for instance, you are drawn
towards poetry, you cannot, in all English literature, make a better
start than with Wordsworth. And Wordsworth will send you backwards
to a comprehension of the poets against whose influence Wordsworth
fought. When you have understood Wordsworth's and Coleridge's _Lyrical
Ballads_, and Wordsworth's defence of them, you will be in a position
to judge poetry in general. If, again, your mind hankers after an
earlier and more romantic literature, Lamb's _Specimens of English
Dramatic Poets Contemporary with Shakspere_ has already, in an
enchanting fashion, piloted you into a vast gulf of "the sea which is
Shakspere."

Again, in Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt you will discover essayists inferior
only to Lamb himself, and critics perhaps not inferior. Hazlitt
is unsurpassed as a critic. His judgments are convincing and his
enthusiasm of the most catching nature. Having arrived at Hazlitt or
Leigh Hunt, you can branch off once more at any one of ten thousand
points into still wider circles. And thus you may continue up and down
the centuries as far as you like, yea, even to Chaucer. If you chance
to read Hazlitt on _Chaucer and Spenser_, you will probably put
your hat on instantly and go out and buy these authors; such is his
communicating fire! I need not particularise further. Commencing with
Lamb, and allowing one thing to lead to another, you cannot fail to be
more and more impressed by the peculiar suitability to your needs of
the Lamb entourage and the Lamb period. For Lamb lived in a time of
universal rebirth in English literature. Wordsworth and Coleridge
were re-creating poetry; Scott was re-creating the novel; Lamb was
re-creating the human document; and Hazlitt, Coleridge, Leigh Hunt,
and others were re-creating criticism. Sparks are flying all about the
place, and it will be not less than a miracle if something combustible
and indestructible in you does not take fire.

I have only one cautionary word to utter. You may be saying to
yourself: "So long as I stick to classics I cannot go wrong." You can
go wrong. You can, while reading naught but very fine stuff, commit
the grave error of reading too much of one kind of stuff. Now there
are two kinds, and only two kinds. These two kinds are not prose and
poetry, nor are they divided the one from the other by any differences
of form or of subject. They are the inspiring kind and the informing
kind. No other genuine division exists in literature. E