this class are the Essays of Elia and
Hazlitt's Table Talk. I would willingly include
Carlyle's French Revolution; but, despite
its picturesqueness, it is so crammed with
grand suggestive truths, that I dare not
open it.

Imagine me then at the breakfast table. I
calmly pour out my coffee, cut the top off my
egg, prop up my volume against the sugar-basin,
and commence a meal, which tires out
the patience of the maid of all work, and
would excite the ire of my landlady, but that
I pay my rent regularly, and seldom grumble.
If I am at all ruffled in temper, I take
Hazlitt. There is something in the perversity
of this author, that at such times strikes
an harmonious note in my breast. His
intense hatreds, his strong expressions, and
his wilfulness, are delightful. Imagine the
gratification it is to an angry man to read
the following: "Most men's minds are to me
like musical instruments out of tune. Touch
a particular key, and it jars and makes harsh
discord with your own." Where can you find
any greater sympathy than these words
convey to you, when you are ill tempered? They
are not harsh discords to an angry man; but
the most enchanting harmony, expressing to
a nicety, what he in his savageness feels
thoroughly: it is almost worth being out of
temper to meet with such consolation. Where-ever
I come in contact with Hazlitt's works,
I cannot help noticing how strongly he
allowed his feelings to overcome his judgment.
For twenty years, in nearly every essay
that he wrote on art, he trumpeted the
praises of a certain portrait by Titian in the
Louvre, known as the man with the glove
(which, by the way, Visconti only attributed
to Titian). It was Hazlitt's master-piece; the
picture that he swore by: Velasquez,
Rembrandt, Vandyke, Sir Antonio More,
Reynolds, Gainsborough, may all have painted
portraits; but the man with the glove was
the portrait, the ideal standard of this branch
of pictorial art. But mark the change! My
author was, as every one knows, a worshipper
of Napoleon I., and when Hazlitt visited
Paris again, after his hero had fallen, he
regarded everything with so jaundiced an eye,
that he could no longer appreciate the
excellences of the man with the glove, and threw
off his allegiance to it, by calumniously
asserting that it must "have been painted
upon!"

When I am in a gentle mood, I love
Charles Lamb at my breakfast. There
is something so kindly, so humanising
in every word he wrote, and his humour
never parades, or obtrudes itself, but ripples
through his writings with a pleasant
murmur, harmonising with the gentleness and
good-heartedness of the sentiments. The
simple and single-mindedness of the man
permeate his writings and give them one of
their most lasting charms, and one of the
foremost of their graces; perhaps, in none
of the essays are these more apparent than in
"My First Play," and "Old China." These
are complete Dutch pictures (much exalted) of
the habits and tastes of a quiet, studious, and
yet genial man whom you can love and
respect. The quaint grace and kindliness with
which he treated everything he touched led
him to handle subjects that no one else would
have cared to take up. We have had, Heaven
knows! millions upon millions of songs,
praising earth, air, and water, women and
wine; but who, besides Charles Lamb, has
recited the praises of chimney sweeps? Not the
sweeps in their tinsel and dirty May-day
finery, which a ray of the glorious sun that
shone on May-days of the olden time might
light up with a touch of fancy, but grimy
young sweeps; Ethiopic dwarfs, dirty with
soot, and tired with climbing. Charles
Lamb has sung the praises of such as these,
with a tenderness, a poetic and a graceful
fancy, that washes the soot off their faces,
and makes cherubims of them. Boswell's
Johnson was one of my breakfast books,
but I got to be a little tired of the
sententious "Sir," and the sententious "I;" so
I have shut out Boswell from my morning
repast, and have placed the book on a high
shelf in my library. Honest, gossipping
Pepys is a favourite with me, but Evelyn is
a greater. If Pepys gives me an amusing
picture of his times, Evelyn affords me
more food for reflection, and presents a
portrait of manners and customs embracing a
wider field.

But to resume, or I shall never get through
my article or my breakfast. I say that when
I have made up my mind to work, I
hurry over breakfast, scald myself with the
coffee, choke myself with dry toast, and
gobble up my egg in a manner that
afterwards shocks me. For, in the matter of
eating eggs I am a true epicure. I consider
that an egg should be eaten slowly, so that
each spoonful yields its full amount of
flavour. Indeed, I am not sure whether eating
an egg is not an art upon which a treatise
might be written with advantage to mankind.
Having brought my breakfast to a hasty
conclusion, I hurry to my writing-table and
seize a pen, but unfortunately, just at that
precise moment, the discursiveness of my
mind is fatal to my plans, for I suddenly
remember that last night a friend asked me
where a particular couplet was to be found.
I contended it was in Dryden: he asserted,
with equal vehemence, it was in Cowley; my
discursive tendency therefore at once
compels me to look for the passage, and I mount
the ladder and take down Dryden. Now,
searching through the Annus Mirabilis is
not done in a moment. But, the evil does not
end there; for, no sooner have I found the
desired passage, than I dip into other parts
of the volume, and am lost for a time in the
satire of Absolom and Achitophel, and only
reclaim my mind from that, to spend the