FOOTNOTES:

“By the blood so basely shedOf the pride of Norfolk’s line,”

“By the blood so basely shed

Of the pride of Norfolk’s line,”

or scornfully settling accounts of his own with the asinine public. When he is not driven about by his moods, Hazlitt is setupon his fact alone; which he thinks is the sole concern of a prose-writer. Grace and force are collateral affairs. “In seeking for truth,” he says proudly, in words fit to be the epitome of his career, “I sometimes found beauty.”

The Edinburgh Review, in an article written while Hazlitt was in the full of his activity, summed up his shortcomings. “There are no great leading principles of taste to give singleness to his aims, nor any central points in his mind around which his feelings may revolve and his imaginations cluster. There is no sufficient distinction between his intellectual and his imaginative faculties. He confounds the truths of imagination with those of fact, the processes of argument with those of feeling, the immunities of intellect with those of virtue.” Here is an admirable arraignment, which goes to the heart of the matter. Hazlitt himself corroborates it in a confession of gallant directness: “I say what I think; I think what I feel.” It is this fatal confusion which makes his course now rapid and clear, anon clogged with vagaries,as if his rudder had run into a mesh of sea-weed; it is this which deflects his judgments, and leads him, in the shrewd phrase of a modern critic, to praise the right things for the wrong reasons. Hazlitt’s prejudices are very instructive, even while he bewails Landor’s or Cobbett’s, and tells you, as it were, with a tear in his eye, when he has done berating the French, that, after all, they are Catholics; and as for manners, “Catholics must be allowed to carry it, all over the world!” His exquisite treatment of Northcote, a winning old sharper for whom he cared nothing, is all due to his looking like a Titian portrait. So with the great Duke: Hazlitt hated the sight of him, “as much for his pasteboard visor of a face as for anything else.” One of his justifications for adoring Napoleon was, that at a levee a young English officer named Lovelace drew from him an endearing recognition: “I perceive, sir, that you bear the name of the hero of Richardson’s romance.” If you look like a Titian portrait, if you read and remember Richardson, you may trust acertain author, who knows a distinction when he sees it, to set you up for the idol of posterity. Hazlitt thought Mr. Wordsworth’s long and immobile countenance resembled that of a horse; and it is not impossible that this conviction, twin-born with that other that Mr. Wordsworth was a mighty poet, is responsible for various gibes at the august contemporary whose memory owes so much to his pen in other moods.

He is the most ingenuous and agreeable egoist we have had since the seventeenth-century men. It must be remembered how little he was in touch outwardly with social and civic affairs; how he was content to be the always young looker-on. There was nothing for him to do but fall back, under given conditions, upon his own capacious entity. The automaton called William Hazlitt is to him a toy made to his hand, to be reached without effort; the digest of all his study and the applicable test of all his assumptions. He knew himself; he could, and did, with decorum, approve or chastise himself in open court. “Hislife was of humanity the sphere.” His “I” has a strong constituency in the other twenty-five initials. In this sense, and in our current cant, Hazlitt is nothing if not subjective, super-personal. His sort of sentimentalism is an anomaly in Northern literature, even in the age when nearly every literary Englishman of note was variously engaged in baring his breast. Whether he would carp or sigh, he will still hold you by the button, as he held host and guest, master and valet, to pour into their adjacent ears the mad extravagances of theLiber Amoris. He gets a little tired at his desk, after battling for hours with the slow and stupid in behalf of the beauty ever-living; he wants fresh air and a reverie; he must digress or die. And from abstractions bardic as Carlyle’s, he runs gladly to his own approved self. This very circumstance, which lends Hazlitt’s pages their curious blur and stain, is the same which stamps his individuality, and gives those who are drawn towards him at all an unspeakably hearty relish for his company. What shall we call it?—the habit, notmaudlin in him, of speaking out, of draining his well of emotion for the benefit of the elect; nay, even of delicate lyric whimperings, beside which

“Poore Petrarch’s long-deceasèd woes”

take on a tinsel glamour. As the dancing-girl carries her jewels, every one in sight as she moves, so our “Faustus, that was wont to make the schools ring withSic probo,” steps into the forum jingling and twinkling with personalia. He is quite aware of the figure he may cut: he does not stumble into an intimacy with you because he is absent-minded, or because he is liable to an attack of affectation. He is as conscious as Poussin’s giants, whom he once described as “seated on the tops of craggy mountains, playing idly on their Pan’s pipes, and knowing the beginning and the end of their own story.” Many sentences of his, from their structure, might be attributed to Coleridge, the single person from whom Hazlitt admits to have learned anything;[71]but there is no mistaking hisnote émue:that is as obvious as the syncopations in a Scotch tune, or the long eyes of Orcagna’s saints.

He wishes you to know, at every breathing-space, “how ill’s all here about my heart; but ’tis no matter.” Laying by or taking up an old print or folio, he loosens some fond confidence to that surprised novice, the common reader. Like Shelley here, as in a few other affectionate absurdities, the prince of prose, turning from his proper affairs, assures you that he, too, is human, hoping, unhappy; he also has lived in Arcadia. It is in such irrelevancies that he is fully himself, Hazlitt freed, Hazlitt autobiographic,“his chariot-wheels hot by driving fast.”[72]Who can forget the parentheses in his advices to his little son, about the scholar having neither mate nor fellow, and the god of love clapping his wings upon the river-bank to mock him as he passes by? Or the noble and moving passage inThe Pleasures of Painting, beginning with “My father was willing to sit as long as I pleased,” and ending with the longing for the revolution of the great Platonic year, that those times might come over again! He freshens with his own childhood the garden of larkspur and mignonette at Walworth, and “the rich notes of the thrush that startle the ear of winter . . . dear in themselves, and dearer for the sake of what is departed.” You care not so much for the placid stream by Peterborough as for his own wistful pilgrimage to the nighfarmhouse gate, where the ten-year-old Grace Loftus (his much-beloved mother, who survived him) used to gaze upon the setting sun. And in a choric outburst of praise for Mrs. Siddons, the splendor seems to culminate less in “her majestic form rising up against misfortune, an antagonist power to it” (what a truly Shakespearean breadth is in that description!); less in the sight of her name on the play-bill, “drawing after it a long trail of Eastern glory, a joy and felicity unutterable,” than in the widening dream of the happy lad in the pit, in his sovereign vision “of waning time, of Persian thrones and them that sat on them”; in the human life which appeared to him, of a sudden, “far from indifferent,” and in his “overwhelming and drowning flood of tears.” He can beautify the evening star itself, this innovator, who records that after a tranced and busy day at the easel, the day of Austerlitz, he watched it set over a poor man’s cottage with other thoughts and feelings than he shall ever have again. There is nothing ofle moi haïssablein all this. It is deliberatenaturalism; the rebellion against didactics and “tall talk,” the milestone of a return, parallel with that of Wordsworth, to the fearless contemplation of plain and near things. But in a professing logician, is it not somewhat peculiar? When has even a poet so centred the universe in his own heart, without offence?

Hazlitt threw away his brush, as a heroic measure, because he foresaw but a middling success. Many canvases he cut into shreds, in a fury of dissatisfaction with himself. Northcote, however, thought his lack of patience had spoiled a great painter. He was too full of worship of the masters to make an attentive artisan. The sacrifice, like all his sacrifices, great or small, left nothing behind but sweetness, the unclouded love of excellence, and the capacity of rejoicing at another’s attaining whatever he had missed. But the sense of disparity between supreme intellectual achievement and that which is only partial and relative, albeit of equal purity, followed him like a frenzy. Comparison is yet moredifficult in literature than in art, and Hazlitt could take some satisfaction in the results of his second ardor. He felt his power most, perhaps, as a critic of the theatre. English actors owe him an incalculable debt, and their best spirits are not unmindful of it. He was reasonably assured of the duration and increase of his fame. Has he not, in one of his headstrong digressions, called the thoughts in hisTable-Talk“founded as rock, free as air, the tone like an Italian picture?” Even there, however, the faint-heartedness natural to every true artist troubled him. He went home in despair from the spectacle of the Indian juggler, “in his white dress and tightened turban,” tossing the four brass balls. “To make them revolve round him at certain intervals, like the planets in their spheres, to make them chase one another like sparkles of fire, or shoot up like flowers or meteors, to throw them behind his back, and twine them round his neck like ribbons or like serpents; to do what appears an impossibility, and to do it with all the ease, the grace, the carelessnessimaginable; to laugh at, to play with the glittering mockeries, to follow them with his eye as if he could fascinate them with its lambent fire, or as if he had only to see that they kept time to the music on the stage—there is something in all this which he who does not admire may be quite sure he never really admired anything in the whole course of his life. It is skill surmounting difficulty, and beauty triumphing over skill. . . . It makes me ashamed of myself. I ask what there is that I can do as well as this? Nothing.” A third person must give another answer. The whole passage offers a very exquisite parallel; for in just such a daring, varied, and magical way can William Hazlitt write. The astounding result, “which costs nothing,” is founded, in each case, upon the toil of a lifetime. Hazlitt’s style is an incredible thing. It is not, like Lamb’s, of one warp and woof. It soars to the rhetorical sublime, and drops to hard Saxon slang. It is for all the world, and not only for specialists. Its range and change incorporate the utmost of many men.The trenchant sweep, the simplicity and point of Newman at his best, are matched by the pages onCobbett, onFox, andOn the Regal Character;and there is, to choose but one opposite instance, in the paperOn the Unconsciousness of Genius, touching Correggio, a fragment of pure eloquence of a very ornate sort, whose onward bound, glow, and volley can give Mr. Swinburne’sEssays and Studiesa look as of sails waiting for the wind. The same hand which fills a brief with epic cadences and invocations overwrought, throws down, often without an adjective, sentence after sentence of ringing steel: “Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity, and afraid of being overtaken by it.” “It is not the omission of individual circumstance, but the omission of general truth, which constitutes the little, the deformed, and the short-lived in art.” The man’s large voice in these aphorisms is Hazlitt’s unmistakably. If it be not as novel to this generation as if he were but just entering the lists of authorship, it is because his fecundating mind has been long enrichingat second-hand the libraries of the English world. He comes forth, like another outrider, Rossetti, so far behind his heralds and disciples, that his mannered utterance seems familiar, and an echo of theirs. For it may be said at last, thanks to the numerous reprints of the last seven years, and thanks to a few competent critics, whom Mr. Stevenson leads, that Hazlitt’s robust work is in a fair way to be known and appraised, by a public which is a little less unworthy of him than his own. His method is entirely unscientific, and therefore archaic. If we can profit no longer by him, we can get out of him cheer and delight: and these profit unto immortality. Meanwhile, what mere “maker of beautiful English” shall be pitted against him there where he sits, the despair of a generation of experts, continually tossing the four brass balls?

It has been said often by shallow reviewers, and is said sometimes still, that Hazlitt’s style aims at effect; as if an effect must not be won, without aiming, by a “born man of letters,” as Mr. Saintsburydescribed him, “who could not help turning into literature everything he touched.”[73]The “effect,” under given conditions, is manifest, unavoidable. Once let Hazlitt speak, as he speaks ever, in the warmth of conviction, and what an intoxicating music begins!—wild as that of the gypsies, and with the same magnet-touch on the sober senses: enough to subvert all “criticism and idle distinction,” and to bring back those Theban times when the force of a sound, rather than masons and surveyors, sent the very walls waltzing into their places.

In the face of diction so joyously clear as his, so sumptuous and splendid, it is well to endorse Mr. Ruskin, that “no right style was ever founded save out of a sincere heart.” It can never be said of William Hazlitt, as DeanTrench well said of those other “great stylists,” Landor and De Quincey, that he had a lack of moral earnestness. What he was determined to impress upon his reader, during the quarter-century while he held a pen, was not that he was knowing, not that he was worthy of the renown and fortune which passed him by, but only that he had rectitude and a consuming passion for good. He declares aloud that his escutcheon has no bar-sinister: he has not sold himself; he has spoken truth in and out of season; he has honored the excellent at his own risk and cost; he has fought for a principle and been slain for it, from his youth up. His sole boast is proven. In a far deeper sense than Leigh Hunt, for whom he forged the lovely compliment, he was “the visionary in humanity, the fool of virtue,” and the captain of those who stood fast, in a hostile day, for ignored and eternal ideals. The best thing to be said of him, the thing for which, in Haydon’s phrase, “everybody must love him,” is that he himself loved justice and hated iniquity. He shared thegroaning of the spirit after mortal welfare with Swift and Fielding, with Shelley and Matthew Arnold, with Carlyle and Ruskin; he was corroded with cares and desires not his own. Beside this intense devotedness, what personal flaw will ultimately show? The host who figure in the Roman martyrology hang all their claim upon the fact of martyrdom, and, according to canon law, need not have been saints in their lifetime at all. So with such souls as his: in the teeth of a thousand acknowledged imperfections in life or in art, they remain our exemplars. Let them do what they will, at some one stroke they dignify this earth. It is not Hazlitt, “the born man of letters” alone, but Hazlitt the born humanist, who bequeaths us, from his England of coarse misconception and abuse, a memory like a loadstar, and a name which is a toast to be drunk standing.

THE END

FOOTNOTES:[58]The article onThe Fine Artsin theEncyclopædia Britannicais signed “W. H.”[59]Mrs. Hazlitt the first, it would appear, undertook to verify her husband’s quotations for him. His favorite metaphor, “Like the tide which flows on to the Propontic, and knows no ebb,” must have passed many times under her eye. Any reference to Othello himself, in the great scene of Act III., would have shown four lines for William Hazlitt’s explicit one.[60]Some of Hazlitt’s comments on women are full of unconscious humor. InGreat and Little Thingshe admits being snubbed by the fair, and adds with grandiloquence: “I took a pride in my disgrace, and concluded that I had elsewhere my inheritance!”[61]In the National Portrait Gallery, London.[62]Blackwood’s, in the charming fashion of the time, repeatedly refers to Hazlitt’s “pimples”; and Byron credited and supplemented the allegation. Hazlitt himself says somewhere “that to lay a thing to a person’s charge from which he is perfectly free, shows spirit and invention!” The calumny is not worth mention, except as a fair specimen of the journalistic methods against which literary men had to contend some eighty years ago.[63]Lamb had been his groomsman twenty-two years before, at the Church of St. Andrew, Holborn, “and like to have been turned out several times during the ceremony; anything awful makes me laugh!” as he confessed in a letter to Southey in 1815.[64]Orrery had seen this same bitter indignation overwhelm Swift at times, “so that it is scarcely possible for human features to carry in them more terror and austerity.”[65]At 19 York Street, Westminster. The house, with its tablet “To the Prince of Poets” set by Hazlitt himself, was destroyed in 1877.[66]A snappy unpublished letter to Hunt, sold among the Hazlitt papers at Sotheby, Wilkinson and Hodge’s, in the late autumn of 1893, complains bitterly of kind Basil Montagu, who had once put off a proffered visit from Hazlitt, on the ground that a party of other guests was expected. The deterred one was naturally wroth. “Yet after this, I am not to look at him a littlein abstracto!This is what has soured me and made me sick of friendship and acquaintanceship.” Hazlitt confounded cause and effect. He was unwelcome in general gatherings where his genius was unappreciated; and we may be sure Montagu was sorry for it when, in the interests of concord, he held up so deprecating and inhospitable a hand. But among those who nursed Hazlitt in his last illness, Basil Montagu was not the least loyal.[67]The Fightappeared in theNew Monthly Magazinein 1822. It was itself antedated byThe Fancyof John Hamilton Reynolds, Keats’s friend and Hood’s brother-in-law, which was printed in 1820. The jolly iambics are as inspired as the essay. “P. C.” is, of course, Pugilistic Club.“Oh, it is life! to see a proudAnd dauntless man step, full of hopes,Up to the P. C. stakes and ropes,Throw in his hat, and with a springGet gallantly within the ring;Eye the wide crown, and walk awhileTaking all cheerings with a smile;To see him strip; his well-trained form,White, glowing, muscular, and warm,All beautiful in conscious power,Relaxed and quiet, till the hour;His glossy and transparent frame,In radiant plight to strive for fame!To look upon the clean shap’d limbIn silk and flannel clothèd trim;While round the waist the kerchief tiedMakes the flesh glow in richer pride.’Tis more than life to watch him holdHis hand forth, tremulous yet bold,Over his second’s, and to claspHis rival’s in a quiet grasp;To watch the noble attitudeHe takes, the crowd in breathless mood;And then to see, with adamant start,The muscles set, and the great heartHurl a courageous splendid lightInto the eye, and then—theFight!”But this is general: Hazlitt is specific. His particular Fight was the great one between Neate of Bristol and Tom Hickman the Gasman, Neate being the victor. On May 20, 1823, Neate met Spring of Hertfordshire (so translated out of his natural patronymic of Winter), in a contest for the championship, and Neate himself went under. This latter battle was mock-heroically celebrated by Maginn inBlackwood’s, and Hood’s casual meteorological simile heaped up honors on the winner:“The Spring! I shrink and shudder at her name.For why? I find her breath a bitter blighter,And suffer from her blows as if they cameFrom Spring the fighter!”So that literature may be said to have set close to the ropes in those days, from first to last.[68]Lamb, in “A Letter to R. Southey, Esq.”[69]The man of Martial’s epigram had other “views.” The capital translation is Dr. Goldwin Smith’s:“Vacerra lauds no living poet’s lays,But for departed genius keeps his praise.I, alas, live; nor deem it worth my whileTo die, that I may win Vacerra’s smile.”[70]This was the spirit of Henry Fielding on his last voyage, hoisted aboard among the watermen at Redcliffe, and hearing his emaciated body made the subject of jeers and laughter. “No man who knew me,” he writes in his journal, “will think I conceived any personal resentment at this behavior; but it was a lively picture of that cruelty and inhumanity in the nature of man which I have often contemplated with concern, and which leads the mind into a train of very uncomfortable and melancholy thoughts.” It is a fine passage, and a strong heart, not given to boasting, penned it. Poor Hazlitt could not bear even an unintentional slight without imputing diabolical malice to the offender. Yet it was certainly true that, in his saner hours, he could suffer personal discomfort in public without flinching, and deplore the habit which imposed it, rather than the act.[71]If Hazlitt conveyed some of his best mannerisms from Coleridge, not always transmuting them, surely the balance may be said to be even when one discovers later in Hartley Coleridge such an easy inherited use of Hazlitt’s “flail of gold” as is exemplified in this summary of Roger Ascham’s career. “There was a primitive honesty, a kindly innocence about this good old scholar, which gave a personal interest to the homeliest details of his life. He had the rare felicity of passing through the worst of times without persecution and without dishonor. He lived with princes and princesses, prelates and diplomatists, without offence as without ambition. Though he enjoyed the smiles of royalty, his heart was none the worse, and his fortunes little the better.”[72]The quotation is from Coleridge, and it was applied by him to Dryden. Hazlitt himself unconsciously expanded and spoiled it in his essay onBurke. “The wheels of his imagination did not catch fire from the rottenness of the material, but from the rapidity of their motion.”[73]The Rev. H. R. Haweis has another characterization of these breathing and burning pages: “long and tiresome essays by Hazlitt.” So they are, sure enough, if only you be endowed to think so! Hazlitt himself gives the diverting fact for what it is worth, that “three chimney-sweeps meeting three Chinese in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, they laughed at one another till they were ready to drop down.”

[58]The article onThe Fine Artsin theEncyclopædia Britannicais signed “W. H.”

[59]Mrs. Hazlitt the first, it would appear, undertook to verify her husband’s quotations for him. His favorite metaphor, “Like the tide which flows on to the Propontic, and knows no ebb,” must have passed many times under her eye. Any reference to Othello himself, in the great scene of Act III., would have shown four lines for William Hazlitt’s explicit one.

[60]Some of Hazlitt’s comments on women are full of unconscious humor. InGreat and Little Thingshe admits being snubbed by the fair, and adds with grandiloquence: “I took a pride in my disgrace, and concluded that I had elsewhere my inheritance!”

[61]In the National Portrait Gallery, London.

[62]Blackwood’s, in the charming fashion of the time, repeatedly refers to Hazlitt’s “pimples”; and Byron credited and supplemented the allegation. Hazlitt himself says somewhere “that to lay a thing to a person’s charge from which he is perfectly free, shows spirit and invention!” The calumny is not worth mention, except as a fair specimen of the journalistic methods against which literary men had to contend some eighty years ago.

[63]Lamb had been his groomsman twenty-two years before, at the Church of St. Andrew, Holborn, “and like to have been turned out several times during the ceremony; anything awful makes me laugh!” as he confessed in a letter to Southey in 1815.

[64]Orrery had seen this same bitter indignation overwhelm Swift at times, “so that it is scarcely possible for human features to carry in them more terror and austerity.”

[65]At 19 York Street, Westminster. The house, with its tablet “To the Prince of Poets” set by Hazlitt himself, was destroyed in 1877.

[66]A snappy unpublished letter to Hunt, sold among the Hazlitt papers at Sotheby, Wilkinson and Hodge’s, in the late autumn of 1893, complains bitterly of kind Basil Montagu, who had once put off a proffered visit from Hazlitt, on the ground that a party of other guests was expected. The deterred one was naturally wroth. “Yet after this, I am not to look at him a littlein abstracto!This is what has soured me and made me sick of friendship and acquaintanceship.” Hazlitt confounded cause and effect. He was unwelcome in general gatherings where his genius was unappreciated; and we may be sure Montagu was sorry for it when, in the interests of concord, he held up so deprecating and inhospitable a hand. But among those who nursed Hazlitt in his last illness, Basil Montagu was not the least loyal.

[67]The Fightappeared in theNew Monthly Magazinein 1822. It was itself antedated byThe Fancyof John Hamilton Reynolds, Keats’s friend and Hood’s brother-in-law, which was printed in 1820. The jolly iambics are as inspired as the essay. “P. C.” is, of course, Pugilistic Club.“Oh, it is life! to see a proudAnd dauntless man step, full of hopes,Up to the P. C. stakes and ropes,Throw in his hat, and with a springGet gallantly within the ring;Eye the wide crown, and walk awhileTaking all cheerings with a smile;To see him strip; his well-trained form,White, glowing, muscular, and warm,All beautiful in conscious power,Relaxed and quiet, till the hour;His glossy and transparent frame,In radiant plight to strive for fame!To look upon the clean shap’d limbIn silk and flannel clothèd trim;While round the waist the kerchief tiedMakes the flesh glow in richer pride.’Tis more than life to watch him holdHis hand forth, tremulous yet bold,Over his second’s, and to claspHis rival’s in a quiet grasp;To watch the noble attitudeHe takes, the crowd in breathless mood;And then to see, with adamant start,The muscles set, and the great heartHurl a courageous splendid lightInto the eye, and then—theFight!”But this is general: Hazlitt is specific. His particular Fight was the great one between Neate of Bristol and Tom Hickman the Gasman, Neate being the victor. On May 20, 1823, Neate met Spring of Hertfordshire (so translated out of his natural patronymic of Winter), in a contest for the championship, and Neate himself went under. This latter battle was mock-heroically celebrated by Maginn inBlackwood’s, and Hood’s casual meteorological simile heaped up honors on the winner:“The Spring! I shrink and shudder at her name.For why? I find her breath a bitter blighter,And suffer from her blows as if they cameFrom Spring the fighter!”So that literature may be said to have set close to the ropes in those days, from first to last.

“Oh, it is life! to see a proudAnd dauntless man step, full of hopes,Up to the P. C. stakes and ropes,Throw in his hat, and with a springGet gallantly within the ring;Eye the wide crown, and walk awhileTaking all cheerings with a smile;To see him strip; his well-trained form,White, glowing, muscular, and warm,All beautiful in conscious power,Relaxed and quiet, till the hour;His glossy and transparent frame,In radiant plight to strive for fame!To look upon the clean shap’d limbIn silk and flannel clothèd trim;While round the waist the kerchief tiedMakes the flesh glow in richer pride.’Tis more than life to watch him holdHis hand forth, tremulous yet bold,Over his second’s, and to claspHis rival’s in a quiet grasp;To watch the noble attitudeHe takes, the crowd in breathless mood;And then to see, with adamant start,The muscles set, and the great heartHurl a courageous splendid lightInto the eye, and then—theFight!”

“Oh, it is life! to see a proud

And dauntless man step, full of hopes,

Up to the P. C. stakes and ropes,

Throw in his hat, and with a spring

Get gallantly within the ring;

Eye the wide crown, and walk awhile

Taking all cheerings with a smile;

To see him strip; his well-trained form,

White, glowing, muscular, and warm,

All beautiful in conscious power,

Relaxed and quiet, till the hour;

His glossy and transparent frame,

In radiant plight to strive for fame!

To look upon the clean shap’d limb

In silk and flannel clothèd trim;

While round the waist the kerchief tied

Makes the flesh glow in richer pride.

’Tis more than life to watch him hold

His hand forth, tremulous yet bold,

Over his second’s, and to clasp

His rival’s in a quiet grasp;

To watch the noble attitude

He takes, the crowd in breathless mood;

And then to see, with adamant start,

The muscles set, and the great heart

Hurl a courageous splendid light

Into the eye, and then—theFight!”

But this is general: Hazlitt is specific. His particular Fight was the great one between Neate of Bristol and Tom Hickman the Gasman, Neate being the victor. On May 20, 1823, Neate met Spring of Hertfordshire (so translated out of his natural patronymic of Winter), in a contest for the championship, and Neate himself went under. This latter battle was mock-heroically celebrated by Maginn inBlackwood’s, and Hood’s casual meteorological simile heaped up honors on the winner:

“The Spring! I shrink and shudder at her name.For why? I find her breath a bitter blighter,And suffer from her blows as if they cameFrom Spring the fighter!”

“The Spring! I shrink and shudder at her name.

For why? I find her breath a bitter blighter,

And suffer from her blows as if they came

From Spring the fighter!”

So that literature may be said to have set close to the ropes in those days, from first to last.

[68]Lamb, in “A Letter to R. Southey, Esq.”

[69]The man of Martial’s epigram had other “views.” The capital translation is Dr. Goldwin Smith’s:“Vacerra lauds no living poet’s lays,But for departed genius keeps his praise.I, alas, live; nor deem it worth my whileTo die, that I may win Vacerra’s smile.”

[69]The man of Martial’s epigram had other “views.” The capital translation is Dr. Goldwin Smith’s:

“Vacerra lauds no living poet’s lays,But for departed genius keeps his praise.I, alas, live; nor deem it worth my whileTo die, that I may win Vacerra’s smile.”

“Vacerra lauds no living poet’s lays,

But for departed genius keeps his praise.

I, alas, live; nor deem it worth my while

To die, that I may win Vacerra’s smile.”

[70]This was the spirit of Henry Fielding on his last voyage, hoisted aboard among the watermen at Redcliffe, and hearing his emaciated body made the subject of jeers and laughter. “No man who knew me,” he writes in his journal, “will think I conceived any personal resentment at this behavior; but it was a lively picture of that cruelty and inhumanity in the nature of man which I have often contemplated with concern, and which leads the mind into a train of very uncomfortable and melancholy thoughts.” It is a fine passage, and a strong heart, not given to boasting, penned it. Poor Hazlitt could not bear even an unintentional slight without imputing diabolical malice to the offender. Yet it was certainly true that, in his saner hours, he could suffer personal discomfort in public without flinching, and deplore the habit which imposed it, rather than the act.

[71]If Hazlitt conveyed some of his best mannerisms from Coleridge, not always transmuting them, surely the balance may be said to be even when one discovers later in Hartley Coleridge such an easy inherited use of Hazlitt’s “flail of gold” as is exemplified in this summary of Roger Ascham’s career. “There was a primitive honesty, a kindly innocence about this good old scholar, which gave a personal interest to the homeliest details of his life. He had the rare felicity of passing through the worst of times without persecution and without dishonor. He lived with princes and princesses, prelates and diplomatists, without offence as without ambition. Though he enjoyed the smiles of royalty, his heart was none the worse, and his fortunes little the better.”

[72]The quotation is from Coleridge, and it was applied by him to Dryden. Hazlitt himself unconsciously expanded and spoiled it in his essay onBurke. “The wheels of his imagination did not catch fire from the rottenness of the material, but from the rapidity of their motion.”

[73]The Rev. H. R. Haweis has another characterization of these breathing and burning pages: “long and tiresome essays by Hazlitt.” So they are, sure enough, if only you be endowed to think so! Hazlitt himself gives the diverting fact for what it is worth, that “three chimney-sweeps meeting three Chinese in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, they laughed at one another till they were ready to drop down.”

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Transcriber’s Note:Obvious punctuation errors were corrected.Repeated headings were removed.Page 56, “Llansaintfraed” changed to “Llansantffraed” (brother’s parish of Llansantffraed)Page 171, Footnote 37, “Farquhare” and “Farqhare” retained as printed from the matriculation entry.

Transcriber’s Note:

Obvious punctuation errors were corrected.

Repeated headings were removed.

Page 56, “Llansaintfraed” changed to “Llansantffraed” (brother’s parish of Llansantffraed)

Page 171, Footnote 37, “Farquhare” and “Farqhare” retained as printed from the matriculation entry.

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