so much wiser than a wicked Frenchman. When he passed by Mrs Hannah More with observing, that "she had written a great deal which he had never read," a voice gave expression to the general commiseration and surprise, by calling out "More pity for you!" They were con

founded at his reading with more emphasis perhaps than discretion, Gay's epigrammatic lines on Sir Richard Blackmore, in which scriptural persons are freely hitched into rhyme; but he went doggedly on to the end, and, by his perseverance, baffled those who, if he had acknowledged himself wrong by stopping, would have hissed him without mercy. He once had an edifying advantage over them. He was enumerating the humanities which endeared Dr Johnson to his mind, and, at the close of an agreeable catalogue, mentioned, as last and noblest, "his carrying the poor victim of disease and dissipation on his back through Fleet street,"-at which a titter arose from some, who were struck by the picture as ludicrous, and a murmur from others, who deemed the allusion unfit for ears polite. He paused for an instant, and then added in his sturdiest and most impressive manner, "an act which realizes the parable of the Good Samaritan," at which his moral and delicate hearers shrunk rebuked into deep silence. He was not eloquent

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in the true sense of the term; for his thoughts were too weighty to be moved along by the shallow stream of feeling which an evening's excitement can rouse. He wrote all his lectures, and read them as they were written; but his deep voice and easnest manner suited his matter well. He seemed to dig into his subject—and not in vain. In delivering his longer quotations, he had scarcely continuity enough for the versification of Shakspeare and Milton, “with linked sweetness long drawn out;" but he gave Pope's brilliant satire and divine compliments, which are usually complete within the couplet, with an elegance and point which the poet himself would have felt as their highest praise.

Mr Hazlitt had little inclination to write about contemporary authors,-and still less to read them. He was with difficulty persuaded to look into the Scotch Novels; but when he did so, he found them old in substance though new in form, read them with as much avidity as the rest of the world, and expressed better than any one else what all the world felt about them. His hearty love of them, however, did not decrease, but aggravate, his dislike of the political opinions and practices of their author; and yet, the strength of his hatred towards that which was accidental and transitory, only set

off the unabated power of his regard for the free and the lasting. Coleridge and Wordsworth were not moderns to him; for he knew them in his youth, which was his own antiquity, and the feelings which were the germ of their poetry had sunk deep into his heart. His personal acquaintance with them was broken before he became known to the world as an author, and he sometimes alluded to them with bitterness: but he, and he alone, has done justice to the immortal works of the one, and the genius of the other. The very prominence which he gave to them as objects of attack, at a time when it was the fashion to pour contempt on their names -when the public echoed those articles of the ‘Edinburgh Review' upon them, which they now regard with wonder as the curiosities of criticism, proved what they still were to him ; and, in the midst of those attacks, there are involuntary confessions of their influence over his mind, are touches of admiration, heightened by fond regret, which speak more than his elaborate eulogies upon them in his 'Spirit of the Age.' With the exception of the works of these, and of two or three friends to whom we have alluded, he held modern literature in slight esteem; and he regarded the discoveries of science, and the visions of optimism, with an

undazzled eye. His "large discourse of reason looked not before, but after. He felt it his great duty, as a lover of genius and art, to defend the fame of the mighty dead. When the old painters were assailed in 'The Catalogue Raisonnée of the British Institution,' he was "touched with noble anger." All his own vain longings after the immortality of the works which were libelled,— the very tranquillity and beauty they had shed into his soul,-all his comprehension of the sympathy and delight of thousands, which, accumulating through long time, had attested their worth-were fused together to dazzle and to blast the poor caviller who would disturb the judgment of ages. So, when a popular poet assailed the fame of Rousseau-seeking to reverse the decision of posterity on what that great writer had done, by fancying the opinion of people of condition in his neighbourhood on what he seemed to their apprehensions while living with Madame de Warrens, he vindicated the prerogatives of genius with the true logic of passion. Few things irritated him more than the claims set up for the present generation to be wiser and better than those which have gone before it. He had no power of imagination to embrace the golden clouds which hang over the Future, but he rested and expatiated in the Past. To his apprehension

human good did not appear a slender shoot of yesterday, like the bean-stalk in the fairy tale, aspiring to the skies, and ending in an enchanted castle, but a huge growth of intertwisted fibres, grasping the earth by numberless roots, and bearing vestiges of "a thousand storms, a thousand thunders."

It would be beside our purpose to discuss the relative merits of Mr Hazlitt's publications, to most of which we have alluded in passing; or to detail the scanty vicissitudes of a literary life. Still less do we feel bound to expose or to defend the personal frailties which fell to his portion. We have endeavoured to trace his intellectual character in the records he has left of himself in his works, as an excitement and a guide to their perusal by those who have yet to know them. The concern of mankind is with this alone. In the case of a profound thinker more than of any other, "that which men call evil"the accident of his condition-is interred with him, while the good he has achieved lives unmingled and entire. The events of Mr Hazlitt's true life are not his engagement by the Morning Chronicle,' or his transfer of his services to the Times,' or his introduction to the Edinburgh Review,' or his contracts or quarrels with booksellers; but the progress and the develop