tic associations in his mind, as a part of old London Wall, or as the frontispiece (time out of mind) of the Gentleman's Magazine. He haunts Watling Street like a gentle spirit; the avenues to the playhouses are thick with panting recollections; and Christ's Hospital still breathes the balmy breath of infancy in his description of it! Whittington and his Cat are a fine hallucination for Mr. Lamb's historic Muse, and we believe he never heartily forgave a certain writer who took the subject of Guy Faux out of his hands. The streets of London are his fairyland, teeming with wonder, with life and interest to his retrospective glance, as it did to the eager eye of childhood; he has contrived to weave its tritest traditions into a bright and endless romance!

Mr. Lamb's taste in books is also fine; and it is peculiar. It is not the worse for a little idiosyncrasy. He does not go deep into the Scotch Novels; but he is at home in Smollett or Fielding. He is little read in Junius or Gibbon; but no man can give a better account of Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," or Sir Thomas Browne's "Urn-Burial," or Fuller's "Worthies," or John Bunyan's "Holy War." No one is more unimpressible to a specious declamation; no one relishes a recondite beauty more. His admiration of Shakspeare and Milton does not make him despise Pope; and he can read Parnell with patience and Gay with delight. His taste in French and German literature is somewhat defective; nor has he made much progress in the science of Political Economy or other abstruse studies, though he has read vast folios of controversial divinity, merely for the sake of the intricacy of style, and to save himself the pain of thinking.

Mr. Lamb is a good judge of prints and pictures. His admiration of Hogarth does credit to both, particularly when it is considered that Leonardo da Vinci is his next greatest favourite, and that his love of the actual does not proceed from a want of taste for the ideal. His worst fault is an over-eagerness of enthusiasm, which occasionally makes him take a surfeit of his highest favourites. Mr. Lamb excels in familiar conversation almost as much as in writing, when his modesty does not overpower his self-possession. He is as little of a proser as possible; but he blurts out the finest wit and sense in the world. He keeps a good deal in the background at first, till some excellent conceit pushes him forward, and then he abounds in whim and pleasantry. There is a primitive simplicity and self-denial about his manners and a Quakerism in his personal appearance, which is, however, relieved by a fine Titian head, full of dumb eloquence!

Mr. Lamb is a general favourite with those who know him. His character is equally singular and amiable. He is endeared to his

friends not less by his foibles than his virtues: he ensures their esteem by the one, and does not wound their self-love by the other. He gains ground in the opinion of others by making no advances in his own. We easily admire genius where the diffidence of the possessor makes our acknowledgment of merit seem like a sort of patronage or act of condescension, as we willingly extend our good offices where they are not exacted as obligations or repaid with sullen indifference.

The style of the Essays of Elia is liable to the charge of a certain mannerism. His sentences are cast in the mould of old authors; his expressions are borrowed from them; but his feelings and observations are genuine and original, taken from actual life or from his own breast; and he may be said (if any one can) "to have coined his heart for jests," and to have split his brain for fine distinctions! Mr. Lamb, from the peculiarity of his exterior and address as an author, would probably never have made his way by detached and independent efforts; but, fortunately for himself and others, he has taken advantage of the Periodical Press, where he has been stuck into notice; and the texture of his compositions is assuredly fine enough to bear the broadest glare of popularity that has hitherto shone upon them. Mr. Lamb's literary efforts have procured him civic honours (a thing unheard of in our times), and he has been invited, in his character of ELIA, to dine at a select party with the Lord Mayor. We should prefer this distinction to that of being poet-laureate. We would recommend to Mr. Waithman's perusal (if Mr. Lamb has not anticipated us) the "Rosamond Gray" and the "John Woodvil" of the same author, as an agreeable relief to the noise of a City feast and the heat of City elections.

A friend, a short time ago, quoted some lines from the last-mentioned of these works, which meeting Mr. Godwin's eye, he was so struck with the beauty of the passage, and with a consciousness of having seen it before, that he was uneasy till he could recollect where, and after hunting in vain for it in Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and other not unlikely places, sent to Mr. Lamb to know if he could help him to the author!

LEIGH HUNT.

WE should descant at greater length on the merits of Leigh Hunt, but that personal intimacy might be supposed to render us partial. It is well when personal intimacy produces this effect; and when the light, that dazzled us at a distance, does not on a closer inspection

turn out an opaque substance. This is a charge that none of his friends will bring against Mr. Leigh Hunt. He improves upon acquaintance. The author translates admirably into the man. Indeed, the very faults of his style are virtues in the individual. His natural gaiety and sprightliness of manner, his high animal spirits, and the vinous quality of his mind produce an immediate fascination and intoxication in those who come in contact with him, and carry off in society whatever in his writings may to some seem flat and impertinent. From great sanguineness of temper, from great quickness and unsuspecting simplicity, he runs on to the public as he does at his own fireside, and talks about himself, forgetting that he is not always among friends. His look, his tone are required to point many things that he says: his frank, cordial manner reconciles you instantly to a little overbearing, overweening self-complacency. "To be admired, he needs but to be seen: but perhaps he ought to be seen to be fully appreciated. No one ever sought his society who did not come away with a more favourable opinion of him: no one was ever disappointed, except those who had entertained idle prejudices against him. He sometimes trifles with his readers, or tires of a subject (from not being urged on by the stimulus of immediate sympathy); but in conversation he is all life and animation, combining the vivacity of the schoolboy with the resources of the wit and the taste of the scholar. The personal character, the spontaneous impulses, do not appear to excuse the author, unless you are acquainted with his situation and habits: like some great beauty who gives herself what we think strange airs and graces under a mask, but who is instantly forgiven when she shows her face.

We have said that Lord Byron is a sublime coxcomb: why should we not say that Mr. Hunt is a delightful one? There is certainly an exuberance of satisfaction in his manner which is more than the strict logical premises warrant, and which dull and phlegmatic constitutions know nothing of, and cannot understand till they see it. He is the only poet or literary man we ever knew who puts us in mind of Sir John Suckling or Killigrew, or Carew; or who united rare intellectual acquirements with outward grace and natural gentility. Mr. Hunt ought to have been a gentleman born, and to have patronised men of letters. He might then have played, and sung, and laughed, and talked his life away; have written manly prose, elegant verse: and his "Story of Rimini" would have been praised by Mr. Blackwood. As it is, there is no man now living who at the same time writes prose and verse so well, with the exception of Mr. Southey (an exception, we fear, that will be little palatable to either of these gentlemen). His proce-writings, how

ever, display more consistency of principle than the Laureate's, his verses more taste. We will venture to oppose his Third Canto of the "Story of Rimini " for classic elegance and natural feeling to any equal number of lines from Mr. Southey's Epics or from Mr. Moore's "Lalla Rookh." In a more gay and conversational style of writing, we think his "Epistle to Lord Byron" on his going abroad is a masterpiece; and the "Feast of the Poets," has run through several editions. A light familiar grace and mild unpretending pathos are the characteristics of his more sportive or serious writings, whether in poetry or prose. A smile plays round the sparkling features of the one; a tear is ready to start from the thoughtful gaze of the other. He perhaps takes too little pains, and indulges in too much wayward caprice in both.

A wit and a poet, Mr. Hunt is also distinguished by fineness of tact and sterling sense: he has only been a visionary in humanity, the fool of virtue. What, then, is the drawback to so many shining qualities, that has made them useless, or even hurtful to their owner? His crime is, to have been Editor of the Examiner ten years ago, when some allusion was made in it to the age of the present King; * and though His Majesty has grown older, our luckless politician is no wiser than he was then!

[Notes of a Journey through France and Italy, 1826. These notes first appeared in the columns of The Morning Chronicle. The volume has never been reprinted.]

THE LOUVRE.

THE first thing I did when I got to Paris was to go to the Louvre. It was indeed "first and last and midst" in my thoughts. Well might it be so, for it had never been absent from them for twenty years. I had gazed myself almost blind in looking at the precious works of art it then contained-should I not weep myself blind in looking at them again, after a lapse of half a life—or on finding them gone, and with them gone all that I had once believed and hoped of human-kind. . . . Thou sacred shrine of god-like magnificence, must not my heart fail and my feet stumble as I approach thee! How gladly would I kneel down and kiss thy threshold, and crawl into thy presence, like an Eastern slave! For here still linger the broken remains and the faded splendour of that proud monument of the triumphs of art and of the majesty of man's nature over * Hunt described him (he was then Prince Regent) as "" an Adonis of fifty."

the mock-majesty of thrones! Here Genius and Fame dwell together; "School calleth unto School," and mighty names answer to each other; that old gallery points to the long, dim perspective of waning years, and the shadow of Glory and of Liberty is seen afar off. In pacing its echoing floors, I hear the sound of the footsteps of my youth, and the dead start from their slumbers! . . In all the time that I had been away from thee, and amidst all the changes that had happened in it, did I ever forget, did I ever profane thee? Never for a moment or in thought have I swerved from thee, or from the cause of which thou wert the pledge and crown. Often have I sought thee in sleep, and cried myself awake to find thee, with the heartfelt yearnings of intolerable affection. Still didst thou haunt me, like a passionate dream-like some proud beauty, the queen and mistress of my thoughts. Neither pain nor sickness could wean me from thee

"" 'My theme in crowds, my solitary pride."

In the tangled forest or the barren waste-in the lowly hovel or the lofty palace, thy roofs reared their vaulted canopy over my head, a loftier palace, an ampler space-a "brave o'erhanging firmament," studded with constellations of art. Wherever I was, thou wert with me, above me and about me; and didst “hang upon the beatings of my heart," a vision and a joy unutterable. There was one chamber of the brain (at least) which I had only to unlock and be master of boundless wealth—a treasure-house of pure thoughts and cherished recollections. Tyranny could not master, barbarism slunk from it; vice could not pollute, folly could not gainsay it. I had but to touch a certain spring, and lo! on the walls the divine grace of Guido appeared free from blemish-there were the golden hues of Titian, and Raphael's speaking faces, the splendour of Rubens, the gorgeous gloom of Rembrandt, the airy elegance of Vandyke, and Claude's classic scenes lapped the senses in Elysium, and Poussin breathed the spirit of antiquity over them. There, in that fine old lumber-room of the imagination, were the "Transfiguration," and the "St. Peter Martyr," with its majestic figures and its unrivalled landscape background. There also were the two "St. Jeromes," "Domenichino's and Correggio's”—there “stood the statue that enchants the world"—there were the "Apollo" and the "Antinous," the "Laocoon," the "Dying Gladiator," "Diana and her Fawn," and all the glories of the antique world—

"There was old Proteus coming from the sea,

And aged Triton blew his wreathed horn."

Instead of the old Republican doorkeepers, with their rough