated, and in which his exquisite and unrivalled melody is most entrancing. Among these are Enone,' 'You ask me why, though ill at ease,' 'Morte d'Arthur,' 'The Talking Oak, Ulysses,' 'The Day Dream,' and 'St. Agnes' Eve.' 'The Talking Oak' is a wonderful poem. Starting from a first imaginary change, a first impersonation, and endowment with human thoughts and wishes, of that which we usually think of as senseless and emotionless, the poet pursues the strange argument with subtle logic through the various consequences of the original conception. In the frenzy of inspiration, the dull coarse wood comes to be endowed, not only with sense and feeling, but with the insight into hidden relations and resemblances which is peculiar to genius. It notes and numbers the sunbeams that fall on the lovely form of the sleeping girl; and each conveys to it some distinct import, flashes back some dazzling thought or image, unlocks and irradiates some new chamber in that mansion of dormant or suspended intelligence. The solidity, richness, and complexity of thought of which this composition is the fruit would furnish the stock-in-trade of a dozen ordinary poets; nor does Tennyson himself seem to have been unconscious of the magnitude of the intellectual effort, or of the perfection of the result. He, too, sings his 'Exegi monumentum' : And I will work in prose and rhyme, And praise thee more in both Than bard has honour'd beech or lime,-- In which the swarthy ringdove sat, And more than England honours that, Wherein the younger Charles abode And far below the Roundhead rode, Ulysses' is enveloped in antique heroic dignity as with a halo. The chief 'motif' is the thought expressed in those lines of Goethe in the Wilhelm Meister (Carlyle's translation),To give space for wandering is it That the world was made so wide. A few stately lines contain a perfect estimate of the less glorious work and less heroic energy of the respectable Telemachus. "He works his work, I mine.' 2. Robert Browning, born in 1812, first made himself known by writing Paracelsus (1836), and Sordello. These poems, remarkable as they were in many ways, announced a writer in whom great discursiveness of thought, fertility of imagination, and copiousness of expression, not being adequately controlled by any canons of poetic art, were likely to be much marred by excess, and blurred by defects of workmanship. If Mr. Browning has never cleared himself of these faults, nevertheless his dialectical power, his moral fervour, and his command over the instrument which he wields, have with advancing age been continually on the increase. Anyone may be convinced of this who will read Bishop Blougram's Apology,' or the 'Epistle of Karshish the Arab physician on the raising of Lazarus, or, most of all, The Ring and the Book (1868), which is the story, told from different sides and with different prepossessions, of the murder of his wife and her parents by an Italian count. Admirable is the skill of psychical analysis displayed in this poem. A few lines taken from it will illustrate |