ledge that we had just spent it! When Mr. barren spectators, and that which is diffused Hazlitt instances the agitation of criminals through the hearts and affections of thousands, before their trial, and their composure after and fructifies and expands in generations yet their conviction, as proofs that if a future unborn, and connects its author with far disevent is certain, "it gives little more disturb- tant times, not by cold renown, but by the links ance or emotion than if it had already taken of living sympathy-to be exemplified in the place, or were something to happen in another very essay which would decry it, and to be state of being, or to another person,” he gives nobly vindicated by its author at other times, an example which is perfectly fair, but which when he shows, and makes us feel, that every one sees is decisive against his theory. "words are the only things which last for If peace followed when hope was no longer ever."* So his attacks on the doctrine of busy; if the quiet of indifference was the same utility, which were provoked by the cold exthing as the stillness of despair; if the palsy travagancies of some of its supporters, consist of fear did not partially anticipate the stroke of noble and passionate eulogies on the graces, of death, and whiten the devoted head with pleasures, and ornaments, of life, which leave premature age; there might be some ground the theory itself, with which all these are confor this sacrifice of the future at the shrine of sistent, precisely where it was. So his "Essays the past; but the poor wretch who grasps the on Mr. Owen's View of Society" are full of hand of the chaplain or the under-sheriff's exquisite banter, well-directed against the inclerk, or a turnkey, or an alderman, in con- dividual: of unanswerable expositions of the vulsive agony, as his last hold on life, and falsehood of his pretensions to novelty and of declares that he is happy, would tell a different the quackery by which he attempted to render tale! It seems strange that so profound a them notorious; of happy satire against the thinker, and so fair a reasoner, as Mr. Hazlitt, aristocratic and religious patronage which he should adduce such a proof of such an hypo- sought and obtained for schemes which were thesis-but the mystery is solved when we tolerated by the great because they were regard the mass of personal feeling he has believed by them to be impracticable; but the brought to bear on the subject, and which has truth of the principal idea itself remains almost made his own view of it unsteady. All untouched. In these instances the personal this picturesque and affecting retrospection has prevailed over the abstract in the mind of amounts to nothing, or rather tells against the the thinker; his else clear intellectual vision argument; because the store of contemplation has been obscured by the intervention of his which is, will ever be while consciousness re- own recollections, loves, resentments, or fanmains; nay, must increase even while we cies; and the real outlines of the subject have reckon it, as the present glides into the past, been overgrown by the exuberant fertility of and turns another arch over the cave of me- the region which bordered upon them. mory. This very possession which he would The same causes diminished the immediate set against the future is the only treasure effect of Mr. Hazlitt's political writings. It which with certainty belongs to it, and of was the fashion to denounce him as a sour which no change of fortune can deprive him; Jacobin; but no description could be more unand, therefore, it is clear that the essayist mis- just. Under the influence of some bitter feel takes a sentiment for a demonstration, when ing, he occasionally poured out a furious inhe expatiates upon it as proof of such a doc- vective against those whom he regarded as the trine. There is nothing affected in the asser- enemies of liberty, or the apostates from its tion—no desire to startle-no playing with the cause; but, in general, his force was diverted subject or the reader; for of such intellectual (unconsciously to himself) by figures and trickeries he was incapable; but an honest fantasies, by fine and quaint allusions, by mistake into which the strong power of per- quotations from his favourite authors, introsonal recollection, and the desire to secure it duced with singular felicity as respects the within the lasting fret-work of a theory, drew direct link of association, but tending by their him. So, when wearied with the injustice very beauty to unnerve the mind of the reader, done to his writings by the profligate misre- and substitute the sense of luxury for that of presentations of the government critics, and the hatred or anger. In some of his essays, when slothful acquiescence of the public, and con- | the reasoning is most cogent, every other sentrasting with it the success of the sturdy play- tence contains some exquisite passage from ers at his favourite game of fives, which no one Shakspeare, or Fletcher, or Wordsworth, trailcould question, he wrote elaborate essays to ing after it a line of golden associations-or prove the superiority of physical qualifications some reference to a novel, over which we have to those of intellect-full of happy illustrations a thousand times forgotten the wrongs of and striking instances, and containing one in- mankind; till in the recurring shock of pleaimitable bit of truth and pathos "On the Death surable surprise, the main argument escapes of Cavanagh," but all beside the mark-proving us. When, for example, he compares the ponothing but that which required no proof-that sition of certain political waverers to that of corporeal strength and beauty are more speed- Clarissa Harlowe when Lovelace would reily and more surely appreciated than the pro- peat his outrage, and describes them as having ducts of genius; and leaving the essential | been, like her, trepanned into a house of illdifferences of the two, of the transitory and the fame near Pall Mall, and defending their soiled lasting-of that which is confined to a few virtue with their pen-knives,-who, at the suggestion of the stupendous scene which the

"On the Indian Jugglers," and "On the Disadvantages of Intellectual Superiority,"

"On Thought and Action."

allusion directly revives, can think or care this strong attachment, at once personal and about the renegade of yesterday? Here, again, refined, would have enabled him to encounter is felt the want of that imagination which the toil of collecting and arranging facts and brings all things into one, tinges all our dates for four volumes of narrative;-a drudg thoughts and sympathies with one joyous or ery too abhorrent to his habits of mind as a solemn hue, and rejects every ornament which thinker, to be sustained by any stimulus which does not heighten or prolong the feeling which the prospect of wealth or reputation could is proper to the design. Even when Mr. Haz- supply. It is not so much in the ingenious litt retaliates on Mr. Southey for attacking his excuses which he discovers for the worst acts old co-patriots, the poetical associations which of his hero, even for the midnight execution bitter remembrance suggests almost neutralize of the Duke d'Enghein, and the invasion of the attack, else overpowering; he brings every Spain, that the stamp of personal devotion is "flower which sad embroidery wears to strew obvious, as in the graphic force with which the laureate hearse," where patriotism is in- he has delineated the short-lived splendours terred; and diverts our indignation and his of the Imperial Court, and "the trivial fond own by affecting references to an early friend-records " he has gathered of every vestige of ship. So little does he regard the unity of his compositions, that in his "Letter to Gifford," after a series of the most just and bitter retorts on his maligner,-"the fine link which connected literature with the police"-he takes a fancy to teach that "Ultra-crepidarian Critic" his own theory of the natural disinterestedness of the human mind, and developes it-not now in the mathematical style in which it was first enunciated, but "o'er-informed" with the glow of sentiment, and terminating in an eloquent rhapsody. This latter part of the letter is one of the noblest of his effusions, but it entirely destroys the first in the mind of the reader; for who, when thus contemplating the living wheels on which human benevolence is borne onward in its triumphant career, and the spirit with which they are instinct, can think of the poor wasp settled upon them, and who was just before transfixed with minikin arrows?

But the most signal result which "the shows of things" had over Mr. Hazlitt's mind, was his setting up the Emperor Napoleon as his idol. He strove to justify his predilection to himself by referring it to the revolutionary origin of his hero, and the contempt with which he trampled upon the claims of legitimacy, and humbled the pride of kings. But if his "only love" thus sprung "from his only hate," it was not wholly cherished by antipathies. If there had been nothing in his mind which tended to aggrandizement and glory, and which would fain reconcile the principles of liberty with the lavish accumulation of power, he might have desired the triumph of young tyranny over legitimate thrones; but he would scarcely have watched its progress "like a lover and a child." His feeling for Bonaparte was not a sentiment of respect for fallen greatness: not a desire to trace "the soul of goodness in things evil;" not a loathing of the treatment the emperor received from "his cousin kings" in the day of adversity; but entire affection mingling with the current of the blood, and pervading the moral and intellectual being. Nothing less than

Proofs of the singular fascination which the idea of Bonaparte created on Mr. Hazlitt's mind abound in his writings. One example of which suffices to show how it mingled with his most passionate thoughts-his earliest aspirations, and his latest sympathies. Having referred to some association which revived the memory of his happiest days, he breathes out into this rhapsody: "As I look on the long-neglected copy of the Death of Clorinda, golden dreams play upon the canvas as they used when I painted it. The flowers of Hope and Joy springing up in my mind, recall the time when they

66

human feeling by which he could reconcile the Emperor to his mind. The first two volumes of the "Life of Napoleon," although redeemed by scattered thoughts of true originality and depth, are often confused and spiritless; the characters of the principal revolutionists are drawn too much in the style of caricatures; but when the hero throws all his rivals into the distance, erects himself the individual enemy of England, consecrates his power by religious ceremonies, and defines it by the circle of a crown, the author's strength becomes concentrated, his narrative assumes an epic dignity and fervour, and glows with "the long-resounding march and energy divine." How happy and proud is he to picture the meeting of Napoleon with the Pope, and the grandeurs of the coronation! How he grows wanton in celebrating the fêtes of the Tuileries, as "presenting all the elegance of enchanted pageants," and laments them as gone like a fairy revel!" How he lives along the line" of Austerlitz, and rejoices in its thunder, and hails its setting sun, and exults in the minutest details of the subsequent meeting of the conquered sovereigns with the conqueror! How he expatiates on the fatal marriage with the "deadly Austrian," (as Mr. Cobbett justly called that most heartless of her sex,) as though it were a chapter in romance, and added the grace of beauty to the imperial picture! How he kindles with martial ardour as he describes the preparations for the expedition against Russia; musters the myriads of barbarians with a show of dramatic justice; and fondly lingers among the brief triumphs of Moskwa on the verge of the terrible catastrophe! The narrative of that disastrous expedition is, indeed, written with a master's hand; we see the "Grand Army" marching to its destruction through the immense perspective; the wild hordes flying before the terror of its "coming;" the barbaric magnificence of Moscow towering in the far distance; and when we gaze upon the sacrificial conflagration of the Kremlin, we feel that it is the funeral pile of the conqueror's glories. It is well for the readers of this splendid work, that there is more in it of the painter than of

first bloomed there. The years that are fled knock at the door and enter. I am in the Louvre once more The Sun of Austerlitz has not set. It shines here, in my heart; and he the Son of Glory is not dead, nor ever shall be to me. I am as when my life began."-See the Essay on "Great and Little Things." Table Talk, vol. ii., p. 171.

the metaphysician; that its style glows with | on "Actors and Acting," breathes the very the fervour of battle, or stiffens with the spoils soul of abandonment to impulse and heedless of victory; yet we wonder that this monument enjoyment, affording glimpses of those brief to imperial grandeur should be raised from triumphs which make a stroller's career "less the dead level of Jacobinism by an honest and forlorn," and presenting mirrors to the stage profound thinker. The solution is, that al- in which its grand and affecting images, themthough he was this, he was also more-that, selves reflected from nature, are yet farther in opinion, he was devoted to the cause of the prolonged and multiplied. His individual people; but that, in feeling, he required some portraits of friends and enemies are hit off individual object of worship; that he selected with all the strength of hatred or affection, Napoleon as one in whose origin and career neither mitigated by courtesy nor mistrust:he might impersonate his principles and gra- partial, as they embrace, at most, only one astify his affections; and that he adhered to his pect of the character, but startling in their vi own idea with heroic obstinacy when the vidness, and productive of infinite amusement "child and champion of the republic" openly to those who are acquainted with the originals. sought to repress all feeling and thought, but It must be conceded that these personal refersuch as he could cast in his own iron moulds, ences were sometimes made with unjustifiable and scoffed at popular enthusiasm even while freedom; but they were more rarely prompted it bore him to the accomplishment of his lof- by malice prepense, than by his strong contiest desires. sciousness of the eccentricities of mankind, which pressed upon him for expression, and irritated his pen into satiric picture. And when this keen observance was exerted on scenes in which he delighted—as the Wednesday evening parties of Mr. Lamb's-how fine, how genial, how happy his delineations! How he gathers up the precious moments, when poets and artists known to fame, and men of fancy and wit yet unexhausted by publication, met in careless pleasure; and distils their finest essence. And if sometimes the temptation of making a spiteful hit at one of his friends was too urgent for resistance, what amends he made by some oblique compliment, at once as hearty and as refined as those by which Pope has made those whom he loved immortal. But these essays, in which the spirit of personality sometimes runs riot, are inferior, in our apprehension, to those in which it warms and peoples more abstracted views of humanity-not purely metaphysical reasonings, which it tended to disturb,* nor political disquisitions which it checked and turned from their aim; but estimates of the high condition and solemn incidents of our nature. Of this class, his papers on the "Love of Life," on the "Fear of Death," on the "Reasons why Distant Objects Please," on “Antiquity," on the "Love of the Country," and on

If the experiences and the sympathies which acted so powerfully on the mind of Hazlitt, detract somewhat from his authority as a reasoner, they give an unprecedented interest and value to his essays on character and books. The excellence of these works differ not so much in degree as in kind from that of all others of their class. There is a weight and substance about them, which makes us feel that amidst all their nice and dexterous analysis, they are, in no small measure, creations. The quantity of thought which is accumulated upon his favourite subjects; the variety and richness of the illustrations; and the strong sense of beauty and pleasure which pervades and animates the composition, give them a place, if not above, yet apart from the writings of all other essayists. They have not, indeed, the dramatic charm of the old "Spectator" and "Tattler," not the airy touch with which Addison and Steele skimmed along the surface of many-coloured life; but they disclose the subtle essences of character, and trace the secret springs of the affections with a more learned and penetrating spirit of human dealing than either. The intense interest which he takes in his theme, and which prompts him to adorn it lavishly with the spoils of many an intellectual struggle, commends it to the feelings as well as the understanding, and makes the thread of his argument seem to us like a fibre of our own moral being. Thus his essay on "Pedantry" seems, within its few pages, to condense not only all that can be said, but all that can be felt, on the happiness which we derive from the force of habit, on the softening influences of blameless vanity, and on the moral and pic-Cause and Effect" are amongst the most remarkable turesque effect of those peculiarities of manner, arising from professional associations, which diversify and emboss the plain groundwork of modern life. Thus, his character of Rousseau is not merely a just estimate of the extraordinary person to whom it relates, but is so imbued with the predominant feeling of his works that they seem to glide in review before us, and we rise from the essayist as if we had pursued the "Confessions" anew with him, and had partaken in the strong sympathy which they excited within him during the happiest summers of his youth. Thus, his paper

Living to Oneself," are choice specimens, written with equal earnestness and ingenuity, and full of noble pieces of retrospection on his own past being. Beyond their immediate

*Of the writers since Hume, who have written on metaphysics, with the severity proper to the subject, are Mr. Fearne, the author of the Essay on "Consciousness," and Lady Mary Shepherd, whose works on

productions of the age. Beattie, Dugald Stewart, Dr. Brown, and his imitators, turned what should have been abstract reasoning "to favour and to prettiness." Mr. Hazlitt obscured it by thickly clustered associations; and Coleridge presented it in the masquerade of a gorgeous fancy. Lady Mary Shepherd, on the other hand, is a thinker of as much honesty as courage; her specu lations are colourless, and leave nothing on the mind ing the Duchess of Devonshire, on a spirited verse she but the fine-drawn lines of thought. Coleridge, addresshad written on the heroism of Tell, asks

"O lady, nursed in pomp and pleasure, Where got ye that heroic measure?" The poet might have found in the reasonings of Lady Mary Shepherd a worthier object of admiration than in the little stanza which seemed so extraordinary an ef fort for a lady of fashion.

objects of contemplation, there is always | tracing instances of pathos and germs of moopened a moral perspective; and the tender rality amidst scenes which the world had hues of memory gleam and tremble over agreed to censure and to enjoy as vulgar and them.

immoral. He revels in the delights of old English comedy; exhibits the soul of art in its town-born graces, and the spirit of gayety in its mirth; detects for us a more delicate flavour in the wit of Congreve, and lights up the age of Charles the Second, "when kings and nobles led purely ornamental lives," with the airy and harmless splendour in which it streamed upon him amidst rustic manners and Presbyterian virtues. But his accounts of many of the dramatists of Shakspeare's age are less happy; for he had no early acquaintance with these that he should receive them into his own heart, and commend them to ours; he read them that he might lecture upon them,and he lectures upon them for effect, not for love. With the exception of a single charac ter, that of Sir Orlando Friscobaldo, whom he recognised at first sight as one with whose qualities he had been long familiar, they did not touch him nearly; and, therefore, his com

and turgid, and he gladly escapes from them into "wise saws and modern instances." The light of his own experience does not thicken about their scenes. His notices of Marlow, Heywood, Middleton, Marston, Deckar, Chap. man, Webster, and Ford, do not let us half so far into the secret of these extraordinary wri ters as the notes which Mr. Lamb has scattered (stray gifts of beauty and wisdom) through the little volume of his "Specimens," imbued with the very feeling which swelled and crimsoned in their intensest passages, and coming on the listening mind like strains of antique melody, breathed from the midst of that wild and solemn region in which their natural magic wrought its wonders. His regard for Beaumont and Fletcher is more hearty, and his appreciation of scattered excellencies in them as fine as can be wished; but he does not seem to apprehend the pervading spirit of their dramas,

"Books," says Mr. Wordsworth, "are a substantial world," and surely those on which Hazlitt has expatiated with true regard, have assumed, to our apprehensions, a stouter reality since we surveyed them through the medium of his mind. In general, the effect of criticism, even when fairly and tenderly applied, is the reverse of this; for the very process of subjecting the creations of the poet and the novelist to examination as works of art, and of estimating the force of passion or of habit, as exemplified in them, so necessarily implies that they are but the shadows of thought, as insensibly to dissipate the illusion which our dreamy youth had perchance cast around them. But in all that Hazlitt has written on old English authors, he is seldom merely critical. His masterly exposition of that huge book of fantastical fallacies, the vaunted "Arcadia" of Sir Philip Sidney, stands almost alone in his works as a specimen of the mere power of un-ments upon them are comparatively meagre erring dissection and impartial judgment. In the laboratory of his intellect, analysis was turned to the sweet uses of alchemy. While he discourses of characters he has known the longest, he sheds over them the light of his own boyhood, and makes us partakers of that realizing power by which they become creatures of flesh and blood, with whom we may eat, drink, and be merry. He bids us enjoy all that he has enjoyed in their society; invites us to gaze, as he did first, on that setting sun which Schiller's heroic Robber watched in his sadness, and makes us feel that to us "that sun will never set;" or introduces us to honest old Deckar on the borders of Salisbury Plain, when he struck a bargain for life with the best creation of the poet's genius. "After a long walk" with him "through unfrequented tracks -after starting the hare from the fern, or hearing the wing of the raven rustle above our heads, being greeted by the woodman's stern good night,' as he strikes into his narrow homeward path," we too "take our ease at our inn beside the blazing hearth, and shake hands with Signor Orlando Friscobaldo as the oldest acquaintance we have." He has increased our personal knowledge of Don Quixote, of John Buncle, of Parson Adams, of Pamela, of Clarissa Harlowe, of Lovelace, of Sir Roger de Coverly, and a hundred other undying teachers of humanity, and placed us on nearer and dearer terms with them. His cordial warmth brings out their pleasantest and most characteristic traits as heat makes visible the writing which a lover's caution has traced in colourless liquid; and he thus attests their reality with an evidence like that of the senses. He restored the "Beggar's Opera," which had been long This exquisite morsel of criticism (if that name be treated as a burlesque appendage to the "New-proper) first appeared in the "Morning Chronicle," as an gate Calendar," to its proper station; showing introduction to the account of the first appearance of Miss how the depth of the design, and the brilliancy an occasion worthy to be so celebrated-but not exciting Stephens in "Polly Peachum" (her second character)of the workmanship, had been overlooked in any hope of such an article. What a surprise it was to the palpable coarseness of the materials; and read it for the first time, amidst the tempered patriotism and measured praise of Mr. Perry's columns It was afterwards printed in the "Round Table," and (being justly a favourite of its author) found fit place in his "Lectures on the English Poets."-See Lecture VI

Lectures on the Age of Laizabeth.-Lecture VI. ↑ Ibid.-Lecture III.

the mere spirit of careless grace and fleeting beauty, which made the walk of tragedy a fairy land; turned passions and motives to its own sweet will; annihilated space and time; and sheds its rainbow hues with bountiful indifference on the just and the unjust; represented virtue as a happy accident, vice as a wayward fancy; and changed one for the other in the same person by sovereign caprice, as by a touch of Harlequin's wand, leaving "nothing serious in mortality," but reducing the struggle of life to an heroic game, to be played splendidly out, and left without a sigh. Nor does he pierce through the hard and knotty rind of Ben Jonson's manner, which alone, in our time, has been entirely penetrated by the author of