his critical power is its width and its versatility, The deepest of all his literary affections, that for Milton, no more interfered with his intense enjoyment of Pope, than did his delight in Pope delay for an instant his recognising the value of Cowper and Burns and their successors. Lamb is our best and wholesomest example of that rare ability to value and enjoy one great literary school without at the same time disparaging its opposites. And he had that even rarer ability to recognise that the same writer often rises above himself, and often sinks below it. These early letters to Coleridge are full of proofs of this. He laughs as frankly at what was namby-pamby in Coleridge and Wordsworth, as he descants with genuine enthusiasm on the "Ancient Mariner " and the "Lines written above Tintern Abbey." He anticipates, curiously enough, the AntiJacobin in parodying Southey and Coleridge's "dactylics" on the "Soldier's Wife," which Coleridge had sent him in a letter in the summer of 1796: "What shall I say," he replies, "to your dactyls? They are what you would call good per se, but a parody on some of 'em is just now suggesting itself, and you shall have it rough and unlicked; I mark with figures the lines parodied : 4. Sorely your dactyls do drag along limp-footed. 5. Sad is the measure that hangs a clog round 'em so. 6. Meagre and languid, proclaiming its wretchedness. 1. Weary, unsatisfied, not little sick of 'em. 11. Cold is my tired heart, I have no charity. 2. Painfully trav'lling thus over the rugged road. 7. O begone, measure, half-Latin, half-English then. 12. Dismal your dactyls are, God help ye, rhyming ones!" 1 Many of you will recall how irresistibly these unfortunate "experiments in metre" by poor Southey appealed to the parodying-instinct of his enemies. Canning and Frere both had their fling at them in the Anti-Jacobin; Byron has his allusion in the familiar line, God help thee, Southey, and thy readers too : but Lamb, you see, had been before them, and yet, because he was an all-round, and not a onesided critic, he passed for a blind worshipper of the young Jacobins. "Messrs. Lamb and Lloyd," says Byron in a note to the mention of their names in English Bards, "the most ignoble followers of Southey and Co." How little he knew! Or again, notice the following curious criticism and prediction concerning a too-well-known 1 [The lines are as follows, the first, second, and fourth stanzas being by Southey, the third by Coleridge : Weary way-wanderer, languid and sick at heart, As o'er thy shoulder thou lookest to hush the babe, Cold is thy hopeless heart even as charity Cold are thy famished babes; God help thee, widowed one.] At effusion of Coleridge's. In 1796 Coleridge had published his first little volume of poems. the end of that year a second edition is in preparation, and its author is consulting Lamb as to what poems are to be retained from the former, and what new ones are to be added. Coleridge was (oddly enough) for omitting the musical and buoyant stanzas imitated from Ossian, called the "Complaint of Ninathoma," and beginning, How long will ye round me be swelling, O ye blue-tumbling waves of the sea? and Lamb earnestly pleads for their being allowed to stand: 66 Let me protest strongly against your rejecting the Complaint of Ninathoma," on page 86. The words, I acknowledge, are Ossian's, but you have added to them the "music of Caril." If a vicarious substitute be wanting, sacrifice (and 'twill be a piece of self-denial too) the "Epitaph on an Infant," of which its author seems so proud, so tenacious. Or if your heart be set on perpetuating the four-line wonder, I'll tell you what to do: Sell the copyright of it at once to a country statuary; commence, in this manner, Death's prime poet-laureate; and let your verses be adopted in every village round, instead of those hitherto famous ones, Afflictions sore long time I bore, You will not need telling that Lamb referred to the quatrain, Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade, Death came with timely care, to which Coleridge had allotted a whole page of his former edition, and of which he had indeed shown himself "tenacious," for it had already appeared twice before, in the Morning Post and in the Watchman. Coleridge was, perhaps, a little nettled at his friend's frank criticism, for he rejected "Ninathoma" (though he restored it in later editions) and retained the epitaph. But Lamb's playful prediction was destined to be fulfilled. No country statuary ever secured a monopoly of the lines, but they will be found, as you know, in almost every churchyard in the kingdom. In So far we have only discovered that Lamb possessed that easy and common critical faculty which detects the weaknesses of a writer; but side by side may be found abundant proof that he recognised at once the strength and value of the new poetry, while other critics were only perplexed by its novelty and uncertain what to think. 1798 Wordsworth and Coleridge published their little joint volume, the Lyrical Ballads, containing among other now familiar and classical poems, the "Ancient Mariner." Even Southey, it appears, was offended by Coleridge's masterpiece, and Lamb writes to him, in November of that year, to remonstrate :- If you wrote that review in Critical Review, I am sorry you are so sparing of praise to the "Ancient Mariner"; so far from calling it, as you do, with some wit but more severity, "A Dutch Attempt, etc., etc.," I call it a right English attempt, and a successful one, to dethrone German sublimity. You have selected a passage fertile in unmeaning miracles, but have passed by fifty passages as miraculous as the miracles they I never so deeply felt the pathetic as in celebrate. that part, A spring of love gushed from my heart, And I blessed them unaware. It stung me into high pleasure, through sufferings. Lloyd does not like it; his head is too metaphysical, and your taste too correct; at least, I must allege something against you both to excuse my own dotage So lonely 'twas, that God Himself Scarce seemèd there to be. But you allow some elaborate beauties-you should have extracted 'em. The "Ancient Mariner plays more tricks with the mind than that last poem, which is yet one of the finest written. "That last poem," here referred to, is no other than the immortal poem of Wordsworth's, which had been placed last in the little joint volume— the "Lines written above Tintern Abbey." The world was long in making up its mind on the subject, for the professional reviewers of that day would have nothing to say to it; but Lamb's judgment has prevailed, that prevailed, that most assuredly among England's finest poems is that which contains the lines, For I have learned To look on Nature, not as in the hour |