Juliet; she is his only reality, his heart's true home and idol. The rest of the world is to him a passing dream."

I confess that I am particularly pleased with a certain discriminating tone of coldness with which Hazlitt speaks of several of the characters in the Merchant of Venice;' to me it is a proof that his sympathy with genius does not blind the natural delicacy and fineness of his taste. For my own part, I have always, from a boy, felt the moral sentiment somewhat invaded and jarred upon by the heartless treachery with which Jessica deserts her father-her utter forgetfulness of his solitude, his infirmities, his wrongs, his passions, and his age;-and scarcely less so by the unconscious and complacent baseness of Lorenzo, pocketing the filial purloinings of the fair Jewess, who can still tarry from the arms of her lover" to gild herself with some more ducats." These two characters would be more worthy of Dryden than of Shakspeare, if the great poet had not "cloaked and jewelled their deformities" by so costly and profuse a poetry. Their language belies their souls.

Passing from his Characters of Shakspeare' to his other various Essays, we shall find in Hazlitt the same one predominating faculty-the Critical; but adorned and set off with a far

greater richness and prodigality of style. He was singularly versatile. His taste encircled all things-Literature, Art, Philosophy, and Manners. I confess, that in the collection of Essays called the Round Table,' it is with a certain uneasiness that I regard his imitation of the tone and style of the essayists of Queen Anne's day. His genius, to my taste, does not walk easily in ruffles and a bag-wig; the affectation has not that nameless and courtly polish which distinguished Addison, or even the more reckless vivacity of Steele. The last thing that Hazlitt really can be called is "the wit about town." He is at home in the closet-in the fresh fieldsin the studies at the theatre, but he seems to me awkward when he would assume an intimacy with Belinda and Sir Plume. I am glad, therefore, when this affectation wears itself away, which it does, in a great part, after the preliminary Essays. Nothing can be more delightful than the freshness of thought and feeling which appears in the ninth Essay on The Love of the Country.' It breathes of a man released from cities. I doubt, however, its philosophy, when it resolves the love of the country into association only. The air, the fragrance, and the silence of woods and fields, require no previous initiation, and would delight us, even if all our

earliest and happiest associations were of Liquorpond street and Cheapside. Scattered throughout these Essays is a wealth of thought and poetry, beside which half the cotemporaries of their author seem as paupers. Hazlitt's remarkable faculty of saying brilliant things, in which the wit only ministers to the wisdom, is very conspicuous in all. His graver aphorisms are peculiar in this :-they are for the most part philosophical distinctions. Nothing can be more striking or more in the spirit of true philosophy than this" Principle is a passion for truth: an incorrigible attachment to a general proposition."

His views of literary men are almost invariably profound and searching. His refutation of Madame de Stael's common-place definitions of Rousseau's genius are triumphant. But as I have elsewhere† said, he does not seem to me equally felicitous with respect to the characters of men of action. His observations on Burke and Pitt, for instance, are vehemently unjust. All his usual discrimination, his habit of weighing quality with quantity, and binding judgment with forbearance, which render him impartial

and accurate as to poets, desert him the instant he comes to politicians. He has said somewhere that "a good patriot must be a good hater." That may be possible, but a good hater is a bad philosopher. I pass over his beautiful and well known criticisms on Art, because they open so wide a field of dispute as to render it impossible to finish the contests they provoke in the time to which I am limited. His perceptions are always keen and glowing, but I think he was scarcely so learned a critic of Art as he was a subtle and a brilliant one. His work on 'Human Actions' is full of valuable hints and ingenious distinctions; but I imagine that he has not fully embodied his own conceptions, and it seems to me also that he has somewhat mistaken the systems of the Utilitarian or Helvetian Philosophy. It is often clear that his disputes with the masters of these schools are merely verbal, and I do not think it would be impossible to reconcile with the theories of his antagonists, the whole of his elaborate reasonings on the mysteries of SYMPATHY." I conclude this to have been one of his earliest works, and it has not the same compression and energy of style which characterizes his lighter and later essays, while it often pretends to their ornament and eloquence.

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It was not my fortune to know Mr Hazlitt

personally, and it is therefore only as one of the herd of readers that I can pretend to estimate his intellect and to measure its productions. But looking over all that he has effected, his various accumulation of knowledge, the amazing range of subjects, from the most recondite to the most familiar, which he compassed, apparently with so much ease; his exceeding force of thought and fluent aptness of expression; I cannot be surprised at the impression he has left amongst those who knew him well, and who consider that his books alone are not sufficient evidence and mirror of his mind. Some men are greatest in their booksothers in themselves;-the first are usually poets, the last critics. For the Imagination is a less pliant and daily faculty than the Reason, and its genii are not so easily invoked. A man of great knowledge, of great analytical faculties, of active intellectual habits, and of a lively fancy, united, can scarcely fail of attaining his level in conversation, provided always that he has the ambition to desire it.

When Hazlitt died, he left no successor; others may equal him, but none resemble. And I confess that few deaths of the great

writers of my time ever affected me more painfully than his: For of most of those who,