plot of his Recruiting Officer) and bringing home with me, "at one proud swoop," a copy of Milton's Paradise Lost and another of Burke's Reflections on the French Revolutionboth which I have still; and I still recollect, when I see the 5 covers, the pleasure with which I dipped into them as I returned with my double prize. I was set up for one while. That time is past, "with all its giddy raptures "; but I am still anxious to preserve its memory, "embalmed with odors." With respect to the first of these works, I would be permitted 10 to remark here, in passing, that it is a sufficient answer to the German criticism which has since been started against the character of Satan (viz., that it is not one of disgusting deformity, or pure, defecated malice) to say that Milton has there drawn, not the abstract principle of evil, not a devil 15 incarnate, but a fallen angel. This is the Scriptural account, and the poet has followed it. We may safely retain such passages as that well-known one, 20 "His form had not yet lost All her original brightness; nor appear'd for the theory which is opposed to them "falls flat upon the grunsel edge and shames its worshippers." Let us hear no more, then, of this monkish cant and bigoted outcry for 25 the restoration of the horns and tail of the devil. Again, as to the other work, Burke's Reflections, I took a particular pride and pleasure in it, and read it to myself and others for months afterwards. I had reason for my prejudice in favor of this author. To understand an adversary is some praise; 30 to admire him is more. I thought I did both; I knew I did one. From the first time I ever cast my eyes on anything of Burke's (which was an extract from his Letter to a Noble Lord, in a three-times-a-week paper, The St. James's Chronicle, in 1796) I said to myself, "This is true eloquence: this 35 is a man pouring out his mind on paper." All other style seemed to me pedantic and impertinent. Dr. Johnson's was walking on stilts; and even Junius's (who was at that time a favorite with me), with all his terseness, shrunk up into little antithetic points and well-trimmed sentences. But Burke's style was forked and playful as the lightning, crested like the serpent. He delivered plain things on a plain ground; but when he rose, there was no end of his flights 5 and circumgyrations-and in this very Letter “he, like an eagle in a dove-cot, fluttered his Volscians" (the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale) "in Corioli." I did not care for his doctrines. I was then, and am still, proof against their contagion; but I admired the author, and was 10 considered as not a very staunch partisan of the opposite side, though I thought myself that an abstract proposition was one thing, a masterly transition, a brilliant metaphor, another. I conceived, too, that he might be wrong in his main argument, and yet deliver fifty truths in arriving at 15 a false conclusion. I remember Coleridge assuring me, as a poetical and political set-off to my sceptical admiration, that Wordsworth had written an Essay on Marriage which, for manly thought and nervous expression, he deemed incomparably superior. As I had not, at that time, seen any 20 specimens of Mr. Wordsworth's prose style, I could not express my doubts on the subject. If there are greater prosewriters than Burke, they either lie out of my course of study or are beyond my sphere of comprehension. I am too old to be a convert to a new mythology of genius. The niches 25 are occupied, the tables are full. If such is still my admiration of this man's misapplied powers, what must it have been at a time when I myself was in vain trying, year after year, to write a single essay, nay, a single page or sentence; when I regarded the wonders of his pen with the longing eyes of 30 one who was dumb and a changeling; and when to be able to convey the slightest conception of my meaning to others in words was the height of an almost hopeless ambition. But I never measured others' excellences by my own defects, though a sense of my own incapacity and of the steep, im- 35 passable ascent from me to them made me regard them with greater awe and fondness. I have thus run through most of my early studies and favorite authors, some of whom I have since criticised more at large. Whether those observations will survive me I neither know nor do I much care; but to the works themselves, "worthy of all acceptation," and to the feelings they 5 have always excited in me since I could distinguish a meaning in language, nothing shall ever prevent me from looking back with gratitude and triumph. To have lived in the cultivation of an intimacy with such works, and to have familiarly relished such names, is not to have lived quite in vain. 10 There are other authors whom I have never read, and yet whom I have frequently had a great desire to read from some circumstance relating to them. Among these is Lord Clarendon's History of the Grand Rebellion, after which I have a hankering from hearing it spoken of by good judges, from 15 my interest in the events and knowledge of the characters from other sources, and from having seen fine portraits of most of them. I like to read a well-penned character, and Clarendon is said to have been a master in this way. I should like to read Froissart's Chronicles, Holinshed and 20 Stowe, and Fuller's Worthies. I intend, whenever I can, to read Beaumont and Fletcher all through. There are fiftytwo of their plays, and I have only read a dozen or fourteen of them. A Wife for a Month and Thierry and Theodoret are, I am told, delicious, and I can believe it. I should like 25 to read the speeches in Thucydides, and Guicciardini's History of Florence, and Don Quixote in the original. I have often thought of reading The Loves of Persiles and Sigismunda and the Galatea of the same author. But I somehow reserve them, like 66 another Yarrow." I should also like 30 to read the last new novel (if I could be sure it was so) of the author of Waverley; no one would be more glad than I to find it the best. Charles Lamb. 1775-1834. NEW YEAR'S EVE. (From The Essays of Elia, 1823.) Every man hath two birthdays: two days, at least, in every year, which set him upon revolving the lapse of time as it affects his mortal duration. The one is that which in an especial manner he termeth his. In the gradual desuetude of old observances, this custom of solemnizing our proper 5 birthday hath nearly passed away, or is left to children, who reflect nothing at all about the matter, nor understand anything in it beyond cake and orange. But the birth of a New Year is of an interest too wide to be pretermitted by king or cobbler. No one ever regarded the first of January with 10 indifference. It is that from which all date their time and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam. Of all sounds of all bells-(bells, the music nighest bordering upon heaven)—most solemn and touching is the peal 15 which rings out the Old Year. I never hear it without a gathering up of my mind to a concentration of all the images that have been diffused over the past twelvemonth; all I have done or suffered, performed or neglected-in that regretted time. I begin to know its worth, as when a person dies. It 20 takes a personal color; nor was it a poetical flight in a contemporary when he exclaimed, "I saw the skirts of the departing Year.” It is no more than what in sober sadness every one of us seems to be conscious of in that awful leave-taking. I am 25 sure I felt it, and all felt it with me, last night; though some of my companions affected rather to manifest an exhilaration 5 at the birth of the coming year than any very tender regrets for the decease of its predecessor. But I am none of those who "Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest." I am naturally, beforehand, shy of novelties; new books, new faces, new years-from some mental twist which makes it difficult in me to face the prospective. I have almost ceased to hope, and am sanguine only in the prospects of other (former) years. I plunge into foregone visions and 10 conclusions. I encounter pellmell with past disappointments. I am armor-proof against old discouragements. I forgive, or overcome in fancy, old adversaries. I play over again for love, as the gamesters phrase it, games for which I once paid so dear. I would scarce now have any of those untoward 15 accidents and events of my life reversed. I would no more alter them than the incidents of some well-contrived novel. Methinks it is better that I should have pined away seven of my goldenest years, when I was thrall to the fair hair and fairer eyes of Alice W- -n, than that so passionate a love20 adventure should be lost. It was better that our family should have missed that legacy which old Dorrell cheated us of than that I should have at this moment two thousand pounds in banco and be without the idea of that specious old rogue. 25 30 In a degree beneath manhood, it is my infirmity to look back upon those early days. Do I advance a paradox when I say that, skipping over the intervention of forty years, a man may have leave to love himself without the imputation of self-love? If I know aught of myself, no one whose mind is introspective and mine is painfully so-can have a less respect for his present identity than I have for the man Elia. I know him to be light and vain and humorsome; a *; addicted to * notorious * * ; averse from 35 counsel, neither taking it nor offering it;— besides; a stammering buffoon; what you will; lay it on, and spare not; I subscribe to it all, and much more than * * * * * |