284 TlMEHRI. 



If your neighbour is cantankerous and you have no one 

 to whom you can tell the tale of his contentiousness, 

 which you have no doubt, ' learn'd and conn'd by rote' 

 turn up Hazlitt's essay * On Disagreeable People' and 

 you will find sympathy, and then read his letter to WiLLIAM 

 GiFFORD, Esq., and you will feel as though you could 

 annihilate your enemy with a stroke of your pen. All 

 Hazlitt's essays bearing on subje6ls conne6led with 

 our daily life are of surpassing interest, and pregnant with 

 clear good sense and acute judgment. Among my 

 favourites are ' The Condu6l of Life,' ' The Spirit of 

 Obligations,' ' Effeminacy of Chara6ler,' ' People with 

 One Idea,' 'Vulgarity and Affe6tation' and * Living to 

 One's Self.' 



The last of these is one of the most beautiful essays 

 that English literature can boast of. 



Lamb and Leigh Hunt are both writers that one can 

 welcome as intimate companions of solitude. 



Of De QuiNCEY, whose strange life so wonderfully 

 told in his English Opium Eater is known to all lovers 

 of books, I can only say, that he has furnished me with 

 some of the greatest intelle6lual treats that I have known. 

 What a picture of Oriental solemnity is painted in 

 these few words taken from * The Daughter of Leba- 

 non'! 



" Damascus, first-born of cities, Om el Denia, mother 

 of generations, that wast before ABRAHAM, that wast 

 before the Pyramids! what sounds are those that, from a 

 postern gate, looking eastwards over secret paths that 

 wind away to the far distant desert, break the solemn 

 silence of an oriental night ?" 



As one reads he feels the heavy starlit silence of the 



