AMONGST the earliest literary acquaintances I made was that with the inimitable Charles Lamb: inimitable, I say, but that word is too limited in its meaning; for, as is said of Milton in that well known life of him attached to all common editions of the 'Paradise Lost,' (Fenton's, I think,) in both senses he was above imitation.' Yes; it was as impossible to the moral nature of Charles Lamb that he should imitate another, as, in an intellectual sense, it was impossible that any other should successfully imitate him. To write with patience even, not to say genially, for Charles Lamb it was a very necessity of his constitution that he should write from his own wayward nature; and that nature was so peculiar that no other man, the ablest at mimicry, could counterfeit its voice. But, let me not anticipate; for these were opinions about Lamb which I had not when I first knew him, nor could have had by any reasonable title. Elia,' be it observed, the exquisite Elia,' was then unborn; Lamb had as yet published nothing to the world which proclaimed him in his proper character of a most original man of genius;'

*'Man of genius' — 'man of talent.' I have, in another place, laid down what I conceive to be the true ground of distinction between genius and talent; which lies mainly in this that genius is intellectual power impregnated with the moral nature, and expresses a synthesis of

at best, he could have been thought no more than a man of talent and of talent moving in a narrow path, with a power rather of mimicking the quaint and the fantastic, than any large grasp over catholic beauty. And, therefore, it need not offend the most doting admirer of Lamb as he is now known to us, a brilliant star for ever fixed in the firmament of English literature, that I acknowledge myself to have sought his acquaintance rather under the reflex honor he had enjoyed of being known as Coleridge's friend, than for any which he yet held directly and separately in his own person. My earliest advances towards this acquaintance had an inauspicious aspect; and it may be worth while reporting the circumstances, for they were characteristic of Charles Lamb; and the immediate result was that we parted, not perhaps (as Lamb says of his philosophic friend R. and the Parisians) 'with mutual contempt,' but at least with coolness; and on my part, with something that might have even turned to disgust - founded, however, entirely on my utter misapprehension of Lamb's character and his manners — had it not been for the winning goodness of Miss Lamb, before which all resentment must have melted in a moment.

It was either late in 1804 or early in 1805, according

the active in man with his original organic capacity of pleasure and pain. Hence the very word genius, because the genial nature in its whole organization is expressed and involved in it. Hence, also, arises the reason that genius is always peculiar and individual; one nian's genius never exactly repeats another man's. But talent is the same in all men; and that which is effected by talent, can never serve to identify or indicate its author. Hence, too, that, although talent is the object of respect, it never conciliates love; you love a man of talent perhaps in concreto, but not talent; whereas genius, even for itself, is idolized. I am the more proud of this distinction, since I have seen the utter failure of Mr. Coleridge, judging from his attempt in his ' Table-Talk.'

6

to my present computations, that I had obtained from a literary friend a letter of introduction to Mr. Lamb. All that I knew of his works was his play of John Woodvil,' which I had bought in Oxford, and perhaps I only had bought throughout that great University, at the time of my matriculation there, about the Christmas of 1803. Another book fell into my hands on that same morning, I recollect the 'Gebir' of Mr. Walter Savage Landor — which astonished me by the splendor of its descriptions (for I had opened accidentally upon the sea-nymph's marriage with Tamor, the youthful brother of Gebir) — and I bought this also. Afterwards, when placing these two most unpopular of books on the same shelf with the other far holier idols of my heart, the joint poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge as then associated in the Lyrical Ballads'-poems not equally unknown, perhaps a little better known, but only with the result of being more openly scorned, rejected—I could not but smile internally at the fair prospect I had of congregating a library which no man had read but myself. John Woodvil' I had almost studied, and Miss Lamb's pretty High-Born Helen,' and the ingenious imitations of Burton; these I had read, and, to a certain degree, must have admired, for some parts of them had settled without effort in my memory. I had read also the Edinburgh notice of them; and with what contempt may be supposed from the fact, that my veneration for Wordsworth transcended all that I felt for any created being, past or present; insomuch that, in the summer, or spring rather, of that same year, and full eight months before I first went to Oxford, I had ventured to address a letter to him, through his publishers, the Messrs. Longman, (which letter, Miss Wordsworth in after years assured me they believed to be the production of some person much older than I represented myself,)

6

and that in due time I had been honored by a long answer from Wordsworth; an honor which, I well remember, kept me awake, from mere excess of pleasure, through a long night in June, 1803. It was not to be supposed that the very feeblest of admirations could be shaken by mere scorn and contumely, unsupported by any shadow of a reason. Wordsworth, therefore, could not have suffered in any man's opinion, from the puny efforts of this new autocrat amongst reviews; but what was said of Lamb, though not containing one iota of criticism, either good or bad, had certainly more point and cleverness. The supposition that John Woodvil' might be a lost drama, recovered from the age of Thespis, and entitled to the hircus, &c., must, I should think, have won a smile from Lamb himself; or why say 'Lamb himself,' which means even Lamb,' when he would have been the very first to laugh, (as he was afterwards among the first to hoot at his own farce,) provided only he could detach his mind from the ill-nature and hard contempt which accompanied the wit. This wit had certainly not dazzled my eyes in the slightest degree. So far as I was left at leisure, by a more potent order of poetry, to think of the John Woodvil' at all, I had felt and acknowledged a delicacy and tenderness in the situations as well as the sentiments, but disfigured, as I thought, by quaint, grotesque, and mimetic phraseology. The main defect, however, of which I complained, was defect of power. I thought Lamb had no right to take his station amongst the inspired writers who had just then risen, to throw new blood into our literature, and to breathe a breath of life through the worn-out, or, at least, torpid organization of the national mind. He belonged, I thought, to the old literature; and, as a poet, he certainly does. There were in his verses minute scintillations of genius

now and

then, even a subtle sense of beauty; and there were shy graces, lurking half-unseen, like violets in the shade. But there was no power on a colossal scale; no breadth; no choice of great subjects; no wrestling with difficulty; no creative energy. So I thought then; and so I should think now, if Lamb were viewed chiefly as a poet. Since those days, he has established his right to a seat in any company. But why? and in what character? As 'Elia: ' -the essays of Elia' are as exquisite a gem amongst the jewellery of literature, as any nation can show. They do not, indeed, suggest to the typifying imagination, a Last Supper of Da Vinci, or a Group from the Sistine Chapel; but they suggest some exquisite cabinet painting; such, for instance, as that Carlo Dolce known to all who have visited Lord Exeter's place of Burleigh; (by the way, I bar the allusion to Charles Lamb, which a shameless punster suggests in the name Carlo Dolce ;) and in this also resembling that famous picture - that many critics (Hazlitt amongst others) can see little or nothing in it. Quam nihil ad genium, Papiniane, tuum ! Those, therefore, err in my opinion, who present Lamb to our notice amongst the poets. Very pretty, very elegant, very tender, very beautiful verses he has written; nay, twice he has written verses of extraordinary force, almost demoniac force― viz., 'The Three Graves,' and The Gipsy's Malison.' But, speaking generally, he writes verses as one to whom that function was a secondary and occasional function; not his original and natural vocation ; not an εργον, but a πάρεργον.

For the reasons, therefore, I have given, never thinking of Charles Lamb as a poet, and, at that time, having no means for judging of him in any other character, I had requested the letter of introduction to him, rather with a view to some further knowledge of Coleridge, (who was