eading: _LAMB._]

Two new magazines appeared in or about 1817, _Blackwood's_ and the
_London_. Brilliant as the leading contributors to the former were, none
of them perhaps can claim a place in the front rank of English
literature. Of the contributors to the _London_ Lamb is doubtless
entitled to the first place. Born in 1775, he was employed as a clerk in
the East India House from 1792 to 1825. He was a schoolfellow of
Coleridge and contributed to his earlier volume of poems It is, however,
to the _Essays of Elia_ that he owes his fame. These appeared in the
_London Magazine_ and were published in a collected form after his death
in 1834. Few authors that have been so much admired have exercised so
little influence. The reason for this is not far to seek. His style
defies imitation, and he would have been the last man to endeavour to
win disciples to his opinions. Another essayist who belongs to the same
group of writers as Coleridge and Lamb is Thomas de Quincey. He wrote
both for _Blackwood's_ and for the _London Magazine_, in the latter of
which appeared in 1821 his best known work, the _Confessions of an
English Opium Eater_. He excelled in what was the dominant
characteristic of English prose of this period, in imagery, a quality
which is conspicuous in the light fancy of Coleridge's most famous
poems, and which gives life to an author so uniformly in dead earnest as
Macaulay. Viewed historically, this taste for imagery is the English
side of the romantic movement, which in Germany reacted against the
conventional, not only in works of the imagination, but in the heavier
form of new philosophical systems. But these systems, in spite of
Coleridge, never became native in England. The growth of the scientific
spirit has made such thought and such language seem unreal in serious
literature, and prevents a later generation from imitating, though not
from admiring, the brilliance of the early essayists.

Hazlitt's genius was of a heavier type. As an essayist his work breathes
the spirit of an earlier age; but as a literary critic he is a leader,
and displays an inwardness in his appreciation that makes him in a sense
the model of the new age in which criticism has so largely supplanted
creation. It may be doubted, however, whether the abnormal growth of
criticism, as a distinct branch of English letters, has been a benefit
on the whole to our literature. Certainly it has tended to substitute
the elaborate study of oth