_New Year's Eve_, and _Poor
Relations_.

The results of Lamb's Elizabethan studies appeared in the excellent
_Tales from Shakespeare_, which he wrote with his sister, and in his
_Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who wrote about the Time of
Shakespeare_.

This age produced much prose criticism. Coleridge remains one of
England's greatest critics, and Lamb and De Quincey are yet two of her
most enjoyable ones. Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864) and William
Hazlitt (1778-1830) also deserve mention in the history of English
prose criticism. Both men were unusually combative. Landor was sent
away from Oxford "for criticizing a noisy party with a shot gun,"
which he discharged against the closed shutters of the room where the
roisterers were holding their festivities. He went to Italy, where
most of his literary work was done. He avoided people, and even
boasted that he took more pleasure with his own thoughts than with
those of others. For companionship, he imagined himself conversing
with other people. The titles of his best two works are _Imaginary
Conversations_ (1824-1848) and _Pericles and Aspasia_ (1836), the
latter a series of imaginary letters. His writings are notable for
their style, for an unusual combination of dignity with simplicity and
directness. A statement like the following shows how vigorous and
sweeping his criticisms sometimes are: "A rib of Shakespeare would
have made a Milton; the same portion of Milton, all poets born ever
since." In spite of many splendid passages and of a style that
suggests sculpture in marble, twentieth-century readers often feel
that he is under full sail, either bound for nowhere, or voyaging to
some port where they do not care to land.

Hazlitt is less polished, but more suggestive, and in closer touch
with life than Landor. In seizing the important qualities of an
author's works and summarizing them in brief space, Hazlitt shows the
skill of a trained journalist. His three volumes, _Characters of
Shakespeare's Plays_ (1817), _Lectures on the English Poets_ (1818),
and _Lectures on the English Comic Writers_ (1819) contain criticism
that remains stimulating and suggestive. He loves to arrive somewhere,
to settle his points definitely. His discussion of the frequently
debated question,--whether Pope is a poet, shows this
characteristic:--

"The question,--whether Pope was a poet, has hardly yet been
settled, and is hardly worth settling; for if he was not a great