picturesque incident, which Charles elsewhere has not overlooked, of the broken battledore and shuttlecock, telling of happy children's voices that had once echoed through the lonely chambers. It is certain that Charles and Mary, ardently as they both clung in after years to London sights and sounds, owed much both in genius and character to having breathed the purer, calmer air of rural homesteads.

A common education, whether that of sweet garden scenes, or the choice fancies and meditations of poet and moralist a sense of mutual need-a profound pity for each other's frailties of these was forged the bond that held them, and years of suffering and self-denial had made it ever more and more strong. "That we had much to struggle with, as we grew up together, we have reason to be most thankful. It strengthened and knit our compact closer. We could never have been what we have been to each other, if we had always had the sufficiency which you now complain of." It is with these words of divine philosophy that, when comparative ease had at last been achieved, Charles Lamb could look back upon the anxious past.

CHAPTER IX.

LAMB'S PLACE AS A CRITIC.

Ir remains to speak of those prose writings of Lamb, many of earlier date than the Essays of Elia, by which his quality as a critic must be determined. As early as 1811 he had published in Leigh Hunt's Reflector his essay on The Genius and Character of Hogarth. This was no subject taken up for the occasion. "His graphic representations," says Lamb, " are indeed books: they have the teeming, fruitful, suggestive meaning of words "—and no book was more familiar to him. A set of Hogarth's prints, including the Harlot's and Rake's Progresses, had been among the treasures of the old house at Blakesware; and Lamb as a child had spelled through their grim and ghastly histories again and again, till he came to know every figure and incident in them by heart. And now the cavalier tone in which certain leaders of the classical and historical schools of painting were wont to dismiss Hogarth as of slight value in point of art, made him keen to vindicate his old favourite. He has scant patience with those who noted defective drawing or "knowledge of the figure" in the artist. He is intolerant altogether of technical criticism. The essay is devoted to showing how true a moralist the painter is, and how false the view which would regard him chiefly as a humourist. He is a great satirist—a

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Moreover, he is a combination of

Juvenal or a Persius. satirist and dramatist. Hogarth had claimed for his pictures that they should be judged as successive scenes in a play, and Lamb takes him at his word. He is carried away by admiration for the tragic power displayed. He is in ecstasies over the print of Gin Lane, certainly one of the poorest of Hogarth's pictures as a composition, losing its due effect by overcrowding of incident, and made grotesque through sheer exaggeration. Yet, what stirs the critic's heart is "the pity of it," and he is in no humour to admit other considerations. He calls it "a sublime print." "Every part is full of strange images of death; it is perfectly amazing and astounding to look at;" and so forth. It is noticeable that Lamb does not write with the pictures before him, and trusts to a memory not quite trustworthy. For example, to prove that Hogarth is not merely repulsive, that there is always a sweet humanity in reserve as a foil for the horrors he deals with-something to "keep the general air from tainting," he says: "Take the mild, supplicating posture of patient poverty, in the poor woman that is persuading the pawnbroker to accept her clothes in pledge in the plate of Gin Lane." There is really no such incident in the picture. There is a woman offering in pawn her kettle and fire-irons; but, taken in combination with all the other incidents of the scene, she is certainly pledging them to buy gin. Here, as elsewhere, Lamb damages his case by over-statement, partly through love of surprises, partly because he willingly discovered in poem or picture what he wished to find there. He sees more of humanity and sweetness in what affects him than is actually present. He reads something of himself into the composition he is reviewing. He is on safer ground when he dwells on the genuine power, the pity and the

terror, in that last scene but one of The Marriage-à-laMode; and on the gentleness of the wife's countenance, poetizing the whole scene, in the print of The Distressed Poet. And he is doing a service to art of larger scope than fixing the respective ranks of Hogarth and Poussin, in these noble concluding lines:

"I say not that all the ridiculous subjects of Hogarth have necessarily something in them to make us like them; some are indifferent to us, some in their natures repulsive, and only made interesting by the wonderful skill and truth to nature in the painter; but I contend that there is in most of them that sprinkling of the better nature which, like holy water, chases away and disperses the contagion of the bad. They have this in them besides, that they bring us acquainted with the every-day human face; they give us skill to detect those gradations of sense and virtue (which escape the careless or fastidious observer) in the countenances of the world about us; and prevent that disgust at common life, that tædium quotidianarum formarum, which an unrestricted passion for ideal forms and beauties is in danger of producing."

His judgments of pictures are, as might be expected, those of a man of letters, not of a painter. It is the story in the picture that impresses him, and the technical qualities leave him unmoved. A curious instance of this is afforded in his essay on The Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Productions of Modern Art. After complaining that, with the exception of Hogarth, no artist within the last fifty years had treated a story imaginatively-"upon whom his subject has so acted that it has seemed to direct him, not to be arranged by him "—he breaks out into a fine rhapsody on the famous Bacchus and Ariadne of Titian in the National Gallery. But it is not as a masterpiece of colour and drawing that it excites his admiration. The qualities of the poet, not those of

the painter, are what he discovers in it. It is the "imaginative faculty" which he detects, as shown in the power of uniting the past and the present. "Precipitous, with his reeling satyr-rout around him, re-peopling and re-illuming suddenly the waste places, drunk with a new fury beyond the grape, Bacchus, born of fire, fire-like flings himself at the Cretan:" this is the present. Ariadne, "unconscious of Bacchus, or but idly casting her eyes as upon some unconcerning pageant, her soul undistracted from Theseus -Ariadne, "pacing the solitary shore in as much heartsilence, and in almost the same local solitude, with which she awoke at daybreak to catch the forlorn last glances of the sail that bore away the Athenian:" this is the past. But it is in the situation itself, not in Titian's treatment of it, that Lamb has found the antithesis that so delights him. He is in fact the poet, taking the subject out of the painter's hands, and treating it afresh. Lamb obtains an easy victory for the ancients over the moderns, by choosing as his foil for Titian and Raffaelle the treatment of sacred subjects by Martin, the painter of Belshazzar's Feast and The Plains of Heaven. And it is significant of a certain inability in Lamb to do full justice to his contemporaries, that in noting the barrenness of the fifty years in question in the matter of art, he has no exception to make but Hogarth. He might have had a word to say for Turner and Wilkie.

The essay on The Artificial Comedy of the Last Century has received more attention than its importance at all warrants, from the circumstance that Macaulay set to work seriously to demolish its reasoning, in reviewing Leigh Hunt's edition of the Restoration Dramatists. Lamb's essay was originally part of a larger essay upon the old actors, in which he was led to speak of the comedies of