for posterity: a last dying speech and confession (as it were) to show that not for nothing were they held rare fellows in their day.

and

This is not to say that Hazlitt was not an admirable man of letters. His theories were many, for he was a reality among men, and so had many interests, and there was none on which he did not His style write forcibly, luminously, arrestingly. He had vocabulary. the true sense of his material, and used the English language as a painter his pigments, as a musician the varying and abounding tonalities that constitute a symphonic scheme. His were a beautiful and choice vocabulary, an excellent ear for cadence, a notable gift of expression. In fact, when Stevenson was pleased to declare that we are mighty fine fellows, but we cannot write like William Hazlitt,' he said no more than the truth. Whether or not we are mighty fine fellows is a Great Perhaps; but that none of us, from Stevenson down, can as writers come near to Hazlitt-this, to me, is merely indubitable. To note that he now and then writes blank verse is to note that he sometimes writes impassioned prose; 1 he misquoted habitually; he was a good hater, and could be monstrous unfair; he was given to thinking twice, and his second 1 It filled the valley like a mist,

1

And still poured out its endless chant,
And still it swells upon the ear,

And wraps me in a golden trance,

Drowning the noisy tumult of the world.

Like sweetest warblings from a sacred grove .
Contending with the wild winds as they roar...
And the proud places of the insolent

And the oppressor fell..

Such and so little is the mind of Man!

His criticism.

thoughts were not always better than his first; he repeated himself as seemed good to him. But in the criticism of politics, the criticism of letters, the criticism of acting, the criticism and expression of Politics and life,1 there is none like him. His politics are not

Art.

mine; I think he is ridiculously mistaken when he contrasts the Wordsworth of the best things in The Excursion with the 'classic Akenside'; his Byron is the merest petulance; his Burke (when he is in a bad temper with Burke), his Fox, his Pitt, his Bonaparte these are impossible. Also I never talk art or life with him but I disagree. But I

In

1 His summary of the fight between Hickman and Bill Neate is alone in literature, as also in the annals of the Ring. Jan Bee was an intelligent creature of his kind, and knew a very great deal more about pugilism than Hazlitt knew; but to contrast the two is to learn much. Badcock (which is Jon Bee) had seen (and worshipped) Jem Belcher, and had reported fights with an extreme contempt for Pierce Egan, the illiterate ass who gave us Boxiana. Hazlitt, however, looked on at the proceedings of Neate and the Gaslight Man exactly as he had looked on at divers creations of Edmund Kean. He saw the essentials in both expressions of human activity, and his treatment of both is fundamentally the same. both he ignores the trivial: here the acting (in its lowest sense), there the hits that did not count. And thus, as he gives you only the vital touches, you know how and why Neate beat Hickman, and can tell the exact moment at which Hickman began to be a beaten man. 'Tis the same with his panegyric on Cavanagh, the fives-player. For a blend of gusto with understanding I know but one thing to equal with this: the note on Dr. Grace, which appeared in The National Observer; and the night that that was written, I sent the writer back to Hazlitt's Cavanagh, and said to him -! On the whole the Dr. Grace is the better of the two. But it has scarce the incorruptible fatness of the Cavanagh. Gusto, though, is Hazlitt's special attribute: he glories in what he likes, what he reads, what he feels, what he writes. He triumphed in his Kean, his Shakespeare, his Bill Neate, his Rousseau, his coffee-and-cream and Love for Love in the inn-parlour at Alton. He relished things; and expressed them with a relish. That is his ' note.' Some others have relished only the consummate expression of nothing.

go on reading him, all the same; and I find that technically and spiritually I am always the better for the bout. Where outside Boswell is there better talk than in Hazlitt's Boswell Redivivus-his socalled Conversations with Northcote? And his Age of Elizabeth, and his Comic Writers, and his Spirit of the Age-where else to look for such a feeling for differences, such a sense of literature, such an instant, such a masterful, whole-hearted interest in the marking and distinguishing qualities of writers? And The Plain Speaker-is it not at least as good reading as (say) Virginibus Puerisque and the discoursings of the late imperishable Mr. Pater! His Political Essays is readable afterhow many years? His notes on Kean and the Siddons are as novel and convincing as when they were penned. In truth, he is ever a solace and a refreshment. As a critic of letters he lacks the intense, immortalising vision, even as he lacks, in places, the illuminating and inevitable style of Lamb. But if he be less savoury, he is also more solid, and he gives you phrases, conclusions, splendours of insight and expression, high-piled and golden essays in appreciation: as the Wordsworth and the Coleridge of the Political Essays, the character of Hamlet, the note on Shakespeare's style, the Horne Tooke, the Cervantes, the Rousseau, the Sir Thomas Browne, the Cobbett: that must ever be rated high among the possessions of the English mind.

As a writer, therefore, it is with Lamb that I Par nobile would bracket him: they are dissimilars, but they fratrum. go gallantly and naturally together-par nobile

fratrum. Give us these two, with some ripe Cobbett, a volume of Southey, some Wordsworth, certain pages of Shelley, a great deal of the Byron who wrote letters, and we get the right prose of the time. The best of it all, perhaps, is the best of Lamb. But Hazlitt's, for different qualities, is so imminent and shining a second that I hesitate as to the pre-eminency. Probably the race is Lamb's. But Hazlitt is ever Hazlitt; and at his highest moments Hazlitt is hard to beat, and has not these many years been beaten.

1 Listen, else, to Lamb himself: 'Protesting against much that he has written, and some things which he chooses to do; judging him by his conversation which I enjoyed so long, and relished so deeply; or by his books, in those places where no clouding passion intervenes, I should belie my own conscience if I said less than that I think W. H. to be, in his natural and healthy state, one of the wisest and finest spirits breathing. So far from being ashamed of that intimacy which was betwixt us, it is my boast that I was able for so many years to have preserved it entire; and I think I shall go to my grave without finding or expecting to find such another companion.' Thus does one Royalty celebrate the kingship and enrich the immortality of another.

ROBERT BURNS

(1759-1796)

Scotland.

IN 1759 the Kirk of Scotland, though a less potent The Kirk of and offensive tyranny than it had been in the good old times, was still a tyranny, and was still offensive and still potent enough to make life miserable, to warp the characters of men and women, and to turn the tempers and affections of many from the kindly, natural way. True it is that Hutcheson (16941746) had for some years taught, and taught with such authority as an University chair can give, a set of doctrines in absolute antagonism with the principles on which the Kirk of Scotland's rule was based, and with the ambitions which the majority in the Kirk of Scotland held in view. But these doctrines, sane and invigorating as they were, had not reached the general; and in all departments of T life among the general, the Kirk of Scotland was a paramount influence, and, despite the intrusion of some generous intelligences, was largely occupied with the work of narrowing the minds, perverting

NOTE. The references throughout this Essay are to The Poetry of Robert Burns, edited by W. E. Henley and T. F. Henderson. In Four Volumes. Edinburgh : T. C. and E. C. Jack. 1897.