If, again, your mind hankers after an
earlier and more romantic literature, Lamb's _Specimens of English
Dramatic Poets Contemporary with Shakspere_ has already, in an
enchanting fashion, piloted you into a vast gulf of "the sea which is
Shakspere."
Again, in Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt you will discover essayists inferior
only to Lamb himself, and critics perhaps not inferior. Hazlitt
is unsurpassed as a critic. His judgments are convincing and his
enthusiasm of the most catching nature. Having arrived at Hazlitt or
Leigh Hunt, you can branch off once more at any one of ten thousand
points into still wider circles. And thus you may continue up and down
the centuries as far as you like, yea, even to Chaucer. If you chance
to read Hazlitt on _Chaucer and Spenser_, you will probably put
your hat on instantly and go out and buy these authors; such is his
communicating fire! I need not particularise further. Commencing with
Lamb, and allowing one thing to lead to another, you cannot fail to be
more and more impressed by the peculiar suitability to your needs of
the Lamb entourage and the Lamb period. For Lamb lived in a time of
universal rebirth in English literature. Wordsworth and Coleridge
were re-creating poetry; Scott was re-creating the novel; Lamb was
re-creating the human document; and Hazlitt, Coleridge, Leigh Hunt,
and others were re-creating criticism.
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