vidualise. And when he And when he goes deeper when he is interested enough to be intimate then you get creations like Bowling and Trunnion, like Lismahago and Matthew Bramble, like Pipes and Strap; and with these you are well into literature. And his narrative is of the same instant, peremptory type. He writes good, nervous forth-right English; knows exactly what he wants to say; and says it exactly as he means it to be said: as, to take three very different examples, the story of Random and Strap in London, the night in the Forest' episode in Fathom, and that unparalleled digression concerning Pipes and the beggar maid, which does so much to reconcile one with the ostentatious blackguardism of Pickle-as these, I say, exist to show. Comes in the last instance, Smollett the humourist-hard and immodest but copious and authentic, if in the main inalterably farcical; and, as I think, the secret of the perennial popularity of some (at least) of him lies open, even to him that runs and reads.

Says Mr. Raleigh,' finally :-'His zest in life is real and infectious, and his purely external treatment gives a certain refreshing quality to his pages; over his books at least it is possible to "unbend the mind." That, if our standard be that of great literature, is good enough for Smollett; and I know not if there be more to say about him. But literature is not all great; and outside the pleasaunce, where Fielding ironises with Cervantes, and Shakespeare discusses an intonation with Dickens, while Scott and Thackeray pause in their talk to hear 1 The English Novel, p. 189.

of Pickwick.

what's said, and Sterne reads Trim and Toby and 'My Father' into them all-outside, I say, the scene of these august familiarities there is honourable room for Smollett. For, take it how For, take it how you will, he anglicised Le Sage, and so was one ancestor of An ancestor Pickwick; he created Pipes and Trunnion and Bowling, and in this wise cleared the way for Chucks, and Mesty, and O'Brien-to name but these; in Ferdinand Count Fathom he struck a note and suggested a set of possibilities with which romance yet thrills; he was the first (so far as I can find) to write a novel for publication in serial form, and herein he has had some forty thousand imitators; finally, he was beloved of the boy Dickens, who remembered and imitated him, and so he takes hands with one of the greatest in English letters. One may like him or not; but one has to admit that he builded better than, with all his full-sailed vanity, he knew, and, at the worst, was full of most excellent differences: that, in so many words, English literature would have been appreciably the poorer, if 'Dr. Toby' had not lived and worked.

WILLIAM HAZLITT

His descent. HAZLITT's father, a minister in the Unitarian Church, was the son of an Antrim dissenter, who had removed to Tipperary; Hazlitt's mother was the daughter of a Cambridgeshire yeoman; so that there is small room for wonder if Hazlitt were all his life distinguished by a fine pugnaciousness of mind, a fiery courage, an excellent doggedness of temper, and (not to crack the wind of the poor metaphor) a brilliancy in the use of his hands unequalled in his time, and since his time, by any writing Englishman. Of course, he was very much else; or this monument1 to his genius would scarce be building, this draft to his credit would have been drawn for To-Morrow on To-Day. But, while he His fighting lived, his fighting talent was the sole thing in his

talent.

various and splendid gift that was evident to the powers that were; and, inasmuch as he loved nothing so dearly as asserting himself to the disadvantage of certain superstitions which the said powers esteemed the very stuff of life, they did their utmost to dissemble his uncommon merits, and to present him to the world at large as a person whose

1 The monument is the edition published by Mr. Dent (1902-4), to which this Essay served as an introduction.

morals were deplorable, whose nose was pimpled, whose mind was lewd, whose character would no more bear inspection than his English, whose heart and soul and taste were irremediable, and who, as he persisted in regarding the Corsican fiend' as a culmination of human genius and character, must for that reason especially (but there were many others) be execrated as a public enemy, and stuck in the pillory whenever, in the black malice of his corrupt and poisonous heart, he sought, by feigning an affection for Shakespeare, or an interest in metaphysics, to recommend his vulgar, mean, pernicious personality to the attention of a loyal, God-fearing, church-going, tax-paying, Pope-and-Pretenderhating British Public. I cannot say that I regret the very scandalous attacks that were made on Hazlitt: since, if they had not been, we should have lacked some admirable pages in the Political Essays and The Spirit of the Age, nor should we now be privileged to rejoice in the dignified and splendid savagery of the Letter to William Gifford. And, if I do not regret them for myself and the many who think with me, still less can I wish them. wanting for Hazlitt's sake; for if they had been, who shall say how dull and how profitless, how weary and flat and stale, some years of what he described, in his last words to his kind, as a happy life'-how mean and beggarly may not some days in these years have seemed? But there is, after all, a reason for being rather sorry than not that Hazlitt's polemic was so brilliant, his young conviction so unalterably constant, his example so detestable as it seemed to the magnificent ruffian in Blackwood and

the infinitely spiteful underling in The Quarterly. The Public The British Public of those days was a good, hardof those days. hitting, hard-drinking, hard-living lot; and, in the matter of letters, there was no guile in it. It read its Campbell, its Rogers, its Moore, its Hook and Egan and Jon Bee; it accepted its convinced and pedantic sycophant in Southey, its gay, light-hearted protestant in Leigh Hunt; it nibbled at its Wordsworth, knew not what to make of its Coleridge, swallowed its Cobbett (that prince of pugilists) as its morning rasher and toast; it made much of Hone, yet was far from contemptuous of Westmacott; it laid itself open to its Scott and its Byron, Michael and Satan, the Angel of Acceptance and the Angel of Revolt. Withal it was essentially a Tory Public: a public long practised in fearing God and honouring the King; with half an ear for Major Cartwright and his like, and a whole mind for the story of Randall and Cribb; honestly and jovially proud of Nelson and 'The Duke,' but neither loving the Emperor nor seeking to understand him. Now, to Hazlitt the Revolution was humanity in excelsis, while the Emperor, being democracy incarnate, and so a complete expression of character and human genius, was as his god. Gifford, then, and Wilson, had small difficulty in blasting Hazlitt's fame, and in so far ruining Hazlitt's chance that 'tis but now, after some seventy years, that he takes his place in literary history as the hero of a Complete Edition. In the meanwhile he has had praise, and praise again. But it has come ever from the few, and he has yet to be considered of the general as a critic of many elements in human activity, a master