ays of Addison to those of Lamb, who has equalled
Hazlitt's best performances of this kind. Addison is too unlike to
justify a comparison; and, to say the truth, though he has rather more
in common with Lamb, the contrast is much more obvious than the
resemblance. Each wants the other's most characteristic vein; Hazlitt
has hardly a touch of humour, and Lamb is incapable of Hazlitt's caustic
scorn for the world and himself. They have indeed in common, besides
certain superficial tastes, a love of pathetic brooding over the past.
But the sentiment exerted is radically different. Lamb forgets himself
when brooding over an old author or summing up the 'old familiar faces.'
His melancholy and his mirth cast delightful cross-lights upon the
topics of which he converses, and we do not know, until we pause to
reflect, that it is not the intrinsic merit of the objects, but Lamb's
own character, which has caused our pleasure. They would be dull, that
is, in other hands; but the feeling is embodied in the object described,
and not made itself the source of our interest. With Hazlitt, it is the
opposite. He is never more present than when he is dwelling upon the
past. Even in criticising a book or a man, his favourite mode is to tell
us how he came to love or to hate him; and in the non-critical Essays he
is always appealing to us, directly or indirectly, for sympathy with his
own personal emotions. He tells us how passionately he is yearning for
the days of his youth; he is trying to escape from his pressing
annoyances; wrapping himself in sacred associations against the fret
and worry of surrounding cares; repaying himself for the scorn of women
or Quarterly Reviewers by retreating into some imaginary hermitage; and
it is the delight of dreaming upon which he dwells more than upon the
beauty of the visions revealed to his inward eye. The force with which
this sentiment is presented gives a curious fascination to some of his
essays. Take, for example, the essay in 'Table Talk,' 'On Living to
One's self,'--an essay written, as he is careful to tell us, on a mild
January day in the country, whilst the fire is blazing on the hearth and
a partridge getting ready for his supper. There he expatiates in happy
isolation on the enjoyments of living as 'a silent spectator of the
mighty scheme of things;' as being in the world, and not of it; watching
the clouds and the stars, poring over a book, or gazing at a picture
without a thought of be