THE ROUND TABLE

ON THE LOVE OF LIFE

This essay formed No. 3 of the Round Table series, the first two having been contributed by Leigh Hunt. To numbers 2, 3, 4 the following motto was prefixed: ‘Sociali foedere mensa. Milton. A Table in a social compact joined.’

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1.

That sage. Hazlitt perhaps refers to Bacon’s lines—

‘What then remains, but that we still should cry

For being born, or being born, to die?’

which are taken from an epigram in the Greek Anthology.

2.

‘The school-boy,’ says Addison. See The Spectator, No. 93.

‘Hope and fantastic expectations,’ etc. Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Dying, Chap. i. § 3, par. 4.

‘An ounce of sweet,’ etc. ‘A dram of sweete is worth a pound of sowre.’ The Faerie Queene, Book I. Canto iii. 30. This line formed the motto of Leigh Hunt’s Indicator.

3.

‘And that must end us,’ etc. Paradise Lost, II. 145–151. In The Examiner Hazlitt publishes the following passage as a note to this quotation: ‘Many persons have wondered how Bonaparte was able to survive the shock of that tremendous height of power from which he fell. But it was that very height which still rivetted his backward gaze, and made it impossible for him to take his eye from it, more than from a hideous spectre. The sun of Austerlitz still rose upon his imagination, and could not set. The huge fabric of glory which he had raised, still “mocked his eyes with air.”^[87] He who had felt his existence so intensely could not consent to lose it!’

4.

‘Are made desperate,’ etc. Wordsworth’s Excursion, Book VI. The following note is appended to this essay in The Examiner: ‘It is proper to notice that an extract from this article formerly appeared in another publication. A series of Criticisms on the principal English Poets will shortly be commenced, and till concluded, will appear alternately with the other subjects of the Round Table.’ The publication referred to was The Morning Chronicle for September 4, 1813, where, under the heading ‘Common Places,’ the substance of the paragraph beginning ‘The love of life is, in general, the effect,’ and the following paragraph will be found. The plan for criticisms of the English Poets was not adhered to. Hazlitt shortly afterwards (1818) delivered a course of Lectures on the English Poets which was published in the same year.

This essay formed the greater part of No. 7 of the Round Table series. The first three paragraphs are from one of Hazlitt’s ‘Common Places’ in The Morning Chronicle, September 25, 1813.

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4.

‘A discipline of humanity.’ Bacon’s Essays, Of Marriage and Single Life.

‘Still green with bays,’ etc. Pope’s Essay on Criticism, 181–188.

5.

A celebrated political writer. Probably Cobbett, of whom Hazlitt says in another place: ‘He is a self-taught man, and has the faults as well as excellences of that class of persons in their most striking and glaring excess.’ (Table Talk, Character of Cobbett.)

6.

‘The world is too much with us,’ etc. Misquoted from Wordsworth’s Sonnet.

Falstaff’s reasoning about honour. See 1 Henry IV. Act V. Scene 1.

‘They that are whole,’ etc. St. Matthew, ix. 12.

In The Examiner this essay concluded with the following passage: ‘We do not think a classical education proper for women. It may pervert their minds, but it cannot elevate them. It has been asked, Why a woman should not learn the dead languages as well as the modern ones? For this plain reason, that the one are still spoken, and have immediate associations connected with them, and the other not. A woman may have a lover who is a Frenchman, or an Italian, or a Spaniard; and it is well to be provided against every contingency in that way. But what possible interest can she feel in those old-fashioned persons, the Greeks and Romans, or in what was done two thousand years ago? A modern widow would doubtless prefer Signor Tramezzani^[88] to Æneas, and Mr. Conway would be a formidable rival to Paris. No young lady in our days, in conceiving an idea of Apollo, can go a step beyond the image of her favourite poet: nor do we wonder that our old friend, the Prince Regent, passes for a perfect Adonis in the circles of beauty and fashion. Women in general have no ideas, except personal ones. They are mere egotists. They have no passion for truth, nor any love of what is purely ideal. They hate to think, and they hate every one who seems to think of anything but themselves. Everything is to them a perfect nonentity which does not touch their senses, their vanity, or their interest. Their poetry, their criticism, their politics, their morality, and their divinity, are downright affectation. That line in Milton is very striking—

“He for God only, she for God in him.”^[89]

Such is the order of nature and providence; and we should be sorry to see any fantastic improvements on it. Women are what they were meant to be; and we wish for no alteration in their bodies or their minds. They are the creatures of the circumstances in which they are placed, of sense, of sympathy and habit. They are exquisitely susceptible of the passive impressions of things: but to form an idea of pure understanding or imagination, to feel an interest in the true and the good beyond themselves, requires an effort of which they are incapable. They want principle, except that which consists in an adherence to established custom; and this is the reason of the severe laws which have been set up as a barrier against every infringement of decorum and propriety in women. It has been observed by an ingenious writer of the present day, that women want imagination. This requires explanation. They have less of that imagination which depends on intensity of passion, on the accumulation of ideas and feelings round one object, on bringing all nature and all art to bear on a particular purpose, on continuity and comprehension of mind; but for the same reason, they have more fancy, that is greater flexibility of mind, and can more readily vary and separate their ideas at pleasure. The reason of that greater presence of mind which has been remarked in women is, that they are less in the habit of speculating on what is best to be done, and the first suggestion is decisive. The writer of this article confesses that he never met with any woman who could reason, and with but one reasonable woman. There is no instance of a woman having been a great mathematician or metaphysician or poet or painter: but they can dance and sing and act and write novels and fall in love, which last quality alone makes more than angels of them. Women are no judges of the characters of men, except as men. They have no real respect for men, or they never respect them for those qualities, for which they are respected by men. They in fact regard all such qualities as interfering with their own pretensions, and creating a jurisdiction different from their own. Women naturally wish to have their favourites all to themselves, and flatter their weaknesses to make them more dependent on their own good opinion, which, they think, is all that they want. We have, indeed, seen instances of men, equally respectable and amiable, equally admired by the women and esteemed by the men, but who have been ruined by an excess of virtues and accomplishments.’ Leigh Hunt replied to these remarks in the following number of the Round Table series (February 19, 1815), where he makes interesting reference to Hazlitt’s appearance and powers.

ON THE TATLER

This essay formed No. 10 of the Round Table series. The substance of it was repeated by Hazlitt in his volume of Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819). (See the Lecture on ‘The Periodical Essayists.’)

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7.

‘The disastrous strokes which his youth suffered.’ ‘Some distressful stroke that my youth suffered.’ Othello, Act I. Scene 3.

He dwells with a secret satisfaction. The Tatler, No. 107.

The club at the ‘Trumpet.’ The Tatler, No. 132.

The cavalcade of the justice, etc. The Tatler, No. 86.

The upholsterer and his companions. See The Tatler, Nos. 155, 160, and 178.

A burlesque copy of verses. The Tatler, No. 238. The verses are by Swift.

8.

Betterton and Mrs. Oldfield. See p. 157. Betterton is frequently mentioned in The Tatler. See especially No. 167.

Mr. Penkethman and Mr. Bullock. See The Tatler, No. 88, and p. 157 of this volume.

‘The first sprightly runnings.’ Dryden’s Aurengzebe, Act IV. Scene 1.

9.

The Court of Honour. Addison, in The Tatler, No. 250, created the Court of Honour. He and Steele together wrote the later papers (Nos. 253, 256, 259, 262, 265) in which the proceedings of the Court are recorded.

The Personification of Musical Instruments. The Spectator, Nos. 153 and 157.

Note. This note is by Leigh Hunt. The authorship of the anonymous paper (The Spectator, No. 95) is uncertain.

The account of the two sisters. The Tatler, No. 151.

The married lady. The Tatler, No. 104.

9.

The lover and his mistress. The Tatler, No. 94.

The bridegroom. The Tatler, No. 82.

Mr. Eustace and his wife. The Tatler, No. 172.

The fine dream. The Tatler, No. 117.

Mandeville’s sarcasm. Bernard Mandeville (d. 1733), author of The Fable of the Bees.

Westminster Abbey. The Spectator, No. 26.

Royal Exchange. The Spectator, No. 69.

The best criticism. The Spectator, No. 226.

10.

Note. An original copy of the ‘Tatler.’ The octavo edition of 1710–11.

ON MODERN COMEDY

This essay did not form one of the Round Table series, but was published in The Examiner for August 20, 1815, under the heading ‘Theatrical Examiner.’ It was substantially repeated in the Lectures on the English Comic Writers (Lecture VIII., ‘on the Comic Writers of the Last Century’), and was republished verbatim in the posthumous volume entitled Criticisms and Dramatic Essays on the English Stage (1851). The essay is practically a reprint of the first of two letters which Hazlitt wrote to The Morning Chronicle (September 25 and October 15, 1813). The second of these letters has not been republished.

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10.

‘Where it must live, or have no life at all.’ Othello, Act. II. Scene 4.

11.

‘See ourselves as others see us.’ Burns, ‘To a Louse.’

Wart. He means Shadow. See 2 Henry IV., Act III. Scene 2.

12.

Lovelace, etc. Nearly all these characters are discussed in the English Comic Writers. Sparkish is in Wycherley’s Country Wife, Lord Foppington in Vanbrugh’s Relapse, Millamant in Congreve’s Way of the World, Sir Sampson Legend in Congreve’s Love for Love.

We cannot expect, etc. This paragraph appeared originally in The Morning Chronicle, October 15, 1813.

13.

‘That sevenfold fence.’ ‘The seven-fold shield of Ajax cannot keep the battery from my heart.’ Antony and Cleopatra, Act IV. Scene 14. This passage is taken by Hazlitt from his own Reply to Malthus (1807).

‘Mr. Smirk, you are a brisk man.’ Foote’s Minor, Act II.

Aristotle. In the Poetics.

‘Warm hearts of flesh and blood,’ etc. Quoted, with omissions and variations, from a passage in Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (Select Works, ed. Payne, ii. 101).

14.

‘Men’s minds are parcel of their fortunes.’ Antony and Cleopatra, Act III. Scene 13.

ON MR. KEAN’S IAGO

Republished with a few variations from The Examiner of July 24, 1814. Hazlitt afterwards published the original article in A View of the English Stage (1818), and borrowed from it in Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (See ante, pp. 206–7).

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14.

A contemporary critic. This was Hazlitt himself who made this criticism of Kean in an article in The Morning Chronicle (May 9, 1814), reprinted in A View of the English Stage.

‘Hedged in with the divinity of kings.’ From Hamlet, Act IV. Scene 5.

15.

Play the dog, etc. 3 Henry VI., Act V. Scene 6.

16.

‘His cue is villainous melancholy,’ etc. King Lear, Act I. Scene 2.

This essay was one of a series called Common-places (No. III.) and appeared in The Examiner on November 27, 1814, before the Round Table series commenced. It was not, therefore, addressed, as it purports to be, ‘to the editor of the “Round Table.”’ The greater part of it was repeated in the Lectures on the English Poets (1818) at the end of Lecture V. on Thomson and Cowper.

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17.

Rousseau in his ‘Confessions.’ Partie I. Livre III.

18.

The minstrel. See Beattie’s Minstrel, Book I. st. 9.

20.

‘A farewell sweet.’

‘If chance the radiant sun, with farewell sweet,

Extend his evening beam,’ etc.

Paradise Lost, II. 492.

‘To me the meanest flower,’ etc. Wordsworth’s Ode, Intimations of Immortality.

‘Nature did ne’er betray,’ etc. Wordsworth’s Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey.

21.

‘Or from the mountain’s sides.’ Collins’s Ode to Evening, stanzas 9 and 10.

ON POSTHUMOUS FAME

This essay is not one of the Round Table series. It appeared in The Examiner on May 22, 1814.

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22.

‘Blessings be with them’ etc. Wordsworth’s Personal Talk, stanza 4.

‘Nor sometimes forget,’ etc. Paradise Lost, III. 33 et seq.

Note. A part of the passage here referred to (from The Reason of Church Government urged against Prelacy) is quoted by Hazlitt in his Lectures on the English Poets (on Shakspeare and Milton).

23.

‘Famous poets’ wit.’ See The Faerie Queene, Verses addressed by the author, No. 2. ‘Have not the poems of Homer,’ etc. The Advancement of Learning, First Book, VIII. 6.

‘Because on Earth,’ etc. See Dante’s Inferno, Canto iv. Cf. ‘On Fames eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled.’ The Faerie Queene, Book IV. Canto ii. st. 32.

‘Every variety of untried being.’

‘Through what variety of untried being,

Through what new scenes and changes must we pass!’

Addison’s Cato, Act V. Scene 1.

24.

Note. ‘Oh! for my sake,’ etc. Sonnet No. III. ‘Desiring this man’s art,’ etc. Sonnet No. 29.

ON HOGARTH’S ‘MARRIAGE À LA MODE’

This essay (from The Examiner, June 5, 1814) and the next one (June 19, 1814) continuing the same subject, were (in substance) republished in the English Comic Writers (see the Lecture VII. on the works of Hogarth) and also in Sketches of the Principal Picture-Galleries in England, etc. (1824).

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25.

The late collection. In 1814.

‘Of amber-lidded snuff-box.’ Pope’s Rape of the Lock, IV. 123.

26.

‘A person, and a smooth dispose,’ etc. Othello, Act I. Scene 3.

‘Vice loses half its evil in losing all its grossness.’ Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (Select Works, ed. Payne, ii. 89).

THE SUBJECT CONTINUED

28.

What Fielding says. See Tom Jones, Book IV. Chap. i.

30.

‘All the mutually reflected charities.’ Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (Select Works, ed. Payne, ii. 40).

‘Frequent and full,’ etc. See Paradise Lost, III. 795–797.

31.

Note. The ‘Reflector.’ For 1811. The essay is included in Poems, Plays and Miscellaneous Essays of Charles Lamb (ed. Ainger).

ON MILTON’S LYCIDAS

No. 15 of the Round Table series.

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31.

‘At last he rose,’ etc. Lycidas, 192–193.

Dr. Johnson. See his Life of Milton (Works, Oxford ed., vii. 119).

‘Most musical, most melancholy.’ Il Penseroso, l. 62.

‘With eager thought warbling his Doric lay.’ Lycidas, l. 189.

32.

‘Together both,’ etc. Lycidas, ll. 25 et seq.

‘Oh fountain Arethuse,’ etc. Lycidas, ll. 85 et seq.

33.

‘Like one that had been led astray,’ etc. Il Penseroso, ll. 69–70.

‘Next Camus,’ etc. Lycidas, ll. 103 et seq.

Has been found fault with. By Dr. Johnson in his Life of Milton (Works, Oxford ed., vii. 120).

Camoens, who, in his ‘Lusiad.’ See The Lusiads, Canto ii. stanzas 56 et seq.

34.

‘The muses in a ring,’ etc. Il Penseroso, ll. 47–48.

‘Have sight of Proteus,’ etc. Wordsworth’s Sonnet, ‘The world is too much with us.’

‘Return, Alphaeus,’ etc. Lycidas, ll. 132 et seq.

35.

Dr. Johnson. Johnson does not seem to have been offended by the dolphins in particular.

The picture by Barry. ‘The triumph of the Thames,’ number 4 of the six pictures painted by James Barry (1741–1806) for the Society of Arts. Johnson’s friend, Dr. Charles Burney (1726–1814) figures as one of the renowned dead.

‘Here’s flowers for you’ etc. Winter’s Tale, Act. IV. Scene 4.

36.

Dr. Johnson’s ‘general remark,’ etc. See his Life of Milton (Works, Oxford ed., vii. 119, 131), and Boswell’s Life of Johnson (ed. G. B. Hill), iv. 305.

ON MILTON’S VERSIFICATION

No. 16 of the Round Table series. Hazlitt drew largely on this essay for his lecture on Shakspeare and Milton. See Lectures on the English Poets.

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37.

‘Makes Ossa like a wart.’ Hamlet, Act V. Scene 1.

‘Sad task, yet argument,’ etc. Quoted, with omissions, from Paradise Lost, IX. 13–45.

37.

‘Him followed Rimmon,’ etc. Paradise Lost, I. 467–469.

‘As when a vulture,’ etc. Paradise Lost, III. 431–439.

38.

It has been said, etc. Hazlitt probably refers to Coleridge. See his Lectures on Shakspeare (Bell’s ed., p. 526).

‘He soon saw within ken,’ etc. Paradise Lost, III. 621–634.

39.

Dr. Johnson. Hazlitt somewhat exaggerates Johnson’s strictures on Milton. See The Rambler, Nos. 86, 88, and 90.

‘His hand was known,’ etc. Paradise Lost, I. 732–747.

‘But chief the spacious hall,’ etc. Paradise Lost, I. 762–788. In The Examiner Hazlitt has a note to the words ‘brush’d with the hiss of rustling wings,’ pointing out that it was one of Dr. Johnson’s speculations, that all imitative sound is merely fanciful. He refers probably to The Rambler, No. 94.

40.

‘Round he surveys,’ etc. Paradise Lost, III. 555–567.

‘In many a winding bout,’ etc. L’Allegro, ll. 139–140.

41.

‘The hidden soul of harmony.’ L’Allegro, l. 144.

Note. Hazlitt quoted these couplets again in his Lectures on the English Poets. See Lecture IV. on Dryden and Pope.

ON MANNER

This essay is compounded of two papers in the Round Table series, Nos. 17 and 18." Hazlitt, however, omitted the greater part of No. 18, at the beginning of which he discussed Dryden’s version of The Flower and the Leaf. No. 18 was published in Winterslow (1839) under the title of Matter and Manner.

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42.

Says Lord Chesterfield. ‘Observe the looks and countenances of those who speak, which is often a surer way of discovering the truth than what they say.’ Letters to his Son, No. cxxx.

Than his sentiments. In The Examiner appears the following note on this passage: ‘We find persons who write what may be called an impracticable style; and their ideas are just as impracticable. They have as little tact of what is going on in the world as of the habitual meaning of words. Other writers betray their natural disposition by affectation, dryness, or levity of style. Style is the adaptation of words to things. Dr. Johnson had no style, that is, no scale of words answering to the differences of his subject. He always translated his ideas into the highest and most imposing form of expression, or more properly, into Latin words with English terminations. Goldsmith said to him, “If you had to write a fable, and to introduce little fishes speaking, you would make them talk like great whales.” It is a satire on this kind of taste that the most ignorant pretenders are in general what is generally understood by the finest writers. Women generally write a good style, because they express themselves according to the impression which things make upon them, without the affectation of authorship. They have besides more sense of propriety than men.’ For the story of Goldsmith see Boswell’s Life of Johnson (ed. G. B. Hill), ii. 231.

43.

One of the most pleasant, etc. It is evident from a passage in Table Talk (on Coffee-House Politicians) that this friend is Leigh Hunt, and that ‘another friend’ is Lamb.

‘As dry as the remainder biscuit,’ etc. As You Like It, Act II. Scene 7.

‘Learning is often,’ etc. 2 Henry IV., Act IV. Scene 3.

44.

Lord Chesterfield’s character of the Duke of Marlborough. Letters to his Son, No. clxviii.

45.

Note 1. It appears from a MS. note in a copy of the 1817 edition that Hazlitt here refers to Lord Castlereagh.

The greatest man, etc. Napoleon. Cf. Table Talk (on Great and Little Things) and Life of Napoleon, Chap. lvii.

Note 2. A sonnet to the King. This must be the sonnet beginning—

‘Now that all hearts are glad, all faces bright’

to which Hazlitt referred again in Political Essays (‘Illustrations of The Times Newspaper’). Wordsworth’s attack on a set of gipsies was in the poem entitled ‘Gipsies’ (1807).

‘In a wise passiveness.’ Expostulation and Reply (1798).

In the ‘Excursion’. Book VIII.

‘They are a grotesque ornament,’ etc. ‘Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order.’ Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (Select Works, ed. Payne, ii. 164).

This is enough. In The Examiner Hazlitt adds: ‘We really have a very great contempt for any one who differs from us on this point.’

46.

The Story of the glass-man. The Barber’s story of his Fifth Brother.

That manner is everything. ‘Sheer impudence answers almost the same purpose. “Those impenetrable whiskers have confronted flames.” Many persons, by looking big and talking loud, make their way through the world without any one good quality. We have here said nothing of mere personal qualifications, which are another set-off against sterling merit. Fielding was of opinion that “the more solid pretensions of virtue and understanding vanish before perfect beauty.” “A certain lady of a manor” (says Don Quixote^[90] in defence of his attachment to Dulcinea, which however was quite of the Platonic kind), “had cast the eyes of affection on a certain squat, brawny lay-brother of a neighbouring monastery, to whom she was lavish of her favours. The head of the order remonstrated with her on this preference shown to one whom he represented as a very low, ignorant fellow, and set forth the superior pretensions of himself, and his more learned brethren. The lady having heard him to an end made answer: All that you have said may be very true; but know, that in those points which I admire, Brother Chrysostom is as great a philosopher, nay greater than Aristotle himself!” So the Wife of Bath:^[91]—

“To church was mine husband borne on the morrow

With neighbours that for him maden sorrow,

And Jenkin our clerk was one of tho:

As help me God, when that I saw him go

After the bier, methought he had a pair

Of legs and feet, so clean and fair,

That all my heart I gave unto his hold.”

“All which, though we most potently believe, yet we hold it not honesty to have it thus set down.”’^[92]—Note by Hazlitt in The Examiner, September 3, 1815.

Note. Sir Roger de Coverley. The Spectator, No. 130.

47.

The successful experiment. See Peregrine Pickle, Chap, lxxxvii.

No. 19 of the Round Table series.

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49.

Note 1. The Freedom of the Will of Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) was published in 1754. Edwards was, of course, an American, as Flower reminded Hazlitt in his letter referred to below (49, note 2).

‘Hid from ages.’ Colossians, i. 26.

Note 2. Benjamin Flower, in a reply which he wrote to this essay (The Examiner, October 8, 1815), pointed out the ‘phenomenon’ of a Quaker poet ‘appeared about thirty years since, Mr. Scott of Amwell, whose volume of poetry obtained the marked approbation of our acknowledged best critics.’ Johnson said of John Scott of Amwell’s (1730–1783) Elegies, ‘they are very well; but such as twenty people might write’ (Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, ii. 351). Another correspondent, signing himself ‘B. B.,’ wrote a letter to The Examiner (September 24, 1815), protesting against Hazlitt’s sketch of Quakerism. This was no doubt Bernard Barton (1784–1849), another Quaker poet, and afterwards the friend of Lamb.

50.

‘There is some soul of goodness,’ etc. Henry V., Act IV. Scene 1.

‘Evil communications,’ etc. 1 Corinthians, xv. 33.

ON JOHN BUNCLE

No. 20 of the Round Table series.

The Life of John Buncle, Esq., by Thomas (not John) Amory (1691?-1788), was published in two volumes, 1756–1766. A new edition in three volumes was published in 1825, very likely on Hazlitt’s recommendation. See Memoirs of William Hazlitt, ii. 198. A quotation from the present essay faces the title-page of the new edition (vol. i.). A volume containing the most readable parts of the book, and happily entitled ‘The Spirit of Buncle,’ was published in 1823. The book was a great favourite of Lamb’s as well as of Hazlitt’s.

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52.

Botargos. ‘Hard roes of mullet called botargos.’ Urquhart’s Rabelais, I. xxi.

53.

‘Man was made to mourn.’

‘Who breathes, must suffer; and who thinks, must mourn.’

Prior, Solomon on the Vanity of the World, III. 240.

He danced the Hays.

‘I will play on the tabor to the worthies, and let them dance the hay.’

Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act V. Scene 1.

A mistress and a saint in every grove. Goldsmith’s Traveller, 152.

‘Most dolphin-like.’ Antony and Cleopatra, Act V. Scene 2.

‘And there the antic sits,’ etc. Richard II., Act III. Scene 2.

56.

Philips’s. The Pastorals of Pope and Ambrose Philips (1675?-1749) appeared in Tonson’s Miscellany (1709).

Sannazarius. An English translation of the Piscatory Eclogues of Jacopo Sannazario was published in 1726.

‘What he beautifully calls,’ etc. See The Complete Angler, Part I. Chap. i.

‘We accompany them,’ etc. The Complete Angler, Part I. Chap. iv. The milkmaid sang ‘Come live with me, and be my love.’ That ‘smooth song’ (says Walton) ‘which was made by Kit Marlowe, now at least fifty years ago.

And the milkmaid’s mother sung an answer to it, which was made by Sir Walter Raleigh in his younger days.’

57.

Tottenham Cross. The subject of one of the prints.

Note. His friendship for Cotton. Charles Cotton (1630–1687), the translator of Montaigne (1685).

Note. Dr. Johnson said. See Mrs. Piozzi’s Anecdotes (Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. G. B. Hill, i. 332).

ON THE CAUSES OF METHODISM

No. 22 of the Round Table series. Leigh Hunt discussed this article in No. 24 of the series, republished in the 1817 edition of the Round Table, and entitled ‘On the Poetical Character.’ On the subject of Methodism Hunt had already spoken his mind in a series of articles in The Examiner, which he republished in 1809 under the title of An Attempt to shew the folly and danger of Methodism.

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58.

‘To sinner it or saint it.’ Pope’s Moral Essays, Ep. II. l. 15.

‘The whole need not a physician.’ St. Matthew, ix. 12.

‘Conceit in weakest,’ etc. Hamlet, Act III. Scene 4.

59.

Mawworm. In Isaac Bickerstaffe’s Hypocrite, altered from Colley Cibber’s Nonjuror, which was itself ‘a comedy threshed out of MoliÈre’s Tartuffe.’ See the Lecture on the Comic Writers of the Last Century in English Comic Writers. For Oxberry’s acting of the part see A View of the English Stage.

‘With sound of bell,’ etc. As You Like It, Act II. Scene 7.

‘Round fat oily men of God,’ etc. Thomson’s Castle of Indolence, stanza 69.

‘That burning and shining light.’ St. John, v. 35.

Note. ‘And filled up all the mighty void of sense.’ Pope’s Essay on Criticism, l. 210.

60.

‘The vice,’ etc. Hebrews, xii. 1.

‘The Society for the Suppression of Vice.’ Founded in 1802. Sydney Smith criticised its methods in one of his Edinburgh Review articles (Jan. 1809). Hazlitt refers to it again. See ante, p. 139.

‘And sweet religion,’ etc. Hamlet, Act III. Scene 4.

‘Numbers without number.’ Paradise Lost, III. 346.

61.

‘Dissolves them,’ etc. Il Penseroso, ll. 165–166.

ON THE MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

No. 26 of the Round Table series. The essay was in substance republished in Characters of Shakespear’s Plays. See ante, pp. 244–248, and the notes thereon.

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64.

‘Age cannot wither,’ etc. Antony and Cleopatra, Act II. Scene 2.

‘’Tis a good piece of work,’ etc. The Taming of the Shrew, Act I. Scene 2.

‘Would, cousin Silence,’ etc. 2 Henry IV., Act III. Scene 2. The dialogue on the death of old Double occurs earlier in the same scene.

‘The most fearful wild-fowl living.’ Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III. Scene 1.

At the end of this essay in The Examiner Hazlitt added the following ‘Note Extraordinary’: ‘We had just concluded our ramble with Puck and Bottom, and were beginning to indulge in some less airy recreations, when in came the last week’s Cobbett,^[93] and with one blow overset our Round Table, and marred all our good things. If while Mr. C. and his lady are sitting in their garden at Botley, like Adam and Eve in Paradise, the delight of one another, the envy of their neighbours, and the admiration of the rest of the world, suddenly a large fat hog from the wilds of Hampshire should bolt right through the hedge, and with snorting menaces and foaming tusks, proceed to lay waste the flower-pots and root up the potatoes, such as the surprise and indignation of so economical a couple would be on this occasion, was the consternation at our Table when Mr. Cobbett himself made his appearance among us, vowing vengeance against Milton and Shakespear, Sir Hugh Evans and Justice Shallow, and all the delights of human life. We were not prepared for such an onset. More barbarous than Mr. Wordsworth’s calling Voltaire dull,^[94] or than Voltaire’s calling Cato the only English tragedy;^[95] more barbarous than Mr. Locke’s admiration of Sir Richard Blackmore; more barbarous than the declaration of a German Elector—afterwards made into an English king—that he hated poets and painters; more barbarous than the Duke of Wellington’s letter to Lord Castlereagh,^[96] or than the Catalogue RaisonnÉ of the Flemish Masters published in the Morning Chronicle,^[97] or than the Latin style of the second Greek scholar^[98] of the age, or the English style of the first:—more barbarous than any or all of these is Mr. Cobbett’s attack on our two great poets. As to Milton, except the fine egotism of the situation of Adam and Eve, which Mr. Cobbett has applied to himself, there is not much in him to touch our politician: but we cannot understand his attack upon Shakespear, which is cutting his own throat. If Mr. Cobbett is for getting rid of his kings and queens, his fops and his courtiers, if he is for pelting Sir Hugh and Falstaff off the stage, yet what will he say to Jack Cade and First and Second Mob? If we are to scout the Roman rabble, where will the Register find English readers? Has the author never found himself out in Shakespear? He may depend upon it he is there, for all the people that ever lived are there! Has he never been struck with the valour of Ancient Pistol, who “would not swagger in any shew of resistance to a Barbary-hen”?^[99] Can he not, upon occasion, “aggravate his voice”^[100] like Bottom in the play? In absolute insensibility, he is a fool to Master Barnardine; and there is enough of gross animal instinct in Calyban to make a whole herd of Cobbetts. Mr. Cobbett admires Bonaparte; and yet there is nothing finer in any of his addresses to the French people than what Coriolanus says to the Romans when they banish him. He abuses the Allies in good set terms; yet one speech of Constance describes them and their magnanimity better than all the columns of the Political Register. Mr. Cobbett’s address to the people of England^[101] on the alarm of an invasion, which was stuck on all the church-doors in Great Britain, was not more eloquent than Henry V.’s address to his soldiers before the battle of Agincourt; nor do we think Mr. Cobbett was ever a better specimen of the common English character than the two soldiers in the same play. After all, there is something so droll in his falling foul of Shakespear for want of delicacy, with his desperate lounges and bear-garden dexterity, snorting, fuming, and grunting, that we cannot help laughing at the affair, now that our surprise is over; as we suppose Mr. Cobbett does, if he can only keep him out of his premises by hallooing and hooting or dry blows, to see his old friend, Grill,^[102] trudging along the highroad in search of his acorns and pig-nuts.’

One of Hazlitt’s ‘Theatrical Examiners,’ and published in The Examiner on June 18, 1815.

PAGE

65.

The Beggar’s Opera was produced at Lincoln’s Inn Fields on January 29, 1728.

‘Happy alchemy of mind,’ etc. Cf. Boswell (Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, iii. 65): ‘I have ever delighted in that intellectual chymistry, which can separate good qualities from evil in the same person.’

‘O’erstepping the modesty of nature.’ Hamlet, Act III. Scene 2.

‘Woman is like,’ etc. Beggar’s Opera, Act I.

Taken from Tibullus. Hazlitt probably means Catullus and refers to the lines (Carm. 62)

‘Ut flos in saeptis secretus nascitur hortis,’ etc.

‘I see him sweeter,’ etc. Act I.

‘There is some soul of goodness in things evil.’ Henry V., Act IV. Scene 1.

66.

‘Hussey, hussey,’ etc. Beggar’s Opera, Act I.

Miss Hannah More’s laboured invectives. Such as Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great to General Society (1788) and An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World (1790). See ante, p. 154, for another expression of Hazlitt’s belief in the disciplinary value of The Beggar’s Opera.

Note. For further reference to Baron Grimm’s Correspondance (1812–14) see ante, p. 131, the essay ‘On the Literary Character.’ Claude Pierre Patu (1729–1757) published Choix de piÈces traduites de l’anglais (de Robert Dodsley et John Gay) in 1756. The collected works of Jean Joseph VadÉ (1720–1757) were published in 1775.

ON PATRIOTISM—A FRAGMENT

This fragment is taken from one of the ‘Illustrations of Vetus’ which appeared originally in The Morning Chronicle and were republished in Political Essays.

PAGE

67.

‘The love of mankind‘, etc. Rousseau’s Emile, Liv. IV. p. 279 (edit. Garnier): a favourite quotation of Hazlitt’s.

ON BEAUTY

No. 29 of the Round Table series, and signed in The Examiner—‘An Amateur.’

PAGE

68.

Three Papers, etc. Reynolds’s papers in the Idler are Nos. 76, 79, and 82. It is to the last, On the true idea of Beauty, that Hazlitt particularly refers.

69.

Spenser’s description of Belphoebe. The Faerie Queene, Book II. Canto iii. st. 21 et seq.

70.

‘Her full dark eyes,’ etc. The reference seems to be to Leiden des jungen Werthers (December 6).

71.

Pope’s translation. Homer’s Odyssey, V. 56–67.

Note. A classical friend. Leigh Hunt.

Note. ‘That was Arion crown’d,’ etc. The Faerie Queene, Book IV. Canto xi. st. 23 and 24.

Note. A striking description. Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (Select Works, ed. Payne, ii. 89).

Note. The idea is in ‘Don Quixote.’ Part II. Chap, xlviii. In The Examiner this note was concluded as follows: ‘Much the same impression which the sight of the Queen of France made on Mr. Burke’s brain sixteen years before the French Revolution, did the reading of the New Eloise make on mine at the commencement of it. “Such is the stuff of which our dreams are made!”^[103] This man (Burke), who was a half poet and a half philosopher, has done more mischief than perhaps any other person in the world. His understanding was not competent to the discovery of any truth, but it was sufficient to palliate a lie; his reasons, of little weight in themselves, thrown into the scale of power, were dreadful. Without genius to adorn the beautiful, he had the art to throw a dazzling veil over the deformed and disgusting, and to strew the flowers of imagination over the rotten carcase of corruption, not to prevent, but to communicate the infection. His jealousy of Rousseau^[104] was one chief cause of his opposition to the French Revolution. The writings of the one had changed the institutions of a kingdom; while the speeches of the other, with the intrigues of his whole party, had changed nothing but the turnspit of the King’s kitchen.^[105] He would have blotted out the broad, pure light of Heaven, because it did not first shine in upon the narrow, crooked passages of St. Stephen’s Chapel. The genius of Rousseau had levelled the towers of the Bastile with the dust; our zealous reformist, who would rather be doing mischief than nothing, tried therefore to patch them up again, by calling that loathsome dungeon the King’s Castle, and by fulsome adulation of the virtues of a Court Strumpet. This man had the impudence to say^[106] that an Elector of Hanover was raised to the throne of these kingdoms, “in contempt of the will of the people,” while the hereditary successor was still alive. He was at once a liar, a coward, and a slave; a liar to his own heart, a coward to the success of his own cause, a slave to the power he despised. See his Letter about the Duke of Bedford, in which the man gets the better of the sycophant, and he belabours the Duke in good earnest. It is not a source of regret to reflect that he closed his eyes on the ruin of liberty, which he had been the principal means of effecting, and of his own projects, at the same time. He did not live to see that deliverance of mankind, bound hand and foot into the absolute, lasting, inexorable power of Kings and Priests, which the author of Joan of Arc^[107] has so triumphantly celebrated. He did not live to see the sending of the Liberales of Spain to the gallies, and the liberating the Afrancesadoes from prison, for which our romantic Laureate, who sees so much farther into futurity than the Edinburgh Reviewers,^[108] thanks God. He did not live to read that Sonnet^[109] to the King which Mr. Wordsworth has written, in imitation of Milton’s Sonnet to Cromwell. There is a species of literary prostitution which has sprung up and spread wide in these days, more nauseous and despicable than any recorded in Juvenal. It proves, however, one thing, that is, the force which knowledge and opinion have acquired, and which makes it worth while for power to court and pervert those faculties which were intended to enlighten and reform the world, in order to plunge it into a darkness that may be felt; and slavery, that can only cease by putting a stop to the propagation of the species.’ Hazlitt used a part of this passage as a note to his essay ‘On Good-Nature.’ See post, p. 105 note.

72.

Mr. Burke, etc. See his Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful, Part III. Sect. xv.

Which describe pleasant motions. ‘It has been conjectured that the pleasure derived from visible form, might be always resolved into the absence of every thing disagreeable to the touch or difficult in motion.’ Note by Hazlitt in The Examiner.

‘He hath set his bow,’ etc. Ecclesiasticus, xliii. 11, 12.

Titian’s ‘Bath of Diana.’ Diana and Actaeon, now the property of the Earl of Ellesmere, in Bridgewater House. Hazlitt described this picture at length in his Sketches of the Principal Picture Galleries in England (The Marquis of Stafford’s Gallery).

ON IMITATION

No. 30 of the Round Table series.

PAGE

73.

The new Spurzheim principles. See Hazlitt’s essays ‘On Dreams’ and ‘On Dr. Spurzheim’s Theory’ in The Plain Speaker.

74.

Note. Vanhuysum. Jan van Huysum (1682–1749).

75.

Pansy freak’d with jet. Lycidas, l. 144.

76.

‘A pleasure in art,’ etc.

‘There is a pleasure in poetic pains,

Which only poets know.’

Cowper’s Task, The Timepiece, ll. 285–286.

Cf. Table Talk (‘On the Pleasure of Painting’): ‘There is a pleasure in painting which none but painters know.’ The original of the expression seems to be Dryden’s ‘There is a pleasure, sure, in being mad, which none but madmen know’ (Spanish Friar, Act II. Scene 1).

Titian’s ‘Schoolmaster.’ For an account of this picture see Hazlitt’s Sketches of the Principal Picture Galleries in England (the Marquis of Stafford’s Gallery).

ON GUSTO

No. 40 of the Round Table series.

PAGE

77.

Albano’s. Francesco Albani (1578–1660), a pupil of Ludovico Caracci.

78.

To touch them. In The Examiner Hazlitt gives the following note to this passage: ‘This may seem obscure. We will therefore avail ourselves of our privilege to explain as Members of Parliament do, when they let fall any thing too paradoxical, novel, or abstruse, to be immediately apprehended by the other side of the House. When the Widow Wadman^[110] looked over my Uncle Toby’s map of the Siege of Namur with him, and as he pointed out the approaches of his battalion in a transverse line across the plain to the gate of St. Nicholas, kept her hand constantly pressed against his, if my Uncle Toby had then “been an artist and could paint,” (as Mr. Fox wished himself to be,^[111] that “he might draw Bonaparte’s conduct to the King of Prussia in the blackest colours”) my Uncle Toby would have drawn the hand of his fair enemy in the manner we have above described. We have heard a good story of this same Bonaparte playing off a very ludicrous parody of the Widow Wadman’s stratagem upon as great a commander by sea as my Uncle Toby was by land. Now, when Sir Isaac Newton, who was sitting smoking with his mistress’s hand in his, took her little finger and made use of it as a tobacco-pipe stopper, there was here a total absence of mind, or a great want of gusto.’

Mr. West. Benjamin West (1738–1820), historical painter, succeeded Sir J. Reynolds as President of the Royal Academy in 1792.

80.

‘Or where Chineses,’ etc. Paradise Lost, III. 438–439.

‘Wild above rule,’ etc. Ib. V. 297.

ON PEDANTRY

No. 32 of the Round Table series. See ante, p. 382, for a reference by Hazlitt to this essay.

PAGE

80.

The pedantry of Parson Adams. See Joseph Andrews, Book III. Chap. v.

Scotch Pedagogue. Roderick Random, Chap. xiv.

Seeing ourselves, etc. Burns, To a Louse, st. 8.

81.

Monsieur Jourdain. In Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme.

Note. ‘Not to admire anything.’

‘Nil admirari, prope res est una, Numici,

Solaque, quÆ possit facere et servare beatum.’—Horace, Ep. I. vi. I.

82.

In the Library, etc. At his father’s house at Wem. See Memoirs of William Hazlitt, i. 33. The Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum, etc., was published in eight volumes folio, 1656.

‘From all this world’s,’ etc. ‘From worldly cares himselfe he did esloyne.’ The Faerie Queene, Book I. Canto iv. st. 20. In The Examiner Hazlitt published the following note: ‘Mr. Wordsworth has on a late occasion humorously applied this line of Spenser to persons holding sinecure places under government. He seems to intend adding to the list of such places that of Poet Laureate. This we think a decided improvement on the system.’ The reference is to Wordsworth’s sonnet, ‘Occasioned by the Battle of Waterloo,’ beginning ‘The bard whose soul is meek as dawning day.’

83.

‘Mitigated authors,’ etc. ‘It was this opinion which mitigated kings into companions, and raised private men to be fellows with kings. Without force, or opposition, it subdued the fierceness of pride and power; it obliged sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of social esteem,’ etc. Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (Select Works, ed. Payne, ii. 90).

The Spectator. See The Spectator, No. 131.

No. 33 the Round Table series.

PAGE

84.

A poetical enthusiast. Wordsworth presumably.

‘A clerk ther was,’ etc. Canterbury Tales, Prologue, ll. 285 et seq.

85.

‘Chemist, statesman,’ etc. Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, l. 550.

‘Tongues in the trees,’ etc. As You Like It, Act II. Scene 1.

86.

Vestris was so far right, etc. Vestris (1729–1808), ‘Le Dieu de la danse,’ said that Europe contained only three great men, himself, Voltaire, and Frederick of Prussia.

We do not see, etc. Johnson and Wordsworth were of the opposite opinion. See Boswell’s Life, ed. G. B. Hill, iv. 114, and Rogers’s Table-Talk, p. 234.

87.

In Froissart’s ‘Chronicles.’ Book IV. chapter 14 (PanthÉon Litteraire). The man was not a monk at all.

88.

‘The sovereign’st thing on earth.’ 1 Henry IV., Act I. Scene 3.

Uneasy and insecure. In The Examiner the following note is appended: ‘It has been found necessary to cement them with blood. “Plus de belles paroles, messieurs, je veux du sang,” is the language of all absolute sovereigns to their subjects, when the film drops from their eyes which leads mankind to suppose themselves the property of tyrants. If men are to be treated like slaves, it is best that they should think themselves born to be so. Plus de belles paroles. The French Revolution was the necessary consequence of our English Revolution and of the Reformation. A crusade once more to re-establish the infallibility of the Pope all over the Continent would be a logical inference from the late crusade to restore divine right.’

ON THE CHARACTER OF ROUSSEAU

No. 36 of the Round Table series.

PAGE

89.

Note. In The Examiner this note was continued as follows: ‘He was the founder of Jacobinism, which disclaims the division of the species into two classes, the one the property of the others. It was of the disciples of his school, where principle is converted into passion, that Mr. Burke said and said truly,—“Once a Jacobin, and always a Jacobin!” The adept in this school does not so much consider the political injury as the personal insult. This is the way to put the case, to set the true revolutionary leaven, the self-love which is at the bottom of every heart, at work, and this was the way in which Rousseau put it. It then becomes a question between man and man, which there is but one way of deciding.’

90.

‘Va Zanetto,’ etc. Part II. liv. 7.

‘Louise Eleonore,’ etc. Part I. liv. 2.

91.

‘As fast,’ etc. Othello, Act V. Scene 2.

There are, indeed, impressions, etc. A quotation from Rousseau’s Confessions. See Hazlitt’s essay entitled ‘My first Acquaintance with Poets.’

92.

‘Ah, voila de la pervenche!’ Confessions, Part I. liv. 6.

Mr. Wordsworth’s discovery. The reference appears to be to Wordsworth’s poem, ‘The Sparrow’s Nest.’

No. 37 of the Round Table series.

PAGE

93.

Fitzosborne’s Letters, by William Melmoth the younger (1710–1799), were published in two vols. in 1742–1747. Hazlitt’s quotation seems to be merely a summary of a passage in Letter X. (p. 35, edit. 1748) which is itself quoted from Wollaston’s Religion of Nature Delineated.

Note. Burns. See his autobiographical letter to Dr. John Moore, 2nd August 1787. (Works, ed. Chambers and Wallace, i. 20).

94.

‘Bitter bad judges.’ Beggar’s Opera, Act I. Scene 1.

‘Makes ambition virtue.’ Othello, Act III. Scene 3.

Dr. Johnson. See his Life of Milton (Works, vii. 108).

‘Fame is the spur,’ etc. Lycidas, ll. 70–77.

Pluck its fruits, unripe and crude. Lycidas, l. 3.

95.

Hogarth’s ‘Distressed Poet.’ The map of the gold-mines of Peru was substituted in the impression of 1740 for a print of Pope thrashing Curll in the original impression of 1736.

A man of genius and eloquence. Coleridge presumably.

96.

Elphinstone. James Elphinston (1721–1809), who superintended an Edinburgh edition of The Rambler, in which he gave English translations of most of the mottoes. This, however, was far from being his only literary enterprise, and it is strange that Hazlitt should ‘know nothing more of him.’ He published many translations, one of which, A Specimen of the Translations of Epigrams of Martial (1778), achieved notoriety from its extreme badness. In his later life he devoted himself to the invention of a kind of phonetic spelling, which he explained in Propriety ascertained in her Picture, or English Speech and Spelling under Mutual Guides (1787), and other works.

Yorick and the Frenchman. Sterne’s Sentimental Journey. The Passport.

CHARACTER OF JOHN BULL

No. 39 of the Round Table series.

PAGE

97.

A respectable publication. Edinburgh Review, xxvi. p. 96 (Feb. 1816). The passage quoted is from a review by Hazlitt himself of Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Literature.

ON GOOD NATURE

No. 41 of the Round Table series.

PAGE

100.

Says Froissart. This well-known saying is wrongly attributed to Froissart. See Notes and Queries for 1863 and subsequent years.

102.

An Englishman, who would be thought a profound one. Wordsworth. See p. 116.

103.

Forge the seal of the realm, etc. The allusion seems to be to the events of the spring of 1804 when Lord Eldon, during the king’s illness, affixed the great seal to a commission giving the royal assent to certain bills.

104.

Good digestion wait on appetite. Macbeth, Act III. Scene 4.

Without control. In The Examiner Hazlitt appended as a note: ‘Henry VIII. was a good-natured monarch. He cut off his wives’ heads with as little ceremony as if they had been eels. This character ought, as Mr. Cobbett says, to be hooted off the stage, as a disgrace to human nature. Shakspeare represented kings as they were in his time.’

104.

Mr. Vansittart. Nicholas Vansittart (1766–1851), created Baron Bexley in 1823, was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1812 till 1822.

Everything by starts and nothing long. Absalom and Achitophel, Part I. l. 548.

105.

Note. This note is part of the note on Burke, which in The Examiner appeared at the foot of the essay ‘On Beauty.’ See ante, p. 71.

ON THE CHARACTER OF MILTON’S EVE

No. 42 of the Round Table series, with occasional passages from No. 43, on Shakspeare’s female characters, the substance of which was published in Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (Cymbeline, Othello, and Winter’s Tale).

PAGE

105.

‘As the vine curls her tendrils.’ Paradise Lost, IV. 307.

106.

‘Two of far nobler shape,’ etc. Paradise Lost, IV. 288–311.

107.

‘That day I oft remember,’ etc. Paradise Lost, IV. 449–465.

‘So spake our general mother,’ etc. Paradise Lost, IV. 492–501.

‘So much the more,’ etc. Paradise Lost, V. 8–20.

108.

‘When Adam thus to Eve,’ etc. Paradise Lost, IV. 610–611.

‘To whom thus Eve,’ etc. Paradise Lost, IV. 634.

‘To whom our general ancestor,’ etc. Paradise Lost, IV. 659–660.

‘Methought close at mine ear,’ etc. Paradise Lost, V. 35–47.

‘So talked the spirited sly snake.’ Paradise Lost, IX. 613.

‘So cheered he his fair spouse,’ etc. Paradise Lost, V. 129–135.

109.

‘Under his forming hands,’ etc. Paradise Lost, VIII. 470–477.

‘In shadier bower,’ etc. Paradise Lost, IV. 705–719.

‘Meanwhile at table Eve,’ etc. Paradise Lost, V. 443–450.

110.

‘Yet not more sweet,’ etc. Southey’s Carmen Nuptiale, Proem, stanza 18.

‘O unexpected stroke,’ etc. Paradise Lost, XI. 268–285.

111.

‘This most afflicts me,’ etc. Paradise Lost, XI. 315–333.

OBSERVATIONS ON MR. WORDSWORTH’S POEM ‘THE EXCURSION’

This essay is composed of two papers by Hazlitt which appeared in The Examiner on August 21 and August 28, 1814.

PAGE

112.

‘Without form and void.’ Genesis, i. 2.

113.

‘The bare trees and mountains bare.’ Wordsworth, ‘To my Sister.’

‘Exchange the shepherd’s flock.’ Excursion, Book VI.

114.

‘The sad historian of the pensive vale.’ Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village, l. 136.

‘Our system is not fashioned,’ etc. Excursion, Book VI.

‘Such as the meeting soul may pierce.’ L’Allegro, l. 138.

‘In that fair clime,’ etc. Excursion, Book IV.

115.

‘Now shall our great discoverers obtain,’ etc. Excursion, Book IV.

116.

‘Poor gentleman,’ etc. Wycherley’s Love in a Wood, Act III. Scene 1.

Dull. Wordsworth speaks of Candide as ‘this dull product of a scoffer’s pen’ (Excursion, Book II.) and refers to it again in Book IV.:—

‘Him I mean

Who penned, to ridicule confiding faith,

This sorry Legend.’

See ante, p. 102.

117.

Tout homme reflechi, etc. Cf. ‘J’ose presque assurer que l’État de rÉflexion est un État contre nature, et que l’homme qui mÉdite est un animal dÉpravÉ.’ Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine de l’inÉgalitÉ parmi les hommes (Édit. Firmin-Didot, p. 52).

‘From that abstraction I was roused,’ etc. Excursion, Book III.

118.

‘For that other loss,’ etc. Excursion, Book IV.

119.

‘What though the radiance,’ etc. Intimations of Immortality, stanza 10.

THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED

From The Examiner, October 2, 1814.

PAGE

120.

‘With glistering spires,’ etc. Paradise Lost, III. 550.

‘The great vision of the guarded mount.’ Lycidas, l. 161.

121.

‘A sudden illness,’ etc. Excursion, Book VI.

123.

Aristotle observed. In The Poetics.

Bells or Lancaster’s. Andrew Bell (1753–1832) founder of the Madras system of education, and Joseph Lancaster (1770–1838). For an account of these two rival reformers of education see Leslie Stephen’s The English Utilitarians, II. 17–19.

Guzman d’Alfarache. Hazlitt discussed this novel by Mateo Aleman, published in 1599, in his English Comic Writers (Lecture on the English Novelists).

A discipline of humanity. Bacon’s Essays, ‘Of Marriage and Single Life.’

124.

The Whig and Jacobite friends. Excursion, Book VI.

Sir Alfred Irthing. Excursion, Book VII.

‘Have proved a monument.’ From the sonnet in which Wordsworth dedicated The Excursion to Lord Lonsdale.

CHARACTER OF THE LATE MR. PITT

This ‘character’ originally appeared in Free Thoughts on Public Affairs, etc. (1806). It must have been a favourite with the author, for he afterwards reprinted it in The Eloquence of the British Senate, etc. (1807), in The Round Table (1817), and in Political Essays (1819). It also appeared in the posthumous Winterslow (1839). See note on p. 383, ante.

PAGE

127.

‘They had learned the trick,’ etc. Hobbes’s Behemoth (Works, ed. Molesworth, vi. 240).

128.

‘Not matchless,’ etc. Paradise Lost, VI. 341–2.

And in its liquid texture, etc. Paradise Lost, VI. 148–149.

From The Examiner, October 9, 1814, ‘Common-places,’ No. 1.

PAGE

129.

‘But ’tis not so above.’ Hamlet, Act III. Scene 3.

‘Compelled to give in evidence,’ etc. Ibid.

130.

‘Open and apparent shame.’ 1 Henry IV., Act II. Scene 4.

131.

Elymas the sorcerer. See Sketches of the Principal Picture Galleries in England (the Pictures at Hampton Court) where Hazlitt describes this cartoon.

ON THE LITERARY CHARACTER

Reprinted with some omissions from a letter which appeared in The Morning Chronicle for October 28, 1813, entitled ‘Baron Grimm and the Edinburgh Reviewers.’

PAGE

131.

A late number, etc. Edinburgh Review, vol. xxi. July 1813. The Correspondance of Friedrich Melchior, Baron Grimm (1723–1807) was published in 1812–14. The article in the Edinburgh is by Jeffrey. Hazlitt, in The Examiner, quotes from it at greater length, and proceeds: ‘These remarks, however shrewd and ingenious in themselves, are somewhat irrelevant to the literary and philosophical character of Mr. Grimm and his friends. There seems to have been an odd transposition of ideas in the writer’s mind; for the whole of his reasoning relates to the manners of fashionable life, or the tendency of mixed and agreeable society in general, to produce levity and insensibility, and does not at all apply to the peculiar defects of the literary character, or account for that hard-heartedness, which Mr. Burke attributes, by way of emphasis, to the thorough-bred metaphysician.^[112] The two characters are evidently distinct, and proceed from very different and even opposite causes, which ought not to have been confounded. It would have been a task worthy of the Edinburgh Reviewers to have pointed out the sources of each, and to have shewn how both appear to have united in the present instance with the natural levity of the French character, to produce that “faultless monster which the world ne’er saw” before.^[113] Much is undoubtedly to be given to accidental and local circumstances. Boswell’s Life of Johnson presents a very different picture of men and manners from Grimm’s Memoirs, though in the circle described by the former there were men who at least rivalled M. Grimm in literature, and in politeness and knowledge of mankind might vie with Baron d’Holbach. The profligacy of the French court, and the mummeries of the established religion might naturally produce an almost satiric license and impudence among the enlightened partisans of the new order of things, and lead them to regard all religion as a barefaced cheat, and every pretension to virtue as hypocrisy. The peculiar intelligible features of the philosophical and literary character are, however, stamped on every page of M. Grimm’s correspondence; and as they do not seem to have been very well distinguished by the Reviewer, I shall venture to throw out a few hints on the subject, in the hope that they may be taken up and embodied in an authentic form in some future supplementary volume.’

133.

Multiplicity of persons and things. Hazlitt quotes with characteristic inaccuracy the Edinburgh article on Grimm (see p. 131). A few lines further on he speaks of a ‘succession of persons and things.’

Rocks of Meillerie. La Nouvelle HÉloÏse, Part IV. 17.

135.

Mr. Shandy. Tristram Shandy, V. Chap, iii., where Sterne tells the story of Cicero and his daughter referred to in the text.

‘HÆret lateri,’ etc. Virgil, Aeneid, V. 73.

‘Clad in flesh and blood.’ From Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Select Works, ed. Payne, ii. 101).

The ghosts of Homer’s heroes. Odyssey, Book XI.

‘Play round the head, but never reach the heart.’

‘All fame is foreign, but of true desert;

Plays round the head, but comes not to the heart.’

Pope’s Essay on Man, IV. 254.

Hazlitt’s letter in The Morning Chronicle concluded as follows: ‘There is another very striking distinction between the indifference and insensibility to moral good and evil, to be met with in the philosopher or the man of the world, which the Reviewer has not pointed out. In the one, it is the effect of “frivolity, dissipation, and familiarity with vice”; in the other, it is oftener the effect of disappointed hope and early enthusiasm. The aversion of the philosopher to moral speculations has almost always the same source as the exclamation of Brutus, “Oh Virtue! I embraced thee as a substance, and I find thou art a shadow!” There is hardly any one of the persons who figure in these memoirs who did not set out with some panacea for the salvation of mankind, with as much sanguine extravagance as ever knight-errants indulged to conquer giants and rescue distressed damsels. The wounds received in the conflict might close, but the scar would remain. Indeed, the practical knowledge of vice and misery makes a stronger impression on the mind, when it has once imbibed a habit of abstract reasoning. Evil thus becomes embodied in a general principle, and shews its happy form in all things. It is a fatal, inevitable necessity hanging over us. It follows us wherever we go—if we fly into the uttermost parts of the earth, it is there; whether we turn to the right or the left, we cannot escape from it.

‘This, it is true, is the disease of philosophy; but it is one to which it is liable in minds of a certain cast, after the first ardour of expectation has been disabused by experience, and the finer feelings have received an irrecoverable shock from the jarring of the world.

‘There seems a peculiar tenaciousness in the French character in this respect, an unfortunate aptitude to cling to every vice and catch at every folly, or else a want of freshness of feeling, of that elastic force about the heart which repels the approach of moral or intellectual depravity.

‘What is said of the tone of the literary society of Paris, is equally misunderstood. The Reviewers hardly mean to represent the exclusion of tediousness and pertinacious wrangling, as the general character of assemblies of wits, and philosophers in all ages and nations. If so, their opinion differs from that of the Sage. The fact is, that the men of letters at this period, by mixing in the fashionable circles, took the tone of good company, as the people of fashion, by their familiarity with men of letters, received the tincture of philosophy. The two characters were blended together in real life, and are confounded in the Edinburgh Review.’

135.

Note. Plato’s Cave. Republic, Book VII.

No. 47 of the Round Table series.

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136.

Tout homme rÉflÉchi, etc. See note to p. 117.

‘Nor can I think what thoughts they can conceive.’ Dryden, The Hind and the Panther, Part I. l. 315.

We have already. In a paper (by Leigh Hunt) On Commonplace People (Examiner, March 19, 1815).

138.

The music which has been since introduced, etc. The famous ‘Macbeth music’ written for D’Avenant’s version produced, according to Genest, in 1672. This music, traditionally assigned to Matthew Locke, is now attributed to Purcell.

139.

Mr. Westall’s drawings. Richard Westall (1765–1836).

Horne Tooke’s account, etc. See The Diversions of Purley and Hazlitt’s essay on Horne Tooke in The Spirit of the Age.

‘For true no-meaning puzzles more than wit.’ Pope’s Moral Essays, II. 114.

The new Schools for all. For the famous educational schemes of Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancaster and for Bentham’s Panopticon, see Leslie Stephen’s English Utilitarians.

The Penitentiary. Millbank Prison, formerly known as the Penitentiary, was the ultimate result of Bentham’s Panopticon scheme and was opened in 1816.

The new Bedlam. The new Bedlam Hospital was opened in 1815.

The new steamboats. The first steamboat had been launched on the Clyde in 1812.

The gaslights. The Chartered Gas Company obtained its Act of Parliament in 1810.

The Bible Society. The British and Foreign Bible Society was established in 1804.

The Society for the Suppression of Vice. See ante, note to p. 60.

ON THE CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ OF THE BRITISH INSTITUTION

These two papers are taken (with considerable variations) from the two last of three ‘Literary Notices,’ dealing with the Catalogue, which Hazlitt contributed to The Examiner on Nov. 3, Nov. 10, and Nov. 17, 1816. The first of these ‘Literary Notices’ was never republished by Hazlitt. All three were republished in their Examiner form in the second volume of Criticisms on Art, etc. (2 vols., 1843–44), edited by the author’s son, who omitted from his edition of The Round Table the two essays in the present text. All three essays will be included in a later volume of the present edition.

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140.

Our former remarks. In The Examiner, Nov. 3, 1816.

141.

The Prince Regent’s new sewer. Presumably the Regent’s Canal, part of which was opened in 1814.

142.

‘The scale by which,’ etc. Paradise Lost, VIII. 591.

Mrs. Peachum’s coloured handkerchiefs. Beggar’s Opera, Act 1.

143.

‘A name great above all names.’ Philippians, ii. 9.

143.

Mr. Payne Knight. Richard Payne Knight gave evidence in 1816 before a Select Committee of the House of Commons upon the value of the Elgin Marbles. He placed them in the second rank of art, and valued them at £25,000. They were bought by the nation for £35,000. Haydon the artist wrote a long letter to The Examiner (March 17, 1816) on the subject, entitled ‘On the Judgment of Connoisseurs being preferred to that of Professional Men, Elgin Marbles, etc.’

144.

Mr. Soane. John Soane (1753–1837), knighted in 1831. His house and its contents, presented by him to the nation in 1833, now form the Soane Museum.

‘With riches fineless.’ Othello, Act III. Scene 3.

‘Beastly; subtle as the fox,’ etc. Cymbeline, Act. III. Scene 3.

‘The link,’ etc. Troilus and Cressida, Act I. Scene 3.

It is many years ago, etc. Apparently, says Mr. W. C. Hazlitt, about 1798, at St. Neot’s, Huntingdonshire. See The English Comic Writers, where this passage is repeated in the Lecture on the Works of Hogarth.

145.

‘How were we then uplifted.’ Troilus and Cressida, Act III. Scene 2.

‘Temples not made with hands‘, etc. Acts, vii. 48.

E. O. Tables. A new game introduced shortly before 1782, when a Bill was brought in prohibiting it under severe penalties. The Bill was lost in the House of Lords. See Parl. Hist., vol. xxiii. pp. 110–113.

‘Cutpurses of the art,’ etc.

‘A cutpurse of the empire and the rule,

That from a shelf the precious diadem stole

And put it in his pocket!’

Hamlet, Act III. Scene 4.

THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED

146.

‘That a great man’s memory,’ etc. Hamlet, Act III. Scene 2.

Their late President. Sir Joshua Reynolds.

147.

‘Feel the future in the instant.’ Macbeth, Act I. Scene 5.

148.

‘Depend upon it,’ etc. This letter was not avowed by Burke, but was attributed to him by Barry himself and by Sir James Prior in his Life of Burke, (Bohn, p. 227).

149.

‘Playing at will,’ etc.

‘——and played at will

Her virgin fancies, pouring forth more sweet,

Wild above rule or art, enormous bliss.’

Paradise Lost, v. 294–296.

Highmore, etc. Joseph Highmore (1692–1780); Francis Hayman (1708–1776), one of the founders of the Royal Academy; Thomas Hudson (1701–1779), portrait painter; Sir Godfrey Kneller (1646–1723).

‘Like flowers in men’s caps,’ etc. Macbeth, Act IV. Scene 3.

Hoppner, etc. John Hoppner (1758–1810), the portrait painter; John Opie (1761–1807); Sir Martin Archer Shee (1769–1850), President of the Royal Academy from 1830 to 1845; Philip James Loutherbourg (1740–1812), scene painter to Garrick; John Francis Rigaud (1742–1810); George Romney (1734–1802). Alderman John Boydell’s (1719–1804) famous Shakespeare Gallery comprised one hundred and seventy pictures. The engravings were published in 1802.

150.

‘Gone to the vault,’ etc. A favourite quotation of Burke’s from the lines in Shakespeare:—

‘To that same ancient vault

Where all the kindred of the Capulets lie.’

Romeo and Juliet, Act IV. Scene 1.

The picture ... of Charles I. In Hazlitt’s time this picture was at Blenheim, and he referred to it in his Sketches of the Principal Picture Galleries in England (Pictures at Oxford and Blenheim). It was bought by Parliament from the Duke of Marlborough in 1885, and is now in the National Gallery.

The Waterloo Exhibition. The Waterloo Museum in Pall Mall ‘which now (according to the advertisement) presents to public view upwards of 1000 mementos of the late extraordinary events upon the Continent.’

‘From this time forth,’ etc. Othello, Act V. Scene 2.

The English are a shopkeeping nation. Hazlitt probably refers to the exclamation of BarÈre said to have been repeated by Napoleon. The expression seems to have been first used by Dean Tucker of Gloucester in a Tract of 1766.

‘Balm of hurt minds,’ etc. Macbeth, Act II. Scene 2.

151.

‘Smoothing the raven down,’ etc. Comus, 251–252.

ON POETICAL VERSATILITY

This fragment is taken from the third of a series of four ‘Illustrations of the Times Newspaper,’ which Hazlitt contributed to The Examiner under the heading of ‘Literary Notices.’ The first of these four papers (Dec. 1, 1816) has not been republished; the other three, dated respectively December 15, 1816, December 22, 1816, and January 12, 1817, were published in Political Essays.

PAGE

151.

‘Heaven’s own tinct.’ Cymbeline, Act II. Scene 2.

‘Being so majestical,’ etc. Hamlet, Act I. Scene 1.

152.

Poets, it has been said. See Political Essays (Mr. Southey’s New Year’s Ode).

They do not like, etc. The reference is to Southey, Poet Laureate, and Wordsworth, distributor of stamps for the county of Westmoreland.

ON ACTORS AND ACTING

This essay and the next are based upon the last (No. 48) of the Round Table series, which appeared in The Examiner for Jan. 5, 1817. Hazlitt has, however, interpolated into both essays various passages from former theatrical criticisms. The paper in the Round Table appears to have been inspired by Colley Cibber’s Apology for his Life. A general reference may here be made to that work, to the volume in the present edition containing Hazlitt’s dramatic criticisms, and to Lamb’s and Leigh Hunt’s essays on the stage.

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153.

‘The abstracts,’ etc. Hamlet, Act II. Scene 2.

154.

George Barnwell. By George Lillo (1693–1739), produced at Drury Lane Theatre on June 22, 1731. The play was frequently revived, and was in some places acted annually as a moral lesson to apprentices.

The Inconstant. Farquhar’s comedy (1702). Orinda should be Oriana.

Mr. Liston. John Liston (1776?-1846),the comic actor, who made his first appearance in 1805 and retired in 1837.

155.

Sir George Etherege (1635?-1691), the dramatist. See English Comic Writers, where a part of this passage is repeated.

John Kemble. John Philip Kemble (1757–1823). Hazlitt wrote an account of his retirement from the stage, which took place at Covent Garden on June 23, 1817.

Pierre. In Otway’s Venice Preserved (1682), ‘one of the happiest and most spirited of all Mr. Kemble’s performances’ (A View of the English Stage).

The Stranger. Benjamin Thompson’s (1776?-1816) play, ‘The Stranger,’ translated from Kotzebue, was produced in 1798, Kemble playing the title-rÔle. See Hazlitt’s essay on ‘Mr. Kemble’s Retirement.’

‘A tale of other times.’ ‘A tale of the times of old!’ the opening words of Macpherson’s Ossian.

One of the most affecting things, etc. This paragraph is taken from a ‘Theatrical Examiner’ (June 4, 1815) on the retirement of John Bannister (1760–1836) from the stage. For Bannister and Richard Suett (1755–1805) see Hazlitt’s essay ‘On Play-Going and on Some of our old Actors,’ and Lamb’s ‘On Some of the old Actors.’

The Prize. By Prince Hoare (1755–1834), originally produced in 1793.

Mrs. Storace. Anna Selina Storace or Storache (1766–1817), the singer and actress, played in ‘The Prize’ in 1793.

My Grandmother. By Prince Hoare, produced in 1793.

The Son-in-Law. A comic opera by John O’Keeffe (1747–1833), produced in 1779.

Scrub. In The Beaux’ Stratagem of Farquhar.

Thomas King (1730–1805), the original Sir Peter Teazle; William Parsons (1736–1795); James William Dodd (1740–1796); John Quick (1748–1831), who made his last appearance in 1813; and John Edwin the elder (1749–1790). See Hazlitt’s essay ‘On Play-Going and Some of our old Actors.’

156.

‘All the world’s a stage’ etc. As You Like It, Act II. Scene 7.

THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED

A large part of the first paragraph of this essay appeared originally in a notice of Kean’s Sir Giles Overreach (‘Theatrical Examiner,’ Jan. 14, 1816). See A View of the English Stage.

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156.

‘Leaving the world no copy.’ Twelfth Night, Act I. Scene 5.

Colley Cibber’s account. See Chap. iv. of Cibber’s Apology.

Miss O’Neill. Eliza O’Neill (1791–1872) made her last appearance on the stage on July 13, 1819, shortly before her marriage with Mr. Becher, who afterwards became a baronet. Hazlitt in an article on her retirement (see A View of the English Stage) said that ‘her excellence (unrivalled by any actress since Mrs. Siddons) consisted in truth of nature and force of passion.’

Mrs. Siddons. Sarah Siddons (1755–1831) appeared without success in London in 1775 and 1776, gained a great reputation in Manchester and Bath, and reappeared in London on October 10, 1782 in Garrick’s Isabella, a version of Southerne’s Fatal Marriage. After a long series of triumphs she made her farewell appearance on June 29, 1812, as Lady Macbeth. Hazlitt’s notices of her are confined to two of the occasional benefit performances which she gave before she finally retired in June 1819. See A View of the English Stage (June 15, 1816, and June 7, 1817).

157.

‘We have seen what a ferment,’ etc. See the essays above, ‘On the Catalogue RaisonnÉ of the British Institution.’

Betterton, etc. Thomas Betterton (1635?-1710); Barton Booth (1681–1733); Robert Wilks (1665?-1732); Samuel Sandford, a well-known actor on the Restoration stage, who died early in the eighteenth century; James Nokes (d. 1692); Anthony Leigh (d. 1692); William Pinkethman (d. 1724); William Bullock (d. 1740?); Richard Estcourt (1668–1712); Thomas Dogget (d. 1721): Elizabeth Barry (1658–1713); Susanna Mountfort, the daughter of William Mountfort, the actor and dramatist, who was murdered by Captain Hill and Lord Mohun in 1692; Anne Oldfield (1683–1730); Anne Bracegirdle (1663?-1748), who retired from the stage in 1707 after being defeated in a competition with Mrs. Oldfield; Susannah Maria Cibber (1714–1766), sister of Arne the composer, and wife of Theophilus Cibber, famous first as a singer (especially of Handel’s music), and later as an actress of tragedy.

Cibber himself. Colley Cibber (1671–1757), actor and dramatist, Poet Laureate from 1730 till his death. For a very entertaining account of himself and of nearly all the well-known actors and actresses whose names appear in the preceding note see his Apology for his Life (1740).

Macklin, etc. Charles Macklin (1697?-1797), actor and dramatist, whose great part was Shylock; James Quin (1693–1766); John Rich (1682–1761), the originator of pantomime in England (his name is substituted by Hazlitt for that of Peg Woffington, which appeared in the original Round Table paper); Catherine or Kitty Clive (1711–1785), whose acting and ‘sprightliness of humour’ were admired by Dr. Johnson, and Hannah Pritchard (1711–1768), who created the part of Irene in Johnson’s play, and Frances Abington (1737–1815), well-known members of Garrick’s company; Thomas Weston (1737–1776), and Edward Shuter (1728–1776), two of the best comic actors of their time.

‘Gladdened life,’ etc. A composite quotation from Johnson’s well-known reference to Garrick (Lives of the Poets, Edmund Smith). See Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, iii. 387.

Our hundred days. The reference is a characteristic one to Buonaparte’s hundred days in Europe in 1815.

Betterton’s Hamlet or his Brutus, etc. Colley Cibber (Apology, Chap, iv.) refers particularly to these two impersonations, describes (Chap. xiv.) Booth’s performance of Cato in 1713, and specially eulogises Mrs. Barry’s Monimia and Belvidera in Otway’s plays, The Orphan and Venice Preserved. (Chap. v.). See Hazlitt’s lecture ‘On the Spirit of Ancient and Modern Literature’ in his Lectures on the Literature of the Age of Elizabeth for a criticism of these plays. He saw and reviewed Miss O’Neill’s performances in both these characters. See A View of the English Stage.

Penkethman’s manner, etc. See The Tatler, No. 188.

Dowton. Hazlitt spoke of William Dowton (1764–1851) as ‘a genuine and excellent comedian’ (‘On Play-Going and on Some of the old Actors’). There are frequent notices of him in A View of the English Stage.

157.

Note. Marriage À la mode. By Dryden, first produced in 1672. In The Examiner this note forms part of the text. At the end of the passage quoted Hazlitt proceeds: ‘The whole of Colley Cibber’s work is very amusing to a dramatic amateur. It gives an interesting account of the progress of the stage, which in his time appears to have been in a state militant. Two actors, Kynaston and Montfort were run through the body in disputes with gentlemen, with impunity; and the Master of the Revels arrested any of the two companies who was refractory to the managers, at his pleasure. Dogget was brought up in this manner from Norwich, by two constables: but Dogget being a whig, and a surly fellow, got a Habeas Corpus, and the Master of the Revels was driven from the field.’ Edward Kynaston (1640–1706) was beaten more than once at the instance of Sir Charles Sedley whom he impersonated on the stage. For the story of the Lord Chamberlain and Dogget, see Cibber’s Apology (Chap. x.).

158.

Sir Harry Wildair. Farquhar’s Sir Harry Wildair, a continuation of The Constant Couple, was produced in 1701.

‘The Jew that Shakespeare drew.’ This is an exclamation (attributed to Pope) overheard at one of Macklin’s representations of Shylock.

As often as we are pleased. The following passage from The Examiner is omitted by Hazlitt: ‘We have no curiosity about things or persons that we never heard of. Mr. Coleridge professes in his Lay Sermon to have discovered a new faculty, by which he can divine the future. This is lucky for himself and his friends, who seem to have lost all recollection of the past.’ Hazlitt here refers to The Statesman’s Manual; or, The Bible the best guide to political skill and foresight: A Lay Sermon, addressed to the Higher Classes of Society (1816), known as the first Lay Sermon. Hazlitt wrote two notices of it in The Examiner, one of which (September 8, 1816) was based merely on newspaper announcements of its forthcoming appearance (see Political Essays); and probably, as Coleridge believed, reviewed it in the Edinburgh Review for December 1816.

Players, after all, etc. This passage to the end of the paragraph is from a ‘Theatrical Examiner,’ January 14, 1816.

Actors have been accused, etc. The whole of this paragraph is taken from a ‘Theatrical Examiner,’ March 31, 1816.

‘The web of our life,’ etc. All’s Well that Ends Well, Act IV. Scene 3.

159.

‘Like the giddy sailor,’ etc. Richard III., Act III. Scene 4.

A neighbouring country. Hazlitt probably refers to France where the disqualifications of actors had only recently been removed by the Revolution government. For an account of ecclesiastical intolerance towards actors, especially in France, see Lecky’s The Rise and Influence of Rationalism in Europe, II. 316 et seq.

‘A consummation,’ etc. Hamlet, Act III. Scene 1.

‘The wine of life,’ etc. Macbeth, Act II. Scene 3.

160.

‘Hurried from fierce extremes,’ etc.

‘——and feel by turns the bitter change

Of fierce extremes, extremes by change more fierce,’ etc.

Paradise Lost, II. 599 et seq.

The strolling player in ‘Gil Blas.’ Gil Blas, Liv. II. Chap. viii.

WHY THE ARTS ARE NOT PROGRESSIVE: A FRAGMENT

In The Morning Chronicle for January 11 and 15, 1814, Hazlitt published two papers entitled ‘Fragments on Art. Why the Arts are not progressive?’ Later in the year he contributed two papers to The Champion (August 28, 1814, and September 11, 1814) under the heading ‘Fine Arts. Whether they are promoted by Academies and Public Institutions?’ and in a letter (October 2) replied to the criticisms of a correspondent. The present ‘Fragment’ is composed of (1) the first of the articles in The Morning Chronicle and part of the second, and (2) part of the second article in The Champion. Much of the matter of the present essay is embodied in Hazlitt’s article on the Fine Arts, contributed to the EncyclopÆdia Britannica.

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160.

‘It is often made a subject,’ etc. The first three paragraphs are taken from The Morning Chronicle, January 11, 1814. In The Champion for August 28, 1814, the first two paragraphs appear as a quotation from a ‘contemporary critic.’

AntÆus. The story of AntÆus the giant is referred to by Milton (Paradise Regained, IV. 563 et seq.).

161.

Nothing is more contrary, etc. This paragraph and part of the next are repeated at the beginning of the Lecture on Shakspeare and Milton in Lectures on the English Poets.

162.

Guido. Substituted for Claude Lorraine, upon whom, in The Morning Chronicle, Hazlitt has the following note: ‘In speaking thus of Claude, we yield rather to common opinion than to our own. However inferior the style of his best landscapes may be, there is something in the execution that redeems all defects. In taste and grace nothing can ever go beyond them. He might be called, if not the perfect, the faultless painter. Sir Joshua Reynolds used to say, that there would be another Raphael, before there was another Claude. In Mr. Northcote’s Dream of a Painter (see his Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds), there is an account of Claude Lorraine, so full of feeling, so picturesque, so truly classical, so like Claude, that we cannot resist this opportunity of copying it out.’ The passage quoted from Northcote is the paragraph beginning, ‘Now tired with pomp and splendid shew.’ See Northcote’s Varieties on Art (The Dream of a Painter) in his Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds, etc. (1813–1815) p. xvi.

‘The human face divine.’ Paradise Lost, III. 44.

‘Circled Una’s angel face,’ etc. The Faerie Queene, Book I. Canto iii. st. 4.

Griselda. See The Canterbury Tales (The Clerk’s Tale).

The Flower and the Leaf. This poem, a great favourite of Hazlitt’s, is not now attributed to Chaucer.

163.

The divine story of the Hawk. The Decameron (Fifth Day, Novel IX.). Hazlitt continually refers to the story.

Isabella. The Decameron (Fourth Day, Novel V.).

So Lear, etc. King Lear, Act II. Scene 4.

Titian. The picture referred to is one of those which Hazlitt copied while he was studying in the Louvre in 1802. See Memoirs of William Hazlitt, I. 88. He frequently mentions it.

Nicolas Poussin. ‘But, above all, who shall celebrate, in terms of fit praise, his picture of the shepherds in the Vale of Tempe going out in a fine morning of the spring, and coming to a tomb with this inscription:—Et ego in Arcadia vixi!’ (Table Talk, ‘On a Landscape of Nicolas Poussin.’)

In general, it must happen, etc. The two concluding paragraphs are taken from The Champion, September 11, 1814.

Current with the world. The following passage in The Champion is here omitted: ‘Common sense, which has been sometimes appealed to as the criterion of taste, is nothing but the common capacity, applied to common facts and feelings; but it neither is nor pretends to be, the judge of anything else. To suppose that it can really appreciate the excellence of works of high art, is as absurd as to suppose that it could produce them.’

Count Castiglione. Baldassare Count Castiglione (1478–1529), whose famous Il Cortegiano was translated into English by Sir Thomas Hoby under the title of ‘The Courtyer’ (1561).

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171.

It is observed by Mr. Pope. Ed. Elwin and Courthope, vol. X. pp. 534–535.

A gentleman of the name of Mason. Neither George Mason (1735–1806), author of An Essay on Design in Gardening, 1768, nor John Monck Mason (1726–1809), Shakespearian commentator, is the author of the work alluded to by Hazlitt, but Thomas Whately (d. 1772) whose Remarks on some of the Characters of Shakespere was published after Thomas Whately’s death by his brother, the Rev. Jos. Whately, in 1785, as ‘by the author of Observations on Modern Gardening’ [1770]; a second edition was published in 1808 with the author’s name on the title-page, and a third in 1839, edited by Archbishop Whately, Thomas Whately’s nephew.

Richardson’s Essays. Essays on Shakespeare’s Dramatic Characters. 1774–1812. By William Richardson (1743–1814).

Schlegel’s Lectures on the Drama. A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. By A. W. von Schlegel. Delivered at Vienna in 1808. English translation, by John Black, in 1815. The quotation which follows will be found in Bohn’s one vol. edition, 1846, pp. 363–371, and the further references given in these notes are to the same edition.

174.

‘to do a great right.’ Mer. Ven. IV. 1.

‘alone is high fantastical.’ Twelfth Night, I. 1.

175.

Dr. Johnson’s Preface to his Edition of Shakespear. 1765.

‘swelling figures.’ Dr. Johnson’s Preface. See Malone’s Shakespeare, 1821, vol. i. p. 75.

176.

Dover cliff in Lear, Act IV. 6.

flowers in The Winter’s Tale, Act IV. 4.

Congreve’s description of a ruin in the Mourning Bride, Act II. 1.

177.

the sleepy eye of love. Cf. ‘The sleepy eye that spoke the melting soul.’ Pope, Imit. 1st Epis. 2nd. Bk. Horace, l. 150.

In his tragic scenes. Dr. Johnson’s Preface, p. 71.

His declamations, etc. Ibid., p. 75.

But the admirers, etc. Ibid., p. 75.

178.

in another work, The Round Table. See pp. 61–64.

CYMBELINE

When the name of the Play is not given it is to be understood that the reference is to the Play under discussion. Differences between the text quoted by Hazlitt and the text of the Globe Shakespeare which seem worth pointing out are indicated in square brackets.

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179.

Dr. Johnson is of opinion. Dr. Johnson’s Preface, p. 73.

180.

Cibber, in speaking of the early English stage. Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber (1740), vol. i. chap. iv.

181.

My lord, Act I. 6.

What cheer, Act III. 4. The six following quotations in the text are in the same scene.

182.

My dear lord, Act III. 6.

And when with wild wood-leaves and with fairest flowers, Act IV. 2.

183.

Cytherea, how bravely, Act II. 2.

Me of my lawful pleasure, Act II. 5.

Whose love-suit, Act III. 4.

the ancient critic, Aristophanes of Byzantium.

184.

Out of your proof, Act III. 3.

185.

The game’s a-foot [is up], Act III. 3.

under the shade. As You Like It, Act II. 7.

See, boys! Act III. 3.

Nay, Cadwell, Act IV. 2.

186.

Stick to your journal course, Act IV. 2.

creatures and Your Highness, Act I. 5.

MACBETH

186.

The poet’s eye. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V. 1.

your only tragedy-maker. It would be better to italicise only ‘tragedy’; the reference is probably to Hamlet, III. 2, ‘your only jig-maker.’

the air [heaven’s breath] smells wooingly and the temple-haunting martlet builds [does approve by his loved mansionry], Act I. 6.

187.

the blasted heath, Act I. 3.

air-drawn dagger, Act III. 4.

gracious Duncan, Act III. 1.

blood-boultered Banquo, Act IV. 1.

What are these, Act I. 3.

bends up, Act I. 7.

The deed [The attempt and not the deed confounds us], Act II. 2.

preter [super] natural solicitings, Act I. 3.

188.

Bring forth and screw his courage, Act I. 7.

lost so poorly and a little water, Act II. 2.

the sides of his intent, Act I. 7.

for their future days and his fatal entrance, Act I. 5.

Come all you spirits, Act I. 5.

189.

Duncan comes there, Act I. 5. The two following quotations in the text are in the same scene.

Mrs. Siddons. Sarah Siddons (1755–1831). It was as Lady Macbeth that Mrs. Siddons made her ‘last’ appearance on the stage, June 29, 1812. She returned occasionally, and Hazlitt saw her act the part at Covent Garden, June 7, 1817. See note to p. 156, and also Hazlitt’s A View of the English Stage.

190.

There is no art, Act I. 4.

How goes the night, Act II. 1.

Light thickens, Act III. 2–3.

191.

So fair and foul, Act I. 3.

Such welcome and unwelcome news together [things at once] and Men’s lives, Act IV. 3.

Look like the innocent flower, Act I. 5.

To him and all [all and him], Avaunt, and himself again, Act III. 4.

he may sleep, Act IV. 1.

Then be thou jocund, Act III. 2.

Had he not resembled, Act II. 2.

they should be women, and in deeper consequence, Act I. 3.

192.

Why stands Macbeth, Act IV. 1.

the milk of human kindness, Act I. 5.

himself alone. The Third Part of King Henry VI., Act V. 6.

For Banquo’s issue, Act III. 1.

193.

Duncan is in his grave, Act III. 2.

direness is thus rendered familiar, Act V. 5.

is troubled, Act V. 3.

subject [servile] to all the skyey influences. Measure for Measure, Act III. 1.

My way of life, Act V. 3.

194.

the ‘Beggar’s Opera,’ by John Gay (1685–1732), first acted January 29, 1728. See The Round Table, pp. 65–66.

Lillo’s murders. George Lillo, dramatist (1693–1739), author of Fatal Curiosity and George Barnwell. See note to p. 154.

Lamb’s Specimens of Early [English] Dramatic Poets, 1808. See Gollancz’s edition, 2 vols., 1893, vol. I. pp. 271–272.

the Witch of Middleton. Thomas Middleton (?1570–1627). It is not known whether the date of the Witch is earlier or later than that of Macbeth.

JULIUS CÆSAR

195.

the celebrated Earl of Hallifax. Charles Montague, Earl of Halifax (1661–1715), poet and statesman. King and no King, licensed 1611, printed 1619; Secret Love, or, the Maiden Queen, first acted 1667, printed the following year.

Thou art a cobler [but with awl. I] and Wherefore rejoice, Act I. 1.

196.

once upon a raw and The games are done, Act I. 2.

197.

And for Mark Antony, and O, name him not, Act II. 1.

198.

This disturbed sky, Act I. 3.

All the conspirators, Act V. 5.

How ‘scaped I killing, Act IV. 3.

You are my true, Act II. 1.

199.

They are all welcome and It is no matter, Act II. 1.

OTHELLO

200.

tragedy purifies the affections by terror and pity, Aristotle’s Poetics.

It comes directly home, Dedication to Bacon’s Essays.

The picturesque contrasts. The germ of this paragraph may be found in The Examiner (The Round Table, No. 38), May 12th, 1816. The paper there indexed as Shakespeare’s exact discrimination of nearly similar characters was used in the preparation of Othello, Henry IV. and Henry VI. in the Characters of Shakespear’s Plays.

202.

flows on to the Propontic, Act III. 3.

the spells, Act I. 3.

What! Michael Cassio? and If she be false, Act III. 3.

203.

Look where he comes, Act III. 3. The four following quotations in the text and footnote are in the same scene.

[I found not Cassio’s kisses

... thy hollow cell.]

Yet, oh the pity of it, Act IV. 2.

My wife! Act V. 2.

204.

his whole course of love, Act I. 3.

’Tis not to make me jealous, Act III. 3.

Believe me, Act III. 4.

I will, my Lord, Act IV. 3.

205.

her visage. Cf. ‘I saw Othello’s visage in his mind,’ Act I. 3.

A maiden never bold, Act I. 3.

Tempests themselves, Act II. 1.

205.

She is subdued and honours and his valiant parts, Act I. 3.

Ay, too gentle, Act IV. 1.

remained at home, Act I. 3.

Alas, Iago, Act IV. 2.

206.

Would you had never seen him, Act IV. 3.

Some persons. See The Round Table, p. 15.

207.

Our ancient, Dram. Per. ‘Iago, his ancient.’

What a full fortune, and Here is her father’s house, Act I. 1.

208.

I cannot believe, Act II. 1.

And yet how nature, Act III. 3.

the milk of human kindness. Macbeth, Act I. 5.

relish of salvation. Hamlet, Act III. 3.

Oh, you are well tuned now, Act II. 1.

My noble lord, Act III. 3.

209.

O grace! O Heaven forgive [defend] me, Act III. 3.

How is it, General, Act IV. 1.

Zanga. See The Revenge, by Edward Young (1683–1765), first acted 1721.

TIMON OF ATHENS

210.

Follow his strides, Act I. 1.

211.

What, think’st thou, Act IV. 3 [moss’d trees].

A thing slipt, Act I. 1.

Ugly all over with hypocrisy. Cf. ‘He is ugly all over with the affectation of the fine gentleman.’ Quoted by Steele from Wycherley, The Tatler, No. 38.

212.

This yellow slave, Act IV. 3.

Let me look, Act IV. 1.

213.

What things in the world, Act IV. 3.

loved few things better, Act I. 1.

Come not to me, Act V. 1.

These well express, Act V. 4.

CORIOLANUS

214.

no jutting frieze and to make its pendant bed. Macbeth, Act I. 6.

it carries noise, Act II. 1.

Carnage is its daughter. See Wordsworth’s Ode, No. XLV. of Poems dedicated to National Independence and Liberty, ed. Hutchinson, 1895. The line was altered by Wordsworth in 1845. See also Byron’s Don Juan, Canto viii. Stanza 9.

215.

poor [these] rats, Act I. 1.

as if he were a God, Act II. 1.

Mark you and cares, Act III. 1.

216.

Now the red pestilence, Act IV. 1.

217.

Methinks I hither hear, Act I. 3 [At Grecian sword, contemning].

These are the ushers, Act II. 1.

Pray now, no more, Act I. 9.

218.

The whole history. The sentence quoted is by Pope. See Malone’s Shakespeare, 1821, vol. xiv.

TROILUS AND CRESSIDA

221.

Troy, yet upon her basis, Act I. 3.

222.

without o’erflowing full. Said of the Thames in Cooper’s Hill, by Sir John Denham (1615–1669).

222.

of losing distinction in his thoughts [joys] and As doth a battle, Act III. 2.

223.

Time hath, my lord, Act. III. 3.

224.

Why there you touch’d, Act II. 2.

Come here about me, Act V. 7.

Go thy way, Act I. 2.

It is the prettiest villain, Act III. 2.

225.

the web of our lives. All’s Well that Ends Well, Act IV. 3.

He hath done, Act V. 5.

226.

Prouder than when, Act I. 3.

like the eye of vassalage, Act III. 2 [like vassalage at unawares encountering the eye of majesty].

And as the new abashed nightingale, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Book III. 177.

227.

Her armes small. Ibid., 179.

O that I thought, Act III. 2.

Rouse yourself, Act III. 3.

What proffer’st thou, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Book III. 209.

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

228.

like the swan’s down-feather, Act III. 2.

If it be love indeed, Act I. 1.

229.

The barge she sat in, Act II. 2.

like a doating mallard, Act III. 10.

He’s speaking now, Act I. 5.

It is my birthday and To let a fellow, Act. III. 13.

Age cannot wither, Act. II. 2 [stale].

There’s gold, Act. II. 5.

230.

Dost thou not see, Act V. 2.

Antony, leave thy lascivious wassels, Act I. 4. [For Mutina read Modena.]

Yes, yes, Act III. 11.

231.

Eros, thou yet behold’st me, Act IV. 14.

I see men’s judgments, Act III. 13.

232.

a master-leaver, Act IV. 9.

HAMLET

232.

this goodly frame and man delighted not, Act II. 2.

too much i’ th’ sun. Cf. Act II. 2.

the pangs of despised love, Act III. 1.

233.

the outward pageants. Cf. the trappings and the suits of woe, Act I. 2.

we have that within, Act I. 2.

234.

that has no relish of salvation and He kneels and prays [now might I do it pat, now he is praying], Act III. 3.

How all occasions, Act IV. 4 [fust in us].

235.

Whole Duty of Man, 1659, a once-popular ethical treatise of unknown authorship.

Academy of Compliments, or the whole Art of Courtship, being the rarest and most exact way of wooing a Maid or Widow, by the way of Dialogue or complimental Expressions. London, 12mo. Academies of Compliments were also published in 1655 and 1669.

236.

his father’s spirit, Act I. 2.

I loved Ophelia and Sweets to the sweet, Act V. 1.

Oh rose of May, Act IV. 5.

There is a willow, Act IV. 7 [grows aslant].

237.

a wave o’ th’ sea. The Winter’s Tale, Act IV. 4.

THE TEMPEST

238.

Either for tragedy. Hamlet, Act II. 2. Hazlitt alters the words of Polonius to apply them to Shakespeare.

a deed without a name. Macbeth, Act IV. 1.

does his spiriting gently, Act I. 2.

to airy nothing. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V. 1.

semblably. The Second Part of King Henry VI., Act V. 1.

worthy of that name. Cf. Act III. 1.

239.

like the dyer’s hand. Sonnet CXI.

‘the liberty of wit’ ... ‘the law’ of the understanding. Cf. Hamlet, Act II. 2 [the law of writ and the liberty].

of the earth, earthy. St. John, iii. 31.

always speaks in blank verse, Schlegel, p. 395.

As wicked dew, Act I. 2.

240.

I’ll shew thee, Act II. 2.

Be not afraid, Act III. 2.

241.

I drink the air, Act V. 1.

I’ll put a girdle, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act II. 2.

Your charm, Act V. 1.

Come unto these yellow sands, Act I. 2.

242.

The cloud-capp’d towers, Act IV. 1.

Ye elves of hills, Act V. 1.

243.

Shakespear has anticipated. The passage quoted is based on Florio’s translation of Montaigne. See Chapter XXX. Book 1. Of the Caniballes.

Had I the plantation, Act II. 1.

THE MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

See The Round Table, pp. 61–64.

244.

This crew of patches, Act III. 2.

He will roar, Act I. 2. The two following quotations in the text are in the same scene.

I believe we must leave, Act III. 1.

245.

Write me a prologue, Act III. 1.

with amiable cheeks and Monsieur Cobweb, Act IV. 1.

Lord, what fools, Act III. 2.

the human mortals, Act II. 1.

gorgons and hydras. Paradise Lost, Book II. l. 628.

regarded him rather as a metaphysician. Cf. ‘No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.’ Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, Chap. XV.

246.

Be kind, Act III. 1.

Go, one of you, Act IV. 1.

247.

the most fearful wild-fowl, Act III. 1.

247.

Liston acted in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Covent Garden, January 17, 1816. See Genest’s Some Account of the English Stage, VIII. 545–549. See also Hazlitt’s A View of the English Stage, where a few of the same sentences used here also occur.

ROMEO AND JULIET

248.

whatever is most intoxicating, Schlegel, p. 400.

fancies [cowslips] wan. Lycidas, l. 147.

249.

We have heard it objected. By Curran. See post, p. 393.

too unripe and crude. Cf. Lycidas, l. 3, ‘harsh and crude.’

the Stranger. Menschenhass und Reue, by A.F.F. von Kotzebue (1761–1819), adapted for the English stage under the title of The Stranger. See note to p. 155.

gather grapes. St. Matthew, vii. 16.

My bounty, Act II. 2.

250.

they fade by degrees, Wordsworth’s Ode, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of early Childhood, V. [fade into the light].

that lies about us. Ibid.

251.

the purple light of love, Gray’s Progress of Poesy, l. 41.

another morn risen on mid-day [mid-noon], Paradise Lost, V. 310–311.

in utter nakedness, Wordsworth’s Ode (see above), V.

I’ve seen the day, Act I. 5.

At my poor house, Act I. 2.

But he, Act I. 1.

252.

the white wonder, Act III. 3.

What lady’s that, Act I. 5.

But stronger Shakespear felt for man alone, Collins’s Epistle to Sir Thomas Hanmer.

Thou know’st the mask, Act II. 2.

253.

calls [think] true love spoken [acted] and Gallop apace, Act III. 2.

It was reserved, Schlegel, p. 400.

254.

Here comes the lady, Act II. 6.

Ancient damnation, Act III. 5.

frail thoughts. Lycidas, 153 [false surmise].

the flatteries, Act V. 1.

What said my man, Act V. 3.

If I may trust, Act V. 1 [flattering truth of sleep].

255.

Shame come to Romeo and Blister’d be thy tongue, Act III. 2.

256.

father, mother, Act III. 2.

Let me peruse, Act V. 3.

257.

as she would take [catch]. Antony and Cleopatra, Act V. 2.

The Beauties of Shakespear. By Dr. Wm. Dodd (1729–1777), 1753.

LEAR

258.

Be Kent unmannerly and Prescribe not, Act I. 1.

259.

This is the excellent foppery, Act I. 2.

the dazzling fence of controversy. Cf. the ‘dazzling fence’ of rhetoric, Comus, 790–791.

260.

beat at the gate, he has made and Let me not stay, Act I. 4.

How now, daughter. Ibid. [much o’ the savour].

263.

O let me not be mad, Act I. 5.

264.

Vengeance and Good-morrow to you both, Act II. 4 [how this becomes the house].

268.

See the little dogs, Act III. 6.

Let them anatomise Regan, Act III. 6.

Nothing but his unkind daughters, Act III. 4.

whether a madman, Act III. 6.

Come on, sir, Act IV. 6.

full circle home, Act V. 3.

269.

Shame, ladies, Act IV. 3.

Alack, ’tis he, Act IV. 4.

How does my royal lord, Act IV. 7.

We are not the first, Act V. 3.

270.

And my poor fool, Act V. 3.

Vex not his ghost, Act V. 3 [this tough world].

Approved of by Dr. Johnson. See Malone’s Shakespeare, vol. X. p. 290.

condemned by Schlegel. See Schlegel, p. 413.

The Lear of Shakespear. See Lamb’s Miscellaneous Essays, ed. Ainger, 1884, p. 233.

271.

[For that rich sea read that sea.]

RICHARD II.

273.

How long a time, Act I. 3.

sighed his English breath, Act III. 1.

The language I have learnt, Act I. 3.

is hung armour, Wordsworth’s Sonnet, It is not to be thought of (1802).

keen encounters. King Richard III., Act I. 2.

If that thy valour, Act IV. 1 [Till thou the lie-giver and that lie do lie].

275.

This royal throne of kings, Act II. 1 [fear’d by their breed and famous by their birth ... the envious siege].

276.

Ourself and Bushy, Act I. 4.

I thank thee, Act II. 3.

O that I were a mockery king, Act IV. 1.

it yearned his heart, Act V. 5.

My lord, you told me, Act V. 2 [scowl on gentle Richard].

HENRY IV.

278.

we behold the fulness. Cf. Col. ii. 9.

lards the lean earth. 1 King Henry IV., Act II. 2.

into thin air. The Tempest, Act IV. 1.

three fingers [omit deep], Act IV. 2.

it snows of meat and drink. Canterbury Tales, Prologue, 345.

ascends me into the brain, Part II. Act IV. 3.

a sun of man, Part I. Act II. 4.

279.

open, palpable, Part I. Act II. 4 [like their father that begets them; gross as a mountain, open, palpable].

By the lord, Part I. Act I. 2.

280.

But Hal, Part I. Act I. 2.

who grew from four [two] men, Part I. Act II. 4.

281.

Harry, I do not only marvel, Part I. Act II. 4 [purses? a question to be asked].

282.

What is the gross sum and Marry, if thou wert an honest man, Part II. Act II. 1.

283.

Would I were with him. Henry V., Act II. 3.

turning his vices [diseases], Part II. Act I. 2.

their legs, Part II. Act II. 4.

a man made after supper and Would, cousin Silence, Part II. Act III. 2.

I did not think Master Silence, in some authority, and You have here, Part II. Act V. 3.

284.

When on the gentle Severn’s sedgy bank and By heaven [honour from the pale-faced moon], Part I. Act I. 3.

Had my sweet Harry, Part II. Act II. 3.

HENRY V.

PAGE

285.

the [best] king of good fellows, Act V. 2.

plume up their wills. Othello, Act I. 3.

the right divine, Pope’s Dunciad, Book IV. 1. 188.

286.

when France is his, Act I. 2.

O for a muse of fire, Prologue.

287.

the reformation and which is a wonder, Act I. 1.

And God forbid, Act I. 2.

288.

the ill neighbourhood, For once the eagle England, and For government [the act of order], Act I. 2.

289.

rich with [omit his] praise, Act I. 2.

O hard condition, Act IV. 1.

290.

The Duke of York, Act IV. 6.

291.

some disputations, Act III. 2.

HENRY VI.

292.

flat and unraised. King Henry V., Act I., Chorus.

Glory is like a circle, Part I. Act I. 2.

yet tell’st thou not, Part I. Act I. 4.

293.

Aye, Edward will use women honourably, Part III. Act III. 2.

We have already observed. See note to p. 200 for the source of this paragraph.

294.

The characters and situations. The material between these words and disappointed ambition (p. 297) formed part of an article by Hazlitt in The Examiner (see note to p. 200).

Edward Plantagenet, Part III. Act II. 2.

mock not my senseless conjuration. Richard II., Act III. 2 [foul rebellion’s arms ... lift shrewd steel ... God for his Richard].

295.

But now the blood. Richard II., Act III. 2.

cheap defence. Cf. Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France, ‘the cheap defence of nations.’

Awake, thou coward majesty [twenty thousand names] and Where is the duke. Richard II., Act III. 2.

296.

what must the king do now. Richard II., Act III. 3.

This battle fares, Part III. Act II. 5.

297.

had staggered his royal person. Richard II., Act V. 5.

William Gifford (1756–1826), the son of a glazier, after a neglected childhood, during which he was at one time apprenticed to a shoemaker, entered Exeter College, Oxford, through the kindness of a friend, and graduated in 1782. His two satires, The Baviad (1791) and The MÆviad (1795), were published together in 1797, and his translation of Juvenal, upon which he had been working since he left Oxford, in 1802. He became editor of The Anti-Jacobin (1797), and was the first editor (1809–1824) of The Quarterly Review. He published a translation of Persius in 1821, and editions of some of the old dramatists: Massinger (1805), Ben Jonson (1816), Ford (1827), and Shirley (completed by Dyce, 1833). In The Examiner for June 14, 1818, appeared a ‘Literary Notice,’ entitled ‘The Editor of the Quarterly Review,’ which Hazlitt incorporated in the present ‘Letter.’

366.

‘False and hollow,’ etc. Paradise Lost, II. 112 et seq.

Ackerman’s dresses for May. Rudolf Ackerman’s (1764–1834) Repository of Arts, Literature, Fashions, Manufactures, etc., was issued periodically between 1809 and 1828.

Carlton House. The residence of the Prince Regent. It was pulled down in 1826.

367.

A Jacobin stationer. Hazlitt refers to the case of William Paul Rogers, a Chelsea stationer, who for taking an active part in a petition for reform was deprived of the charge of a letter-box. Leigh Hunt referred to the case in The Examiner for February 7, 1819 (not February 9, as Hazlitt says), and opened a subscription list for Rogers. The two clergymen referred to took an active part against Rogers. Wellesley, a brother of the Duke of Wellington, was Rector of Chelsea, and Butler had a school there.

‘The tenth transmitter.’

‘No tenth transmitter of a foolish face.’

Richard Savage’s The Bastard, l. 7.

368.

Ultra-Crepidarian. Leigh Hunt published a satire on Gifford entitled Ultra-Crepidarius in 1823, but the phrase was invented for Gifford, Leigh Hunt says in his preface, ‘by a friend of mine ... one of the humblest as well as noblest spirits that exist.’ This was perhaps Lamb.

370.

Your account of the first work. In The Quarterly Review, April 1817 (vol. xvii. p. 154).

Albemarle Street hoax. John Murray (1778–1843), the founder and publisher of The Quarterly Review, purchased No. 50 Albemarle Street in 1812.

372.

‘Secret, sweet and precious.’

‘The landlady and Tam grew gracious

Wi’ secret favours, sweet and precious.’

Burns, Tam o’Shanter.

373.

‘Two or three conclusive digs,’ etc. From a passage in Leigh Hunt’s essay ‘On Washerwomen’ referred to by Gifford.

Note. ‘The milk of human kindness.’ Macbeth, Act I. Scene 5.

374.

Earl Grosvenor. Gifford was for a time tutor in Lord Grosvenor’s family.

‘Their gorge did not rise.’ Hamlet, Act V. Scene 1.

‘You assume a vice,’ etc.

‘Assume a virtue, if you have it not.’

Hamlet, Act III. Scene 4.

In the ‘Examiner.’ February 25, 1816.

375.

How little knew’st thou of Calista!

‘O, thou hast known but little of Calista!’

Rowe’s The Fair Penitent, Act IV. Scene 1.

Anne Davies. Gifford bequeathed £3000 to her relatives. In addition to the epitaph quoted in the text he wrote an elegy on her, beginning, ‘I wish I was where Anna lies,’ which is referred to in Hazlitt’s character of Gifford in The Spirit of the Age.

376.

‘Other such dulcet diseases.’ As You Like It, Act V. Scene 4.

‘Compunctious visitings of Nature.’ Macbeth, Act I. Scene 5.

‘You are well tuned now,’ etc. Othello, Act II. Scene 1.

‘Made of penetrable stuff.’ Hamlet, Act III. Scene 4.

‘Stuffed with paltry, blurred sheets.’ Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (Select Works, ed. Payne, ii. 101).

Note 1. ‘It is easier,’ etc. St. Matthew, xix. 24.

377.

The Admiralty Scribe. John Wilson Croker (1780–1857), who contributed two hundred and sixty articles to The Quarterly Review, was Secretary to the Admiralty from 1809 to 1830.

His ‘Feast of the Poets.’ Published in 1814.

378.

Thus painters write their names at Co. From Prior’s Protogenes and Apelles. Burke quoted the line in his Regicide Peace (Select Works, ed. Payne, p. 94).

For this passage, etc. Leigh Hunt and his brother John were in prison for two years from February 1813 for a libel on the Prince Regent in The Examiner (March 22, 1812). Leigh Hunt was sent, not to Newgate, but to the Surrey Gaol in Horsemonger Lane, where he wrote The Descent of Liberty: A Masque, and the greater part of The Story of Rimini. Gifford’s review of Rimini appeared in The Quarterly Review for Jan. 1816 (vol. xiv. p. 473).

378.

Yet you say somewhere. In the review of Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Poets (Quarterly Review, July 1818, vol. xix. at p. 430).

Note. Mary Robinson (1758–1800), known as ‘Perdita,’ from her having captivated the Prince of Wales while she was acting in that part in 1778. On being deserted by him she devoted herself to literature, and became one of the Della Cruscan School ridiculed by Gifford. Hazlitt refers to Gifford’s Baviad, ll. 27–28:—

‘See Robinson forget her state, and move

On crutches tow’rds the grave, to “Light o’ Love.”’

Put on the pannel, etc. ‘If I can help it, he shall not be on the inquest of my quantum meruit.’ Burke’s A Letter to a Noble Lord (Works, Bohn, V. 114). Note. Mr. Sheridan once spoke. See speech of March 7, 1788 (Parl. Hist., vol. xxvii.).

379.

John Hoppner (1758–1810), the portrait-painter.

Charles Long (1761–1838), paymaster-general, created Baron Farnborough in 1826.

380.

‘From slashing Bentley,’ etc. Pope, Prologue to the Satires, l. 164.

381.

‘It was Caviare to the multitude.’ ‘’Twas caviare to the general.’ Hamlet, Act II. Scene 2.

Note. Hamlet, Act II. Scene 2.

382.

An Essay on the Ignorance of the Learned. Republished in Table Talk, from The Scots Magazine (New Series), iii. 55.

384.

Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Founded by William Blackwood (1776–1834) in 1817.

You have tried it twice since. That is, in his reviews of Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (January 1818, vol. xviii. p. 458) and of Lectures on the English Poets (July 1818, vol. xix. p. 424).

385.

Be noticed in the Edinburgh Review. By Jeffrey, July 1817 (vol. xxviii. p. 472). ‘Dedicate its sweet leaves.’

‘Ere he can spread his sweet leaves to the air,

Or dedicate his beauty to the sun.’

Romeo and Juliet, Act I. Scene 1.

386.

‘This is what is looked for,’ etc. Twelfth Night, Act III. Scene 2.

‘They keep you as an ape,’ etc. Hamlet, Act IV. Scene 2.

You ‘have the office,’ etc.

‘——You, mistress,

That have the office opposite to Saint Peter,

And keep the gate of hell!’

Othello, Act IV. Scene 2.

386.

You ‘keep a corner,’ etc.

‘Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads

To knot and gender in.’

Othello, Act IV. Scene 2.

‘Lay the flattering unction.’

‘Lay not that flattering unction to your soul.’

Hamlet, Act III. Scene 4.

387.

The authority of Mr. Burke. Burke refers to Henry VIII. as ‘one of the most decided tyrants in the rolls of history,’ and speaks of ‘his iniquitous proceedings’ ‘when he resolved to rob the abbies.’ Reflections on the Revolution in France (Select Works, ed. Payne, ii. 136–137). See also a passage in A Letter to a Noble Lord (Works, Bohn, V. 131 et seq.).

With Mr. Coleridge in his late Lectures. Hazlitt probably refers to The Statesman’s Manual (1816). See Political Essays.

‘Truth to be a liar.’ Hamlet, Act II. Scene 2.

‘Speak out, Grildrig.’ See Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (Voyage to Brobdingnag).

388.

‘The insolence of office,’ etc. Hamlet, Act III. Scene 1.

Those ‘who crook,’ etc. Hamlet, Act III. Scene 2.

Spa-fields. Where the famous meeting of reformers had recently (December 2, 1816) been held.

A seditious Sunday paper. The Examiner was published on Sunday.

Mr. Coleridge’s ‘Conciones ad Populum.’ Two anti-Pittite addresses published in 1795.

389.

‘The pride, pomp,’ etc. Othello, Act III. Scene 3.

‘One murder makes a villain,’ etc. From Bishop Porteus’s prize poem Death (1759).

390.

The still sad music of humanity. Wordsworth’s Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey.

391.

You have forgotten Mr. Burke, etc. See Letters on a Regicide Peace (Select Works, ed. Payne, iii. p. 50).

‘Go to,’ etc.

‘Go to, Sir; you weigh equally; a feather will turn the scale.’

Measure for Measure, Act IV. Scene 2.

‘The weight of a hair will turn the scales between their avoirdupois.’

2 Henry IV., Act III. Scene 4.

‘Cinque-spotted,’ etc. Cymbeline, Act II. Scene 3.

Note. ‘Carnage is the daughter of humanity.’ See note to p. 214 and Notes and Queries, 9th series, ii. 309, 398; iii. 37.

392.

Red-lattice phrases. Alehouse language. See Merry Wives of Windsor, Act II. Scene 2.

393.

Such ‘welcome and unwelcome things.’ Macbeth, Act IV. Scene 3.

The objection to ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ See ante, p. 249. Hazlitt refers to the criticism of Paradise Lost in his Lecture on Shakspeare and Milton (Lectures on the English Poets).

Note. Quoted from a review by Jeffrey in The Edinburgh Review, August 1817 (vol. xxviii. at p. 473).

394.

‘One of the most perfect,’ etc. Quoted from Gifford’s review of Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (vol. xviii. p. 458).

Ends of verse, etc.

‘Chear’d up himself with ends of verse,

And sayings of philosophers.’

Hudibras, Part I. Canto iii.

394.

The geometricians and chemists of France. Burke’s A Letter to a Noble Lord (Works, Bohn, V. 142).

‘Present to your mind’s eye.’ Hamlet, Act I. Scene 2.

‘Holds his crown,’ etc. Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (Select Works, ed. Payne, ii. 17).

395.

The ingenious parallel, etc. See ante, p. 171.

The article in the last Review. Quarterly Review, July 1818 (vol. xix, p. 424).

398.

We must speak by the card, etc. Hamlet, Act V. Scene 1.

A knavish speech, etc. Hamlet, Act IV. Scene 2.

Shakespear says, etc. Othello, Act III. Scene 3.

400.

The authority of Mr. Burke. Hazlitt quotes inaccurately a passage in Burke’s essay ‘On the Sublime and Beautiful,’ Works (Bohn), i. 81.

Emelie that fayrer, etc. Canterbury Tales (The Knightes Tale, 1035–8).

401.

The only mistake. The reference is probably to a passage in the first edition, where Hazlitt says, ‘Prior’s serious poetry, as his Alma, is as heavy, as his familiar style was light and agreeable.’ Gifford quotes this passage and adds: ‘Unluckily for our critic, Prior’s Alma is in his lightest and most familiar style, and is the most highly finished specimen of that species of versification which our language possesses.’ In the second edition Hazlitt substituted Solomon for Alma.

Mr. Coleridge. See Biographia Literaria, Chap, iii., note at the end. Coleridge had already in the first number of the Friend referred to this passage, which appeared in a footnote by the editor of The Beauties of the Anti-Jacobin, and not in The Anti-Jacobin itself. See AthenÆum, May 31, 1900.

Your predecessor. Gifford was himself editor of the Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner, which appeared from November 20, 1797, to July 9, 1798.

402.

‘Dying, make a swan-like end.’

‘Then, if he lose, he makes a swan-like end,

Fading in music.’

Merchant of Venice, Act III. Scene 2.

‘Being so majestical,’ etc. Hamlet, Act I. Scene 1.

‘Love is not love,’ etc. Shakespeare, Sonnet CXVI.

403.

‘A writer of third-rate books.’ ‘He is a mere quack, Mr. Editor, and a mere bookmaker; one of the sort that lounge in third-rate book shops, and write third-rate books.’ From a letter in Blackwood’s Magazine, August 1818 (vol. iii. p. 550).

An Essay on the Principles of Human Action. Published in 1805.

408.

Mirabaud. D’Holbach’s SystÈme de la Nature is wrongly attributed to Jean Baptiste de Mirabaud (1675–1760), the translator of Tasso.

409.

‘On this bank and shoal of time.’ Macbeth, Act I. Scene 7.

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1.Hazlitt has glanced at him in his notes on dissenters and dissent in the Political Essays, and has given a further taste of him in that very notable and gracious piece, ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets.’