1. Slightly altered from Isaiah 29.8. 6. The Roman Juvenal, in Satires 11.27 of Horace 2. This paragraph is from appendix C of The (Quintas Horatius Flaccus), had said that 'From Statesman's Manual. Heaven it descends, 'Know Thyself.' ' The original
3. Matthew 6.22: 'The light of the body is the saying, 'Know Thyself,' was attributed by classical eye.' authors to the Delphic oracle.
4. Pietro Metastasio (1698-1782), a minor Italian 7. From The Statesman's Manual, appendix C. poet and author of opera librettos. Jean Racine Coleridge analyzes the character of Milton's Satan (1639?1699), the great French author of verse and goes on to recognize, and to warn his age tragedies. Set on dissociating himself from his against, the appeal of that type of Romantic hero youthful support for the Revolution, Coleridge (exemplified above all by the protagonists in enjoyed finding fault with French philosophy and Byron's romances and in his drama, Manfred), culture. 'Naturalist': one who studies natural sci-which was in large part modeled on the Satan of ence. Paradise Lost.
5. I.e., learned men who hold a mechanistic phi-8. Intellectual. losophy of nature. 9. In its theological sense: rejection by God.
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Means; these are the qualities that have constituted the COMMANDING GENIUS! these are the Marks that have characterized the Masters of Mischief, the Liberticides, and mighty Hunters of Mankind, from NIMROD1 to NAPOLEON. And from inattention to the possibility of such a character as well as from ignorance of its elements, even men of honest intentions too frequently become fascinated. Nay, whole nations have been so far duped by this want of insight and reflection as to regard with palliative admiration, instead of wonder and abhorrence, the Molocks2 of human nature, who are indebted, for the far larger portion of their meteoric success, to their total want of principle, and who surpass the generality of their fellow creatures in one act of courage only, that of daring to say with their whole heart, 'Evil, be thou my good!'3?All systemso far is power; and a systematic criminal, self- consistent and entire in wickedness, who entrenches villainy within villainy, and barricades crime by crime, has removed a world of obstacles by the mere decision, that he will have no
obstacles, but those of force and brute matter.
1816
1. In Genesis 10.9 Nimrod is described as 'a ment Moloch is an idol to whom firstborn children mighty hunter before the Lord.' The passage was are sacrificed. Milton adopted the name for the
traditionally interpreted to signify that Nimrod warlike fallen angel in Satan's company (see Par-
hunted down men, hence that he was the proto-adise Lost 2.43-107). type of all tyrants and bloody conquerors. 3. Spoken by Satan, Paradise Lost 4.110.
2. Molochs, monsters of evil. In the Old Testa- CHARLES LAMB 1775-1834
Charles Lamb was a near contemporary of Wordsworth and Coleridge. He numbered
these two poets among his close friends, published his own early poems in combi
nation with those of Coleridge in 1796 and 1797, and supported the Lyrical Ballads
and some of the other new poetry of his time. Yet Lamb lacks almost all the traits
and convictions we think of as characteristically 'Romantic.' He happily lived all his
life in the city and its environs. He could not abide Shelley or his poetry, and he
distrusted Coleridge's supernaturalism and Wordsworth's oracular sublimities and
religion of nature, preferring those elements in their poems that were human and
realistic. In an age when many of the important writers were fervent radicals and
some became equally fervent reactionaries, Lamb remained uncommitted in both
politics and religion, and although on intimate terms with such dedicated reformers
as William Hazlitt, William Godwin, Thomas Holcroft, and Leigh Hunt, he chose
them as friends, as he said, not for their opinions but 'for some individuality of
character which they manifested.' In his own writings he shared Wordsworth's con
cern with memories' power to transform the present moment and, like him, inter
jected a sense of the ideal into his representations of the actual and everyday. 'The
streets of London,' Hazlitt wrote, assessing the essays Lamb published under the
pseudonym Elia in the London Magazine, 'are his fairy-land, teeming with wonder,
with life and interest to his retrospective glance, as it did to the eager eye of
childhood.' Lamb was born in London at the Inner Temple, center of the English legal profes
sion. His father, who began his working life as a footman, was assistant to a lawyer
there. His paternal as well as maternal grandparents were servants. At the age of
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49 2 / CHARLES LAMB
seven he entered Christ's Hospital, the 'Bluecoat School' of his essay 'Christ's Hospital Five-and-Thirty Years Ago.' Childhood ended early. He left the school before he was fifteen and soon thereafter became a clerk in the accounting department of the East India Company, a huge commercial house, where he remained for thirty-three
