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.
Sparks are flying all about the place, and it will be not less than
a miracle if something combustible and indestructible in you
does not take fire.


I have only one cautionary word to utter. You may be saying
to yourself: "So long as I stick to classics I cannot go wrong."
You can go wrong. You can, while reading naught but very fine stuff,
commit the grave error of reading too much of one kind of stuff.
Now there are two kinds, and only two kinds. These two kinds are not
prose and poetry, nor are they divided the one from the other
by any differences of form or of subject. They are the inspiring kind