Page:Mary Lamb (Gilchrist 1883).djvu/125

Rh rendered. Compared with the drawing by Hancock, done when Lamb was twenty-three, engraved in Cottle's Early Recollections of Coleridge, each may be said to corroborate the truth of the other, allowing for difference of age and aspect,—Hancock's being in profile, Hazlitt's (of which there is a good lithograph in Barry Cornwall's Memoir) nearly full face. The print from it prefixed to Fitzgerald's Lamb is almost unrecognisable. It was the last time Hazlitt took brush in hand, his grandson tells us; and it comes as a pleasant surprise—an indication that he was too modest in estimating his own gifts as a painter; and that the freshness of feeling and insight he displayed as an art critic were backed by some capacity for good workmanship.

It was whilst this portrait was being painted that the acquaintance between Lamb and Hazlitt ripened into an intimacy which, with one or two brief interruptions, was to be fruitful, invigorating on both sides and lifelong. Hazlitt was at this time staying with his brother John, a successful miniature-painter and a member of the Godwin circle much frequented by the Lambs.

"It is not well to be very poor which we certainly are at this present," Mary had lately written. This it was which spurred her on to undertake her first literary venture, the Tales from Shakespeare. The nature of the malady from which she suffered made continuous mental exertion distressing and probably injurious; so that without this spur she would never, we may be sure, have dug and planted her little plot in the field of literature and made of it a sweet and pleasant place for the young where they may play and be nourished, regardless of time and change. The first hint of any such scheme occurs in a letter to Sarah Stoddart dated