deed, exhibit here and there, throughout his career, symptoms of a slight misanthropical tendency; but in general well sustained the dignity of the sage and the conscious immortal. He had courage, too, of no ordinary kind, and needed it all to sustain the reaction of prodigious popularity; every specious of attack, from the sun-shafts of Burke, Mackintosh, and Hall, to the reptile calumnies of meaner assailants; and a perpetual struggle with narrow circumstances. He enjoyed, we believe, however, a pension for a few years ere his death. He is now only a name; but it is a name as great as the fame of "Caleb Williams," as wide as the civilised world, and as lasting as the literature of his native land.

WILLIAM HAZLITT.

WE may begin by stating, that our principal qualification for writing about Hazlitt is, that we have learned to love him, in spite of himself. This is no ordinary attainment. There is, at first sight, much that is repulsive about his works. There is a fierceness and intellectual intolerance about him by no means attractive. He dashes paradoxes like putting stones in your face. He now impales a literary reputation upon an antithesis, and now sends a political character limping away, with the point of a prose epigram sticking in its side. How he did fall foul of Rogers, for instance, in a description which must live in the annals of contemptuous criticism-it was so excessively like. It was a painting to the life of the weaknesses of that elegant, but finical poet. Moore, too, he has embalmed-not Moore of "The Twopenny Post-bag," and "The Fudge Family," the most witty and subtle of satirists-but Moore of "The Loves of Angels,' and "The Veiled Prophet;" the same, but oh, how different!the elegant ephemeral-the Bard of the Butterflies. How he discusses Crabbe, "describing the house of a poor man like one sent there to distrain for rent !" "giving us the petrifaction of a sigh, and carving a tear to the life in marble!" There was much injustice in all these attacks—all of them, at any rate, were provoking; but no matter; you remembered them; they stung and piqued you, though you could hardly at first love the savage hand which perpetrated such things. Yet we liked Hazlitt even in this wild work. He was honest in it. And there was a feeling of pity mingled with your admiration. You pitied power perversely and wantonly directed against popular idols, and doomed thus everlastingly to prevent its own popularity. He could denounce Moore for "changing the Harp of Erin into a musical snuff-box, and letting her tears of blood evaporate in lip-deep melodies ;"

but Moore, meanwhile, was singing them in drawing-rooms, where poor Hazlitt was not admitted. He could describe Moore barking at kings like a "pug-dog from the carriage of a lady of quality;" but Moore had his revenge in ridiculing a dear friend of Hazlitt's Hunt, namely-by a wicked little poem concerning a lion and a puppy dog. Hazlitt's criticisms might be immortal, but they did not sell. "Cash, Corn, Currency, and Catholics," did. When you recollected this, you forgave the critic. The quantity of verjuice in Hazlitt's mind was indeed immense. How it breaks out perpetually upon his page, in sudden, fierce, and fantastic gushes! How spleen burns in his declamations, darts athwart the pure light of his genius, imbitters his wit into satire, tinges his eloquence with frenzy, and sprinkles his enthusiastic criticisms on poetry and painting with bitter jaundiced personalities! The effect of this upon his reputation has been pernicious. He has taught men to imagine him a misanthrope, a modern Timon, with more bile than brains; a soured malignant cynic, who carried party and personal vindictiveness to the verge of madness. This, must we prove?—is but a segment of Hazlitt's character. He was a man, not a gall-bladder, though that needful organ was largely developed in his system. And he had deep wrongs to explain his spleen. Far are we from proposing him as a faultless or exemplary character. But will his enemies now deny that he was, for whatever reasons, made the mark of relentless and ramified persecution: and that his literary and moral sins were more than expiated by those torrents of incessant abuse which descended on his head, till his name became identical with all that was absurd in Cockneyism, and infamous in London life? Why a man of keen warm temperament, with passions equal to his powers, and with a deep soul-rooted sense of his superiority to some, at least, of his assailants, should be exasperated by such treatment, we can understand well, upon the principle of the stag turning on his hunters, and finding in those horns, which were meant only for ornament, means of defence and retaliation. Why, while others of his party were treated with comparative gentleness, he was so specially victimised why, while Jeffrey, for instance, was only tipped lightly with the lash, he was stripped naked and scourged to ribands he himself never could understand, and it is yet a mystery to many. The explanation, perhaps, lies in the history of those unhappy times, when the foul hoof of the demon of politics was still allowed to pollute the stream of literature, and poison Castalia itself.

In the light of a better era, we approach the consideration of the character and genius of Hazlitt, as a great erring man, but one of whom it may truly be said, that he was more sinned against than sinning. And his first characteristic is that of absolute earnestness. In this respect, he has few equals. Verily it is the

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rarest of qualities. Shreds of sincerity are common enough. Bits of truth come out every now and then from the most artificial of the mock-earnest. Those men are wrong, who think Byron always affected in his proclamations of personal misery. Often he is so palpably; but, at other times, the words bespeak their own truthfulness. They are the mere wringings of the heart. Who can doubt that his brow, the index of his soul, darkened, as he wrote that fearful curse, the burden of which is forgiveness? or that he wept when he penned the last stanzas of the Second Canto of "Childe Harold," Thou, too, art gone, thou loved and lovely one!" But, as a whole, his works are, as confessions, overcharged. No one, indeed, should write confessions in rhyme. There is too strong a temptation, while employing the melody, to use the language of fiction. Not that Byron's letters are more faithful to his emotions than some of his poetry; they reflect the man in all his moods; but the "Dream" showed him in his reverie, in his trance of passion, and depth of inspiration. And that mar, sitting alone, and with the warm tears falling upon the blurred and blotted pages-that man was Byron. But while he frequently counterfeited, Hazlitt is always in earnest. Writing in prose, he had never to sacrifice a sentiment to a sound. His works are therefore a mirror of the heart. And we pardon their egotism, their spleen, their very rancour, for the sake of that eloquence of earnestness in which their every sentence is steeped. In this respect, as well as in agreeable gossip, he reminds us of Montaigne, the fine old Gascon egotist, who possessed, however, a happier disposition, and whose lines fell in pleasanter places than the author of "Table Talk."

Hazlitt's ruling faculty was unquestionably a discriminating intellect. His forte lay in fastening, by sure, swift instinct, upon the differential quality of the author, book, or picture, which was the topic of his criticism. And, in saying this, we intend to intimate our belief that he does not belong to the very highest order of minds, in whom imagination, or, more properly, creative intellect, is ever the presiding power. Here we are aware of going in opposition to Foster, who, in his critical estimate of Robert Hall, asserts that, "except in the opinion of very young people, and second-rate poets, intellect is the first faculty in every great mind." At the risk of being included in one or other of the two classes thus contemptuously discriminated, we venture to contradict the critic. We ask, what are the very highest minds, by universal admission, which have yet appeared among men? Are they not those of Homer, Plato, Dante, Shakspere, Milton, Spenser; perhaps we should add, Sir Walter Scott, Goethe, Newton, and Lord Bacon? Now, with the exception of the two last mentioned, can any one doubt that imagination, though far from being the sole, was the presiding, power in all those majes

tic minds. Was it not this faculty which animated that old bardwho, on the Chian strand,

Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssee,

Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea?

Was it not imagination which prompted the golden fantasies and eloquence of Plato? Was it not the same power, in a darker and more demoniac shape, which took down the mighty Florentine through the descending circles of damnation, and up the bright steps of celestial blessedness? Did not imagination bind in, like a glorious girdle, all the varied and numberless faculties of Shakspere, the myriad-minded? Dd it not show to Milton's inward eye, the secrets of eternity? Did it not pour all the "Arabian heaven" upon the nights and days of Spenser, whose pen was a limb of the rainbow? Did it not people the blank of the past with crowding forms and faces, to the exhaustless mind, and on the many-coloured page of Scott? Did not its magic robe bear Goethe harmless, as he entered with Faust and Mephistopheles amid the hurry and horror of the Walpurgis night? Nay, even in reference to Newton and Bacon, we can hardly persuade ourselves that, in both their minds, it was not the ruling, as we know in the latter it was a principal, faculty; that it did not attend the one in the giant leaps of his geometry, as well as assist the other in making out his map of all the provinces of science, and of all the capabilities of mind. In somewhat lower, but still lofty regions, we find the same faculty presiding over the rest as in Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, and Burke. In those writers who had the benefit of inspiration, it is the same. Think of Isaiah, with his glowing eloquence; Ezekiel, with his stupendous visions, tinged by the "terrible crystal;' the author of Job, with his gorgeous imagery; Daniel, with his allegory; David, with his lyric enthusiasm; and the author of the Apocalypse, where the events of time and the cycles of eternity are blended in one tremendous tragedy, and enacted on one obscure and visionary stage.

Imagination thus seems, in its higher form, to be the sovereign. faculty of the loftiest natures; not perhaps of critics and logicians, but certainly of philosophers and poets. Perhaps, after all, Foster, in underrating imagination, is only committing the common error of confounding it with fancy-confounding the faculty which supplies foliage with that finer power which produces fruit-the faculty which is a mere fountain of images and illustrations with that which is the parent of thought. Imagination, in our sense of the term, is at once illustrative and creative. It sees by intuition, it illustrates by metaphor, it speaks in music. All great thought links itself instantaneously to imagery, and comes forth, like Minerva, in a panoply of glittering armour. All great thought is, in a word, poetical, and creates a rhythm of its own.

With this explanation, we hold imagination to be the most godlike of human powers; and being neither very young persons, nor yet guilty of the sin of verse, we can afford to retain our opinion, in defiance of the anathema of the late admired and eloquent essayist.

The subject of the present sketch was far from destitute of this faculty. He had more of it than he himself would believe. But though we have heard him charged, by those who knew nothing about him, with a superabundance of this very quality, his great strength lay neither in imagination, nor to take the word in the philosophical sense-in reason, but in acute and discriminating understanding. Unable to reach the aerial heights of poetryto grapple with the greater passions of the human soul-or to catch, on immortal canvass, either the features of the human face, the lineaments of nature, or the eloquent passages of history -he has become, nevertheless, through his blended discrimination and enthusiasm, one of our best critics on poetry; and, his enemies themselves being judges, a first-rate, if not unrivalled, connoisseur of painting. Add to this, his knowledge of human nature his deep dissections of life, in all its varieties-his ingenious but imperfect metaphysical aspirations-his memorable points, jutting out in vigorous projection from every page-the boldness of his paradoxes-the allusions to his past history, which, like flowers on murk and haggard rocks," flash on you where you expect them not-his imagery, chiefly culled from his own experience, or from the pages of the early English dramatists -his delicious gossip-his passionate panegyrics, bursting out so obviously from the heart-his criticisms upon the drama, the fancy, and every department of the fine arts-his frequent and vigorous irruptions into more abstruse regions of thought, such as the principles of human action, the Malthusian theory, legislation, pulpit eloquence, and criminal law; and his style, with its point, its terseness, its brilliance, its resistless charm of playful ease, alternating with fierce earnestness, and its rich profusion of poetical quotation-take all this together, and we have a view of the sunny side of his literary character. His faults are--an occasional ambition to shine-to sparkle to dazzle-a fondness for paradox, pushed to a passion-a lack of simplicity in his more elaborate, and of dignity in his more conversational passages delight in sudden breaks, marks of admiration, and other convulsive spasms, which we hate, even in the ablest writers-a display of strong prejudices, too plainly interfering with the dictates of his better judgment-a taste keen and sensitive, but capricious-a habit of quoting favourite authors, carried so far as to interfere with the unity, freedom, and force of his own style occasional bursts of sheer fustian, like the bright sores of leprosy frequent, though petty, pilferings from other authors;

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