drey jog along a level path;' but certain thoughts of Shakspeare pitch and jostle each other as in the dark.' The public taste hangs like a millstone about the neck of all original genius.' Mr. Wordsworth' might have said at once, instead of making a parcel of wry faces over the matter.' The 'gods made Burns poetical; but nature had a hand in him first.' 'When your expectations are worked up to the highest pitch, you are sure to have them knocked on the head.' In fine, there would be no end to this list of vulgarisms. We have all such expressions as 'rule the roast,' baby-house theatricals,' that great baby, the world,' thinking aloud,' all of a piece,' 'all of a sudden,'' interesting enough, badly enough off, come up to time and again,' at a hull, up-hill work, over and over,' topsyturvy, 'substantial flesh and blood display,' good as his word,' 'do-me-good air,' 'stock-still,' 'lag-end of life,' 'Shakspeare is much of a gentleman,'' Milton strives hard to say the finest things in the world,' 'sound of wind and limb,' &c. Nearly allied to this vulgarity is Mr. Hazlitt's eternal repetition of common-place quotations. 'Naïveté gusto,' 'mind's-eye,'' chaos and old night;' the passage about fine frenzy,' &c.

་

Another characteristic of this school, is, to pretend a general acquaintance with every thing, but to know nothing by detail. To mention particular names, or to make specific references, is beneath the dignity of a brilliant genius. He must speak of men and things as if they had been long familiar to him, so long, indeed, that he is really incapable of recollecting them with any precision. Thus, it cannot be said of Shakspeare as it was said of some one, that he was not o'erflowing full. Now, Mr. Hazlitt knew perfectly well, that this was first said by Denham; repeated by Pope; and has become of the most common-place quotations in the language. Again, 'Rochefoucault, I think it is, who says so and so; and Mr. Southey, I believe, has somewhere expressed an opinion.' In another place, Shakspeare says of some one;' and immediately after, some one says' of somebody else.

But an affectation which disgusts us still more is that of an acquaintance with the whole circle of the sciences. Lest you should suspect, he had not studied mathematics, Mr. Hazlitt repeats, on every convenient occasion, that action and re-action are equal.' For the same reason, he tells us, that 'Chaucer's characters are too much like identical propositions.' So he must be an adept in natural philosophy. He first observes, that Pope's chief power consisted in diminishing objects; and then adds, by way of illustration, that his mind was like a microscope. He had probably heard, that an instrument of this name was employed to look at minute objects; and he innocently supposed, that its use was to diminish, and not to magnify. He is a politician too. Pope's 'muse,' he says, 'was on a peace establishment;' and 'his irony and gravity was as nicely balanced as the balance of power in Europe.' Our author is equally proficient in ethics. After quoting a part of Thompson's Winter, he adds, it is thus that he always gives a

moral sense to nature,' an observation, of which we do not pretend to fathom the depths. To let you know that he has read Blackstone, he gives you the expressions malice-prepense,' ' quantum merruit,' 'a mensa et thoro,' 'during the term of their natural lives.' That he is acquainted with French and geography is, at once evident, from his saying, that Falstaff was a puny prompter of violence and outrage compared with the archbishop, who gave the king carte blanche, in a genealogical tree of his family, to rob and murder in circles of latitude and longitude abroad -to serve the possessions of the church at home.' The author unquestionably supposed, that he was here expressing an idea; but we are so very dull as not to comprehend him. He is, too, familiar with astronomy. The Indian,' in the Gertrude of Wyoming, 'vanishes and returns, at long intervals, like the periodical revolutions of the planets.' He had heard some such thing of the comets; and he supposed that all the heavenly bodies vanish and return, at long intervals.'

We have reserved his theological allusions to the last, because we wished to set a particular mark of reprobation upon that levity of disposition, which thinks itself intitled to play with the language of Scripture. Sir John Falstaff,' says our author, carries a most portly presence in the mind's eye;' and in him, we behold the fulness of the spirit of wit and humour bodily.' Mr. Hazlitt says, indeed, not to speak it profanely;' but this is to take the name of God in vain, not to be blasphemous.' Mr. Wordsworth had placed Chatterton by the side of Burns. Mr. Hazlitt says, “I am loth to put asunder whom so great an authority has joined together; but,' &c. Again, from the Lyrical Ballads,' we are told, 'it does not appear that men eat, or drink, marry, or are given in marriage. If we lived by every sentiment that proceeded out of mouths, and not by bread and wine, &c. Mr. Wordsworth's poetry would be just as good as ever.' This sentence has the double recommendation of nonsense and profanity. Shall we shut up our books,' asks the author, in another place, and seal up our senses, to please the dull spite, and inordinate vanity of those "who have eyes, but they see not-ears, but they hear not-and understandings, but they understand not,”—and go about asking our blind guides, whether Pope was a poet or not? It will never do.' Shakspeare, we are told, did not gather grapes of thorns, nor figs of thistles.' Ossian was without God in the world.' Mr. Hazlitt talks of an original sin' in the plot of a drama; and says the leviathan 'took up the sea in its nostrils as a very little thing.'

There is no end to the absurditics and the inconsistencies into which a writer may be betrayed, by abandoning himself to the capricious impulses of his imagination. He is every thing by turns, and nothing long.' He adopts the first doctrine he encounters,the more paradoxical the better; pursues it, for a few sentences, with ardour; leaves it suddenly for another; follows up that with the same spirit; and, perhaps, in less than two pages, will start the very opposites of both, and discuss them with an equal appearance of

zeal. So with Mr. Hazlitt. In one place, for instance, he runs a parallel between Chaucer and Shakspeare. We see Chaucer's characters,' says he, as they saw themselves, not as they appeared to others, or might have appeared to the poet. He is as deeply implicated in his personages as they could be themselves. He had to go a long journey with each of them, and became a kind of necessary confidant.' Shakspeare, we are taught, was the reverse of all this. He never committed himself to his characters. He trifled, laughed, or wept with them as he chose. He has no prejudices for or against them; and it seems a matter of perfect indifference whether he shall be in jest or earnest.'* Here Mr. Hazlitt foregoes the truth for the sake of a contrast. A more inept remark upon Shakspeare could not have been made; and, a few pages farther on, he has himself taken care to contradict it. 'Instead of being an indifferent spectator, who points at his characters, and bids you laugh or weep, Shakspeare now enters into their very being, prompts all their speeches, and actuates all their movements. The characters breathe, move, and live. Shakspeare does not stand reasoning on what his characters would do or say, but at once becomes them, and speaks and acts for them.'t

In one place Mr. Hazlitt takes much pains to show us, that painting and poetry are not at all alike; yet if there be any one thing, in which he has been consistent, it is in the uniformity with which he draws his illustrations of the latter from the analogies of the former. When artists and connoisseurs,' says he, talk on stilts about the poetry of painting, they show that they know little about poetry, and have little love for the art. Painting gives the object itself; poetry what it implies. Painting embodies what a thing contains in itself: poetry suggests what exists out of it, in any manner connected with it. This is one of those pert and hasty observations, which Mr. Hazlitt makes as he skims along, and never stops to examine. He was, indeed, sure to say the reverse in the very next page. 'Raphael's cartoons,' he tells us, are certainly the finest comments that ever were made on the Scriptures. Would their effect be the same if we were not acquainted with the text?' Yet a picture never implies,' or suggests,' any thing!

6

Mr. Hazlitt begins at a long distance to prepare for an attack upon lord Byron. He first defines what he takes genius to be; then proceeds to give a solemn dissertation upon fame; and, after a page or two of the usual common-places upon the evanescence of present popularity, he opens his hostility with such oblique observations as, that he who thinks much of himself, will be in danger of being forgotten by the world;' that the love of nature is the first thing in the mind of the true poet,-the admiration of himself the last;' and that 'he, who is conscious of great powers in himself, appeals also to a test and judge of merit, which is the highest, but which is too remote, grave, and impartial, to flatter his self-love extravagantly, or puff him up with intolerable and vain

* Characters, p. 108. VOL. XII.

Characters, p. 96.
27

Lectures, p. 20.

conceit.'* Then we are asked, 'was Raphael, think you, when he painted the pictures of the Virgin and Child in all their inconceivable truth of beauty and expression, thinking most of his subject or of himself? Do you suppose that Titian, when he painted a landscape, was pluming himself on being the finest colourist in the world, or making himself so by looking at nature? Do you imagine Shakspeare, when he wrote Lear or Othello, was thinking of any thing but Lear and Othello?' It would be ridiculous to reason gravely against such absurd notions as Mr. Hazlitt has promulgated in the Lecture from which we have copied these sentences. Every body knows, that the deepest interest that was ever given to poetry or prose, has been drawn from the author's own intense reflecting upon himself; and, after all Mr. Hazlitt's flourishes about the danger of looking too often into our own minds, he has, as usual, taken up the very opposite doctrine, and answered all his socratic questions in the negative. Even in the sentence which immediately precedes this triumphant appeal, he tells us, that 'truth and nature must first be inly felt and copied with severe delight, from the love of truth and nature (again), before it can ever appear in an author's works.' It has been remarked, that lord Byron's character seems to be a verification of Shakspeare's Hamlet; and, whether the remark be just or not, the reasons which Mr. Hazlitt gives, for the interest we take in the latter, are equally applicable to the former, and flatly contradictory of what he says about thinking of one's self. Hamlet, he tells us, is one of Shakspeare's plays which we think of oftenest, because it abounds most in striking reflections on human life, and because the distresses of Hamlet are transferred, by the turn of his mind, to the general account of humanity. Whatever happens to him, we apply to ourselves, because he applies it to himself as a means of general reasoning. He is a great moralizer; and, what makes him worth attending to, is, that he moralizes on his own feelings and experience.' Mr. Hazlitt could not adopt more appropriate language to characterize the peculiar attraction of lord Byron's poetry.

These may serve as specimens of the contradictions, into which the heedless magnanimity' of Mr. Hazlitt's wit' is constantly leading him. It is the same hurried and superficial investigation, which makes him utter an infinite deal of nonsense,' in the course of a few hundred pages. In opposition to the general voice of the world, he must maintain, that fago is, in all respects, a perfectly natural character; that he had an abundant motive for the hellish malignity with which he plotted the destruction of a happy family; and that he belongs to a class of persons who are amateurs of tragedy in real life; and instead of employing their invention on imaginary characters, or long forgotten incidents, take the bolder and more desperate course of getting up a plot at home, cast the principal parts among their nearest friends and connexions,

* Lecture viii.

+ Characters, p. 105.

and rehearse it in downright earnest, with steady nerves and unabated resolution.* It is a libel upon humanity to tell us, that such a character is natural. No man was ever moved to do mischief, through a pure love of ruin, without the expectation of some profit to himself; and Iago, as Mr. Hazlitt rightly observes,' is quite or nearly as indifferent to his own fate as to that of others. He runs all risks for a trifling and doubtful advantage; and is himself the dupe and victim of his ruling passion.' Where are the men, who, without any provocation of injury, or hope of benefit, are willing to sacrifice their own lives to a favourite propensity' of seeing 'tragedy in real life?'

There is one subject which seems to have given our author considerable alarm; and to which, therefore, he recurs, in different parts of his writings, with a singular consistency of opinion. He has adopted an idea, that the progress of knowledge is fast narrowing the boundaries of poetry; and that, after the lapse of a few centuries, this department of intellectual pleasure must entirely disappear. It cannot be concealed,' he says, that the progress of knowledge and refinement has a tendency to circumscribe the imagination, and to clip the wings of poetry. It is the undefined and uncommon that gives birth and scope to the imagination. We can only fancy what we do not know. There can never be another Jacob's dream. Since that time, the heavens have gone farther off, and grown astronomical. They have become averse to the imagination, nor will they return to us in the squares of the distances, or in Dr. Chalmer's Discoveries.'t Again, in another place, the progress of manners and knowledge,' we are told, has an influence on the stage, and will, in time, perhaps, destroy both tragedy and comedy. Filch's picking pockets in the Beggar's Opera, is not so good a jest as it used to be: by the force of the police and of philosophy, Lillo's murders, and the ghosts of Shakspeare, will become obsolete. At last, there will be nothing left, good or bad, to be desired or dreaded, on the theatre or in real life.' It is really a pity, that picking pockets should no longer be a good joke, and that murder and witchcraft have become obsolete.

It is our firm opinion, however, notwithstanding Mr. Hazlitt's despair, that this wicked philosophy, though it removes the errors of real life, will have little influence upon the world of imagination; that the heavens by 'going farther off,' have not become a whit the less poetical; and that we shall have as many more Jacob's ladders as we have Jacobs. What effect will the squares of the distances' have upon our imagination? Does Mr. Hazlitt suppose, that we shall, in future, dream according to the laws of gravitation, or set our fancies by the rules, which teach us how to find the time of day, or the sun's place in the heavens? Have we the less admiration of Homer, or of any of the ancient poets, because the progress of knowledge has dissipated the scientific erCharacters, p. 30.

* Characters, p. 55, 56.

Lect. p. 18, 19,