this writer, I shall content myself with quoting two poems, in two very different tones of feeling, and which, I think, contain all the characteristics of which I have been speaking.

HESTER.

When maidens such as Hester die,
Their place ye may not well supply,
Though ye among a thousand try,
With vain endeavour.

A month or more hath she been dead,
Yet cannot I by force be led
To think upon the wormy bed
And her together.

A springy motion in her gait,
A rising step, did indicate,
Of pride and joy no common rate,
That flush'd her spirit.

I know not by what name beside
I shall it call ;-if 't was not pride,
It was a joy to that allied,
She did inherit.

Her parents held the Quaker rule,
Which doth the human feeling cool,
But she was train'd in Nature's school,
Nature had bless'd her.

A waking eye, a prying mind,

A heart that stirs, is hard to bind;
A hawk's keen sight ye cannot blind,
Ye could not Hester.

My sprightly neighbour, gone before
To that unknown and silent shore,
Shall we not meet, as heretofore,
Some summer morning

When from thy cheerful eyes a ray
Hath struck a bliss upon the day,
A bliss that would not go away,
A sweet forewarning?

A FAREWELL TO TOBACCO.

May the Babylonish curse

Straight confound my stammering verse,
If I can a passage see

In this word-perplexity,

Or a fit expression find,
Or a language to my mind,

(Still the phrase is wide or scant)
To take leave of thee, GREAT Plant!
Or in any terms relate

Half my love, or half my hate :

For I hate, yet love, thee so,
That, whichever thing I show,

The plain truth will seem to be
A constrain'd hyperbole,

And the passion to proceed

More from a mistress than a weed.

Sooty retainer to the vine,
Bacchus' black servant, negro fine;
Sorcerer, that makest us dote upon
Thy begrimed complexion,
And, for thy pernicious sake,
More and greater oaths to break
Than reclaimed lovers take

'Gainst women: thou thy siege dost lay

Much too in the female way,

While thou suck'st the labouring breath

Faster than kisses, or than death.

Thou in such a cloud dost bind us,

That our worst foes cannot find us,

And ill fortune, that would thwart us,

Shoots at rovers, shooting at us;

While each man, through thy height'ning steam,

Does like a smoking Ætna seem,

And all about us does express

(Fancy and Wit in richest dress)

A Sicilian fruitfulness.

Thou through such a mist dost show us,

That our best friends do not know us,

And, for those allowed features

Due to reasonable creatures,

For thy sake, Tobacco, I
Would do any thing but die,
And but seek to extend my days
Long enough to sing thy praise.
But, as she, who once hath been
A King's consort, is a queen
Ever after, nor will bate
Any title of her state,
Though a widow or divorced,
So I, from thy converse forced,
The old name and style retain,
A right Katherine of Spain;
And a seat, too, 'mongst the joys
Of the bless'd Tobacco boys;
Where, though I, by sour physician,
Am debarr'd the full fruition
Of thy favours, I may catch

Some collateral sweets, and snatch
Sidelong odours, that give life
Like glances from a neighbour's wife ;
And still live in the by-places
And the suburbs of thy graces ;
And in thy borders take delight,
An unconquer'd Canaanite.

I would not have quoted to such a length, if I had known how to have broken the preceding poem into parts. But it is so perfectly continuous and one throughout, that such anatomy was impossible. I do not remember any thing so near the swing and flow of L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, as the lines printed in italics. The same fusion of ideas, couched in the same long drawn out melody, is conspicuous in both poets; I question if the diction only be very much superior in Milton : every thing else is out of the comparison entirely.

It is foreign to the purpose of these letters to consider the prose works of the authors whose poetical merits I have alone taken upon me to discuss; yet so small is the

*Published in 1818.

sum total, verse and prose, of Lamb's publications, that perhaps I shall be pardoned, if in conclusion I take some notice of his pretensions as a critic upon Shakspeare and Hogarth. With respect to the former, he is possessed with all that vehement admiration of our immortal Bard, which was first introduced, in its present form of devout enthusiasm, by the Lake School: he is particularly anxious in proving the spirituality of his characters; i. e. that essence of the Poet's own soul in them all, which makes them different from all others in kind as well as degree; and hence he denies the possibility of acting these plays, without materializing the creations of Imagination, and reducing Shakspeare, as far as he was Shakspeare, differing from all mankind in intenseness of thought, to a level with the commonest productions of modern talent.

"The truth is, the characters of Shakspeare are so much the objects of meditation, rather than of interest or curiosity as to their actions, that while we are reading any of his greatest criminal characters-Macbeth, Richard, even lago-we think not so much of the crimes which they commit, as of the ambition, the aspiring spirit, the intellectual activity, which prompts them to overleap those moral fences."

*

"So to see Lear acted-to see an old man tottering about the stage with a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want to take him into shelter and relieve him. That is all the feeling which the acting of Lear ever produced in me. But the Lear of Shakspeare cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery by which they mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more inadequate to represent the horrors of the real elements, than any actor can be to represent Lear: they might more easily propose to personate the Satan of Milton upon a stage, or one of Michael Angelo's terrible figures. The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual: the explosions of his passion are terrible as a volcano: they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea, his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare. This care of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be thought on; even as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see nothing but corporeal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage: while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear;

we are in his mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his reason, we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodized from the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind blows where it listeth, at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind. What have looks or tones to do with that sublime identification of his age, with that of the heavens themselves, when in his reproaches to them for conniving at the injustice of his children, he reminds them that they themselves are old! What gesture shall we appropriate to this? What has the voice or the eye to do with such things? But the play is beyond all art, as the tamperings with it show: it is too hard and stony; it must have love-scenes and a happy ending. It is not enough that Cordelia is a daughter; she must shine as a lover too. Tate has put his hook into the nostrils of this Leviathan, for Garrick and his followers, the showmen of the scene, to draw the mighty beast about more easily. A happy ending !—as if the living martyrdom that Lear had gone through, the flaying of his feelings alive,-did not make a dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous thing for him. If he is to live and be happy after, if he could sustain this world's burden after, why all this pudder and preparation,-why torment us with all this unnecessary sympathy? as if the childish pleasure of getting his gilt robes and sceptre again could tempt him to act over again his misused station, as if at his years, and with his experience, any thing was left but to die."

Is not this true? and yet Dr. Johnson upholds the profanation of Tate for reasons that are really quite childish; because it made him cry at the last representation! Made him cry! to be sure it did; was it to make him laugh? But I much fear that Dr. Johnson had about as much poetry in his constitution as he had humility.

Hogarth has at length found in C. Lamb a worthy commentator; one who has felt the marvellous creative powers of that artist, and elucidated them with penetration and eloquence. I perceive that my limits forbid me to enter upon this subject, but I certainly would recommend any one, who wishes to peruse the prints of our illustrious countryman with proper feelings of their ends and intrinsic beauties, to spend an hour upon Lamb's little Essay on the Genius of Hogarth. It is full of ingenious criticism, profound insight into what constitutes