whose names on earth. In his review of Sismondi’s “Literature of the South” (Works, X, 62) Hazlitt cites among the proofs of Dante’s poetic power “his description of the poets and great men of antiquity, whom he represents ‘serene and smiling,’ though in the shades of death, ‘because on earth their names in fame’s eternal records shine for aye.’” As these lines have not been located in Dante, they have been ascribed to the lying memory of Lamb, from whose lips Hazlitt learned them.
[P. 330.] Mrs. Hutchinson, Lucy (b. 1620), whose life of her Puritan husband, Colonel Hutchinson, had appeared in 1806, presumably shortly before the conversation recorded in this essay.
one in the room. Mary Lamb, the sister of the essayist.
Ninon de Lenclos (1615-1705), for a long time the leader of fashion in Paris and the patroness of poets.
Voltaire (1694-1778), the sceptical philosopher of the Enlightenment; Rabelais (1490-1553), the greatest French humorist, author of “Gargantua and Pantagruel”; Molière (1622-1673), the master of French comedy; Racine (1639-1699), the master of French classic tragedy; La Fontaine (1621-1695), author of the “Fables”; La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680), celebrated for his book of cynical “Maxims” which Hazlitt imitated in his “Characteristics”; St. Evremont (1610-1703), a critic.
[P. 331.] Your most exquisite reason. Cf. “Twelfth Night,” ii, 3, 155.
Oh, ever right. “Coriolanus,” ii, 1, 208.
H——. This speech is attributed to Lamb in “Literary Remains,” but wrongly so according to Waller and Glover “because, in the first place, the speech seems more characteristic of Hunt than of Lamb, and, secondly, because the volume of the New Monthly in which the essay appeared contains a list of errata in which two corrections (one of them relating to initials) are made in the essay and yet this ‘H——’ is left uncorrected.”
ON READING OLD BOOKS
This essay was first published in the London Magazine for February, 1821, and republished in the “Plain Speaker.”