The Sun.
London, England, 1867-01-30 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

The Quarterly Review. No. 243. John Murray.
The January number of the Quarterly, just pub-
lished, opens with a charming paper, critical rather
than biographical in its character, upon " Charles
Lamb and some of his Companions." It is apropos of
course to the graceful memoir of Charles Lamb re-
cently penned by Barry Cornwall. Coupled with Mr.
Procter's recollections of his old friend, however,
we find due note taken at the head of the review of
the " Final Memorials of Charles Lamb" (happily
a misnomer) given to the world of his admirers in
1848 by Mr. Sergeant Talfourd. The Quarterly
Reviewer's paper about Elia and Elia's Com-
panions—an article as alluring in its contents as
Rosamond Gray's own basket of peaches with a
dewy rose here and there a-top —is chiefly remark-
able, by the way, for the closing passages of it in
which a splendid tribute is offered to the genius,
the influ nee, and the achievements of the Master-
Mind of that age (as the critic deems him to have
been) —Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Reverting, how-
ever, to a consideration of the article itself as a whole,
we may best indicate the character of it, as a criticism
subtly appreciative of the idiocyncracies of the three
or four gifted writers signified under the title of
" Charles Lamb and some of his Companions."
Strictly speaking, the Reviewer's observations are di-
rected almost exclusively to three among those men
of letters associating together here in London about
the beginning of this century—Hazlitt, " Elia," and
" Leontius" (as Byron dubbed him)—Leigh Hunt,
Charles Lamb, and William Hazlitt. With Hazlitt
the Quarterly Reviewer deals rather mercilessly—
doing but scant justice, as we think, to what
Hazlitt himself hoped would prove his opus may-
nun:, that " Life of Napoleon," which, from our
own delighted remembrance of it and of its often
impassioned eloquence, we, at any rate, cannot
regard as altogether relegated to the limbo of the
Forgotten. Hardly, we think, has the full measure
of commendation been awarded, here, even to Leigh
Hunt, in his capacity as an exquisitely delicate and
humoristic writer, alike in prose and verse. Yet
while we feel almost constrained to say this, we
cannot but bear in charmed remembrance how,
in this Quarterly paper about Charles Lamb
and his Companions, the reviewer with a subtle
perception of the pathos, the modesty, and the
ennobling aspirations dictating a passage in
Leigh Hunt's Essay on " My Books" quotes it as
follows—" How pleasant it is to reflect that all
those lovers of books have themselves become
books. . . May I hope to become the meanest
of those existences ? . . I should like to remain
visible in this shape. The little of myself that
pleases myself, I could wish to be accounted worth
pleasing others. I should like to remain so, were
it only for the sake of those who love me in private,
knowing, as I do, what a treasure is the possession
of a friend' s mind when he is no more." Having
transcribed which—the reviewer himself adds—
"We think few can read this very lovely pas-
sage, and not sympathise cordially in the wish so
nobly conceived and so tenderly expressed." Ob-
serving still further—though we cannot help feeling
as by the mere concession of an after-thought
—" Something not to be replaced would be struck
out of the gentler literature of our century; could
the mind of Leigh Hunt cease to speak to us in a
book." Turning over the particular leaves of the
Quarterly from which we have culled this extract,
the thought occurs to us how Leigh Hunt himself
would have revelled in the beauties scattered
lavishly enough through the criticism. As for
example, where the reviewer is in a manner ex-
tenuating or at any rate accounting for the lack of
courtesy towards Hazlitt, as evidenced by those
amongst whom he (Hazlitt himself) moved with a
habitual disdain of anything at all in the way of
courtesies—the critic drily remarks—" One does
not readily make room in any decorous society for a
visitor who slaps everybody's face and treads on every-
body's toes." Or, again, where, having commented
upon Hazlitt's habit of drawing invidious comparisons
between persons essentially differing, .the one from
the other—while doing justice to Reynolds, for
example, in the same breath depreciating Gains-
borough —while expatiating on the humour of
flogarth, denying that Wilkie had any humour at
all—while extolling Edmund Kean, degrading
Charles Young—and so forth— the reviewer here in
this charming article in the Quarterly observes, in
words in which Leigh Hunt, of all men, we are certain,
would have revelled with a sort of gusto —" No
man if he would praise a race-horse thinks it
necessary to abuse a lion ; no man who calls on us
to admire the rose asks us to despise the violet ; no
man who invites the eye to the shimmer of the ash
leaves thinks we cannot adequately enjoy the sight
unless we point a finger of scorn at the solid repose
of the cedar." If, as we have said, but scant justice,
(according to our notion at least) is accorded to
Hazlitt in some respects—and in others to Hunt—
more than justice seems to us to have been done to
the no doubt vast and noble intellectual capacities of
Coleridge. Regarding him, as he is here described,
he is a Demigod, one might almost say, one of the Dii
Majorcs. A glorious creature, no doubt—Poet at
once and Philosopher—but, for all that, according
to our lights, an incomplete life—a genius, the scope
of which is, we can't help feeling, even while we
read his remarkable works, very inadequately re-
presented by the noblest amongst them. When the
Quarterly reviewer descants upon Charles Lamb,
however, we have not a word of exception to take to
what the critic there expresses so very admirably. He
is at his best, at his happiest. Instance this where
he is speaking of Lamb's humour as at once pure
and genial, having no malice in its smile, the
critic says very exquisitely " Ills keenest sar.
easm is but his arehest pleasantry." It has pre-
viously been remarked, and that, moteover, with
perfect truth, by the reviewer, that " Elia is
never verbose, yet never incomplete. You are not
wearied because he says too much, nor dissatisfied
because he says too little. In this inimitable sense
of proportion, this fitness of adjustment between
thought and expression, the prose of Elia re-
minds us of the verse of Horace. Nor is the
essayist without some other resemblance to the
poet : in the amenity which accompanies his satire ;
in his sportive view of things grave ; the grave mo-
rality he deduces from things sportive ; his equal
sympathy for rural and for town life ; his constant
good fellowship and his lenient philosophy." In-
cidentally in the course of this opening paper in the
current number of the Quarterly there occurs a sen-
tence through which we observe, with an especial
sense of satisfaction, that the writer has in a man-
ner accepted as almost proven, a theory thrown
out not long since by an ingenious commen-
tator upon the Sonnets of Shakspere, to the effect
that those Sonnets are, strictly speaking, allegori-
cal in their reference to the poet's own life and
genius, a theory that especially caught our own
Lucy at the time, and ono that still appsars to us in
the highest degree probable, as affording a key to
the otherwise bewildering enigma of the Sonnets.
The passage we refer to runs as follows :—" Hence,
judging by the sonnets in which he intimates his dis-
dain of the works on which his life was spent, and
by the indifference with which he left those works to
their fate among the other properties of the
Globe Theatre, Shakspere would probably
have told us that he never fully wrought
out that which was in him, and that we saw
of his genius but outlines and fragments."
Among the many fine thoaghts scattered through
this very charming paper upon Charles Lamb and
his Companions, the finest of all perhaps is that
noble and consolatoryreflexion fo.r all of us while tra-
velling here in the Valley of the S hadow, that " the
visibility of shadow is the evidenoe of light." Or, as
it might otherwise and yet more tersely,be expressed,
that the Shadow implies the Light ! Passing
on to the other articles—eight in number—in
the January number of the Quarterly, the
readers of that great review will find variety enough
to satisfy them, alike in the subjects themselves and
in their treatment. An examination of the records
of " The Cholera Conference " is followed by a
delightful paper on "Books of Fiction for Children"
—a grim survey of " Crime in the State of New
York" by a historical epitome of "The Week's Re-
public in Palermo" last year—another of those
interminable arguments anent " Game and the Game
Laws," and an apropos essay about 4;