as Adam did while in Paradise and but one day old.  “As we passed along,” writes the essayist, “between Wem and Shrewsbury, and I eyed the blue hill tops seen through the wintry branches, or the red, rustling leaves of the sturdy oak-trees by the wayside, a sound was in my ears as of a siren’s song.  I was stunned, startled with it as from deep sleep; but I had no notion that I should ever be able to express my admiration to others in motley imagery or quaint allusion, till the light of his genius shone into my soul, like the sun’s rays glittering in the puddles of the road.  I was at that time dumb, inarticulate, helpless, like a worm by the wayside, crushed, bleeding, lifeless; but now, bursting from the deadly bands that bound them, my ideas float on winged words, and as they expand their plumes, catch the golden light of other years.  My soul has indeed remained in its original bondage, dark, obscure, with longings infinite and unsatisfied; my heart, shut up in the prison-house of this rude clay, has never found, nor will it ever find, a heart to speak to; but that my understanding also did not remain dumb and brutish, or at length found a language to express itself, I owe to Coleridge.”  Time and sorrow, personal ambition thwarted and fruitlessly driven back on itself, hopes for the world defeated and unrealised, changed the enthusiastic youth into a petulant, unsocial man; yet ever as he remembered that meeting and his wintry walk from Wem to Shrewsbury, the early glow came back, and a “sound was in his ears as of a siren’s song.”

We are not all hero-worshippers like Hazlitt, but most of us are so to a large extent.  A large proportion of mankind feel a quite peculiar interest in famous writers.  They like to read about them, to know what they said on this or the other occasion, what sort of house they inhabited, what fashion of dress they wore, if they liked any particular dish for dinner, what kind of women they fell in love with, and whether their domestic atmosphere was stormy or the reverse.  Concerning such men no bit of information is too trifling; everything helps to make out the mental image we have dimly formed for ourselves.  And this kind of interest is heightened by the artistic way in which time occasionally groups them.  The race is gregarious, they are visible to us in clumps like primroses, they are brought into neighbourhood and flash light on each other like gems in a diadem.  We think of the wild geniuses who came up from the universities to London in the dawn of the English drama.  Greene, Nash, Marlowe—­our first professional men of letters—­how they cracked their satirical whips, how they brawled in taverns, how pinched they were at times, how, when they possessed money, they flung it from them as if it were poison, with what fierce speed they wrote, how they shook the stage.  Then we think of the “Mermaid” in session, with Shakspeare’s bland, oval face, the light of a smile spread over it, and Ben Jonson’s truculent visage, and Beaumont and Fletcher sitting together in their beautiful friendship, and fancy as best we can the drollery, the repartee, the sage sentences, the lightning gleams of wit, the thunder-peals of laughter.