sure up thoughts for posterity, since he was compelled to commit all, as soon as they were born, to leaves as volatile as those of the Sibyl—rapidis ludibria ventis-not those only which flowed spontaneously, but those which, as he often complained, were wrung out with pain and difficulty to meet the exigencies of the hour. Under such disadvantages, the wonder is, not that he has not achieved all which his over-zealous panegyrists appear inclined to attribute to him, but that he has made himself a name in literature at all--a name which will retain a share of its popularity while terse and sententious expression, variety of thought, and vigorous home truths, mixed with the paradoxes and refinement of a subtler philosophy, continue to please and interest the ordinary reader.—“Edinburgh Review;” Article on "Hazlitt's Literary Remains." 1837. Vol. 64, p. 409.

66 BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE."

We are not apt to imbibe half opinions, or to express them by halves; we shall, therefore, say at once that when Mr. Hazlitt's taste and judgment are left to themselves, we think him among the best, if not the very best, living critic on our national literature. His varied and healthful perceptions of truth and beauty, of falsehood and deformity, have a clearness, a depth, and a comprehensiveness, that have rarely been equalled. They appear to come to him by intuition; and he conveys the impression of them to others with a vividness and precision that cannot be surpassed. But his genius is one that will not be "constrained by mastery." When, in spite of himself, his prejudice or habits of general feeling interfere, and attempt to shackle or bias its movements, it deserts him at once.-A. Z. in "Blackwood's Magazine,” April, 1818, p. 75.

"THE LONDON MAGAZINE."

With a comprehension of innate character, absolutely unequalled by any of his contemporaries-with a finer and more philosophical taste than any other critic on poetry and art whose name we can cite-with an intense feeling of the pathetic, the pure, the sublime, in quality, action, and formhe is not, we think, by any means done full justice to by people at large, and he has even laid himself, in some measure, open to a series of abuse, as weak as base, but which he might easily have deprived of the shadow of plausibility, and thus done a service both to himself and the public.

The series of discourses, delivered during several seasons, at the Surrey Institution, include a set of topics of the highest possible national as well as literary interest, and comprehends a body of criticism, equally exalted by the integrity and depth of its principles, and the glory and genius of those to whose works it is applied. Our author's manner of commenting on the great writers, that come under his examination, is precisely that which Gibbon described as the best of all others-most worthy of the memory of departed genius, and giving the most undoubted testimony to the sincerity with which it is admired. He catches the mantles of those whose celestial flights he regards with devout, but undazzled eye. He lives in their time, becomes animated with their feelings, and conveys to us their spirit, in its unsullied freshness and unquenched fire. Nothing that is common-place or unmeaning-none of the expletives of criticism-enter into his discourses: he never "bandies idle words:" the source of true beauty, the soul of poetical life, the hidden charm, the essential principle of power and efficacy, the original feature, the distinguishing property-to these his sagacity and taste are drawn, as it were by instinct, and with these only he meddles in his expositions. There is a fervour, too, in his language, which must, we should think, have a contagious influence on the minds of his hearers: he

is evidently a true worshipper of the divinity at whose altar he officiates, and nothing is so catching as zeal. He summonses back the past, and places it before us in the brightness of a vision; he calls up the musical echos of its finest names, and listens to them himself in entranced delight. He chases from our hearts sordid, vain, and presumptuous sentiments, by humiliating us before the august image of departed genius and magnanimity. He renders us ashamed of ourselves, and of to-day, by spreading out before our eyes the great scroll of fame, and overwhelming us with its mighty volume. But what we lose as individuals, we seem to regain in a higher idea of our kind, and are not displeased to sacrifice the narrow point on which we stand, and which is fast crumbling from under our feet, for the assurance we receive, that "dark oblivion" does not close over the line of generations.-"London Magazine," Vol. 1, p. 185; "Review of Hazlitt's Lectures on the Literature of the age of Elizabeth."

Hazlitt's "Table Talk" contains some of the most valuable of those treasures which its author has produced from his vast stores of feeling and of thought. Admirable as his critical powers are, he is, perhaps, most felicitous when he discusses things rather than books-when he analyses social manners, or fathoms the depths of the heart—or gives passionate sketches of the history of his own past being. We are acquainted with no other living writer who can depict the intricacies of human character with so firm and masterly a hand-who can detect, with so fine an intuition, the essences of opinion and prejudice—or follow, with so unerring a skill, the subtle windings of the deepest affections.

The most distinguishing quality of Mr. Hazlitt's essays is that which makes them, in a great degree, creations. They have in them a body of feeling and of wisdom rarely to be found in the works of a professed observer. They do not merely guide us in our estimate of the works of others, or unravel the subtleties of habit, or explain the mysteries of the heart; but they give us pieces of sentiment in themselves worthy of a high place in the chambers of memory. He clothes abstract speculations with human thoughts, hopes, and fears. He embodies the shadowy, and brings the distant home to the bosom. If he gives a character of a favourite book, he not merely analyses its beauties, but makes us partakers of the first impression it left on his own heart, recalling some of the most precious moments of his existence, and engrafting them into our own.

There is no other critic who thus makes his comments part of ourselves for ever after, as is the poet's sweetest verse, or the novelist's most vivid fiction. His hearty manner of bringing before us the finest characters of romance, as Don Quixote, Parson Adams, Lovelace, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison, has stamped them with a more assured reality than they had to us before he wrote. There is the same substantiality, or even more, in his metaphysical speculations, and in his remarks on men and things. In the first, if he does not, like Rousseau, puzzle us amidst flowery paths and thickets of freshest green; or, like Coleridge, bewilder us in golden mazes; still less does he, like the tribe of philosophers, lead us up a steep and stony ascent, to a cold eminence above the mists of error and the warmth of humanity. He not only defines the dim verge of the horizon of our being, but fills all the foreground with busy hope, with stately recol· lection, with forms of old and undying love. He puts a heart into his abstrusest theories. No other writer mingles so much sturdiness with so much pathos; or makes us feel so well the strength of the most delicate affections. He estimates human nature in all its height, and breadth, and depth. He does not, with some who regard themselves as the only philanthropists, think of it as mighty, only in reference to certain glittering

dreams of its future progress; but takes into his account all it is and has been.-"London Magazine," Vol. 3, p. 545; “Review of Hazlitt's Table Talk, or Original Essays.'

Perhaps there is no living writer who combines so much fancy and occasional pathos with qualities of a more stern and logical cast as he does; and we believe, that no one ever ventured to consult his own nature more closely than himself, or to display with greater truth the treasures derived from such investigation. The vanity of men in general prevents their "looking at home" for information: they would rather consult the structure of their neighbours' minds than their own, and they are consequently content to sit down with but half of the knowledge which they might otherwise acquire.-"London Magazine," Vol. 3, p. 431.

"TAIT'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE."

Take him for all in all, we consider Hazlitt as the most hardly-treated man of genius of modern times. Calumniated and maligned to the top of their bent by all tribes and denominations of the servile, and imperfectly understood by the multitude, he did not in his lifetime enjoy even the small kindly services and active zeal of the literary coterie to which he was understood to belong. He was with them, but scarcely of them-a sectarian, attached personally to no sect. We question if they knew his full value, or felt that intellectual superiority to one and all of them which the world begins tardily to perceive. His writings consist of essays on morals, politics, and philosophy, and on Life in the largest and most emphatic sense of that comprehensive and awful term; and of criticism upon painting, poetry, and refined literature-such criticism as the world never had before dreamed of. With Hazlitt criticism is not so much an art cultivated, as a new and beautiful species of literature created; and one ministering wholly to refined enjoyment. He has done far more to open up the pages of Shakspeare and the old poets to the multitude, than all former critics and commentators. He has given us the true key-in the new, the real reading; translated their antique text into the vernacular, set their poetry and their passion to exquisite music, and taught us to revive the old drama for ourselves by our firesides after the theatre had failed us. He is less a critic than an illustrator, and less an illustrator than an enthusiastic panegyrist, whose eulogium is the spontaneous, unstrained overflow of an exquisite perception, and of intense sympathy with the beauties upon which he expatiates. If we may not at times be disposed to acquiesce in the justness of his criticisms or illustrations, we rarely miss to feel, as it were by reflection, the power and charm of his discoveries to his own earnest mind, and to joy in his joy. Yet these glowing_commentaries—this letting in of richly-coloured light upon the pages of Shakspeare, Milton, Spenser, and a cluster of consecrated names-is not, to our thinking, the chief merit of Hazlitt. Higher far do we prize his musing and moralizing upon the varied and complex play of human life, and its strife of passions; those incidental allusions to his individual experiences, his hopes, and chagrins, and pathetic reminiscences, and those partial revealings of the warfare within, of which the passionate earnestness bears away whatever, in an inferior mind, might seem egotism or affectation." Tait's Edinburgh Magazine," 1836. "The Writings of Hazlitt."

66 NORTH BRITISH REVIEW."

Hazlitt, if he lacked Lamb's quaintness and ethereal humour, and Hunt's fancifulness, possessed a robust and passionate faculty which gave him a distinct place in the literature of his time. His feelings were keen

and deep. The French Revolution seemed to him-in common with Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge—in its early stages an authentic angel rising with a new morning for the race upon its forehead; and when disappointment came, and when his friends sought refuge in the old order of things, he, loyal to his youthful hope, stood aloof, hating them almost as renegades; and never ceasing to give utterance to his despair: "I started in life with the French Revolution," he tells us; "and I have lived, alas! to see the end of it. My sun arose with the first dawn of liberty, and I did not think how soon both must set. We were strong to run a race together, and I little dreamed that, long before mine was set, the sun of liberty would turn to blood, or sink once more in the night of despotism. Since then, I confess, I have no longer felt myself young, for with that my hopes fell." This was the central bitterness in Hazlitt's life; but around it were grouped lesser and more personal bitternesses. His early ambition was to be a painter, and in that he failed. Coleridge was the man whom he admired most in all the world, in whose genius he stood, like an Arcadian shepherd in an Arcadian sunrise, full of admiration,- every sense absorbed in that of sight; and that genius he was fated to see coming to nothing. Then he was headstrong, violent, made many enemies, was the object of cruel criticism, his financial affairs were never prosperous, and in domestic matters he is not understood to have been happy. He was a troubled and exasperated man, and this exasperation is continually breaking out in his writings. Deeply wounded in early life, he carried the smart with him to his death-bed. And in his Essays and other writings it is almost pathetic to notice how he clings to the peaceful images which the poets love; how he reposes in their restful lines; how he listens to the bleating of the lamb in the fields of imagination. He is continually quoting Sidney's Arcadian image of the shepherd-boy under the shade, piping as he would never grow old,-as if the recurrence of the image to his memory brought with it silence, sunshine, and waving trees. Hazlitt had a strong metaphysical turn; he was an acute critic in poetry and art, but he wrote too much, and he wrote too hurriedly. When at his best, his style is excellent, concise, sinewy,-laying open the stubborn thought as the sharp ploughshare the glebe; while at other times, it wants edge and sharpness, and the sentences resemble the impressions of a seal which has been blunted with too frequent use. His best Essays are, in a sense, autobiographical, because in them he recalls his enthusiasms and the passionate hopes on which he fed his spirit. The Essay entitled, "My First Acquaintance with Poets," is full of memorable passages. To Hazlitt, Coleridge was a divinity. They walked from Wem to Shrewsbury on a winter day, Coleridge talking all the while; and Hazlitt recalls it after the lapse of years: "A sound was in my ears as of a syren's song: I was stunned, startled with it as from deep sleep; but I had no notion then that I should ever be able to express my admiration to others in motley imagery and quaint allusion, till the light of his genius shone into my soul like the sun's rays glittering in the puddles of the road. My soul has indeed remained in its original bondage,-dark, obscure, with longings infinite and unsatisfied; my heart, shut up in the prison-house of this rude clay, has never found, nor will it ever find, a heart to speak to; but that my understanding also did not remain dumb and brutish, or at length found a language to express itself, I owe to Coleridge." This testimony, from a man like Hazlitt, to the worth of Coleridge's talk is interesting, and contrasts strangely, with Carlyle's description of it, when, in later years, the silvery-haired sage looked down on the smoky London from Highgate. Nor is it without its moral. Talk, which in his early day came like a dawn upon another mind, illumi

nating dark recesses, kindling intellectual life, revealing itself to itself,became, through personal indulgence and the will's infirmity, mere glittering mists in which men were lost. Hazlitt's other Essay, on the "Pleasures of Painting," is quite as personal as the one to which we have referred, and is perhaps the finest thing he has written. It is full of the love and the despair of art. He tells how he was engaged for blissful days in painting a portrait of his father: how he imitated as best he could the rough texture of the skin, and the blood circulating beneath; how, when it was finished, he sat on a chair opposite, and with wild thoughts enough in his head, looked at it through the long evenings; how with a throbbing heart he sent it to the Exhibition, and saw it hung up there by the side of a portrait "of the Honourable Mr. Skeffington (now Sir George)." Then he characteristically tells us, "that he finished the portrait on the same day that the news of the battle of Austerlitz came: I walked out in the afternoon, and as I returned, saw the evening star set over a poor man's cottage, with other thoughts and feelings than I shall ever have again. Oh, for the revolution of the great Platonic year, that these times might come over again! I could sleep out the three hundred and sixty-five thousand intervening years very contentedly." He was a passionate, melancholy, keen-feeling, and disappointed man; and those portions of his Essays are the least valuable where his passion and his disappointment break out into spleen or irritability, just as those portions are the most valuable where bitter feelings are transfused into poetry by memory and imagination. With perhaps more intellectual, certainly with more passionate force, than either Lamb or Hunt, Hazlitt's Essays are, as a whole, inferior to theirs ; but each contains passages, which not only they, but any man, might be proud to have written." North British Review," 1862, vol. 37. Article Essayists, Old and New," p. 141,

66

HAZLITT AS A LITERARY CRITIC.

William Hazlitt we regard, all things considered, as the first of the regular critics in this nineteenth century, surpassed by several in some one particular quality or acquisition, but superior to them all, in general force, originality, and independence. With less scholarship considerably than Hunt or Southey, he has more substance than either; with less of Lamb's fineness and nothing of his subtle humour, he has a wider grasp and altogether a more manly cast of intellect. He has less liveliness and more smartness than Jeffrey, but a far profounder insight into the mysteries of poesy, and apparently a more genial sympathy with common life. Then, too, what freshness in all his writings, "wild wit, invention ever new:" for although he disclaims having any imagination, he certainly possessed creative talent and fine ingenuity. Most of his essays are, as has been well remarked, original creations," not mere homilies or didactic theses, so much as a new illustration from experience and observation of great truths coloured and set off by all the brilliant aids of eloquence, fancy, and the choicest stores of accumulation.

66

As a literary critic, we think Hazlitt may be placed rather among the independent judges of original power, than among the trained critics of education and acquirements. He relies almost entirely on individual impressions and personal feeling, thus giving a charm to his writings, quite apart from, and independent of, their purely critical excellences. Though he has never published an autobiography (the "Liber Amoris" can hardly be called an exception), yet all of his works are, in a certain sense, confessions. He pours out his feelings on a theme of interest to him, and treats the impulses of his