From 1782 to 1789 he was at Christ's Hospital, but did not attain to the high rank of Grecian, nor enter either of the Universities which he loved. He continued to meet Coleridge during vacations at "The Salutation and Cat," and contributed verses to Coleridge's volume of 1796 (Cottle, Bristol). In 1796 befell the tragedy in his family, and henceforth the care of his sister Mary (the Bridget of Elia) dominated his existence of unrepining self-sacrifice. In literature (in addition to the old writers), he admired Burns, and Wordsworth, from the first. It is more curious that Burger's ballad of Lenore (the Death-ride) struck Lamb as potently as it inspired Scott, who appreciated Lamb much more than he was by Lamb appreciated, and in vain invited this resolute Cockney to visit Abbotsford. In 1797 he contributed more sonnets to a volume by Coleridge and Lloyd, and in 1798 published his tale "Rosamund Gray",
Friends going up to examine it
Observe a good deal of Charles Lamb in it
(to parody Browning), it has passages of his style, quotations from his favourite old authors; one chapter is an essay in his own manner, and there is even an anticipation of "Dream Children". Shelley praised the story highly, but Lamb was not enthusiastic about Shelley's poems or Byron's. His "John Woodvil" was intended for the stage, and the tragedy was published in 1802. It contains fine passages of verse, and a great deal of the "local colour" of the Restoration; perhaps the chief merit lies in the restoration of the accents of old poetry. The farce of "Mr. H." was a foredoomed failure. There is room for variety of opinion as to the suitability of the "Tales from Shakespeare" (much of which was executed by Mary Lamb), for children; but the peculiar merits of the style are beyond dispute. The same remark may be made on "The Adventures of Ulysses". On the other hand the notes to the "Specimens of English Dramatic Poets" (1808) reveal Lamb at his best as a critic and a master of language, while the selections are invaluable to readers who have not the time nor the taste for the perusal of the entire works of many most unequal dramatists. The book was a revelation to all but a few readers who, like Scott, had dwelt much with Marlowe, Chapman, Ford, Webster, and the rest.
Lamb "found himself" and found a public, at first small but ever increasing, when he wrote his first essays for "The London Magazine" in 1820, under the name of Elia. (Republished as "Essays of Elia" in 1823.) The very names of the essays are fragrant in the memory, and the characters drawn have become household words, while the personal touches are, with Lamb's delightful and fantastic letters, his best biography. In 1825, Lamb retired, with a liberal pension, from the India Office, and was "a freed man after thirty-three years' slavery" (see his essay "The Superannuated Man"). Lamb's "Last Essays" were published in 1833, and the author did not long survive the death of his life-long friend, Coleridge, in July, 1834; he passed away on 27 December, 1834. His name stands with those of Addison and Steele among English essayists: indeed he is much more read than they, as he was nearer to our own time, while more closely connected than they with the best literature of the great centuries which preceded the eighteenth. His self-revelations too are more serious than those of his famous predecessors, and the character revealed is more potently attractive.
Leigh Hunt.
Born nine years after Lamb (in 1784) and, like Lamb and Coleridge, educated at Christ's Hospital, Leigh Hunt perhaps holds, after Lamb and Hazlitt, the third place among the English essayists of his age. While love of literature, of wide and very miscellaneous reading in old English and Italian poetry was the chief pleasure of Hunt, he also took, with great vigour, a side in the politics of his age. A "Friend of the People," a contemner of kings, and no sympathizer with his country in the Napoleonic wars, Hunt, with his brother John, started, in 1808, "The Examiner," a Radical weekly journal of politics and literature. In 1812 he published what the law called a libel on the Prince Regent, and for two years occupied prison rooms which he decorated in his own taste (leaning to roses on the wall-paper, and plaster casts), among these he received his friends. Though he had a rapid perception of new poetic excellence, though he was the first to perceive and welcome the star of Keats, and, almost alone, encouraged and applauded Shelley, Hunt was blind to the merits of poets who were not of his own political party. In the text and notes of his "Feast of the Poets" (1814), first published in "The Reflector," he insulted Scott, Coleridge, and Wordsworth,—and made "for" rhyme to "straw". When his "Story of Rimini" appeared (1816), it told Dante's tale of Paolo and Francesca with a Cockney jauntiness, and abounded in such epithets as "perky," "bosomy," "farmy," "winy Hunt's theory was that "the harmonious freedom of our old poets"—"their freedom in continuing the sense of the heroic rhyming couplets," should be "united with the vigour of Dryden". His verse was based on Chaucer's, and on some examples of the seventeenth century, and his metrical example influenced Shelley, while Keats followed him in re-telling Italian stories, and, at first, even in his affectations.
"Rimini" and its author were furiously attacked, for reasons of politics, by the young Tory writers in "Blackwood's Magazine," to whom Hunt's ineradicable vanity and lack of taste lent handles. He was dubbed "King of the Cockneys," and Keats himself shrank from his ways and manners. He joined Byron and Shelley in Italy in 1822; they were to work together on a journal, "The Liberal," but, from the first, and especially after the death of Shelley, the relations of Byron with the needy and familiar Hunt were intolerably unpleasant. In 1828, after Byron's death, Hunt avenged himself in his "Lord Byron and His Contemporaries," a book which, as he came to see, should never have been written.
The rest of Hunt's life was spent in journalism, mainly literary; his essays, often delightful reading, were republished in "Men, Women, and Books," "Imagination and Fancy," "A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla," while in his last work, "Autobiography," he forgives all his enemies, among whom he had actually reckoned Sir Walter Scott. He was the friend of Dickens and Carlyle. He wrote concerning Carlyle's style: "How could he exculpate this style, in which he denounces so many 'shams,' of being itself a sham? of being affected, unnecessary, and ostentatious? a jargon got up to confound pretension with performance, and reproduce endless German talk under the guise of novelty?" Here was candour: Leigh Hunt cultivated the virtue described as "the independence of the heart".
William Hazlitt.
Lamb as a man was universally beloved, except by Carlyle, and as a writer he is the friend of the human race. On the other side, Lamb's friend and fellow-essayist, William Hazlitt, in a letter to Leigh Hunt, says, "I want to know why everybody has such a dislike to me". There is much pathos and a plentiful lack of humour in the question. The brief answer is that Hazlitt acted as if he were trying to make himself disliked. In this he was pretty successful; he quarrelled even with Lamb, but never shook Lamb's constant affection. There is so much of Hazlitt's self in his works that, greatly as his good qualities delight us, there are times when we can scarcely forgive his defects, and are apt to conceive a personal grudge against him.