The next periodicals, the founding of which enlisted or brought out journalists or essay-writers of the true kind, were Blackwood's Magazine, founded at Edinburgh in 1817, and the London Magazine, of about the same date, the first with one of the longest as well as the most brilliant careers to run that any periodical can boast of, the latter as short-lived as it was brilliant. Indeed, the two had an odd and—in the Shakespearian sense—metaphysical opposition. Scotland and England, the country and the Cockney schools, Toryism and Liberalism (though the London was by no means so thoroughgoing on the Liberal side as Blackwood was on the Tory, and some of its most distinguished contributors were either Tory, as De Quincey, or neutral, as Lamb) fought out their differences under the two flags. And by a climax of coincidence, the fate of the London was practically decided by the duel which killed John Scott, its editor, this duel being the direct result of an editorial or contributorial quarrel between the two periodicals.
Both these magazines, besides being more frequent in appearance than the Edinburgh and the Quarterly, attempted, as their very title of "magazine" expressed, a much wider and more miscellaneous collection of subjects than the strict "review" theory permitted. From the very first Blackwood gave a welcome to fiction, to poetry, and to the widest possible construction of the essay, while, in almost every respect, the London was equally hospitable. Both had staffs of unusual strength, and of still more unusual personality; and while the London could boast of Charles Lamb, of Hazlitt, of De Quincey, of Hood, of Miss Mitford, besides many lesser names, Blackwood was practically launched by the triumvirate of Wilson, Lockhart, and the Ettrick Shepherd, with the speedy collaboration of Maginn.
The eldest of these, and if not the most vigorous, if very nearly the least prolific, yet the most exquisite and singular in literary genius, was Charles Lamb. He also was of the "Seventy Club," as we may call it, which founded the literature of the nineteenth century, and he was born in London on 18th February 1775. He was of rather lower birth than most of its other members (if membership can be predicated of a purely imaginary body), being the son of a lawyer's clerk and confidential servant; but he was educated at Christ's Hospital, and, through the interest of his father's employer, obtained, at the age of seventeen, a berth in the East India House, which assured his modest fortunes through life. But there was the curse of madness in his family, and though he himself escaped with but one slight and passing attack of actual lunacy, and at the cost of an eccentricity which only imparted a rarer touch to his genius, his elder sister Mary was subject to constant seizures, in one of which she stabbed her mother to the heart. She was more gently dealt with than perhaps would have been the case at present, and Lamb undertook the entire charge of her. She repaid him by unfailing care and affection during her lucid intervals (which were long and frequent), and by a sympathy with his own literary tastes, which not seldom made her a valuable collaborator as well as sympathiser. But the shadow was on his whole life: it made it impossible for him to marry, as he evidently would have done if it had not existed; and it perhaps had something to do with a venial but actual tendency on his part to take, rather fully, the convivial license of the time. But Lamb had no other weakness, and had not this in any ruinous degree. The quality of his genius was unique. He had from the first been a diligent and affectionate student of sixteenth and seventeenth century writers, and some of his first literary efforts, after some early sonnets (written with Coleridge and their friend Lloyd, and much fallen foul of by the Tory wits of the Anti-Jacobin), were connected with these studies. He and his sister wrote Tales from Shakespeare, which, almost alone of such things, are not unworthy of the original. He executed an Elizabethan tragedy, John Woodvil, which is rather better than it has been generally said to be; and he arranged a series (or rather two) of scenes from the Elizabethan drama itself, the short, interspersed, critical remarks of which, though occasionally a very little fanciful, contain the most exquisitely sympathetic criticism to be found anywhere in English literature.
It was not, however, till he had well reached middle age that the establishment of the London, the later publishers of which, Taylor and Hessey, were his friends, gave him that half accidental, and yet it would seem necessary, opening which has so often made the fame of men of genius, and which apparently they are by no means often able to make for themselves. Lamb's poems have occasionally an exquisite pathos and more frequently a pleasant humour, but they would not by themselves justify a very high estimate of him; and it is at least possible that, if we had nothing but the brief critical remarks on the dramatists above noticed, they would, independently of their extreme brevity, have failed to obtain for him the just reputation which they now hold, thanks partly to the fact that we have, as comments on them, the Essays of Elia and the delightful correspondence. This latter, after being first published soon after Lamb's death in 1834 (nine years after he had been pensioned off from the India House), by Mr., afterwards Serjeant and Sir Thomas Talfourd, has been gradually augmented, till it has at last found an excellent and probably final editor in Canon Ainger.
It is in these two collections that Lamb presents himself in the character which alone can confer on any man the first rank in literature, the character of unicity—of being some one and giving something which no one before him has given or has been. The Essays of Elia (a nom de guerre said to have been taken from an Italian comrade of the writer's elder brother John in the South Sea House, and directed by Lamb himself to be pronounced "Ell-ia") elude definition not merely as almost all works of genius do, but by virtue of something essentially elvish and tricksy in their own nature. It is easy to detect in them—or rather the things there are so obvious that there is no need of detection—an extraordinary familiarity with the great "quaint" writers of the seventeenth century—Burton, Fuller, Browne—which has supplied a diction of unsurpassed brilliancy and charm; a familiarity with the eighteenth century essayists which has enabled the writer to construct a form very different from theirs in appearance but closely connected with it in reality; an unequalled command over that kind of humour which unites the most fantastic merriment to the most exquisite pathos; a perfect humanity; a cast of thought which, though completely conscious of itself, and not in any grovelling sense humble (Lamb, forgiving and gentle as he was, could turn sharply even upon Coleridge, even upon Southey, when he thought liberties had been taken with him), was a thousand miles removed from arrogance or bumptiousness; an endlessly various and attractive set of crotchets and whimsies, never divorced from the power of seeing the ludicrous side of themselves; a fervent love for literature and a wonderful gift of expounding it; imagination in a high, and fancy almost in the highest degree. But when all this has been duly set down, how much remains both in the essays and in the letters, which in fact are chiefly distinguished from one another by the fact that the essays are letters somewhat less discursive and somewhat in fuller dress, the letters essays in the rough. For the style of Lamb is as indefinable as it is inimitable, and his matter and method defy selection and specification as much as the flutterings of a butterfly. One thing he has always, and that is charm; as for the rest he is an epitome of the lighter side of belles lettres, and not always of the lighter side only.
No one who studies Lamb can fail to see the enormous advantage which was given him by his possession of an official employment which brought him a small but sufficient income without very hard labour. Such literary work as his could never be done (at any rate for a length of time) as "collar-work," and even if the best of it had by chance been so performed, it must necessarily have been mixed, as that of Leigh Hunt is, with a far larger quantity of mere work to order. No such advantage was possessed by the third of the great trio of Cockney critics, or at least critics of the so-called Cockney school; for William Hazlitt, as much the greatest of English critics in a certain way as Lamb is in another and Jeffrey in a third (though a lower than either), was a Cockney neither by extraction nor by birth, nor by early sojourn, nor even by continuous residence in later life. His family was Irish, his father a Unitarian minister; he was born at Maidstone in 1778. When his father was officiating at Wem in Shropshire, in Hazlitt's twentieth year, Coleridge, who at times affected the same denomination, visited the place, and Hazlitt was most powerfully impressed by him. He was, however, divided between art and literature as professions, and his first essays were in the former, which he practised for some time, visiting the Louvre during the peace, or rather armistice, of Amiens, to copy pictures for some English collectors, and to study them on his own account. Returning to London, he met Lamb and others of the literary set in the capital, and, after some newspaper work, married Miss Stoddart, a friend of Mary Lamb's, and a lady of some property. He and his wife lived for some years at her estate of Winterslow on Salisbury Plain (long afterwards still a favourite resort of Hazlitt's), and then he went in 1812 once more to London, where abundant work on periodicals of all kinds, on the Liberal side, from daily newspapers to the Edinburgh Review, soon fell into his hands. But after a time he gave up most kinds of writing except literary, theatrical, and art criticism, the delivery of lectures on literature, and the composition of essays of a character less fanciful and less purely original than Lamb's, but almost as miscellaneous.
He lived till September 1830, the first of those early thirties of the nineteenth century which were to be as generally fatal to his generation of great English men of letters as the seventies of the eighteenth had been prolific of them; and his dying words, "Well, I have had a happy life," are noteworthy. For certainly that life would hardly have seemed happy to many. He quarrelled with his first wife, was divorced from her in Scotland, discreditably enough; published to the world with astounding lack of reticence the details of a frantic passion for Sarah Walker, a lodginghouse-keeper's daughter, who jilted him; and after marrying a second time, was left by his second wife. He had never been rich, and during the last years of his life was in positive difficulties, while for almost the whole period of his second sojourn in London he was the object of the most virulent abuse from the Tory organs, especially the Quarterly and Blackwood—abuse which, it must be confessed, he was both ready and able to repay in kind with handsome interest. He appears to have played the part of firebrand and makebate in the John Scott duel already referred to. Even with his friends he could not keep upon good terms, and the sincere gentleness of Lamb broke down at least once, as the easy good-nature of Leigh Hunt did many times, under the strain of his perverse and savage wrong-headedness.
But whether the critical and the unamiable temper are, as some would have it, essentially one, or whether their combination in the same person be mere coincidence, Hazlitt was beyond all question a great, a very great, critic—in not a few respects our very greatest. All his work, or almost all that has much merit, is small in individual bulk, though the total is very respectable. His longest book, his Life of Napoleon, which was written late and as a counterblast to Scott's, from the singular standpoint of a Republican who was an admirer of Bonaparte, has next to no value; and his earliest, a philosophical work in eighteenth century style on The Principles of Human Action, has not much. But his essays and lectures, which, though probably not as yet by any means exhaustively collected or capable of being identified, fill nine or ten volumes, are of extraordinary goodness. They may be divided roughly into three classes. The first, dealing with art and the drama, must take the lowest room, for theatrical criticism is of necessity, except in so far as it touches on literature rather than acting, of very ephemeral interest; and Hazlitt's education in art and knowledge of it were not quite extensive enough, nor the examples which in the first quarter of this century he had before him in England important enough, to make his work of this kind of the first importance. The best of it is the Conversations with Northcote, a painter of no very great merit, but a survivor of the Reynolds studio; and these conversations very frequently and very widely diverge from painting into literary and miscellaneous matters. The second class contains the miscellaneous essays proper, and these have by some been put at the head of Hazlitt's work. But although some of them, indeed, nearly all, display a spirit, a command of the subject, and a faculty of literary treatment which had never been given to the same subjects in the same way before, although such things as the famous "Going to a Fight," "Going a Journey," "The Indian Jugglers," "Merry England," "Sundials," "On Taste," and not a few more would, put together and freed from good but less good companions, make a most memorable collection, still his real strength is not here.
Great as Hazlitt was as a miscellaneous and Montaignesque essayist, he was greater as a literary critic. Literature was, though he coquetted with art, his first and most constant love; it was the subject on which, as far as English literature is concerned (and he knew little and is still less worth consulting about any other), he had acquired the largest and soundest knowledge; and it is that for which he had the most original and essential genius. His intense prejudices and his occasional inadequacy make themselves felt here as they do everywhere, and even here it is necessary to give the caution that Hazlitt is never to be trusted when he shows the least evidence of dislike for which he gives no reason. But to any one who has made a little progress in criticism himself, to any one who has either read for himself or is capable of reading for himself, of being guided by what is helpful and of neglecting what is not, there is no greater critic than Hazlitt in any language. He will sometimes miss—he is never perhaps so certain as his friends Lamb and Hunt were to find—exquisite individual points. Prejudice, accidental ignorance, or other causes may sometimes invalidate his account of authors or of subjects in general. But still the four great collections of his criticism, The Characters of Shakespeare, The Elizabethan Dramatists, The English Poets, and The English Comic Writers, with not a few scattered things in his other writings, make what is on the whole the best corpus of criticism by a single writer in English on English. He is the critics' critic as Spenser is the poets' poet; that is to say, he has, errors excepted and deficiencies allowed, the greatest proportion of the strictly critical excellencies—of the qualities which make a critic—that any English writer of his craft has ever possessed.
Blackwood's Magazine, the headquarters, the citadel, the place d'armes of the opposition to the Cockney school and of criticism and journalism that were Tory first of all, enlisted a younger set of recruits than those hitherto mentioned, and the special style of writing which it introduced, though exceedingly clever and stimulating, lent itself rather less to dispassionate literary appreciation than even the avowedly partisan methods of the Edinburgh. In its successful form (for it had a short and inglorious existence before it found out the way) it was launched by an audacious "skit" on the literati of Edinburgh written by John Wilson, John Gibson Lockhart, and James Hogg, while very soon after its establishment it was joined by a wild and witty Bohemian scholar from the south of Ireland, William Maginn, who, though before long he drifted away to other resorts, and ere many years established in Fraser a new abode of guerilla journalism, impressed on Blackwood itself, before he left it, several of its best-known features, and in particular is said to have practically started the famous Noctes Ambrosianæ. Of Hogg, enough has been said in a former chapter. For the critical purpose of "Maga," as Blackwood's Magazine loved to call itself, he was rather a butt, or, to speak less despiteously, a stimulant, than an originator; and he had neither the education nor indeed the gifts of a critic. Of each of the others some account must be given, and Maginn will introduce yet another flight of brilliant journalists, some of whom, especially the greatest of all, Carlyle, lived till far into the last quarter of the present century.