love feed on doubts, that never yet cou'd thrive on such a diet? If I have granted your request-Oh!-Why will you ever say that you have studied me, and give so great an instance to the contrary? that wretched if-speaks as if I would refuse what you desire, or cou'd; both which are equally impossible. My dear Princess, there needs no new approaches, where the breach is made already: nor must you ever ask any where but of your fair self, for any thing that shall concern Your humble servant.

TO CORRESPONDENTS.

C. W. E, writes to us, as a Companion should. We have not yet looked at the Dream, having been, in fact, hardly able to write these notices to Correspondents, owing to a fit of illness. The vicious late hours into which our theatrical criticisms have brought us, are new to our habits of late years; and, coming upon a state of health that has been a good deal tried, have given us a shaking.

Our friend Horatio need not have apologised for his youth. It is a fault (as the old ladies say) that will mend every day; and besides, as we are not among those who think that men are apt to grow wiser as they grow older, there are few things more interesting to us than the approbation of an intelligent youth in the bloom of his enthusiasm. May our friend be as wise at forty as he is at twenty; and find out all sorts of good things, where others may have no such eyesight. No matter if he makes a good deal of what he sees. If all the world had the same faculty, what a brave globe we should make of it!-The passage about Mr Kean we shall have pleasure in extracting another time.

Gilbertus will be kind enough to take for his answer the one addressed to S. T. P. in the wrapper of the first Monthly Part.

Passages have been handed to us from the Belfast Northern Whig, the Taunton Courier, and the Kent Herald, expressing their approbation of our little work, and giving a personal value to their good word by the cordiality of it. It is as if they had drank so many glasses of wine with us. Our Irish friend was the more welcome, inasmuch as we sometimes fancy, that what he may see to like in us, is partly owing to certain Irish blood that we have in our veins.

Our Correspondent who asks us if we are "enamoured of Madame Pasta," will be answered by a confession we had made to that effect in our present number. It is a very innocent love; and such as we are apt to entertain for every face we meet, that has truth in it.

LONDON:

Published by HUNT and CLARKE, York street, Covent garden: and sold by all Booksellers and Newsvenders in town and country.-Price 4d.

PRINTED BY C. H. REYNELL, BROAD STREET, GOLDEN SQUARE.

THE COMPANION.

No. X. WEDNESDAY, MARCH 12, 1828.

"Something alone yet not alone, to be wished, and only to be found, in a friend."SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE.

REMARKS

SUGGESTED BY THE PERUSAL OF MR HAZLITT'S" PLAIN SPEAKER: OPINIONS ON BOOKS, MEN, AND THINGS.

[We had not intended to devote the whole of our present number to a review. We prefer occupying some portion of our work at all times with subjects of more immediate interest. But to genuine readers Mr Hazlitt is always welcome, for he sets them thinking; and illness must be our excuse with less thoughtful ones, for drawing upon some reflections which he occasioned us a year ago by the perusal of these masterly essays. The same reason must excuse us this week to our correspondents.]

Mr Burke. We have as great a regard for celebrated names, and the sanction of posterity, as our author can desire; but he does not scruple to make short work with the pretensions of Mr Fox; and for our parts we cannot but think that he over-rates Mr Burke. Nobody doubts that Burke was an extraordinary man; but we suspect that the impatience of the House of Commons under his long rhetorical speeches did not arise so much from his talking too well and too deeply, as from a doubt of his sincerity and the dislike of his attempting to lord it over them by false 10

VOL. I.

pretensions. At least, if this is paying too great a compliment to the House, it is the impression made upon ourselves by Mr Burke's writings, and by the writings of his panegyrists,-Mr Prior's late biography of him included! Mr Hazlitt speaks of himself as an impartial critic of Burke, because he differs from him in opinion; but we doubt whether at bottom he has any great faith in the sincerity of Burke's opinions, and whether, above all, he does not feel a great point of contact with him in the fact of his being eminently an author, and caring for power and effect above every thing else. Mr Hazlitt sees Mr Burke making a great sensation in his time, somehow or other, whether in the House or out of the House, upon the sole strength of his willing to do it, and pressing every trick and vantage of authorship into the service, even to the imitation of the love of truth; and he rejoices in seeing the writer getting the better of Lords and Commoners and critics, and mourns with him when his right hand is not borne out in its cunning. We do not say this in depreciation of Mr Hazlitt's own love of truth, of which we conceive him to have a much greater and more radical portion than the converted Reformer of the King's kitchen. But we suspect even Mr Hazlitt's love of power to be more on a par with his love of truth than he may chuse to discover; and whatever there is of impartial in his adoration of Mr Burke, we can more easily lay to the account of that illustrious person's address, than to anything else. But this was little, personally speaking, compared with the effect of his authorship. We cannot agree with Mr Hazlitt in the instances he has brought forward of Mr Burke's nice tact of truth in bringing together incongruous images, and making them bear upon the question, as in the case of Windsor Castle and the "fat Bedford level," the lord and the leviathan, and Louis the XVIth's head and that of Death in Milton. We are aware of the sympathies to be found in remote ideas, and the wit and the fine wisdom thence to be deduced; but we do not think, in these instances, at all events, that Mr Burke has done it; and we think he fails, partly because he substitutes the love of power for that of truth, and partly because he has a real reverence for those very sophistications and petty lordly authorities which we are called upon, in his pages, at once to think great and little.

If Mr Hazlitt's taste were in its usual state of independence, when contemplating this wielder of sentences, he would ask the question which he instinctively puts into the mouths of readers in general, who might demand, he says, what connexion there is "between a Peer of the Realm and that sea-beast,' of those

'Created hugest that swim the ocean stream ?'"

It is a burlesque in all but sophisticate eyes. There can be no such " enormous creature of the crown," when you come to bring the petty and the universal together in this manner, any more than a pin's head can contain an ocean. So of the likeness which Mr Burke (who was no more of a poet than orators are accustomed to be) was pleased to institute between Louis the XVIth's head, when he was king in form and appearance only, and the shadowy terror in Milton.

"What seem'd his head,

The likeness of a kingly crown had on."

"The person who heard him make the speech," says Mr Hazlitt, "said, that if ever a poet's language had been finely applied by an orator to express his thoughts and make out his purpose, it was in this instance. The passage, I believe, is not in his reported speeches; and I should think, in all likelihood, it fell still-born' from his lips; while one of Mr Canning's well-thumbed quotations out of Virgil would electrify the Treasury Benches, and be echoed".... [We cannot finish this passage, having lent somebody the volume that contains what we had but partly copied.]

Now we have nothing to say for "the well-thumbed quotations out of Virgil;" but Mr Burke's quotation, if less trite, is hardly less obvious; and there is a ludicrous incompatibility between poor Louis's head and that of the mighty shade of the poet. All the interest of the monarch's position will not bring two such images together with safety. The quotation becomes a sort of pun; and we will venture to say, would have been thought of and rejected by fifty persons. The mere will to make out the highest possible case, does not of necessity make it, though Mr Burke too often thought so, and Mr Hazlitt is inclined to follow him. The passion recoils on the speaker, and leaves his will and his self-love upon his hands. Mr Burke, on one occasion, rushed out of the House

in a frenzy, foaming at the mouth, because a country-gentleman exclaimed in despair, "I hope the Honourable Gentleman does not mean to read that large bundle of papers, and bore us with a long speech into the bargain." What was this but the enormous sense of personal importance, bursting with rage at having its claims thrown back in its face, and its secret detected? The action shewed that the House guessed right, however wrong they were themselves, or clownish in the mode of opposing enquiry.

Dreams and the Arabian Nights.-" Coleridge used to laugh at me," says Mr Hazlitt, " for my want of the faculty of dreaming;" and once, on my saying that I did not like the preternatural stories in the Arabian Nights (for the comic parts I love dearly) he said, "That must be because you never dream. There is a class of poetry built on this foundation, which is surely no inconsiderable part of our nature, since we are asleep and building up imaginations of this sort half our time." I had nothing to say against it it was one of his conjectural subtleties, in which he excels all the persons I ever knew; but I had some satisfaction in finding afterwards that I had Bishop Atterbury expressly on my side in this question, who has recorded his detestation of Sinbad the Sailor, in an interesting letter to Pope. Perhaps he too did not dream!"—Atterbury was a wit, and a swearing Bishop,—a man of the world. His opinion is worth little on such a question. That of the author of Kubla Khan and the Ancient Mariner is worth a great deal; and we are glad to have him with us. The Arabian Nights appeal to the sympathy of mankind with the supernatural world, with the unknown and the hazardous, with the possible and the remote. It fetches out the marvellous, included in our common-places. Surely this is an universal sympathy; and Mr Hazlitt, inasmuch as he is deficient in it, is not exempt from an extravagance and an error, but wanting in his portion of the common stock. Spenser and Chaucer, whom he admires so much, would, we may be sure, have been passionate admirers of the Arabian Nights. Milton would have called out for the conclusion of Sinbad the Sailor, had it been left unfinished, as he did for "the story of Cambuscan bold" with its magic ring and horse,— a manifest Arabian Night! Would it had been a week long!

On Reason and Imagination.-Mr Hazlitt has an excellent essay,