**I}nifa richer m a little room?
 
 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS 
 
 OF 
 
 LAMB, HAZLITT, AND OTHERS.
 
 BRIC-A-BRAC SERIES. 
 
 I. 
 
 PERSONAL REMINISCENCES BYCHORLEY, PLANCHE, AND YOUNG. 
 
 II. 
 V ANECDOTE BIOGRAPHIES OF THACKERAY AND DICKENS. 
 
 III. 
 
 PROSPER 'MERIMEE'S LETTERS TO AN INCOGNITA; WITH 
 RECOLLECTIONS BY LAMARTINE AND GEORGE SAND. 
 
 IV. 
 
 PERSONAL REMINISCENCES BY BARHAM, HARNESS, AND HOD- 
 
 DER. 
 
 V. 
 
 THE GREVILLE MEMOIRS. 
 
 VI. 
 
 PERSONAL REMINISCENCES BY MOORE AND JERDAN. 
 
 VII. 
 
 PERSONAL REMINISCENCES BY CORNELIA KNIGHT AND THOMAS 
 
 RAIKES. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 PERSONAL REMINISCENCES BY MICHAEL KELLY JOHN O'KEEFFE, 
 AND JOHN TAYLOR. 
 
 IX. 
 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF LAMB, HAZLITT, AND OTHERS. 
 
 Each i vol. sq. I2mo. Per vol. $1.50. 
 Sent, post-paid, on receipt of price by the Publishers.
 
 LJf e ,n 18^5 'by h.s IHenci Brook Pulha
 
 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS 
 
 OF 
 
 LAMB, HAZLITT, AND OTHERS 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 RICHARD HENRY STODDARD
 
 Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873, by 
 
 SCRIBNKR, ARMSTRONG, AND COMPANY, 
 In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 
 
 RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE: 
 
 STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY 
 
 H. O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 PATMORE'S FIRST ACQUAINTANCE WITH LAMB 
 AT HOME, ABROAD, AND AMONG HIS BOOKS 
 
 LAMB'S LETTERS 
 
 THE LAMBS' DOMESTIC ARRANGEMENTS 
 LAMB'S SYMPATHIES AND SELF-SACRIFICES 
 
 ELIANA 
 
 INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER 
 ODD CORRESPONDENT OF LAMB 
 
 ANECDOTES 
 
 LAMB, HAZLITT, AND SOUTHEY 
 
 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 PATMORE'S FIRST INTRODUCTION TO HAZLITT 
 
 HAZLITT'S RESIDENCE 
 
 IN THE STREETS 
 
 DINNER WITH HAZLITT AT JOHN SCOTT'S 
 PERSONAL BEARING AND ITS CAUSES 
 
 HAZLITT'S HABITS 
 
 HAZLITT AS A POLITICIAN 
 
 HAZLITT'S FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 
 
 DISLIKE OF WRITING ..... 
 
 CONVERSATIONAL AND SOCIAL POWERS . 
 
 HAZLITT AT A PRIZE-FIGHT 
 
 AT FONTHILL AND BURLEIGH HOUSE 
 
 EVENINGS AT THE SOUTHAMPTON 
 
 A VISIT WITH HAZLITT TO JOHN HUNT 
 
 OPINIONS AND CRITICAL ESTIMATES . 
 
 ORIGIN OF THE *' LIBER AMORIS " . 
 
 HAZLITT'S MARRIAGE 
 
 3 
 ii 
 16 
 
 22 
 24 
 30 
 
 33 
 37 
 39 
 42 
 
 55 
 61 
 67 
 72 
 80 
 
 85 
 88 
 101 
 in 
 118 
 129 
 135 
 '47 
 154 
 181 
 190
 
 vi CONTENTS. 
 
 REMOVAL TO LONDON 193 
 
 HAZLITT AS A REPORTER 195 
 
 FULL OF WORK 197 
 
 HAZLITT AND HAYDON . 198 
 
 HAZLITT'S HOUSEKEEPING 201 
 
 HAZLITT'S MARRIED LIFE 203 
 
 SARAH WALKER 207 
 
 THE HAZLITT DIVORCE 215 
 
 HAZLITT'S LAST DAYS 237 
 
 HAZLITTIANA 242 
 
 THOMAS CAMPBELL. 
 
 THE "NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE" . . . .251 
 
 HAZLITT AND NORTHCOTE 259 
 
 INCAPACITY FOR FRIENDSHIP 265 
 
 CAMPBELL AND LORD AND LADY BYRON .... 269 
 
 PERSONAL CHARACTER 271 
 
 APPEARANCE OF CAMPBELL AND ROGERS .... 276 
 
 COUNTESS OF BLESSINGTON. 
 
 AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY 283 
 
 IN ITALY . . . . . . . . . . 288 
 
 AT PARIS 294 
 
 HYDE PARK 296 
 
 LETTERS TO PATMORE . i 298 
 
 THE HABITUE'S OF SEAMORE PLACE AND GORE HOUSE 307
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 |MONG the motives which impel to the writing of 
 books, there may be singled out from the num- 
 ber, the belief that the writer has something to 
 say which the world will be willing to hear, the intention 
 of making money, and the desire for fame. The con- 
 sciousness of a literary mission is an agreeable one, for 
 however delusive it may be, it raises its possessor for 
 the time being above his fellows, and places him in his 
 own estimation among the benefactors of his race. Not 
 less agreeable is the hope of deriving profit from one's 
 pleasure, for though it is seldom fulfilled, it is never per- 
 haps entirely abandoned ; most men, I fancy, most 
 authors, I am sure, would rather become rich by Lit- 
 erature than by Trade. We respect the mercantile mind, 
 as we should, but something tells us that it is inferior 
 to pure Intellect. We reverence genius more than gun- 
 ny-bags, and would rather witch the world with noble 
 horsemanship on the back of Pegasus than be carried 
 more comfortably to oblivion in a palace-car. But 
 fame 
 
 Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise, 
 
 (That last infirmity of noble minds,) 
 
 To scorn delights and live laborious days." 
 
 The desire for fame is one of the highest by which man
 
 viii PREFACE. 
 
 is actuated. I can conceive of nothing grander than the 
 love of fame by which so many are governed, and noth- 
 ing sadder than the disappointment to which they are 
 doomed. It is confined to no station, and no sex. The 
 smallest have felt it equally with the greatest, and the 
 greatest have not felt it all. That Shakespeare was with- 
 out it appears as certain as that it was, after duty, the 
 chief incentive to the literary life of Milton. The rickety 
 little papist Pope construing his Tully at Binfield ; the stu- 
 dious scholar Gray annotating his books in the cloisters 
 of Cambridge ; the marvelous boy, Chatterton, poring 
 over old parchments in the muniment room at St. Mary 
 Redclyffe's ; the stalwart Scottish peasant at Mossgiel, 
 
 " Behind his plough along the mountain side ; " 
 
 the irascible young lord, carrying war into the enemy's 
 camp over his claret ; who does not recall them, and 
 their struggles and triumphs ? But the Kirke Whites, the 
 Bloomfields, the Dermodys, the Clares, and the crowd of 
 nameless singers, whose pursuit of fame was as eager as 
 that of their masters, whoever thinks of them, and of 
 their aspirations and failures ? They followed a Will-o'- 
 the-wisp, which so far from guiding them to 
 
 " The steep where Fame's proud temple shines afar," 
 
 went out in darkness, and left them to die in poverty 
 and neglect. Clearly, it is as true of Literature, as of 
 a weightier matter, that many are called, but few chosen. 
 The life of an author is about the last life which any 
 sensible man would choose, and the life of Charles Lamb 
 is certainly the first from which he would turn with aver- 
 sion. It was not Life in the full sense, but endurance 
 of existence, a period of denial and disappointment. 
 There was no enjoyment in it ; nothing in which a vigor-
 
 PREFACE. ix 
 
 ous 'nature could sun itself ; only the twilight of creat- 
 ure comforts. His happiest days were perhaps those 
 which he spent in Christ's Hospital, where he became ac- 
 quainted with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a blue coat boy 
 like himself, and where he picked up his " small Latin 
 and less Greek," being, in the language of the school, 
 in Greek, but not a Deputy Grecian. He left Christ's 
 Hospital in his fifteenth year, and entered the South 
 Sea House, under his elder brother John, a cold-hearted, 
 selfish man, who cared nothing for his family. His par- 
 ents were poor, his father, John Lamb, being the clerk of 
 Mr. Salt, one of the benchers of the Inner Temple. A 
 duller home than that of the Lambs cannot well be imag- 
 ined, for as the years went on the father fell into dotage, 
 the mother became bedridden, and the daughter Mary 
 shattered her health by needle-work all day, and incessant 
 watches throughout the night. Hours of happiness were 
 occasionally vouchsafed to the young clerk, the best of 
 which were spent in the society of Coleridge at the Salu- 
 tation and Cat, a little public-house in the neighborhood 
 of Smithfield, where the whilom charity boys used to sup, 
 and smoke and talk, long after they heard the chimes of 
 midnight, beguiling the cares of life with poetry. For 
 Charles was a poet, a sonneteer in a small way, who 
 was, or thought he was, in love with a fair-haired maid, 
 whom he christened Anna, and whom his biographers con- 
 jecture to have been one Miss Alice Winterton, or Winn, 
 they are not certain which. In the autumn of 1796, his 
 twenty-second year, his life was darkened by a tragedy, 
 the shadow of which surrounded all his after days. His 
 sister, who had been deranged, became insane, and seiz- 
 ing a case knife one day, while the family was preparing 
 for dinner, she plunged it into the heart of her mother.
 
 X PREFACE. 
 
 It was a dreadful picture which met the eyes of the land- 
 lord, who came hurrying into the room ; the mother life- 
 less in her chair, the daughter standing wildly over her 
 with the fatal knife, and the old man, her father, weeping 
 by her side, bleeding at the forehead, from the effects of 
 a blow from one of the forks which she had been hurling 
 madly about. Charles snatched the knife from his poor 
 demented sister, who was carried to a mad-house, where 
 she remained until she had recovered her reason, and 
 where, a few months later, he followed her. 
 
 Lamb's father soon died, and an old aunt who had 
 lived with them, and he and Mary were alone. His 
 brother was still living, but he might as well have been 
 dead, for all the help he afforded them in their trouble. 
 They lived for each other, or rather Charles lived for 
 Mary, who henceforth was the sole object of his anxiety. 
 What had been might have been forgotten (she at least 
 ceased to grieve over it) but for the cloud which brooded 
 above them, and was ready at any moment to burst upon 
 their devoted heads. There was no security in the house- 
 hold, for Mary was out of her head again and again ; the 
 only consolation they had was that she knew when it was 
 going to happen, and could be prepared for it. When 
 the hour approached they used to go to the Asylum at 
 Foxton together, weeping bitterly along the way. The 
 burden would have crushed him, one would think, but 
 strength was given him, and he rose and bore it manfully. 
 There was something heroic in the determination with 
 which he gave his life to his sister, and it is to be hoped 
 that it sustained him, for there was little else to sustain 
 him. He made no great professions of religion his 
 friends were a little doubtful about his orthodoxy ; but if 
 Christianity consists in a life-long performance of duty,
 
 PREFACE. XI 
 
 he was certainly a Christian. He solaced himself with 
 old books Burton, and Fuller, and Walton, and her 
 Grace, the eccentric Duchess of Newcastle, and indulged 
 in the dream of one day making a name as a poet. His 
 friend Coleridge patronized and altered his verse, and 
 published a sample of it in a collection of his own poems, 
 together with a sample of the verse of their common 
 friend, Charles Lloyd. A year later the two friends sal- 
 lied from behind the shield of the greater Ajax, and chal- 
 lenged fame on their own account. It was accorded to 
 neither. Lamb now changed his " 'prentice han'," and 
 brought out the little prose story of " Rosamond Gray," 
 which was too artless for the time, if not for any time. 
 
 The life of Lamb during the next twenty years was 
 uneventful. It may be traced in outline in his letters to 
 his correspondents, who were the most prominent mem- 
 bers of the Lake school of poets, Coleridge, Southey, 
 and Wordsworth, and others of less note, Manning, Mon- 
 tague, etc., and in the little volumes upon which he em- 
 ployed his leisure hours. The influence of the old books 
 which he read so ardently is evident in his writings, 
 and nowhere so much as in " John Woodvil," which is 
 the most faithful reproduction of the Elizabethan Drama, 
 so called, that we possess ; a reproduction as perfect in 
 its way as the strange dramas of Beddoes, and the dra- 
 matic fragments of Barry Cornwall. " John Woodvil " 
 might have been written by a post-Shakespearean dram- 
 atist, and had it been published as by one, I question 
 whether any critic known to us could have successfully 
 disputed its authenticity. " Hang the age," Lamb wrote 
 after one of his failures, " I will write for antiquity." 
 " John Woodvil " was written for antiquity, and only 
 failed to reach its address because it was written two
 
 Xll PREFACE 
 
 centuries too late. It is affecting, in a primitive fashion, 
 but as artless as the babbling of a child. That Lamb 
 should ever have supposed that it could be acted suc- 
 cessfully is a striking evidence of his inability to under- 
 stand modern literature, dramatic or otherwise. He was 
 born out of his time, and had to pay a penalty for the 
 tardiness of nature. " John Woodvil " failed to make 
 a mark, even among Lamb's friends, upon whom its- most 
 poetical passages were lost. He had no motive to write, 
 except the necessity of diverting his mind, and the possi- 
 bility of adding to his income, but he wrote, nevertheless, 
 his sister assisting him, or he assisting her, it is not easy 
 to say which. They produced together, " Tales from 
 Shakespeare " (1807), and " Mrs. Leicester's School " 
 (1809). Between these he had published " The Ad- 
 ventures of Ulysses" (1808), of which he was the sole 
 author, and, in conjunction with his sister, two little vol- 
 umes of " Original Poetry for Children " (1809), which 
 is only known to us through extracts in a later publica- 
 tion, the whole original edition having disappeared, ap- 
 parently beyond recovery. More important than either 
 of these works was his " Specimens of English Dramatic 
 Poets " (1808), a collection of extracts, which was the 
 fruit of his devotion to old English literature, and which 
 ought to have placed him at the head of the critics of his 
 time. It must have been a revelation to its readers, who 
 for the most part were unacquainted with the early poets 
 whom it laid under contribution, and whom it introduced 
 to their notice. His critical comments, brief as they are, 
 have never been excelled, and never approached, except 
 perhaps by Coleridge, whose knowledge of the old dram- 
 atists was not so extensive as Lamb's, and whose appre- 
 ciation is chiefly confined to their master, Shakespeare.
 
 PREFACE. xiii 
 
 The " Specimens " is a book which scholars love ; one of 
 the "books which are books," and which will never be 
 out of date. 
 
 Lamb had no inducements to continue to write. He 
 had made no money, or at least but yeoman's wages, and 
 fame was as far from sounding his praises as when he sat 
 and talked o' nights with Coleridge, in the little smoky 
 room at the Salutation and Cat. Did he care for fame ? 
 I am inclined to think not. It was not that which he 
 sought, but recreation and forgetfulness, compensation 
 for his daily drudgery at the India House, and distrac- 
 tion from the anxieties which filled his household. The 
 authors in whom he most delighted were not the most 
 famous ones, his prime favorites were not famous at 
 all. If they had missed fame, who was he that he should 
 achieve it ? He was obscure, no doubt, but he was in 
 good company there could be no better, and he was 
 content. What did his masters think of fame ? What 
 did well-languaged Daniel, for example, think of it ? 
 
 " Alas, poor Fame ! in what a narrow room, 
 
 As an encaged parrot, as thou pent 
 Here amongst us ? when even as good be dumb 
 
 As speak, and to be heard with no attent : 
 How can you promise of the time to come, 
 
 When as the present is so negligent 1 " 
 
 Or Lord Brooke, in whom, as he well says, the under- 
 standing must have held a mystical predominance ? 
 
 " Who worship fame commit idolatry ; 
 
 Make men their god, fortune and time their worth ; 
 Form, but reform not, mere hypocrisy : 
 
 By shadows, only shadows bringing forth : 
 Which must, as blossoms, fade e'er true fruit springs, 
 Like voice and echo joined, yet diverse things." 
 
 Or Middleton, for whom he had a generous sympathy, as
 
 XIV PREFACE. 
 
 is shown by his comparison of his witches with the weird 
 sisters in Macbeth : 
 
 " The fame that a man wins himself is best : 
 That he may call his own : honors put to him, 
 Make him no more a man than his clothes do, 
 And are as soon ta'en off : for in the warmth, 
 The heat comes from the body, not the weeds : 
 So man's true fame must strike from his own deeds." 
 
 In a gr-aver and sadder mood he may have exclaimed, 
 with Davenant : 
 
 " For fame (whose custom is to have a care 
 Only of those who her familiars are) 
 Does with a proud neglect o'er strangers fly, 
 As if unworthy of her voice or eye : 
 She seldom is acquainted -with the young. 
 And weary is of those -who live too long." 
 
 The books of Lamb, though they did not make him 
 known to the world, made him known to his friends, the 
 circle of which was gradually enlarging. He lost none 
 of the old ones, and the new which gathered around him, 
 when he had once taken them into his confidence, clung 
 to him to the last. They were mostly men of letters, like 
 himself, and were not popular favorites. He was the 
 centre of a little set, who believed in themselves, and 
 in each other, and who looked askance at their more for- 
 tunate and famous brothers. What Holland House was 
 to the latter, they imagined they found in the chambers 
 of Lamb, whose Wednesday suppers surpassed, they 
 were sure, the rarest breakfasts of Rogers. They vis- 
 ited him and Mary, played whist, talked books, punned, 
 ate cold meat, drank porter, and made merry generally. 
 One of the earliest of the new brood was Hazlitt, who 
 made Lamb's acquaintance in 1805, and who paid him 
 the dubious honor of painting his portrait. Another was
 
 PREFACE. XV 
 
 Leigh Hunt, a slashing theatrical critic, who was soon 
 to be incarcerated for calling the Prince Regent a fat 
 Adonis of fifty. Coleridge sometimes came, and Words- 
 worth, when he was in town, but the great names whom 
 the world delighted to lionor held aloof. They would 
 not have been at home with Lamb, and Lamb would not 
 have been at home with them, so there was no loss on 
 either side. They had their enjoyments, which if brill- 
 iant were frivolous, as the reader may satisfy himself 
 by running over the pages of Moore's Diary ; and Lamb 
 had his enjoyments, the choicest of which came to him 
 in midnight hours as he pored over his beloved folios. 
 He read and read, and when he was thirsty sipped his 
 tumbler of brandy and water. He had a decanter of 
 brandy on his table, and, the story goes, that it ebbed 
 before he went to bed. He had given up smoking years 
 before, but not for good, for, in spite of his " Farewell 
 to Tobacco," he resumed the habit in moderation, treat- 
 ing the resolution that had enabled him to overcome it. 
 
 Of Lamb's personal appearance we have the following 
 description from the pen of Barry Cornwall, whose 
 memory appears to date from the first year of his ac- 
 quaintance, 1817. "Persons who had been in the habit 
 of traversing Covent Garden at that time, might, by ex- 
 tending their walk a few yards into Russell Street, have 
 noticed a small, square man, clothed in black, who went 
 every morning, and returned every afternoon as the 
 hands of the clock moved towards certain hours. You 
 could not mistake him. He was somewhat stiff in man- 
 ner, and almost clerical in dress, which indicated much 
 wear. He had a long, melancholy face, with keen, pene- 
 trating eyes, and he walked with a short, resolute step city- 
 wards. He looked no one in the face for more than a
 
 xvi PREFACE. 
 
 moment, yet contrived to see everything as he went on. 
 No one who ever studied the human features could pass 
 him by without recollecting his countenance ; it was full 
 of sensibility, and it came upon you like a new thought, 
 which you could not help dwelling upon afterwards ; it 
 gave rise to meditation, and did you good. This small 
 half-clerical man was Charles Lamb." Hazlitt pro- 
 nounced Lamb's head to be " worthy of Aristotle," and 
 Hunt called him " a compound of the Jew, the gentle- 
 man, and the angel." 
 
 The establishment of the " London Magazine," in 
 1820, was an epoch in the life of Lamb. It numbered 
 among its contributors most of the rising writers of the 
 time, Hazlitt, De Quincey, Carlyle, Allan Cunningham, 
 Keats, Hood, Darley, Landor, Julius Hare, and, great- 
 est of all, Lamb. He adopted a signature, which has 
 become immortal, that of Elia, a former clerk in the 
 India House, and wrote upon whatever came uppermost 
 in his mind, with a humor and a pathos which have never 
 been excelled. There was a flavor of antiquity in his style, 
 as if he had caught the spirit of the old writers whom he 
 loved, and had made it his own. It was quaint, dramatic, 
 felicitous. There was no trace of imitation in it ; it sug- 
 gested no model ; it was original and individual. The 
 Essays of Elia are unlike any that preceded them, and any 
 that have succeeded them ; they are unique. Lamb had 
 found his true vocation ; the world which had turned a 
 deaf ear so long, listened to him now, or rather to his shadow 
 Elia, not divining at first that it was his veritable self. 
 
 The life of a man of letters is seldom, or never, depict- 
 ured accurately by his biographers. They write when it 
 is finished, gathering information concerning it and him 
 from his acquaintances, and tracing, as well as they can,
 
 PREFACE. xvii 
 
 the history of his mind in his books. It is an interesting 
 task which they undertake, but is a task, nevertheless, 
 and one which generally baffles them before they are 
 done with it. They cannot put themselves in the place 
 of the men and women whom they are dissecting, for 
 what after all is biography but dissection, the post-mortem 
 examination of hearts that have ceased to beat, and brains 
 that have ceased to think ? The publication of the Essays 
 of Elia strikes us as an important event in the life of 
 Lamb, but if the truth were fully known, we should find, 
 I think, that it was really very little to him. It did not 
 enrich him, and it did not surround him with crowds of 
 new admirers. The world knew him not, and when he 
 came in contact with its favorites they considered him 
 a queer customer. Moore characterizes him in his Diary 
 as a clever fellow, but full of villainous and abortive 
 puns, which he miscarried of every moment, and flip- 
 pantly refers to his sister as the poor woman who went 
 mad with him in the diligence on the way to Paris. He 
 mentions Lamb's receiving ^170 (that, if I remember 
 rightly, is the figure) for his two years' contributions to 
 the " London Magazine," of which he was then the hero, 
 and wonders, as he well might, at the smallness of the sum. 
 There was nothing in common between the fashionable 
 and petted author of " Lalla Rookh " and the old-fash- 
 ioned, black gaitered little man who was masquerading as 
 Elia, and it would have been strange if they had under- 
 stood each other. It was otherwise with Rogers, whom 
 Lamb knew later, and whose brother's death he cele- 
 brated in one of his best sonnets. 
 
 The last days of Lamb were passed in comparative 
 ease. He left the India House in 1825, after thirty-three 
 years' faithful service at his desk, and found that he had 
 b
 
 XVlll PREFACE. 
 
 made a mistake in so doing. His time hung heavily 
 on his hands ; he knew not what to do, and in conse- 
 quence increased his libations of porter. Mary perpetu- 
 ally charged him to refrain, but the public-houses that lay 
 in wait along the roads that he was accustomed to travel, 
 were too tempting to be avoided. He moved from place 
 to place, restless everywhere, and finally settled at Edmon- 
 ton, where he died in his sixtieth year. His last days 
 were clouded by insanity, as were also those of his sister, 
 who was out of her mind when he passed away. She 
 survived him over twelve years, falling asleep at last at 
 the age of eighty-two. 
 
 Such was the life of Charles Lamb, which was not 
 known in its entirety until after the death of his sister. 
 It was a tragedy, but it was manfully borne. To sacri- 
 fice himself, as he did, to the care of this poor demented 
 creature, was an act of life-long heroism, which has en- 
 deared his memory to the world. He is beloved, as few 
 writers have been, and his reputation is steadily increas- 
 ing. A literature has sprung up from his ashes. We 
 can trace his career from youth to age ; can read his 
 poems, his essays, and his letters ; can see the houses 
 in which he lived, and be present in imagination at his 
 midnight studies. If his gentle spirit knows this, we 
 may be sure that it compensates it for all the ills it suf- 
 fered in the flesh. 
 
 The friendship of Lamb and Hazlitt, if we may dig- 
 nify their intimacy by that name, was intellectual rather 
 than personal. They differed in many things, notably 
 in politics, which Lamb detested, but at heart each re- 
 spected the sterling qualities of the other. " I should 
 belie my own conscience," Lamb wrote in 1823, " if I 
 said less than that I think W. H. to be, in his natural and
 
 PREFACE. XIX 
 
 healthy state, one of the finest and rarest spirits breathing. 
 So far from being ashamed of that intimacy which was 
 betwixt us, it is my boast that I was able for so many 
 years to have preserved it entire, and I think I shall go 
 to my grave without finding, or expecting to find, such 
 another companion." When the intimacy of Lamb and 
 Hazlitt began we are not told, but probably in 1803. 
 There was a woman in it, a Miss Sarah Stoddart, the 
 daughter of Lieutenant John Stoddart, R. N., whose 
 acquaintance the Lambs had made, and who was one 
 of Miss Lamb's correspondents. Her share of the cor- 
 respondence has survived, and, bating its tediousness, it 
 is curious reading. It turns upon love and marriage, in 
 which Miss Stoddart was naturally interested. She was 
 twenty-eight, and she wanted a husband. A lady in this 
 predicament generally makes a confidant of one of her 
 own sex. She discloses her little secrets of feeling, and 
 discourses about her lover, or lovers. She is sure she 
 needs sympathy, and thinks she needs advice ! Miss 
 Stoddart bared her tender bosom to Miss Lamb, who 
 medicated its wounds with the traditionary simples of 
 old maids. She is of two minds, is Miss Stoddart, for 
 while she is engaged to one lover, a Mr. Turner, who was 
 her brother's choice, she is writing to a certain W. H., 
 who is her own. A Mr. White makes matrimonial over- 
 tures, which amount to nothing, and is followed by a Mr. 
 Dowling. At last she is engaged to Hazlitt. 
 
 Whether authors are more eccentric than other men, 
 may admit of discussion ; but that in their relations with 
 women they are singular admits of none. The history 
 of their loves may be entertaining, but it is not the his- 
 tory which most of us would prefer to have written about 
 ourselves. If there is a moral attached to it, it is that
 
 XX PREFACE. 
 
 genius is a doubtful, if not dangerous possession, a 
 possession which insures neither its own happiness, nor 
 the happiness of others. It is a law to itself ; let us be 
 thankful that it is not a law to us. We may not be very 
 wise, but we are wiser than many men of genius. We 
 make fewer and lesser mistakes, and when we make mis- 
 takes we abide by them. More gifted souls perpetually 
 repent, but never amend. Such an one was Hazlitt, 
 whose married life was comically unfortunate. He mar- 
 ried Miss Stoddart in 1808 ; lived with her ten or twelve 
 years, and then, by her consent, was divorced from her. 
 Before the divorce was obtained he fell in love with a 
 tailor's daughter, whom he would have married. It was 
 a temporary flame, which burned intensely while it lasted, 
 more intensely than the Hymeneal torch that lighted him 
 to the couch of his Sarah (the tailor's daughter, by the 
 way, was a Sarah, too, Miss Sarah Walker), and which 
 was soon to be rekindled, for a similar blessed purpose. 
 Disappointment in a wife, and rejected by a maid, he 
 espoused a widow named Bridgewater, with whom he 
 made a tour on the Continent, and who left him in 
 about a year, giving no other reason than the womanly 
 one that they had parted forever ! 
 
 I do not propose to write even a sketch of Hazlitt's 
 life, for apart from its matrimonial infelicities, it was 
 uneventful. What interest it had was literary, for ex- 
 cept when he labored under the delusion that he was a 
 painter, a delusion which Thackeray shared when young, 
 he was a man of letters, and nothing else. His inclina- 
 tion was towards metaphysics, his forte was criticism. 
 He was an admirable critic, though rather intolerant to 
 the moderns, and the most brilliant and eloquent essayist 
 that ever committed his thoughts to paper. A vein of
 
 PREFACE. xxi 
 
 autobiography runs through his writings, which is not 
 the least of their charms. We share his tastes, his 
 sympathies, his prejudices even, and are inspired by a 
 warm personal feeling. We do not love him, as we do 
 Lamb, but we respect him as the profounder thinker. 
 His life was a warfare, and his death, which occurred in 
 his fifty-third year, was a release. His last words were, 
 " Well, I 've had a happy life." 
 
 The life of Lamb has been written by Talfourd and 
 Procter, who were acquainted with him in his later years, 
 and the life of Hazlitt has been written by his grandson, 
 Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt; who was not acquainted with him 
 at all. The biographies of Talfourd and Procter are 
 what might be expected, elegant, but superficial stud- 
 ies of a singular nature. They were gentlemen, and 
 Lamb I say it in no invidious spirit was not. He 
 was a man of genius, a whimsical creature, with a 
 mad sister, and lots of queer people about him. His 
 biographers surveyed him from without, not from within, 
 and of course missed much that was characteristic of 
 him. They painted him as they would have had him, 
 not as he was, and the most that can be said of their 
 sketches is that they bear some resemblance to the orig- 
 inal. He is more truly portrayed, I think, by others, 
 and by none more truly than by Mr. P. G. Patmore, in 
 " My Friends and Acquaintance," a collection of per- 
 sonal reminiscences of deceased celebrities of the nine- 
 teenth century (3 vols. London, 1854). Mr. Patmore 
 was not a man of note, though acquainted with nota- 
 bilities ; his chief distinction, and it is not a remarkable 
 one, being that he was the father of Coventry Patmore, 
 the poet. He wrote a romance entitled, " Chatsworth," 
 which was attributed to Mr. R. P. Ward, a dull novelist of
 
 Xxil PREFACE. 
 
 fifty years ago, " Marriage in May Fair," and I know not 
 what besides. We are not interested in him on his own 
 account, but on account of the people whom he knew, 
 Lamb, Hazlitt, and others who figure here. I have not 
 gone beyond his reminiscences, except in the case of Haz- 
 litt, certain episodes of whose erratic life, his divorce, his 
 affair with Sarah Walker, etc., are amusing enough to be 
 remembered. For these I am indebted to the two vol- 
 umes of " Memoirs," published by his grandson in 1867, 
 a bumptious book-maker, profusely addicted to scis- 
 sors and paste. He has edited Constable, Lovelace, and 
 other old English worthies, who never did him any harm, 
 and, besides taking the life of his grandfather, has dis- 
 turbed the ashes of Charles and Mary Lamb. 
 " Insatiate archer, could not one suffice ?" 
 
 Enough, however, of Mr. Hazlitt and Mr. Patmore, who 
 shall now introduce the reader to their betters. 
 
 R. H. STODDARD.
 
 (Letter to William Hane.) 
 
 <**.
 
 Wt$ 
 
 /* '<" , 
 
 ,fc M***r' 
 
 te"
 
 CHARLES LAMB.
 
 CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 PATMORE'S FIRST ACQUAINTANCE WITH LAMB. 
 
 Y first introduction to Charles Lamb took place acci- 
 dentally, at the lodgings of William Hazlitt, in Down 
 Street, Piccadilly, in 1824, and under circumstances 
 which have impressed it with peculiar vividness on 
 my memory. Mr. Colburn had published anonymously, only 
 two or three days before, ^.jeu-d 1 esprit of mine, 1 which aimed 
 
 at being, to the prose literature of the day, something like what 
 the " Rejected Addresses " was to the poetry, with this 
 marked difference, however, that my imitations were in a great 
 measure bond fide ones, seeking to reproduce or represent, 
 rather than to ridicule, the respective qualities and styles of the 
 writers imitated ; merely (for the sake of " effect ") pushing 
 their peculiarities to the verge of what the truth permitted. 
 
 As I was very young in author-craft at that time, and pro- 
 portionately nervous as to the personal consequences that might 
 attend a literary adventure of this peculiar character, I had 
 called on Hazlitt on the day in question, in 'the hope of learning 
 from him anything that might have transpired on the subject 
 in his circle, he himself, and several of his personal friends, 
 being among the imitated. We met from opposite directions 
 at his door, and he had (what was the rarest thing in the world 
 with him) a book in his hand, the uncut leaves of which he had 
 been impatiently tearing open with his finger as he came along, 
 
 1 Rejected Articles.
 
 4 CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 and before we had reached the top of the stairs I found, to my 
 no small alarm, it was the book which occupied all my thoughts. 
 
 This was an ominous commencement of my investigation ; 
 for the book contained a portrait of Hazlitt himself, drawn with 
 a most unsparing hand, because professing to be his own, and 
 to have been " Rejected," for obvious reasons, from his own 
 " Spirit of the Age," then recently published. Hazlitt's looks, 
 however, which were an infallible criterion of the temper of 
 his mind at the moment of consulting them, were quite suffi- 
 cient to satisfy me that he was not displeased with what he had 
 been reading. But before anything could be said on the matter 
 beyond his asking me if I had seen the book, the door opened, 
 and two persons entered, whom, though I had never before 
 seen either of them, I at oncey*?// to be Charles Lamb and his 
 sister. 
 
 The plot now thickened ; for scarcely had I been introduced 
 to the new-comers, when Hazlitt pointed to the book, which he 
 had laid on the table on their entrance, and said to Miss Lamb, 
 " There 's something there about Charles and you. Have you 
 seen it ?" 
 
 Miss Lamb immediately took up the book, and began to read 
 to herself (evidently with no very good will) the opening paper 
 which was an imitation of an Essay by Elia. 
 
 Here was an accumulation of embarrassments, which no 
 consideration could have induced me to encounter willingly, 
 but which, being inevitable, I contrived to endure with great 
 apparent composure ; though the awkwardness of my position 
 was not a little enhanced by Miss Lamb presently turning to 
 her brother, and expressing feelings about what she had read, 
 which indicated that her first impression was anything but a 
 favorable or agreeable one. Lamb himself seemed to take no 
 interest whatever in the matter. 
 
 They stayed but a very short time, spoke only on the ordi- 
 nary literary topics of the day, and on taking leave, Lamb 
 pressed me to visit him at Islington, where he then resided. 
 
 During this brief interview with the Lambs, nothing in the 
 smallest degree characteristic occurred ; and if I had not seen
 
 PA TMORES FIRST A CQ UAINTANCE WITH LAMB. 5 
 
 Charles Lamb again, I might have set him down as an ordinary 
 person, whose literary eccentricities and oddities had been 
 gratuitously transferred by report to his personal character and 
 way of life. 
 
 I visited Lamb shortly afterwards at his house in Colnbrook 
 Row, and an intimacy ensued which lasted till his death, if, 
 indeed, one is entitled to describe as intimacy an intercourse 
 which, as in the case of all the rest of Lamb's friends, con- 
 sisted of pleasant visits on the one part, and a gratified and 
 grateful reception of them on the other, which seemed intended 
 to intimate that there was nothing he did not owe you, and was 
 not willing to pay, in return for the dispensation you granted 
 him from the ceremony of visiting you in return : for the Lambs 
 rarely left home, and when they did, were never themselves 
 till they got back again. 
 
 The foregoing remarks point at what I afterwards learned 
 to consider as the leading and distinctive feature of Lamb's in- 
 tellectual character, and also that of his sister at least at 
 and after the time at which I first became acquainted with 
 them. All their personal thoughts, feelings, and associations 
 were so entirely centred in those of each other, that it was 
 only by an almost painful effort they were allowed to wander 
 elsewhere, even at the brief intervals claimed by that social in- 
 tercourse which they nevertheless could not persuade them- 
 selves wholly to shun. They had been for so many years ac- 
 customed to look to each other alone for sympathy and sup- 
 port, that they could scarcely believe these to exist for them 
 apart from themselves ; and the perpetual consciousness of 
 this mutual failing, in a sorial point of view, and the perpetual 
 sense of its results upon their intellectual characters respect- 
 ively, gave to both of them an absent and embarrassed air 
 always excepting when they sought and found temporary shel- 
 ter from it in that profuse and somewhat indiscriminate hospi- 
 tality, which, at this period, marked their simple home at 
 Islington. 
 
 It is true they were, perhaps, never so happy as when sur- 
 rounded by those friends and acquaintances who sought them
 
 6 CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 at their own house. But this was at best a happiness little 
 suited to the intellectual habits and temperament of either, 
 and one, therefore, for which they paid much more than it was 
 worth to them so much more that they, not long after the 
 period to which I am now alluding, sought refuge from the 
 evil in a remedy that was worse than the disease. Always in 
 extremes, and being now able, by his retirement from the In- 
 dia House, to fix their whereabout wherever they pleased, they 
 fled from the too exciting scenes of the great metropolis to the 
 (for them) anything but " populous solitude " of that country 
 life for which they were equally unfitted and unprepared. 
 
 What I have further to say of Charles Lamb, I shall leave 
 nearly in the words in which it was recorded shortly after his 
 death in 1834, while the impression of his remarkable intellect- 
 ual qualities, and their results upon his personal character, 
 were fresh in my recollection, and therefore likely to be less 
 unworthy the reader's attention than anything I could now 
 substitute in their place. 
 
 What immediately follows, however, was written during 
 Lamb's life-time ; and as it will serve as a sort of personal in- 
 troduction of him to the reader, I shall give it precedence of 
 those recollections which were not written till after his death. 
 The following descriptive passages are part of what was in- 
 tended to form a group of Sketches from Real Life, the imag- 
 inary scene of which was the Athenaeum Club House. 
 
 Observe that diminutive figure, all in black (the head and 
 face only half visible from beneath the penthouse of an ill-fit- 
 ting hat), that has just entered the splendid and luxurious 
 apartment in which we are taking our sketches, and is looking 
 about with an air of odd perplexity, half timid, half bold, as 
 if 
 
 " Wondering how the devil it got there." 
 
 And well it may, for its owner is as little dependent on mod- 
 ern luxury for his comforts, as if he had just been disinterred 
 by the genius of Bulwer from the oblivion of Pompeii. 
 
 Doubtless in passing down Waterloo Place, from his friend
 
 PA TMORE'S FIRST A CQUAINTANCE WITH LAMB. J 
 
 Moxon's, with the intention of losing his way home to Isling- 
 ton through St. James's Park, the statue of the Goddess of 
 Wisdom over our portico attracted his eye, and his thoughts 
 naturally jumped to the conclusion that the temple over which 
 her effigy presides can be devoted to no less dignified purposes 
 than she was wont to patronize in those times of which this 
 " ignorant present " is apt to make such little use. And that 
 such a temple should be other than open to all comers, our ex- 
 quisite " modern antique " could not for an instant doubt. In 
 therefore he walks, unmolested by the liveried menials of the 
 vestibule; for " there 's a divinity doth hedge " a man of gen- 
 ius, that makes his person in some sort sacred, even to the 
 wearer of a laced coat, be he lackey or lord. During the gap- 
 ing wonder of the waiters at his advent, he has mounted the 
 staircase, glancing with a look of momentary surprise at the 
 undraped figure of the Goddess of Love and Beauty, which 
 strikes him as a novel but by no means inappropriate introduc- 
 tion into a temple of wisdom ; and entering the first door that 
 seems likely to lead towards the penetralia of the place, behold 
 him among us ! . . . . It is odd how appearances some- 
 times belie themselves. If all here present were compelled to 
 guess the worldly calling of the object of our attention, nine 
 out of ten would pronounce for his being a half-starved coun- 
 try curate, who has wandered up to the metropolis on a week's 
 leave of absence, to make his fortune, and immortalize his 
 name, by a volume of MS. sermons. And the rusty suit of 
 black, the knee breeches met by high gaiters of the same, and 
 the contemplative gravity of the face and air, aid the delusion 
 a delusion which those who know him cannot think of with- 
 out a smile, and which he himself would hail the announce- 
 ment of with a shout of laughter, of a kind seldom heard 
 within these refined and fastidious walls, laughter, however, 
 in which there would be no touch of derision at the association 
 that called it forth. 
 
 But see he has removed his hat ; and all vestige of the 
 vestry has disappeared ; for the operation has revealed a coun- 
 tenance, the traits and characteristics of which never yet ap-
 
 8 CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 pertained to the follower of any exclusive profession or calling 
 
 not even the sacred one which has for its object to lift men 
 from the commerce of earth to that of immortality. 
 
 If read aright, there is not a finer countenance extant than 
 that of Charles Lamb, nor one that more exquisitely and elo- 
 quently shadows forth the soul and spirit that give it life and 
 speech. It is a face that would have taxed the genius of 
 Titian himself to set it forth truly so varied and almost con- 
 tradictory in appearance are the evidences and intimations it 
 includes. There are lines of the loftiest thought and the 
 purest wisdom, intersected by others traced by the hand of 
 Folly herself while sporting there in her cap and bells. There 
 is the deepest and the gentlest love for mankind, inextricably 
 mingled with marks of the most bitter and biting contempt 
 for men and their ways and works. There is the far-darting 
 glance of high and searching intellect quelled, and as it were 
 hoodwinked, by an ever-present sense of the petty and ped- 
 dling limits of even its widest and wildest range. There is 
 the profound melancholy of the poetic temperament, brooding 
 fondly over the imagination of what it feels to be unattainable, 
 
 mixed into a " chance medley " of all sorts of quips, quib- 
 bles, and quiddities of the brain. There is the gravity of the 
 sage contending with the gayety of the humorist ; the pride* 
 and solemnity of the philosophic observer of human nature, 
 melting into the innocent playfulness of the child, and the mad 
 fun of the school-boy. In short, to sum up the case as para- 
 doxically as we have been tempted, from the peculiar nature 
 of the theme, to commence and carry it on, Charles Lamb's 
 face, like his other attributes, amounts to a " contradiction in 
 terms," with this special qualification in every particular of 
 the case, that the contradiction is invariably in favor of right, 
 of truth, and of good, wherever these are brought into momen- 
 tary contention with their opposites. 
 
 So much for a sketch that, in its accessories at least, is in 
 some sort a "fancy" one. The details of the description 
 which follows refer to a period immediately preceding his 
 death.
 
 PATMORE'S FIRST ACQUAINTANCE WITH LAMB, g 
 
 I do not know whether Lamb had any oriental blood in his 
 veins, but certainly the most marked complexional character- 
 istic of his head was a Jewish look, which pervaded every 
 portion of it, even to the sallow and uniform complexion, and 
 the black and crisp hair standing off loosely from the head, 
 as if every single hair were independent of the rest. The 
 nose, too, was large and slightly hooked, and the chin rounded 
 and elevated to correspond. There was altogether a Rabbini- 
 cal look about Lamb's head which was at once striking and 
 impressive. 
 
 Thus much of form chiefly. In point of intellectual char- 
 acter and expression, a finer face was never seen, nor one 
 more fully, however vaguely, corresponding with the mind 
 whose features it interpreted. There was the gravity usually 
 engendered by a life passed in book-learning, without the 
 slightest tinge of that assumption and affectation which almost 
 always attend the gravity so engendered ; the intensity and ele- 
 vation of general expression that mark high genius, without any 
 of its pretension and its oddity ; the sadness waiting on fruit- 
 less thoughts and baffled aspirations, but no evidences of that 
 spirit of scorning and contempt which these are apt to engen- 
 der. Above all, there was a pervading sweetness and gentle- 
 ness which went straight to the heart of every one who looked 
 on it ; and not the less so, perhaps, that it bore about it an 
 air, a something, seeming to tell that it was not prtt on for 
 nothing would be more unjust than to tax Lamb with assum- 
 ing anything, even a virtue, which he did not possess but 
 preserved and persevered in, spite of opposing and contradic- 
 tory feelings within, that struggled in vain for mastery. It 
 was a thing to remind you of that painful smile which bodily 
 disease and agony will sometimes put on, to conceal their 
 sufferings from the observation of those they love. 
 
 I feel it a very difficult and delicate task to speak of this 
 peculiar feature of Lamb's physiognomy ; and the more so 
 that, from never having seen it noted and observed by others of 
 his friends, I am by no means sure of meeting with an ac- 
 cordance in the opinions, or rather the feelings, of those who
 
 IO CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 knew him as well, or even better than I did. But I am sure 
 that the peculiarity I speak of was there, and therefore vent- 
 ure to allude to it for a moment longer, with a view to its 
 apparent explanation. The truth then is, that Lamb was what 
 is by no means so uncommon or so contradictory a character 
 as the unobservant may deem it : he was a gentle, amiable, and 
 tender-hearted misanthrope. He hated and despised men 
 with his mind and judgment, in proportion as (and precisely 
 because) he loved and yearned towards them in his heart ; 
 and individually, he loved those best whom everybody else 
 hated, and for the very reasons for which others hated them. 
 He generally through life had two or three especial pets, who 
 were always the most disagreeable people in the world to 
 the world. To be taken into Lamb's favor and protection you 
 had only to get discarded, defamed, and shunned by every- 
 body else ; and if you deserved this treatment, so much the 
 better ! If I may venture so to express myself, there was in 
 Lamb's eyes a sort of sacredness in sin, on account of its sure 
 ill consequences to the sinner ; and he seemed to open his 
 arms and his heart to the rejected and reviled of mankind in 
 a spirit kindred at least with that of the Deity. 
 
 Returning to my description of Lamb's personal appear- 
 ance, his head might have belonged to a full-sized person, 
 but it was set upon a figure so petite that it took an appear- 
 ance of inappropriate largeness by comparison. This was the 
 only striking peculiarity in the ensemble of his figure ; in 
 other respects it was pleasing and well-formed, but so slight 
 and delicate as to bear the appearance of extreme spareness, 
 as if of a man air-fed, instead of one rejoicing in a proverbial 
 predilection for "roast pig." The only defect of his figure 
 was that the legs were too slight even for the slight body. 
 
 Lamb had laid aside his snuff-colored suit long before I 
 knew him, and was never seen in anything but a suit of black, 
 with knee-breeches and gaiters, and black worsted or silk 
 stockings. Probably he was induced to admit this innovation 
 by a sort of compromise with his affection for the color of 
 other years ; for though his dress was, by courtesy, " black,"
 
 AT HOME, ABROAD, AMONG HIS BOOKS. II 
 
 he always contrived that it should exist in a condition of rusty 
 brown. 
 
 The only way in which I can account for Lamb's having 
 been faithless to his former color, after having stood by it 
 through a daily ordeal, for twenty years, at the Long Room of 
 the India House, is, that he was placarded out of it by his 
 dear friend Wordsworth's description of the personal appear- 
 ance of his ideal of a poet, which can scarcely have been 
 drawn from any but Lamb himself so exact is the likeness 
 in several of its leading features. 1 Now, Lamb did not like 
 to be taken for a poet, nor, indeed, for anything else in partic- 
 ular ; so latterly he made a point of dressing so as to be taken, 
 by ninety-nine people out of every hundred who looked upon 
 him, for a Methodist preacher which was just the very last 
 he was like, or would like to be taken for ! This was one of 
 his little willful contradictions. 
 
 AT HOME, ABROAD, AND AMONG HIS BOOKS. 
 
 I am bound to say that my acquaintance with Charles 
 Lamb, during his residence at Islington, offered little to con- 
 firm the associations which Hazlitt has connected with those 
 palmy days when his residence was the resort of all those 
 who "called Admiral Burney friend." When I knew him, 
 his house had, for various reasons wholly unconnected with 
 any change in the Lambs themselves, degenerated, for the 
 most part, into the trysting-place of a little anomalous coterie 
 of strenuous idlers and " Curious Impertinents," who, without 
 the smallest power of appreciating the qualities of mind and 
 character which nominally brought them together, came there 
 
 1 See " A Poet's Epitaph," in the Lyrical Ballads, 
 
 u But who is he with modest looks, 
 
 A >id clad in homely russet brown, 
 
 Who murmurs near the running brooks 
 
 A music sweeter than their own ? 
 
 " He is retired as noon-tide dew, 
 
 Or fountain in a noon-day grove ; 
 A ndyou must love him ere to you 
 He will seem worthy of your love."
 
 12 CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 to pass the time under a species of excitement a little differ- 
 ent from their ordinary modes of a social intercourse alter- 
 nating " an evening at the Lambs' " with a half-price to the 
 play, or a visit to the wild beasts at Exeter 'Change. Certain 
 it is, that not one out of twenty ever came there with the re- 
 motest thought of enjoying the society of Lamb and his sister, 
 and quite as little for that of the distinguished men who still 
 occasionally sought the residence of Lamb with that view. 
 Still more certain is it that Lamb himself did not shine in this 
 sort of " mixed company " this strange olla-podrida of intel- 
 lect, oddity, and commonplace. It might be an " Entertaining 
 Miscellany " to him, but it was one in which he rarely or never 
 published any of those exquisite Eliaisms of which his mind 
 and heart were made up. He was everything that was kind 
 and cordial in his welcome to all comers, and his sister used 
 to bustle and potter about like a gentle housewife, to make 
 everybody comfortable ; but you might almost as well have 
 been in the apartments of any other clerk of the India House, 
 for anything you heard that was deserving of note or recol- 
 lection. 
 
 The fact is, that in ordinary society, if Lamb was not an 
 ordinary man, he was only an odd and strange one display- 
 ing no superior knowledge or wit or wisdom or eloquence, but 
 only that invariable accompaniment of genius, a moral in- 
 capacity to subside into the conventional cant or the flat com- 
 monplace of every-day life. He would do anything to gratify 
 his guests but that. He would joke, or mystify, or pun, or 
 play the buffoon ; but he could not bring himself to prose, or 
 preach, or play the philosopher. He could not be himself 
 (for others, I mean) except when something out of himself 
 made him so ; but he could not be anything at variance with 
 himself to please a king. 
 
 The consequence was, that to those who did not know him, 
 or, knowing, did not or could not appreciate him, Lamb often 
 passed for something between an imbecile, a brute, and a 
 buffoon ; and the first impression he made on ordinary people 
 was always unfavorable sometimes to a violent and repul-
 
 AT HOME, ABROAD, AMONG HIS BOOKS. 13 
 
 sive degree. Hazlitt has somewhere said of him in substance 
 (with about an equal po'rtion of truth and exaggeration, but 
 with an exact feeling of the truth in the very exaggeration) 
 that Lamb was always on a par with his company, however 
 high or however low it might be. But, somehow or other, 
 silly or ridiculous people have an instinct that makes them 
 feel it as a sort of personal offense if you treat them as if 
 you fancied yourself no better than they. They know it to 
 be a hoax upon them, manage it how you may, and they resent 
 it accordingly. 
 
 Now Lamb was very apt to play fast and loose with his 
 literary reputation in this way, and would certainly rather have 
 passed with nine tenths of the world for a fool than for a 
 philosopher, a wit, or a man of letters. And I cannot help 
 thinking it was his deep sympathy with mankind, and espe- 
 cially with the poor, whether in spirit or in purse, that was the. 
 cause of this. He did not like to be thought different from 
 his fellow-men, and he knew that, in the vocabulary of the 
 ordinary world, " a man of genius " seldom means anything 
 better, and often something worse, than an object of mingled 
 fear, pity, and contempt. 
 
 The truth is, that the Elia of private life could be known 
 and appreciated only by his friends and intimates, and even 
 by them only at home. He shone, and was answerable to 
 his literary and social reputation, only in a tete-a-tete, or in 
 those unpremeditated colloquies over his own table, or by his 
 own fireside, in which his sister and one or two more friends 
 took part, and in which every inanimate object about him was 
 as familiar as the "household words" in which he uttered 
 his deep and subtle thoughts, his quaint and strange fancies, 
 and his sweet and humane philosophy. Under these cir- 
 cumstances, he was perfectly and emphatically a natural per- 
 son, and there was not a vestige of that startling oddity and 
 extravagance which subjected him to the charge of affecting to 
 be " singular " and " original " in his notions, feelings, and 
 opinions. 
 
 In any other species of " company " than that to which I
 
 14 CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 have just referred, however cultivated or intellectual it might 
 be, Lamb was unquestionably liable to the charge of seeming 
 to court attention by the strangeness and novelty of his opin- 
 ions, rather than by their justness and truth he was liable 
 and open to this charge, but as certainly he did not deserve 
 it ; for affectation supposes a something assumed, put on, 
 pretended and of this, Lamb was physically as well as mor- 
 ally incapable. His strangeness and oddity under the one 
 set of circumstances, was as natural to him as his naturalness 
 and simplicity under the other. In the former case, he was 
 not at ease not a free agent not his own man ; but 
 
 " Cabined, cribbed, confined 
 Bound in by saucy doubts and fears" 
 
 that were cast about him by his " reputation " which tram- 
 meled and hampered him by claims that he had neither the 
 strength cordially to repudiate, nor the weakness cordially to 
 embrace ; and in struggling between the two inclinations, he 
 was able to exhibit nothing but the salient and superficial 
 points of his mind and character, as moulded and modified by 
 a state of society so utterly at variance with all his own delib- 
 erate views and feelings, as to what it might be, or at least 
 might have been, that he shrank from the contemplation of it 
 with an almost convulsive movement of pain and disgust, or 
 sought refuge from it in the solitary places of his own thoughts 
 and fancies. When forced into contact with " the world's 
 true worldlings," being anything but one of themselves, he 
 knew that he could not show like them, and yet feared to pain 
 or affront their feelings by seeming too widely different ; and 
 between the two it was impossible to guess beforehand what 
 he would do or be under any given circumstances ; he himself 
 being the last person capable of predicating on the point. 
 The consequence was, that when the exigency arrived, he was 
 anything or nothing, as the turn of the case or the temper of 
 the moment might impel him ; he was equally likely to out- 
 rage or to delight the persons in whose company he might 
 fall, or else to be regarded by them as a mere piece of human
 
 A7" HOME, ABROAD, AMONG HIS BOOKS. 15 
 
 still-life, claiming no more notice or remembrance than an old- 
 fashioned portrait, or a piece of odd-looking old china. 
 
 What an exquisite contrast to all this did Lamb's intercourse 
 with his friends present ! Then, and then only, was he him- 
 self; for assuredly he was not so when in the sole company 
 of his own thoughts, unless when they were communing with 
 those of his dearest friends of all his old books his "mid- 
 night darlings," as he endearingly calls them somewhere, in a 
 tone and spirit which prove that he loved them better than 
 any of his friends of the living world, and cared not if the 
 latter knew it. 
 
 Yet I 'm afraid it does not follow that Lamb was happier 
 among his books than with his friends ; he was only more 
 himself. In fact, there was a constitutional sadness about 
 Lamb's mind, which nothing could overcome but an actual 
 personal interchange of thought and sentiment with those, 
 whoever they might be, whose tone and cast of intellect were 
 ji some sort correspondent with his own. And though in his 
 intercourse with his beloved old books, he found infinitely 
 more of this correspondence than the minds of his most 
 choice living friends could furnish ; yet in the former there 
 was wanting that reciprocal action which constitutes the soul 
 of human intercourse. Lamb could listen with delight to the 
 talk of his books, but they could not listen to him in return ; 
 and his spirit was so essentially and emphatically a human 
 one, that it was only in the performance and interchange of 
 human offices and instincts it could exist in its happiest form 
 and aspect. Unlike his friends, Coleridge and Wordsworth, 
 Lamb was not a man whose mind was sufficient to itself, and 
 could dwell forever, if need were, in the world of its own 
 thoughts, or that which the thoughts of others had created for 
 it. He delighted to visit those worlds, and found there, it 
 may be, his purest and loftiest pleasures. But the home of 
 his spirit was the face of the common earth, and in the ab- 
 sence of human faces and sympathies, it longed and yearned 
 for them with a hunger that nothing else could satisfy.
 
 1 6 CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 LAMB'S LETTERS. 
 
 Just before the Lambs quitted the metropolis for the volun- 
 tary banishment of Enfield Chace, they came to spend a day 
 with me at Fulham, and brought with them a companion, who, 
 " dumb animal " though it was, had for some time past been 
 in the habit of giving play to one of Charles Lamb's most 
 amiable characteristics, that of sacrificing his own feelings 
 and inclinations to those of others. This was a large and 
 very handsome dog, of a rather curious and singularly saga- 
 cious breed, which had belonged to Thomas Hood, and at the 
 time I speak of, and to oblige both dog and master, had been 
 transferred to the Lambs, who made a great pet of him, to 
 the entire disturbance and discomfiture, as it appeared, of all 
 Lamb's habits of life, but especially of that most favorite and 
 salutary of all, his long and heretofore solitary suburban 
 walks : for Dash (that was the dog's name) would never allow 
 Lamb to quit the house without him, and, when out, would 
 never go anywhere but precisely where it pleased himself. 
 The consequence was, that Lamb made himself a perfect slave 
 to this dog, who was always half a mile off from his com- 
 panion, either before or behind, scouring the fields or roads in 
 all directions, up and down " all manner of streets," and keep- 
 ing his attendant in a perfect fever of anxiety and irritation^ 
 from his fear of losing him on the one hand, and his reluc- 
 tance to put the needful restraint upon him on the other. 
 Dash perfectly well knew his host's amiable weakness in this 
 respect, and took a due dog-like advantage of it. In the Re- 
 gent's Park in particular Dash had his quasi-master completely 
 at his mercy ; for the moment they got within the ring, he used 
 to squeeze himself through the railing, and disappear for half 
 an hour together in the then inclosed and thickly planted 
 greensward, knowing perfectly well that Lamb did not dare to 
 move from the spot where he (Dash) had disappeared till he 
 thought proper to show himself again. And they used to take 
 this walk oftener than any other, precisely because Dash liked 
 it and Lamb did not.
 
 LAMB'S LETTERS. \"J 
 
 The performance of the Pig-driver that Leigh Hunt de- 
 scribes so capitally in the " Companion," must have been an 
 easy and straightforward thing. compared with this enterprise 
 of the dear couple in conducting Dash from Islington to Ful- 
 ham. It appeared, however, that they had not undertaken it 
 this time purely for Dash's gratification ; but (as I had often 
 admired the dog) to ask me if I would accept him, " if only 
 out of charity," said Miss Lamb, "for if we keep him rrmch 
 longer, he '11 be the death of Charles." 
 
 I readily took charge of the unruly favorite, and soon found, 
 as I suspected, that his wild and willful ways were a pure im- 
 position upon the easy temper of Lamb ; for as soon as he 
 found himself in the keeping of one who knew what dog-deco- 
 rum was, he subsided into the best bred and best behaved of 
 his species. 
 
 A few weeks after I had taken charge of Dash, I received 
 the following letter from Lamb, who had now removed to En- 
 field Chace. Exquisitely characteristic of their writer as are 
 the " Elia " Essays of Charles Lamb, I doubt if any one of 
 them is superior in this respect to the letter I am about to 
 cite : 
 
 CHARLES LAMB TO P. G. PATMORE. 
 
 " MRS. LEISHMAN'S, CHACE, ENFIEI.D. 
 
 "DEAR PATMORE, Excuse my anxiety but how is 
 Dash ? (I should have asked if Mrs. Patmore kept her rules 
 and was improving but Dash came uppermost. The order 
 of our thoughts should be the order of our writing.) Goes he 
 muzzled, or aperto ore? Are his intellects sound, or does he 
 wander a little in his conversation ? * You cannot be too care- 
 ful to watch the first symptoms of incoherence. The first illog- 
 ical snarl he makes, to St. Luke's with him. All the dogs here 
 are going mad, if you believe the overseers ; but I protest they 
 seem to me very rational and collected. But nothing is so 
 deceitful as mad people to those who are not used to them. 
 Try him with hot water. If he wont lick it up, it is a sign he 
 does not like it. Does his tail wag horizontally or perpendic- 
 
 1 A sly hjntj I suspect, to one who did and does. 
 >
 
 1 8 CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 ularly ? That has decided the fate of many dogs in Enfield. 
 Is his general deportment cheerful ? I mean when he is 
 pleased for otherwise there is no judging. You can't be 
 too careful. Has he bit any of the children yet ? If he has, 
 have them shot, and keep him for curiosity, to see if it was the 
 hydrophobia. They say all our army in India had it at one 
 time but that was in Hyder- Ally's time. Do you get paunch 
 for him ? Take care the sheep was sane. You might pull out 
 his teeth (if he would let you), and then you need not mind if 
 he were as mad as a bedlamite. It would be rather fun to see 
 his odd ways. It might amuse Mrs. Patmore and the chil- 
 dren. They 'd have more sense than he ! He 'd be like a 
 Fool kept in the family, to keep the household in good humor 
 with their own understanding. You might teach him the mad 
 dance set to the mad howl. Madge Owl-et would be nothing 
 to him. ' My, how he capers ! ' (One of the children speaks 
 this.) . . . . 
 
 (Here three lines are erased.} 
 
 " What I scratch out is a German quotation from Lessing 
 on the bite of rabid animals : but, I remember, you don't read 
 German. But Mrs. Patmore may, so I wish I had let it stand. 
 The meaning in English is, ' Avoid to approach an animal 
 suspected of madness, as you would avoid a fire or a preci- 
 pice : ' which I think is a sensible observation. The Ger- 
 mans are certainly profounder than we. 
 
 " If the slightest suspicion arises in your breast, that all is 
 not right with him (Dash), muzzle him, and lead him in a 
 string (common packthread will do ; he don't care for twist) to 
 Hood's, his quondam master, and he'll take him in at any 
 time. You may mention your suspicion or not, as you like, or 
 as you think it may wound or not Mr. H.'s feelings. Hood, I 
 know, will wink at a few follies in Dash, in consideration of 
 his former sense. Besides, Hood is deaf, and if you hinted 
 anything, ten to one he would not hear you. Besides, you will 
 have discharged your conscience, and laid the child at the 
 right door, as they say. 
 
 "We are dawdling our time away very idly and pleasantly, at
 
 LAMB'S LETTERS. 19 
 
 a Mrs. Irishman's, Chace, Enfield, where, if you come a-hunt- 
 ing, we can give you cold meat and a tankard. Her husband 
 is a tailor ; but that, you know, does not make her one. I 
 knew a jailer (which rhymes), but his wife was a fine lady. 
 
 " Let us hear from you respecting Mrs. Patmore's regimen. 
 I send my love in a to Dash. C. LAMB." 
 
 On the outside of the letter (a letter sent by the public post) 
 is written : " Seriously, I wish you would call on Hood when 
 you are that way. He 's a capital fellow. I sent him a couple 
 of poems : one ordered by his wife, and written to order ; 
 and 't is a week since, and I 've not heard from him. I fear 
 something is the matter. 
 
 " Omitted within : 
 
 " Our kindest remembrance to Mrs. P." 
 
 Is the reader acquainted with anything in its way more ex- 
 quisite than this letter, in the whole circle of our epistolary 
 literature anything more buoyant with wit, drollery, and 
 humor, and, at the same time more pregnant with that spirit 
 of self-contradiction which was so singularly characteristic 
 of Lamb in almost all he said and did ? His broadest jokes 
 have a sentiment in them, and his most subtle and refined 
 sentiment always takes the form of a joke. Whole pages 
 or chapters of critical comment on his intellectual char- 
 acter would not speak its chief features more clearly and 
 emphatically than the three first lines of this letter, especially 
 when coupled with the three last " Excuse my anxiety but 
 how is Dash ? I should have asked if Mrs. Patmore kept 
 her rules, and was improving ; but Dash came uppermost." 
 " Let us hear from you respecting Mrs. P.'s regimen. I send 
 
 my love in a to Dash." Lively and sincere as was the 
 
 interest that he felt for the lady referred to (whose health was 
 at that time in a very delicate state), he never would have 
 written the letter at all, but for his still livelier interest about 
 Dash. And he could not, and would not conceal the truth 
 though he did not object to disguise it in the form of a seem- 
 ing joke.
 
 2O CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 As Dash was one of the very few objects of Lamb's " Hero- 
 worship," the reader may like to learn a little more about him 
 from my reply to the foregoing letter : 
 
 P. G. PATMORE TO CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 " DEAR LAMB, Dash is very mad indeed. As I knew you 
 would be shocked to hear it, I did not volunteer to trouble 
 your peaceful retreat by the sad information, thinking it could 
 do no good, either to you, to Dash, to us, or to the innocent 
 creature that he has already bitten, or to those he may (please 
 God) bite hereafter. But when you ask it of me as a friend, 
 I cannot withhold the truth from you. The poor little patient 
 has resolutely refused to touch water (either hot or cold) ever 
 since, and if we attempt to force it down her throat, she 
 scratches, grins, fights, makes faces, and utters strange noises, 
 showing every recognized symptom of being very mad indeed. 
 . . . . As for your panacea (of shooting the bitten one), 
 we utterly set our faces against it, not thinking death 'a happy 
 release ' under any given circumstances, and being specially 
 averse to it under circumstances given by our own neglect. 
 
 " By the bye, it has just occurred to me, that the fact of the 
 poor little sufferer making a noise more like a cat's than a 
 dog's, may possibly indicate that she is not quite so mad as 
 we at first feared. Still there is no saying but the symptom 
 may be one of aggravation. Indeed I should n't wonder if the 
 ' faculty ' preferred the bark, as that (under the queer name of 
 quinine) has been getting very fashionable among them of late. 
 
 " I wish you could have seen the poor little patient before 
 we got rid of her how she scoured round the kitchen among 
 the pots and pans, scampered about the garden, and clambered 
 up to the tops of the highest trees. (No symptoms of high- 
 drophobia, you will say, in that.) .... 
 
 " By the bye again, I have entirely forgotten to tell you, that 
 the injured innocent is not one of our children, but of the 
 cat's; and this reminds me to tell you that, putting cats out of 
 the question (to which, like some of his so-called ' betters,' 
 Dash has evidently a ' natural antipathy '), he comports him-
 
 LAMB'S LETTERS. 21 
 
 self in all other respects as a sane and well-bred dog should 
 do. In fact, his distemper, I am happy to tell you, is clearly 
 not insanity, but only a temporary hallucination or monomania 
 in regard (want of regard, you will say) to one particular spe- 
 cies of his fellow-creatures videlicet, cats. (For the delicate 
 distinctions in these cases, see Haslam passim ; or pass him, 
 if you prefer it.) .... 
 
 " With respect to the second subject of your kind inquiries 
 the lady, and the success of her prescribed regimen I 
 will not say that she absolutely barks at the sight of water 
 when proffered to her, but she shakes her head, and sighs 
 piteously, which are bad symptoms. In sober seriousness, 
 her watery regimen does not yet show any signs of doing her 
 good, and we have now finally determined on going to France 
 for the summer, and shall leave North End, with that purpose, 
 in about three weeks. 
 
 " I was going up to Colnbrook Cottage on the very Monday 
 that you left ; but (for a wonder) I took the precaution of call- 
 ing on your ancient friend at the factory in my way, and 
 
 learned that you had left I hope you will not feel 
 
 yourselves justified in remaining long at Enfield, for if you 
 do, I shall certainly devise some means of getting down to 
 see you, in which case I shall inevitably stay very late at night', 
 and in all human probability shall be stopped and robbed in 
 coming back ; so that your sister, if not you, will see the pro- 
 priety of your returning to town as soon as may be. 
 
 " Talking of being stopped on the King's Highway, reminds 
 me of Dash's last exploit. He was out at near dusk, down 
 the lane, a few nights ago, with his mistress (who is as fond of 
 him as his master please to be careful how you construe 
 this last equivocally expressed phrase, and don't make the 
 ' master ' an accusative case), when Dash attacked a carpenter, 
 armed with a large saw not Dash, but the carpenter and 
 a ' wise saw ' it turned out, for its teeth protected him from 
 Dash's, and a battle royal ensued, worthy the Surrey Theatre. 
 Mrs. Patmore says that it was really frightful to see the saw, 
 and the way in which it and Dash gnashed their teeth at each 
 other Ever yours, P. G. P."
 
 22 CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 THE LAMBS' DOMESTIC ARRANGEMENTS. 
 
 Another characteristic instance of Lamb's sacrifice of his 
 own most cherished habits and feelings to those of other 
 people was in the case of a favorite servant, " Beckey," to 
 whose will and pleasure both Charles Lamb and his sister 
 were as much at the mercy as they were to those of Dash. 
 
 This Beckey was an excellent person in her way, and not 
 the worse that she had not the happiness of comprehending 
 the difference between- genius and common sense between 
 " an author " and an ordinary man. Accordingly, having a 
 real regard for her master and mistress, and a strong impres- 
 sion of what was or was not " good for them," she used not 
 seldom to take the liberty of telling them " a bit of her mind," 
 when they did anything that she considered to be " odd " or 
 out of the way. And as (to do them justice) their whole life 
 and behavior were as little directed by the rules of common- 
 place as could well be, Beckey had plenty of occasions for 
 the exercise of her self-imposed task, of instructing her 
 master and mistress in the ways of the world. Beckey, too, 
 piqued herself on her previous experience in observing and 
 treating the vagaries of extraordinary people ; for she had 
 lived some years with Hazlitt before she went to the Lambs. 
 
 In performing the duties of housekeeping the Lambs were 
 something like an excellent friend of mine, who, when a 
 tradesman brings him home a pair of particularly easy boots, 
 or any other object perfectionated in a way that peculiarly 
 takes his fancy, inquires the price, and if it happens to be at 
 all within decent tradesmanlike limits, says, " No I cannot 
 give you that price it is too little you cannot afford it, 
 I 'm sure I shall .give you so and so " naming a third or 
 fourth more than the price demanded. . If the Lambs' baker, 
 for example, had charged them (as it is said bakers have been 
 known to do) a dozen loaves in their weekly bill, when they 
 must have known that they had not eaten two thirds of that 
 number, the last thing they would have thought of was com- 
 plaining of the overcharge. If they had not consumed the
 
 THE LAMBS' DOMESTIC ARRANGEMENTS. 23 
 
 proper quantity to remunerate him for the trouble of serving 
 them, it was not the baker's fault, and the least they could do 
 was to pay for it ! 
 
 Now this "kind of logic was utterly lost upon Beckey, and 
 she would not hear of it. Her master and mistress, she fully 
 admitted, had a right to be as extravagant as they pleased ; 
 but they had no right to confound the distinctions between 
 honesty and roguery, and it was what she would not permit. 
 
 There are few of us who would not duly prize a domestic 
 who had honesty and wit enough to protect us from the conse- 
 quences of our own carelessness or indifference ; but where 
 is the one who, like Lamb, without caring one farthing for the 
 advantages he might derive from Beckey's unimpeachable 
 honesty, and her genius for going the best way to market, 
 could not merely overlook, but be highly gratified and amused 
 by, the ineffable airs of superiority, amounting to nothing less 
 than a sort of personal patronage, which she assumed on the 
 strength of these ? The truth is, that Beckey used to take 
 unwarrantable liberties with her quasi-master and mistress 
 liberties that amounted to what are usually deemed, in such 
 cases, gross and unpardonable impertinences. Yet I do not 
 believe any of their friends ever heard a complaint or a harsh 
 word uttered of her, much less to her ; and I believe there 
 was no inconvenience or privation they would not have sub- 
 mitted to, rather than exchange her blunt honesty for the 
 servile civility, whether accompanied by honesty or not, of 
 anybody else. And I believe, when Beckey at last left them, 
 to be married, it was this circumstance, much more than any- 
 thing else, which caused them to give up housekeeping, never 
 afterwards to resume it. 
 
 Another notable instance may here be cited of Lamb's 
 habitual disposition to bend and veil his own feelings, inclina- 
 tions, and personal comforts to those of other people. When 
 they left off housekeeping, and went to reside at Enfield, 
 they boarded for some time in the house of a reputable old 
 couple, to whom they paid, for the plainest possible accom- 
 modation, a price almost sufficient to keep all the household
 
 24 CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 twice over, but where, nevertheless, they were expected to 
 pay for every extra cup of tea, or any other refreshment, they 
 might offer to any occasional visitor. Lamb soon found out 
 the mistake he had made in connecting himself with these 
 people, and did not fail to philosophize (to his friends) on their 
 blind stupidity, in thus risking what was almost their sole 
 means of support, in order to screw an extra shilling out of 
 his easy temper. But he endured it patiently, nevertheless. 
 One circumstance I remember his telling me with great glee, 
 which was evidently unmixed with any anger or annoyance 
 at the cupidity of these people, but only at its blindness. 
 Wordsworth and another friend had just been down to see 
 them, and had taken tea ; and in the next week's bill one of 
 the extra " teas " was charged an extra sixpence, and on 
 Lamb's inquiring what this meant, the reply was, that " the 
 elderly gentleman," meaning Wordsworth, " had taken such a 
 quantity of sugar in his tea." 
 
 Yet this sort of thing Lamb bore patiently, month after 
 month, for years, under the feeling, or rather on the express 
 plea of What was to become of the poor people if he left 
 them ? 
 
 The Protectionists never pleaded harder for their " vested 
 rights " than did Lamb for the claims of these people to 
 continue to live upon him, and affront him every now and 
 then into the bargain, because they had been permitted to 
 begin to do so. 
 
 LAMB'S SYMPATHIES AND SELF-SACRIFICES. 
 
 I 'm afraid it must not be concluded that Lamb gained in 
 personal comfort and happiness by the change of life conse- 
 quent on his removal from London. It is true he got rid of 
 all those visitors who sought him only for his oddity or his 
 reputation, and retained those only between whom and him- 
 self there could be any real interchange of intellect and affec- 
 tion. But it may be doubted whether the former were not 
 more necessary to him than the latter ; for it was with the 
 poor and lowly (whether in spirit or in purse) that Lamb chiefly
 
 LAMB'S SYMPATHIES AND SELF-SACRIFICES. 2$ 
 
 sympathized, and with them he could hold communion only in 
 the busy scenes of metropolitan life ; and that communion, 
 either in imagination or in fact, was necessary to the due exer- 
 cise and healthy tone of his mind. The higher class of com- 
 munion he could at all times find, when he needed it, in books ; 
 but that living sympathy which alone came home to his bosom, 
 he could compass nowhere but in the living world of towns 
 and cities. 
 
 In fact, Lamb's retirement, first from the pleasant monotony 
 of a public office, and afterwards from the busy idleness of his 
 beloved London, was the crowning one of those self-sacrifices 
 which he was ever ready to make at the shrine of human affec- 
 tion ; sacrifices not the less noble and beautiful that they were 
 submitted to with an ill grace ; for what sacrifices are those 
 which it costs us nothing to make ? It was for the greater se- 
 curity of his sister's health that Lamb retired from London ; 
 and, in doing so, he as much offered himself a sacrifice for her 
 well-being as the martyrs and heroes of other times did for 
 their religion or their country. 
 
 And why should the truth be concealed on this point ? 
 " The country " was to Lamb precisely what London is to 
 thoroughly country people born and bred, who, however 
 they may long to see it for the first time, and are lost in a 
 week's empty admiration at its " sights " and wonders, 
 would literally die of home-sickness if compelled to remain 
 long in it. I remember, when wandering once with Lamb 
 among the pleasant scenery about Enfield shortly after his re- 
 tirement there, I was congratulating him on the change be- 
 tween these walks and his accustomed ones about Islington, 
 Dalston, and the like. But I soon found that I was treading 
 on tender ground, and he declared afterwards, with a vehe- 
 mence of expression extremely unusual with him, and almost 
 with tears in his eyes, that the most squalid garret in the most 
 confined and noisome purlieu of London would be a paradise 
 to him, compared with the fairest dwelling placed in the love- 
 liest scenery of " the country." " I hate the country ! " he 
 exclaimed, in a tone and with an emphasis which showed not
 
 26 CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 only that the feeling came from the bottom of his soul, but 
 that it was working ungentle and sinister results there, that he 
 was himself almost alarmed at. The fact is that, away from 
 London, Lamb's spirits seemed to shrink and retire inwards, 
 and his body to fade and wither like a plant in an uncongenial 
 soil. The whole of what he felt to be the truly vital years of 
 his existence had been passed in London; almost every pleas- 
 ant association connected with the growth, development, and 
 exercise of his intellectual being belonged to some metropoli- 
 tan locality ; every agreeable recollection of his social inter- 
 course with his most valued friends arose out of some London 
 scene or incident. He was born in London ; the whole even 
 of his school-life was passed in London ; l he earned his liv- 
 ing in London, performing there for thirty years that to 
 him pleasantly monotonous drudgery which gave him his ulti- 
 mate independence ; 2 in London he won that fame which, 
 however little store he might seem to set by it, was not with- 
 out a high and cherished value in his eyes. In short, London 
 was the centre to which every movement of Lamb's mind 
 gravitated the pole to which the needle of his affections and 
 sympathies vibrated the home to which his heart was tied 
 by innumerable strings of flesh and blood, that could not be 
 broken without lacerating the being of which they formed a 
 part. In Lamb's eye and estimation the close passages and 
 grim quadrangles of the Temple (one of his early dwelling- 
 places) were far more pleasant and healthful than the most 
 fair and flowery spots of 
 
 " Auburn, loveliest village of the plain." 
 
 To him, the tide of human life that flowed through Fleet 
 Street and Ludgate Hill, was worth all the Wyes and Yarrows 
 in the universe ; there were, to his thinking, no " Green 
 Lanes " to compare with Fetter Lane or St. Bride's ; no gar- 
 den like Covent Garden ; and the singing of all the feathered 
 
 1 At Christ's Hospital, where he was contemporary with Coleridge, and where 
 their life-long friendship commenced. 
 
 2 He was a clerk in the India House for that period, but before I knew him had 
 retired on half-pay.
 
 S YMPA THIES AND SELF-SA CKIFICES. 2 / 
 
 tribes of the air " grated harsh discord " in his ear, attuned as 
 it was only to the drone or squall of the London ballad-singer, 
 the grinding of the hand-organ, and the nondescript " London 
 cries," set to their cart-wheel accompaniments. 
 
 And yet, when Lamb lived in the country he used to spend 
 the whole of the fore part of his days, winter and summer 
 alike, in long walks and wanderings not in search of any 
 specific scenes or objects of interest or curiosity, but merely 
 for the sake of walking its movement and action being con- 
 genial to the somewhat torpid and sluggish character of his 
 temperament ; for, when sitting still alone, his thoughts were 
 apt to brood and hover, in an uneasy slumberousness, over 
 dangerous and intractable questions, on which his strong com- 
 mon sense told him there was no satisfaction to be gained, but 
 from which his searching spirit could not detach itself. 
 
 There was another inducement to these long walks. In 
 whatever direction they lay, Lamb always saw at the end of 
 them the pleasant vision of a foaming pot of ale or porter, 
 which was always liked the better for being quaffed 
 
 " In the worst inn's worst room." 
 
 The reader, who has accompanied me thus far in my per- 
 sonal recollections of Charles Lamb, will not object to my 
 dwelling for a few moments on a habit of his latter years, 
 which is one of those on which a man's friends are apt, with- 
 out sufficient reason, to interdict themselves from speaking ; 
 thus abandoning the topic to the tender mercies of his 
 enemies. 
 
 The truth is, that as " to the pure, all is pure," so to the wise 
 and good, all is wise and good. Now, there never was a wiser 
 and better man than Charles Lamb, and the habit to which I 
 am about to refer more definitely than in the above passage, 
 was one of the wisest to which he addicted himself ; and if it 
 now and then lapsed into folly, what is the merely human wis- 
 dom which does not sometimes do the like ? 
 
 When Lamb was about to accompany a parting guest half a 
 mile, or half a dozen miles on his way to town (which was his 
 almost constant practice), you could always see that his sister
 
 28 CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 had rather he stayed at home ; and her last salutation was apt 
 to be, " Now, Charles, you 're not going to take any ale ? " 
 " No, no," was his more than half-impatient reply. Now, this 
 simple question, and its simple reply, form the text on which I 
 ask leave to preach my little homily on the imputed sin of an 
 extra glass of gin and water. 
 
 The truth, then, is, that Lamb's excellent sister, in her over- 
 anxious and affectionate care in regard to what she looked at 
 too exclusively as a question of bodily health, endeavored lat- 
 terly to restrict her brother too much in the use for to the 
 abuse he was never addicted of those artificial stimuli which 
 were to a certain extent indispensable to the healthy tone of 
 his mental condition. To keep him from the chance of being 
 ill, she often kept him from the certainty of being well and 
 happy not to mention the keeping others from partaking in 
 the inestimable results of that health and happiness. I have 
 listened delightedly to the intellectual Table Talk of a large 
 proportion of the most distinguished conversers of the day, and 
 have ever found it, as a rule, to be infinitely more deeply im- 
 bued with wisdom, and the virtues which spring from wisdom, 
 and infinitely more capable of impressing and generating these, 
 than the written words of the same teachers. But I have no 
 recollection of any such colloquies that have left such delight- 
 ful and instructive impressions on my mind as those which 
 have taken place between the first and the last glass of gin and 
 water, after a rump-steak or a pork-chop supper in the simple 
 little domicile of Charles Lamb and his sister at Enfield Chace. 
 And it must not be overlooked that the aforenamed gin and 
 water played no insignificant part in those repasts. True, it 
 created nothing. But it was the talisman that not only unlocked 
 the poor casket in which the rich thoughts of Charles Lamb 
 were shut up, but set in motion that machinery in the absence 
 of which they would have lain like gems in the mountain, or 
 gold in the mine. 
 
 No really good converser, who duly appreciates the use and 
 virtue of that noble faculty, ever talks for the pleasure of talk- 
 ing, or in the absence of some external stimulus to the act.
 
 LAMB'S SYMPA THIES AND SELF-SACRIFICES. 29 
 
 He talks wisely and eloquently only because he thinks and 
 feels wisely and eloquently, and he is always fonder of listen- 
 ing than of talking. He talks chiefly that he may listen, not 
 listens merely that he may talk. 
 
 Now Charles Lamb, who, when present was always the cen- 
 tre from which flowed and to which tended the stream of the 
 talk, was literally tongue-tied till some slight artificial stimulus 
 let loose the sluggish member ; and his profound and subtle 
 spirit itself seemed to wear chains till the same external agency 
 set it at liberty. Indeed, compared with what it really con- 
 tained, his mind remained a sealed book to the last, as regards 
 the world in general. I mean that his writings, rich and beau- 
 tiful as they are, were but mere spillings, or forced overflow- 
 ings, from the hidden fountains of his mind and heart. It was 
 a task of almost insuperable difficulty and trouble to him to 
 write ; for he had no desire for literary fame, no affected anx- 
 iety to make his fellow-creatures wiser or better than he found 
 them, and no fancied mission to do so ; nor had he any pecun- 
 iary necessities pressing him on to the labor. So that I do 
 not believe he would ever have written at all but for that salu- 
 tary " pressure from within" which answered to the divine 
 afflatus of the oracles of old, and -would have vent in speech or 
 written words. His thoughts were like the inspirations of the 
 true poet, which must be expressed by visible symbols or audi- 
 ble sounds, or they drive their recipient mad. What was " the 
 Reading Public" to Charles Lamb ? He did not care a pinch 
 out of his dear sister's snuff-box whether they were supplied 
 to repletion with " food convenient for them," or left to starve 
 themselves into mental health for the want of it. He knew 
 that, in any case, what he had to offer would be " caviare " to 
 them. 
 
 But it was a very different case with regard to the little 
 world of friends and intimates that his social and intellectual 
 qualities had gathered about him. When with them, it was 
 always as pleasant and easy for him to talk as it was to listen ; 
 but never more so ; for the truth is, he did not care much even 
 about them, so far as related to any pressing desire or neces-
 
 3O CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 sity for their admiration or appreciation of his mental parts or 
 acquirements : so that latterly nothing enabled or rather in- 
 duced him to talk at all but that artificial stimulus which for a 
 time restored to him his youth, and chased away that spirit of 
 indifference which had pervaded the whole of his moral being 
 during the last ten years of his life. 
 
 In the country, too, this mental apathy and indifference 
 gathered double weight and strength by the absence of any of 
 those more legitimate means of resisting them, which were 
 always at hand in London : for Lamb was not, as I have hinted, 
 among those fortunate persons who 
 
 " Find tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, 
 Sermons in stones, and good in everything : " 
 
 on the contrary, he saw about him on every side an infinite 
 deal of bad, and no means of turtiing it to good ; while the 
 good that there really is, he saw perpetually overlooked, or 
 turned to bad, by those who should apply and administer it. 
 
 The reader must not for a moment suppose, from anything 
 I have now said, that Charles Lamb was in the habit of indulg- 
 ing in that " inordinate cup " which is so justly said to be 
 " unblest, and its ingredient a devil." My very object and 
 excuse in alluding to the subject has been to show that pre- 
 cisely the reverse was the case that the cup in which he in- 
 dulged was a blessing one, no less to himself than to others, 
 and that for both parties " its ingredient " was an angel. 
 
 ELIAN A. 
 
 Hazlitt has somewhere said of Charles Lamb speculatively, 
 that he was a man who would laugh at a funeral and cry at 
 a wedding. How far the first branch of the proposition was 
 true may be seen by the following exquisite effusion : 
 
 CHARLES LAMB TO P. G. PATMORE. 
 
 " DEAR P., I am so poorly ! I have been to a funeral, 
 where I made a pun, to the consternation of the rest of the 
 mourners. And we had wine. I can't describe to you the
 
 ELI ANA. 3 1 
 
 howl which the widow set up at proper intervals. Dash could, 
 for it was not unlike what he makes. 
 
 " The letter I sent you was one directed to the care of E. 
 White, India House, for Mrs. Hazlitt. Which Mrs. Hazlitt I 
 don.'t yet know, but A. has taken it to France on speculation. 
 Really it is embarrassing. There is Mrs. present H., Mrs. 
 late H., and Mrs. John H., and to which of the three Mrs. 
 Wigginses it appertains I don't know. Twanted to open it, 
 but it 's transportation. 
 
 " I am sorry you are plagued about your bpok. I would 
 strongly recommend you to take for one story Massinger s 
 'Old Law.' It is exquisite. I can think of no other. 
 
 " Dash is frightful this morning. He whines and stands 
 up on his hind legs. He misses Beckey, who is gone to 
 town. I took him to Barnet the other day, and he could n't 
 eat his victuals after it. Pray God his intellects be not 
 slipping. 
 
 " Mary is gone out for some soles. I suppose it's no use 
 to ask you to come and partake of 'em ; else there 's a steam- 
 vessel. 
 
 " I am doing a tragi-comedy in two acts, and have got on 
 tolerably ; but it will be refused, or worse. I never had luck 
 with anything my name was put to. 
 
 " Oh, I am so poorly ! I waked it at my cousin's the book- 
 binder's who is now with God ; or if he is not, it's no fault 
 of mine. 
 
 " We hope the frank wines do not disagree with Mrs. Pat- 
 more. By the way, I like her. 
 
 " Did you ever taste frogs ? Get them, if you can. They 
 are like little Lilliput rabbits, only a thought nicer. 
 
 "Christ, how sick I am! not of the world, but of the 
 widow's shrub. She's sworn under ^6,000, but I think she 
 perjured herself. She howls in E /<z, and I comfort her in B 
 flat. You understand music ? 
 
 " If you have n't got Massinger, you have nothing to do but 
 go to the first bibliothZqtte you can light upon at Boulogne, 
 and ask for it (Gifford's edition), and if they have n't got it,
 
 32 CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 you can have " Athalie," par Monsieur Racine, and make the 
 best of it But that ' Old Law ' 's delicious. 
 
 " ' No shrimps ! ' (That 's in answer to Mary's question 
 about how the soles are to be done.) 
 
 " I am uncertain where this wandering letter may reach you. 
 What you mean by Poste Restante, God knows. Do you 
 mean I must pay the postage ? So I do to Dover. 
 
 " We had a merry passage with the widow at the Commons. 
 She was howling part howling and part giving directions to 
 the proctor when crash! down went my sister through a 
 crazy chair, and made the clerks grin r and I grinned, and the 
 widow tittered and then I knew that she was not inconsol- 
 able. Mary was more frightened than hurt 
 
 " She 'd make a good match for anybody (by she, I mean the 
 widow). 
 
 ' If he bring but a relict away 
 He is happy, nor heard to complain.' 
 
 SHENSTONB. 
 
 " Procter has got a wen growing out at the nape of his 
 neck, which his wife wants him to have cut off ; but I think 
 it rather an agreeable excrescence like his poetry re- 
 dundant. Hone has hanged himself for debt. Godwin was 
 taken up for picking pockets. Beckey takes to bad courses. 
 Her father was blown up in a steam machine. The cor- 
 oner found it Insanity. I should not like him to sit on my 
 letter. 1 
 
 " Do you observe my direction ? Is it Gallic ? Clas- 
 sical ? 2 
 
 " Do try and get some frogs. You must ask for ' gren- 
 ouilles ' (green-eels). They don't understand ' frogs,' though 
 it 's a common phrase with us. 
 
 " If you go through Bulloign (Boulogne) inquire if old God- 
 frey is living, and how he got home from the Crusades. He 
 must be a very old man now. 
 
 1 The reader need scarcely be told that all the above items of home news are 
 pure fiction. 
 
 1 By this it should seem that the direction was written before the letter, for the 
 passage is not interlined.
 
 INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 33 
 
 " If there is anything new in politics or literature in France, 
 keep it till I see you again, for I 'm in no hurry. Chatty- 
 Briant (Chateaubriand) is well, I hope. 
 
 " I think I have no more news ; only give both our loves 
 ('all three,' says Dash) to Mrs. Patmore, and bid her get quite 
 well, as I am at present, bating qualms, and the grief incident 
 to losing a valuable relation. C. L." 
 
 " LONDRES, July 19, 1827." 
 
 If I give this incomparable letter in all its disjointed integ- 
 rity, with its enormous jokes in the shape of pretended domes- 
 tic news, about Procter, Hone, Godwin, Beckey, etc. ; its in- 
 imitable tableau vivant of the " merry passage with the widow 
 at the Commons ; " its "and then I knew that she was not in- 
 consolable," which cannot be paralleled out of Shakespeare ; 
 its startling dramatic interpolations, " No shrimps ! " and "All 
 three, says Dash ; " its sick qualms, curable only by puns ; its 
 deliberate incoherencies ; its hypothetical invitation to dinner, 
 (I was at Paris at the time) ; if I venture to give all these in 
 their naked innocence, it is because I do not dare to tamper, 
 even to the amount of a single word, with an epistolary gem 
 that is worth the best volume of Horace Walpole's, and half 
 the " Elegant Extracts " from Pope and Atterbury to boot. 
 
 INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 
 
 From much that I have said of Charles Lamb it will have 
 been gathered that he was little qualified, either by tempera- 
 ment or habits, to live in what is called u the world." It may 
 seem paradoxical to say so, but he was quite as little qualified 
 to live out of it. In some sort wedded both to solitude and to 
 society, so far from being able to make himself " happy with 
 either," each was equally incapable of filling and satisfying his 
 affections. The truth is that, deep and yet gentle as those af- 
 fections were, his daily life gave token that in their early de- 
 velopment they had received a sinister bias which never after- 
 wards quitted them perchance a blow which struck them 
 from the just centre on which they seemed to have been origi- 
 3
 
 34 CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 nally destined to revolve, in a circle of the most perfect beauty 
 and harmony. 
 
 Those of Lamb's friends who felt a real and deep interest in 
 his intellectual character, and its results on his personal hap- 
 piness, must, I think, have seen this influence at work in al- 
 most every movement of his mind and heart, as these devel- 
 oped themselves in his ordinary life and conversation ; for in 
 his published writings the evidences I allude to do not appear, 
 at least in any distinct and tangible form. There, in short, 
 and there only, was Charles Lamb his own man his early, 
 natural, original self ; as indeed is almost always the case with 
 those men who possess that peculiar idiosyncrasy which is 
 indicated by the term genius. 
 
 It would be a task as difficult as delicate, to adduce detailed 
 evidence of the peculiar condition of mind and heart, in 
 Charles Lamb, to which I have just alluded ; but I think that 
 some, at least, of his intimates, will call to mind such evidence, 
 especially in connection with the last few years of his life. I 
 appeal to those intimates whether they ever saw Lamb wholly 
 at his ease for half an hour together wholly free from that 
 restlessness which is incompatible with mental tranquillity ; 
 whether they ever saw him wrapt in that deep and calm re- 
 pose, in the absence of which there can be no actual, soul-felt 
 satisfaction. 
 
 If, indeed, they have seen him alone in his book-room he 
 unknowing of their presence hanging in rapt sympathy over 
 the tattered pages of one of his beloved old folios, perchance, 
 quietly disentangling some ineffable mystery in " Heywood's 
 Hierarchy of Angels," or listening with his mind's ear to the 
 solemn music breathing from the funereal organ of Sir 
 Thomas Browne's Urn-burial they may have seen him in a 
 condition of mind analogous to that self-centred repose which 
 is the soul of human happiness, but is not identical with it. 
 
 It is not the less true that Lamb was, for the moment, de- 
 lighted at the advent of an unlooked-for friend, even though 
 he was thereby interrupted in the midst of one of these be- 
 atific communings. But they must have read his character
 
 INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER. 35 
 
 ill, or with little interest, who did not perceive that, after the 
 pleasant excitement of the moment was over, he became rest- 
 less, uneasy, and "busied about many things" about any- 
 thing, rather than the settling down quietly into a condition of 
 mind or temper, even analogous to that from which the new 
 arrival had irretrievably roused him, for that day at least. 
 Feeling the unseasonable disturbance as such, yet not for a 
 moment admitting it to be such, even to himself, he became 
 over-anxious to show you how welcome you were, doing 
 half a dozen things in a breath, to prove the feeling, every 
 one of which, if read aright, proved something very like the 
 reverse. If it happened to be about dinner-time, he would go 
 into the kitchen to see if it was ready, or put on his hat and go 
 out to order an additional supply of porter, or open a bottle of 
 wine and pour some out, taking a glass himself to set you 
 the example, as he innocently imagined, but, in reality, to 
 fortify himself for the task of hospitality that you had imposed 
 upon him ; anything, in fact, but sit quietly down by the fire, 
 and enjoy your company, or let you enjoy his. And if you 
 happened to arrive when dinner or tea was over, he was per- 
 fectly fidgety, and almost cross, till you were fairly seated at 
 the meal which he and his excellent sister insisted on provid- 
 ing for you, whether you would or not. 
 
 It is true that, by the time all these preliminaries were over, 
 he had recovered his ease, and was really glad to see you ; 
 and if you had come to stay the night, when the shutters were 
 shut, and the candles came, and you were comfortably seated 
 round the fire, he was evidently pleased and bettered by the 
 occasion thus afforded for a dish of cosey table-talk. But not 
 the less true is it that every knock at the door sent a pang to 
 his heart ; and this without any distinction of persons : who- 
 ever it might be, he equally welcomed and wished them away ; 
 and all for the same reason namely, that they called him 
 from the company of his own thoughts, or those still better 
 communings with the thoughts of his dead friends, with whom 
 he could hold an intercourse unclogged by any actual bodily 
 presence.
 
 36 CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 In these respects, Lamb resembled the lover in Martial's 
 epigram : he could neither live -with his friends, nor without 
 them. If they stayed away from him long, he was hurt and 
 angry ; and when they went to him, he was put out. 
 
 I believe those contradictory feelings of Lamb in regard to 
 the visits of his friends, to have been in a great measure the 
 secret of his daily and interminable rambles, which he pursued 
 without aim or object, and certainly without any care about 
 the scenes of external nature they might bring before him ; 
 for, as I have said, he was anything but fond of the country 
 for itself, and took no sort of pleasure in any of the pursuits 
 and amusements connected with it. Even a garden he was 
 more than indifferent about. If compelled to walk in one, he 
 could no more have confined himself to the regular walks than 
 a bird could, and had it been his own, he would have trampled 
 it all into one plot in a week. The garden attached to the 
 cottage they first took at Enfield Chace was in the condition 
 of a school play-ground never having been touched by spade 
 or hoe for the two years they occupied the place. In short, if 
 such a truth may be told of one who was after all a true poet, 
 Lamb was more than indifferent about flowers he almost 
 disliked them. In the world, as at present constituted, a man 
 like Charles Lamb must hate something; and for him (Lamb) 
 to hate a human being, or indeed any sentient being even 
 an adder or a toad was impossible to his nature. Is it, 
 then, speculating too curiously on his singularly-constituted 
 mind and heart to suppose that he may have gone to the op- 
 posite extreme for he lived in extremes and hated that 
 which seems made only to be loved, and which all the world 
 fancy they love, or pretend to do, because they can find 
 nothing in them to move their hate flowers, fields, and the 
 face of external nature ? 
 
 Before quitting this perhaps too speculative portion of my 
 recollections of Charles Lamb, I must remind his earlier and 
 older friends that my knowledge of him extended only over 
 the last nine or ten years of his life : and every lustre that he 
 lived made him in many respects a new man.
 
 ODD CORRESPONDENT OF LAMB. 37 
 
 ODD CORRESPONDENT OF LAMB. 
 
 Most literary men of exterisive reputation have met with 
 odd and unexpected testimonies of the admiration they have 
 excited in quarters where they would have least looked for it, 
 and which has been set forth in a fashion drolly discordant 
 with their tastes and habits of feeling ; and Lamb was not 
 without these testimonies. One of them he related to me as 
 having mightily tickled his sense of the ludicrous. A young 
 gentleman in the country, of a " literary turn," 
 
 " A clerk foredoomed his father's soul to cross, 
 Who penned a stanza when he should engross," 
 
 solicited the favor of Lamb's correspondence and friendship ; 
 and as an unequivocal testimonial of his claims to these, he 
 forwarded to the object of his admiration his miniature por- 
 trait ; the said effigy setting forth a form and feature such as 
 "youthful maidens fancy when they love." 
 
 It was excessively amusing to hear Lamb describe his droll 
 embarrassment, on the reception of this naive and original 
 mode of paying court to a man who almost piqued himself on 
 having no eye or taste for personal comeliness, even in 
 women, while anything like coxcombry in a man made him 
 sick ; and who yet had so exquisite a sense of what was due 
 to the feelings of others, that when a young lady who was 
 staying at his house, had been making some clothes for the 
 child of a poor gypsy woman in the neighborhood, whose 
 husband was afterwards convicted of sheep-stealing, would not 
 allow her (the young lady) to quit the village without going to 
 see and take leave of her unhappy prottgte, on the express 
 plea that otherwise the felon's wife might imagine that she 
 had heard of her husband's " misfortune," and was ashamed 
 to go near her. " I have a delicacy for a sheep-stealer," 
 said he. 
 
 There are many who duly appreciate, and are ready enough 
 to extol, the beauty and the merits of this delicacy to the per- 
 sonal feelings of others, and a few who can sympathize with it
 
 38 CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 even in extreme cases like the one just cited ; but I never 
 knew any one who was capable of uniformly, and at all costs, 
 practising it, except Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt, 
 both of whom extended it to the lowest and vilest of man and 
 woman kind : would give the wall to a beggar if it became a 
 question which of the two should cede it, and if they had vis- 
 ited a convicted felon in his cell, would have been on tenter- 
 hooks all the time, lest anything might drop from them to in- 
 dicate that they had less consideration for the object of their 
 visit than if he had been the most " respectable " of men. 
 
 The name of William Hazlitt reminds me that a writer J of 
 some pleasing " recollections " of Charles Lamb, in the num- 
 ber of the " New Monthly Magazine " immediately following 
 his death, speaking of LamB's intimacy with Hazlitt, and of 
 the unshrinking manner in which he stood by him, " through 
 good report and through ill report," says, " He (Lamb) was, 
 we believe, the only one of Hazlitt's early associates who 
 stood beside his grave." He was not merely the only one of 
 Hazlitt's " early " associates, he was the only one of all his 
 associates or friends, early or recent, excepting his own son, 
 and the writer of these pages. The fact offers a sorry evi- 
 dence of the estimation in which purely intellectual endow- 
 ments are held among us. And the case is not bettered by 
 the circumstance that, to this day, no one of the many who 
 knew him intimately through the whole of his literary life, has 
 taken the pains to rescue his name and character from the 
 load of undeserved obloquy that was cast upon them, during 
 his life-time, by those political enemies and opponents who 
 saw no other way of combating the "cannonade-reasoning" 
 and the terrible invective he was accustomed to bring to bear 
 against them. 
 
 But Hazlitt, to say nothing of his unpopular manners, and 
 his unlucky disposition to " call a knave a knave, and Chartres 
 Chartres," could not abstain from speaking the truth even of 
 his best friends, when they happened to treat him as he felt 
 that only an enemy should be treated ; and the man who does 
 
 1 Mr. Forster, I believe.
 
 ANECDOTES. . 39 
 
 this must reckon upon outliving every friend he has in the 
 world, die when he may. 
 
 ANECDOTES. 
 
 As it is not the aim of this work to exalt or aggrandize the 
 intellectual pretensions of the persons to whom it relates, but 
 only to give true sketches of them as they appeared from the 
 point of view from which the writer looked at them, I shall 
 resort very sparingly to those daily records which I occasion- 
 ally made, of my personal intercourse with them at set literary 
 or other meetings, where they were more or less on show, and 
 consequently never perfectly themselves any more than a 
 sitter for his portrait is until the artist has talked and enticed 
 him into forgetfulness of the occasion of his visit. What I 
 profess to know and to depict of the persons I treat of was 
 gathered chiefly in that familiar tete-a-tete intercourse in which 
 alone men show themselves for what they really are. The 
 startling strangeness of Lamb's utterances at those social 
 meetings in which he joined, either at his own house or else- 
 where, though strikingly characteristic of the turn of thought 
 and tone of feeling which prompted them, were anything but 
 indicative of his personal and intellectual character, except as 
 these were momentarily colored and modified by the circum- 
 stances acting upon them. Still, as these colorings and modi- 
 fications are part and parcel of the picture he has left on my 
 recollection, the reader may like, and, indeed, may be con- 
 sidered as entitled in Lamb's case, to see a few of those traits 
 and touches which the self-painter was accustomed to throw 
 in when the beloved solitude of his studio was disturbed by 
 the presence of comparative strangers. And to this end I 
 shall copy -verbatim from a diary which, when made at all, was 
 invariably made on the night of the day to which it refers. 
 
 "December 5, 1826. Spent the evening at Lamb's. When 
 I went in, they (Charles and his sister) were alone, playing at 
 cards together. 
 
 " I took up a book on the table ' Almack's ' and Lamb 
 said, ' Aye ; that must be all max to the lovers of scandal.'
 
 40 CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 " Speaking of Northcote, he related a story of him, illustrat- 
 ing his love for doing and saying little malicious things. It 
 was at a party at Sir Joshua Reynolds's, where Boswell was 
 present, and they were talking of Malone, and somebody said 
 that Malone seemed to live in Shakespeare, and not to have a 
 feeling or thought connected with anything else ; upon which 
 Northcote said, 'Then he must have been the meanest of 
 mankind. The man who sets up any other man as a sort of 
 God, and worships him to the exclusion of all other things and 
 thoughts, must be the meanest of men; and everybody,' said 
 Northcote (who was himself the original relator of the story), 
 ' everybody turned and looked at Boswell.' 
 
 " We spoke of L. E. L., and Lamb said, ' If she belonged 
 to me, I would lock her up and feed her on bread and water 
 till she left off writing poetry. A female poet, or female au- 
 thor of any kind, ranks below an actress, I think.' 
 
 " was mentioned, and Lamb said he seemed to him to 
 
 be a sort of L. E. L. in pantaloons. 
 
 " Bernard Barton was mentioned, and Lamb said that he 
 did not write nonsense, at any rate which all the rest of 
 them did (meaning the Magazine poets of the day). He was 
 dull enough ; but not nonsensical. ' He writes English, too,' 
 said Lamb, ' which they do not.' 
 
 " H. C. R. came in about half-past eight, and put a stop to 
 all further conversation keeping all the talk to himself. 
 
 " Speaking of some German story, in which a man is made 
 to meet himself he himself having changed forms with some 
 one else the talk turned on what we should think of our- 
 selves, if we could see ourselves without knowing that it was 
 ourselves. R. said that he had all his life felt a sort of horror 
 come over him every time he caught a sight of his own face in 
 the glass ; and that he was almost afraid to shave himself for 
 the same reason. He said that he often wondered how any- 
 body could sustain an intimacy with, much less feel a friend- 
 ship for, a man with such a face. Lamb said ' I hope you have 
 mercy on the barbers, and always shave yourself.' 
 
 "Speaking of names, Lamb said, 'John of Gaunt, time-
 
 ANECDOTES. 41 
 
 honored Lancaster,' was the grandest name in the world. 
 On this R. spoke of a Spanish pamphlet he had lately met 
 with, describing the Reformation, in which all the English 
 names were changed to Spanish ones, and the fine effect it 
 had. It began by relating that a great prince named Don 
 Henriquez (Henry VIII.) was married to a beautiful princess 
 called La Donna Catalina (Queen Catherine) that he was 
 under the influence of a wily priest named II Cardinal Bolseo 
 (Wolsey), who advised him to divorce his chaste wife La 
 Donna Catalina, and unite himself to a foul though beautiful 
 witch named La Donna Anna Volena (Anna Boleyn). Jane 
 Seymour was called La Donna Joanna Sumaro, and her house 
 (at Greenwich) the castle of Grenuccio. 
 
 " Friday, July 13. Spent the evening at Leigh Hunt's, 
 with the Lambs, Atherstone, Mrs. Shelley, and the Gliddons. 
 Lamb talked admirably about Dryden and some of the older 
 poets, in particular of DavenantV" Gondibert." Of this Hunt 
 wanted to show that it consisted almost entirely of monosylla- 
 bles, which gave a most heavy and monotonous effect to the 
 versification ; and he read some passages to that effect. Lamb 
 would not admit this, and he read an admirable passage in 
 reply, about a Museum of Natural Curiosities in which Man, 
 the pretended Lord of all the other creatures, hung by the 
 wall, dry, like all the rest, and even Woman, the Lord of 
 Man, hung there too ' a'nd she dried by him.' The effect 
 of the passage was prodigious 
 
 " He (Lamb) spoke of Dryden as a prodigious person, so far 
 as his wonderful power of versification went, but not a first- 
 rate poet, or even capable of appreciating such giving in- 
 stances from his prefaces in proof of this. He spoke of Dry- 
 den's prefaces as the finest pieces of criticism, nevertheless, 
 that had ever been written, and the better for being contra- 
 dictory to each other, because not founded on any pretended 
 rules. 
 
 " Hunt was asking how it was necessary to manage in order 
 to get Coleridge to come and dine. Lamb replied that he 
 believed he (Coleridge) was under a kind of watch and ward
 
 42 CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 alluding to the watchful care taken of him by the Gilmans, 
 with whom he was then residing. ' Ah," said H., ' vain is 
 the watch (Mrs. G.), and bootless is the ward ' (Mr. G.), who 
 always wore shoes. 
 
 " Lamb repeated one of his own enormous puns. He had 
 met Procter, and speaking of his little girl (then an infant), 
 Procter said they had called her Adelaide. ' Ah,' said Lamb, 
 ' a very good name for her Addle-head? " 
 
 The two following anecdotes are so characteristic that, al- 
 though they reached me at second-hand, and may possibly, 
 therefore, have been printed before, I will not omit them. 
 They were told me by James Smith (of the " Rejected Ad- 
 dresses "), at a dinner at the late Charles Matthews's : 
 
 Lamb and Coleridge were talking together on the incidents 
 of Coleridge's early life, when he was beginning his career in 
 the Church, and Coleridge was describing some of the facts in 
 his usual tone, when he paused, and said : " Pray, Mr. Lamb, 
 did you ever hear me preach ? " " Damme," said Lamb, " I 
 never heard you do anything else." 
 
 The other anecdote was of a lady a sort of social Mrs. 
 Fry who had been for some time lecturing Lamb on his 
 irregularities. At last, she said : " But, really, Mr. Lamb, 
 I 'm afraid all that I 'm saying has very little effect on you. 
 I 'm afraid from your manner of attending to it, that it will not 
 do you much good." " No, ma'am," said Lamb, " I don't 
 think it will. But as all that you have been saying has gone 
 in at this ear (the one next her) and out at the other, I dare say 
 it will do this gentleman a great deal of good," turning to a 
 stranger who stood on the other side of him. 
 
 LAMB, HAZLITT, AND SOUTHEY. 
 
 In glancing through the foregoing " Recollections " of 
 Charles Lamb, it seems probable that they may be deemed 
 liable to the objection of not being sufficiently specific of 
 not dealing enough with facts of expressing rather what the 
 writer thought andfe/t of Lamb than what he knew. Should 
 this complaint be made, it will doubtless be a valid one for
 
 LAMB, HAZLITT, AND SOUTHS Y. 43 
 
 those who make it ; but it is one against which I cannot de- 
 fend myself, because it points at the precise object, not only 
 of these Recollections, but of all the others of which the work 
 consists. In fact, I did not go to Charles Lamb's house with 
 a note-book in my pocket, ready to slip aside at every oppor- 
 tunity, and record his "good things " for the benefit of the 
 absent, or the amusement of those who, had they been pres- 
 ent, would have disputed his wit because it was not dressed 
 in the received mode, and yawned over (if they had not felt 
 scandalized at) his wisdom, because it was dictated by the 
 heart rather than the head. Moreover, Lamb was anything 
 but what is understood by "a wit" and a diseur de mots, in 
 the ordinary and " company " sense of the phrase, as the 
 respectable Lord Mayor who invited him to the city feast of 
 Lord Mayor's Day in that capacity would have found to his 
 cost, had Lamb, in that spirit of contradiction which some- 
 times beset him, accepted the invitation. Though for the 
 mere sitters-by it would have been capital fun to see him 
 mystifying my Lord Mayor, scandalizing my Lady Mayoress, 
 confounding the sheriffs, and putting the whole Court of Al- 
 dermen and their wives into a fever of mingled wonder and 
 indignation, at the unseemly revival of an exploded barba- 
 rism ; for they would doubtless have mistaken our incompara- 
 ble Elia for the Lord Mayor's Fool. 1 The Boswells of the 
 literary world are excellent and admirable persons in their 
 way that is, when they have Doctor Johnson to deal with. 
 But Lamb was, of all men that ever lived, the least of a Doc- 
 tor Johnson ; and Heaven preserve us from a Boswell in his 
 case! for he would infallibly dissipate the charm and the 
 fragrance that at present encircle the personal memory of 
 Lamb in the minds of his friends, and which, if not so dis- 
 turbed, may descend with him to that posterity which his 
 name and writings will surely reach. 
 
 1 I am supposing that Lamb did not accept this tribute offered to his literary 
 fame ; but he may have done so for anything I know to the contrary. What I am 
 sure of is, that if he had gone, he would have taken care to remunerate his inviter 
 as well as himself in a manner and to an effect something like that which I have 
 supposed in the text. The story of the invitation I find in Hazlitt's notice of him 
 in The Spirit of the Age.
 
 44 CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 As my opening recollections of Charles Lamb have neces- 
 sarily connected themselves with the name of William Hazlitt, 
 I shall, perhaps, not be improperly departing from the spirit 
 of my theme if I allow my closing remarks to again couple 
 them together. And I do so the rather that my impulse to 
 the act involves in its explanation certain characteristic feat- 
 ures in the minds of both these remarkable men. 
 
 The truth is, that though Lamb and Hazlitt were strangely 
 different from each other in many features of their minds, they 
 were singularly alike in many others more so, perhaps, than 
 any other two men of their day. There was a general sympa- 
 thy between them, which served to melt away, and as it were 
 fuse together, and bring into something like a friendly unison 
 and correspondence, those differences themselves, till they 
 almost took the character of meeting-points, which brought 
 the two extremes together, when perhaps nothing else could. 
 
 In confirmation of this seemingly fanciful theory, I would 
 refer to two facts only, as almost demonstrative of it : I allude 
 first to that magnanimous letter of Charles Lamb's to Southey, 
 on the latter paying him some public compliment which could 
 only be accepted, as it was only offered, at the 'cost of some 
 imputation on Hazlitt's character and pursuits. Lamb, on that 
 occasion, flung back to Southey, with a beautiful indignation 
 almost bordering on contempt, and in a tone of but half-sup- 
 pressed bitterness which I do not believe he ever exhibited on 
 any other occasion, a testimony to his talents and character 
 which he could not have merited, had the qualifying insinua- 
 tion, or regret, or whatever it might be called that accompa- 
 nied it, also been deserved. If I remember the circumstances 
 rightly (for I have no means at hand of referring to the record 
 of them on either side), the gist of Southey's double offense was 
 a mingled remonstrance and lamentation at the melancholy 
 fact, that such, a man as Lamb should consort with such a matt 
 as Hazlitt ! As if any two men that ever lived were more ex- 
 quisitely constituted and qualified to appreciate and admire the 
 large balance of good over evil that existed in each, and to ex- 
 plain, account for, and excuse the ill, than those two men !
 
 LAMB, HAZLITT, AA r D SOUTHS Y. 45 
 
 Lamb never did a more noble or beautiful or characteristic thing 
 than the writing of that memorable letter ; and Hazlitt never 
 experienced a higher purer intellectual pleasure than in read- 
 ing it ; and though at the period of its publication Hazlitt had 
 for a long time absented himself from Lamb's house and so- 
 ciety, on account of some strange and gratuitous crotchet of 
 his brain, respecting some imagined offense on the part of 
 Lamb or of himself (for in these cases it was impossible to tell 
 which) the letter instantly brought them together again ; 
 and there was no division of their friendship till Hazlitt's. death, 
 fifteen years afterwards. 
 
 The other proof I would offer of the natural sympathy be- 
 tween Lamb and Hazlitt, of which I have spoken, is to be 
 found in the fact, that of all the associates of Hazlitt's early 
 days indeed of his whole literary and social life the only 
 one, except his son and myself, who followed him to his grave 
 was Charles Lamb. 
 
 But, perhaps, those readers who are unacquainted with the 
 literary table-talk of the last twenty years, or have become ac- 
 quainted with it through a discoloring and distorting medium, 
 may imagine that there was some good and sufficient reason 
 for the double-edged insult of Southey, and the seeming de- 
 sertion of Hazlitt by his early friends and associates. 
 
 If any reader of this page has imbibed such a notion, I call 
 upon him, in the name of our common nature, and of that 
 sense of justice which is its fairest and noblest feature, to dis- 
 abuse himself of the unworthy and utterly unfounded impres- 
 sion. And that he is bound in truth and honesty to do so, I 
 appeal to every individual who really knew Hazlitt during the 
 last fifteen years of his life. That Hazlitt had great and cry- 
 ing faults, nobody intimately acquainted with him will deny. 
 But they were faults which hurt himself alone, and were, 
 moreover, inextricably linked with the finer qualities of his 
 nature. The only one of those faults which brought upon 
 him the obloquy to which the peace and comfort of his life 
 were sacrificed, was the result of a virtue which nine tenths 
 of the world (his maligners included) have the wit to divest
 
 46 CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 themselves of what he thought and felt about other people, 
 whether friends or foes, that he spoke or wrote, careless of 
 the consequences to himself, and sparing himself as little as 
 he spared any one else. Moreover, if a man smote him on 
 one cheek, he did not meekly turn the other, and crave for it 
 the same process ; nor could he ever persuade himself to 
 carry away the affront quietly, merely because it might consist 
 with his worldly interest to do so. If he was hated and feared 
 more than any other living man, it was because he saw more 
 deeply than any other man into the legitimate objects of 
 hatred, and was, by habit as well as temper, not amenable to 
 those convenient restraints and mental reservations which cus- 
 tom has imposed, in order to guard against the social conse- 
 quences of such untoward discoveries. lago says it was the 
 virtue of the Venetian dames of his day, " not to leave un- 
 done, but to keep unknown." It was Hazlitt's virtue or 
 vice, if you please not merely " to spy into abuses " (for 
 that we can all of us do), but to feel a sort of moral necessity 
 for dragging them into the light, when he had found them. 
 He could neither conceal nor palliate a single fault or weak- 
 ness of his own. Was it likely, then, that he would be at the 
 trouble of throwing a veil over those of other people es- 
 pecially when the only passion of his soul was a love of 
 Truth! 
 
 Charles Lamb knew and appreciated these qualities of 
 Hazlitt's mind more truly and entirely than any one else, be- 
 cause he found the types of them in his own ; the only but 
 signal difference being, that he (Lamb), while he saw the 
 truth with an intellectual vision as clear as that of Hazlitt, was, 
 by the gentleness and moral sweetness of his nature, not 
 merely deterred from exposing it to those who might have 
 overlooked it, but was impelled to transform or translate it 
 into symbols of its most striking opposite. Like the " sweet 
 Ophelia," he " turned to favor and to prettiness " all the moral 
 evil and deformity that presented itself to his observation. 
 He could not, or would not see ugliness anywhere, except as 
 a sort of beauty-spot upon the face of beauty ; but beauty he
 
 7. A MB, HAZLITT, AND SOUTHEY. 47 
 
 could see everywhere, and nowhere shining so brightly as 
 when in connection with what others called ugliness. 
 
 There is something inexpressibly shocking in first hearing 
 of a dear friend's death through the medium of a public news- 
 paper, at a time, perhaps, when you believe him to be in per- 
 fect health, and are on the point of paying him a too long de- 
 layed visit. Such was my case in respect to Charles Lamb. 
 Still more painful was the case of a lady, formerly a dis- 
 tinguished ornament of the English stage, to whom Lamb was 
 attached by the double tie of admiration and friendship. 1 
 Several days after Lamb's death, she was conversing of him 
 with a mutual friend, who, taking for granted her knowledge 
 of Lamb's death, abruptly referred to some circumstance con- 
 nected with the event, which for the first time made her ac- 
 quainted with it. 
 
 1 Miss Kelly.
 
 WILLIAM HAZLITT.
 
 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 PATMORE'S FIRST INTRODUCTION TO HAZLITT. 
 j]Y acquaintance with William Hazlitt commenced be- 
 fore his name emerged from the " illustrious ob- 
 scurity " of that private and local fame which had 
 gathered round it, in the small coterie to which he 
 had till then addicted himself, and just as it was rising into that 
 "bad eminence" to which the abuse and scandal of his politi- 
 cal and personal enemies (not unaided by his friends) soon after 
 lifted it. My first interview with him took place in the commit- 
 tee-room of a literary institution, of which I was at that time 
 one of the managers, and had been deputed by my colleagues 
 to arrange with Hazlitt respecting the details of a course of 
 lectures, which it was proposed he should deliver in the thea- 
 tre of the institution ; an office to which he had been recom- 
 mended by an influential member of the institution, the late 
 Mr. Alsager, of the " Times " newspaper. 
 
 Having been previously cautioned not to be surprised or 
 repelled by any " strangeness " that I might observe in Haz- 
 litt's manner and personal appearance, I was shown into the 
 room where he was by the librarian, who merely named each 
 to the other, and then left us together. 
 
 On entering, I saw a pale anatomy. of a man, sitting un- 
 easily, half on half off a chair, with his legs tucked awkwardly 
 underneath the rail, his hands folded listlessly on his knees, 
 his head drooping on one side, and one of his elbows leaning 
 (not resting) on the edge of the table by which he sat, as if in
 
 52 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 fear of its having no right to be there. His hat had taken an 
 odd position on the floor beside him, as if that, too, felt itself 
 as much out of its element as the owner. 
 
 He half rose at my entrance, and, without speaking a word, 
 or looking at me, except with a momentary and furtive glance, 
 he sat down again, in a more uneasy position than before, and 
 seemed to wait the result of what I might have to say to him, 
 with the same sort of desperate indifference with which a cul- 
 prit may be supposed to wait the sentence of his judge, after 
 conviction. He was to learn from me whether his proffered 
 services, as a lecturer, were accepted or rejected : and, to a 
 man of his habits and temperament, and under his circum- 
 stances, either alternative took the shape of an intolerable 
 penalty like those to Romeo, of " Death " or " Banishment." 
 If the lectures he proposed to deliver were rejected, he prob- 
 ably did not know where to* meet the claims of to-morrow. 
 On the other hand, if they were accepted, his condition was 
 still more trying : for I learned from him that not a line of the 
 lectures were written, nor even their materials prepared ; they 
 had been merely thought of. It was a case, too, in which 
 punctuality was indispensable ; yet such were his uncertain 
 and desultory habits, that the fulfillment of an engagement to 
 be at a given place and time, on a given day, for ten successive 
 weeks, then and there to address a miscellaneous audience for 
 "an hour by Shrewsbury clock," was what few who knew him 
 could have believed to be among possible contingencies. 
 
 The picture which Hazlitt presented when I first saw him 
 in the little dark, dungeon-like committee-room referred to, 
 was not unlike that of Sir Joshua's " Ugolino." There he sat, 
 his anxious and highly-intellectual face looking upon vacancy ; 
 pale and silent as a ghost ; emaciated as an anatomy ; loose, 
 unstrung, inanimate, as a being whose life is leaving it, from 
 sheer emptiness and inanition. And this " poor creature " (as 
 he used sometimes to call himselt) apparently with scarcely 
 energy enough to grapple with an infant or face a shadow 
 was the launcher forth of winged words that could shake the 
 hearts of princes and potentates, and make them tremble in
 
 PATMORE'S INTRODUCTION TO HAZLITT. 53 
 
 their seats of power ; this effigy of silence was the utterer of 
 floods of indignant eloquence, that could rouse the soul of apa- 
 thy itself, and stir the blood like the sound of a trumpet ; this 
 " dish of skimmed milk " was the writer of the celebrated re- 
 plies to " Vetus," in the " Times " newspaper ; the invectives 
 of the " Catalogue Raisonne" ; " and the essays on " The Spirit 
 of Monarchy," and " The Regal Character." Nay, more he 
 was the only man of letters in England who had dared openly 
 to stand by the French Revolution, through good and through 
 evil report ; and who had the magnanimity never to turn his 
 back on its "child and champion." 
 
 Though nothing worth particular record occurred in this my 
 first interview with William Hazlitt, I have been tempted to 
 dwell on it thus long, because it has left a more vivid and 
 picturesque impression on my mind than any subsequent one, 
 except the last, which took place when he was on his death- 
 bed. 
 
 It was not till two or three years after the period above re- 
 ferred to, that a strict intimacy commenced between Hazlitt 
 and myself, and that I had the full and fair means of ap- 
 preciating his remarkable, and in all respects self-consistent 
 character. I shall, therefore, not dwell upon the intercourse 
 which ensued upon our first acquaintance, except to contrast 
 the impression I gained of him before I really knew him, with 
 that which was the due and just result of an intimate and 
 unrestricted insight into his mental and moral constitution 
 
 a contrast which may, in some degree, account for the 
 strangely contradictory feelings and impressions which pre- 
 vailed in the world respecting him, according to the amount 
 of actual knowledge or ignorance possessed, concerning his 
 character and the springs of it. I remember the time and 
 I remember it without shame, because the impressions under 
 which I then felt and spoke of Hazlitt were the natural ones 
 
 that is to say, the only ones naturally resulting from the 
 circumstances under which I had formed my judgment I 
 remember the time when no words could express the horror I 
 felt at the (supposed) personal character of William Hazlitt,
 
 54 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 or were deemed too strong to openly set forth those feelings. 
 But my first impressions were derived, not from my own ob- 
 servations, but from the report of those who ought to have 
 known better, and who certainly would have known better, 
 had not their personal feelings been enlisted into the cabal 
 against him, either by their having been the subject of one 
 of those insane assaults that he was every now and then 
 making on his best friends, under a false (or true) impression 
 of their occasional treatment of him, or (still worse) in conse- 
 quence of some " good-natured " acquaintance repeating some 
 of those unpalatable truths which Hazlitt was in the habit of 
 telling of all his friends in their absence. For he professed 
 to lay no restraint upon his tongue in this particular : he con- 
 sidered the foibles of our friends to be as fair game as those 
 of our enemies, always provided they were pursued and hunted 
 down without the cognizance of the owner. He recognized 
 no Game Laws in this particular. The axiom which bids 
 us " never speak ill of a man behind his back " (as if one 
 might do it with propriety before his face ! ), was not one of 
 those ranked by Hazlitt among " the wisdom of nations." 
 On the contrary, he spoke what he thought of people, every- 
 where but in their hearing ; trusting (rather too implicitly, I 
 am afraid) to that tacit compact which recognizes the sacred- 
 ness of social intercourse. And he cared not what you said 
 of him in return, nor if he heard your injurious estimate of 
 him repeated by half the town ; or if he sought to make re- 
 prisals, it was on the hawker, not the originator, of the 
 affront. But a personal slight or incivility he held to be the 
 most unpardonable of offenses, and to be punished and 
 avenged as such. You might think and call him a rascal or a 
 reprobate as much as you pleased ; you might " prove " him 
 to be a bad writer and a worse man, with perfect impunity ; 
 but if you looked aslcance upon him in company, or "cut" 
 him in the street, or even gave him reason to fancy that you 
 had done so, there was (as we shall see hereafter) no limit to 
 the revenge he would take on you, and no rest for him till he 
 had taken it.
 
 HAZLITT' S RESIDENCE. 55 
 
 But I will not go farther wide of my intended mark, which 
 is that of painting William Hazlitt as I knew him ; not de- 
 scribing or estimating his general character, but leaving the 
 reader to form an estimate for himself, from the personal 
 traits that I may be able to furnish, in addition to those which 
 may be gathered from his writings. 
 
 Our first interview, as above alluded to, lasted but a few 
 minutes, and was concluded by an arrangement for the early 
 delivery of a course of lectures those on the Comic Writers ; 
 and I saw nothing more of William Hazlitt till a day or two 
 before the delivery of the first lecture, when I addressed a 
 note to him, stating my intention of giving a critical notice of 
 the lectures in " Blackwood's Magazine," and asking him for 
 such facilities as he might choose to afford me, with a view 
 to offering specimens of the matter. His reply was a re- 
 quest to see me at his residence in York Street, Westmin- 
 ster. 
 
 HAZLITT'S RESIDENCE. 
 
 It is, perhaps, worth remark, that my early intercourse with 
 William Hazlitt has left on my memory a singularly vivid im- 
 pression of the local circumstances and objects connected 
 with it. I remember every room in which I have seen him, as 
 clearly as if I were now sitting in it, and the exact situation 
 and attitudes in which I was accustomed to see him sit or 
 stand when conversing with him. I make the observation, 
 because it would not be applicable to my intercourse with any 
 other of the distinguished men of the day. The reason prob- 
 ably is, that our susceptibility to external impressions at any 
 given time, and our consequent power of retaining them, is 
 proportioned to the interest we feel in the immediate source 
 of those impressions. I have not slightly or unduly ap- 
 preciated and enjoyed the intercourse that has fallen to my lot 
 with a large proportion of the remarkable men of our day, in 
 every department of human acquirement ; but I have never 
 been induced to feel that any one of them claimed or justified 
 that profound intellectual study which I was always (in spite 
 of myself) called upon to apply in the case of William Hazlitt ;
 
 56 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 or it may be that he alone was always susceptible of that study, 
 by reason of the beautifully simple and natural cast of his 
 character ; in which spring and evidence of true greatness of 
 capacity I do not believe him to have been surpassed by any 
 man that ever lived. If " to know a man truly were to know 
 himself" then was William Hazlitt's character, though the 
 least common in the world, so legibly written in his daily 
 conduct and converse, that for those who saw much of him 
 to mistake it was next to impossible. Yet no character was 
 ever so mistaken and misrepresented. 
 
 Leaving the onus of this charge to be divided between the 
 willful blindness of his friends and the willful falsehood of his 
 enemies, I will say, that I believe the certainty of not coming 
 away empty-handed was the secret of the strong and unwearied 
 interest that I always felt in his society, even at the very time 
 when I felt an inexpressible horror and dread of His supposed 
 personal character, as was the case at the time I am now 
 speaking of. From all that I had heard, both from his ene- 
 mies (and even from his so-called friends) and the little I had 
 hitherto seen for myself, I looked upon him, personally, as 
 little better than an incarnate fiend : and those who recollect 
 the looks that occasionally came over him (as if, against his 
 will, to warn by-standers of their danger), will scarcely deem 
 this an exaggerated description of the feeling. Yet my desire 
 to see and know him was not the less strong and urgent ; and 
 hence, as I conceive, the peculiar vividness with which I re- 
 tain my impressions of the local circumstances under which 
 we met. 
 
 I went to him in York Street, in consequence of the note re- 
 ferred to above ; and, though I have never since (until this 
 moment) attempted to recall the scene, it lives before me now 
 as if it were of yesterday. On knocking at the door, it was, 
 after a long interval, opened by a sufficiently " neat-handed " 
 domestic. The outer door led immediately from the street 
 (down a step) into an empty apartment, indicating an uninhab- 
 ited house, and I supposed I had mistaken the number ; but, 
 on asking for the object of my search, I was shown to a door
 
 HAZLITT' S RESIDENCE. 57 
 
 which opened (a step from the ground) on to a ladder-like 
 staircase, bare like the rest, which led to a dark, bare landing- 
 place, and thence to a large square wainscotted apartment. 
 The great curtainless windows of this room looked upon some 
 dingy trees ; the whole of the wall, over and about the chim- 
 ney-piece, was entirely covered, up to the ceiling, by names 
 written in pencil, of all sizes and characters, and in all direc- 
 tions commemorative of visits of curiosity to " the house of 
 Pindarus." 1 There was, near to the empty fire-place, a table 
 with breakfast things upon it (though it was two o'clock in the 
 afternoon) ; three chairs and a sofa were standing about the 
 room, and one unbound book lay on the mantel-piece. At the 
 table sat Hazlitt, and on the sofa a lady, whom I found to be 
 his wife. 
 
 My reception was not very inviting ; and it struck me at 
 once (what had not occurred to me before) that in asking facil- 
 ities for criticising William Hazlitt in " Blackwood's Maga- 
 zine," I had taken a step open to the suspicion of either mis- 
 chief or mystification, or both. However, I soon satisfied him 
 that my object and design were anything but unfriendly. To 
 be what he called " puffed " in so unlooked-for a quarter was 
 evidently deemed a godsend ; it put him in excellent humor 
 accordingly ; and the " Lake Poets " being mentioned, and 
 finding me something of a novice in such matters (and more- 
 over an excellent listener), he talked for a couple of hours, 
 without intermission, on those " personal themes," which he 
 evidently " loved best," and with which, in this instance, he 
 mixed up that spice of malice which was never, or rarely, ab- 
 sent from his discourse about his quondam friends, Words- 
 worth, Coleridge, and Southey, and which so strangely inter- 
 f erred with his general estimate of their pretensions or 
 rather (for such I believe to have been the case) with that per- 
 fect good faith with which he was accustomed to give his es- 
 timates to the world : for I believe the above-named were the 
 only instances in which he did not say of celebrated men all 
 
 1 The house had been the residence of Milton, and now belonged to Jeremy 
 Bentham, over whose garden it looked.
 
 58 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 t\\e good that he thought, as well as the bad. But to put the 
 seal of his critical fiat to the fame of men whom he believed to 
 have treated him personally as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and 
 Southey were supposed by him to have done, was scarcely in 
 human nature. 
 
 The above was my first initiation into themes of this nature ; 
 and I must confess that the way in which Hazlitt stripped off 
 the attributes of divinity with which I had hitherto invested 
 those idols of my boyish worship, was not so unpalatable to 
 my taste as I should myself have expected it to be. The 
 truth is, we are not sorry to learn that any of our fellow-beings 
 are less immaculate or superlative in personal character than 
 our imaginations, excited by their written works, had led us to 
 suppose them : nor do I know that it in the least degree 
 interferes with the effect which their works are calculated to 
 produce upon us afterwards, or to impair those we already 
 possess. On the contrary, it perhaps aggrandizes our impres- 
 sions of them, from the seeming inadequacy of the source 
 whence they flow, and soothes our personal feelings into the 
 belief that we ourselves are not so immeasurably inferior to 
 these " gods of the earth " as we had been accustomed to 
 deem ourselves. We do not think the less of Shakespeare 
 for being told that he was a link-boy or a deer-stealer ; and 
 we do think very considerably less of Goethe from knowing 
 that he was, for his worldly wisdom, deemed fit to be the privy 
 councilor, and for his unimpeachable morals and manners the 
 personal friend and associate, of an absolute prince. The only 
 difference is, that after the new light has come to us, the pro- 
 duct is thenceforth one thing, and the producer another ; 
 whereas they were before inextricably linked and blended to- 
 gether ; and our impressions of the latter, as derived from the 
 former, besides being altogether gratuitous, were infinitely 
 more likely to be the false interpretation than the true one. 
 To which it may be added, that what the human soul instinct- 
 ively yearns for and reaches after, as the hart pants for the 
 water-brooks, is not this or that vague generality, or empty 
 and unmeaning abstraction, but THE TRUTH. Whatever it may
 
 HAZLITTS RESIDENCE. 59 
 
 be, or wheresoever it may lead, truth is the goal to which the 
 undiverted tendency of the human mind points all its affec- 
 tions ; and it is never satisfied or at rest till this is reached. 
 The natural and healthful condition of any given mind may, in 
 a great degree, be estimated by the strength or weakness with 
 which it retains and is acted upon by this bias ; and the lin- 
 gering love which is perpetually pointing to it, after it has been 
 destroyed by the conventional ordinances of the world, is a 
 proof and a measure of its original amount. We love all 
 other things for something else not inherent in themselves ; 
 but we love the truth for itself alone. In this sense it is that 
 " Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty." We desire, first and fore- 
 most, to know what a thing is : it is time enough afterwards 
 to inquire the why and wherefore the how and when. 
 These are very well as matters of amusement and curiosity ; 
 but the truth is the only pabulum of our mental and moral ex- 
 istence the only real necessity .the only veritable "staff 
 of life." We can live by it in health and vigor, deprived of 
 all other things ; and with, all others, that wanting, we pine 
 and pule and fret away our fruitless days, in an empty and un- 
 easy search after that which is not to be found. Nor when 
 the truth is once attained on any given point of inquiry, is the 
 searcher at a moment's loss in the recognition of it, nor does 
 he seek to proceed another step in his pursuit. They say 
 " marriages are made in heaven," and that when the objects 
 destined for each other meet, the recognition is instant and 
 mutual. At least it is so with Truth and the Human Soul ; and 
 it is a marriage which, when once consummated, cannot know 
 division or divorce. We may pass from the cradle to the 
 grave without meeting with this bride of our souls ; or we may 
 meet with a thousand "false Florizels," and mistake each of 
 them for the true one ; but we cannot meet with the true one 
 and mistake or reject her. It is not in the nature of things. 
 
 The reader will I hope excuse this digression, in favor of 
 the occasion which suggested itself ; for if ever there was a 
 human mind devoted and self-sacrificed to the love of truth, 
 it was that of William Hazlitt ; and he pursued the search of
 
 60 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 it with a fearless pertinacity only equaled by the sagacity 
 which pointed out and applied the means and materials of the 
 discovery. This love of truth was the leading feature of his 
 mind, and it was the key to all its weaknesses, errors, and in- 
 consistencies, as well as to all its extraordinary powers and 
 the successful application of them. He used to boast of 
 being " a good hater." If the boast and the habit were un- 
 charitable ones, they were the offspring of that love of truth 
 which was the passion of his soul, and that power of eliciting 
 it which was the great characteristic of his intellect. If, 
 while conscious of his own errors and failings, he felt and ex- 
 pressed too bitter a scorn for those of others, it was because 
 others instead of owning and despising their frailties as he 
 did, insist on monstering them into virtues and subjects of per- 
 sonal vanity, and the world abets and encourages them in the 
 mischievous self-deception. If, instead of being content to use 
 his great powers in calmly exposing the false pretensions of 
 the world to that contempt which they merit, he was too apt to 
 seize upon them with a savage fury, and tear them to pieces, as 
 the wild beast tears and rends the cloak that is flung upon it 
 to blind its eyes from the attacks of its enemies, it was because 
 his self-control was less than his detestation of the debasing 
 consequences that spring from the admission of those preten- 
 sions ; it was because it drove him mad to see whole nations, 
 generation after generation, dragged like slaves and idiots at 
 the chariot-wheels of a few empty and vulgar idols bound 
 there by lilliputian threads that a breath might have broken. 
 
 This first lengthened interview of mine with Hazlitt ended 
 by his promising to let me have the MS. of his lectures, to do 
 what I pleased with, and we parted on a better footing than 
 we had met ; though evidently with as little prospect as before 
 of our ever becoming intimate associates : for the way in 
 which he handled his quondam friends, as above described, 
 did anything but decrease the dread I had been taught to en- 
 tertain of his personal character.
 
 IN THE STREETS. 6 1 
 
 IN THE STREETS. 
 
 As it is of my intimacy alone with Hazlitt that I propose to 
 treat in any detail, I shall pass hastily over that mere desul- 
 tory acquaintance which ensued on his delivery of the lectures 
 above alluded to. Two or three trifling but characteristic 
 circumstances growing out of that acquaintance are, however, 
 worth referring to. 
 
 I well remember, after the successful delivery of his first 
 lecture on the Comic Writers, my walking home with Hazlitt 
 from the institution to his house in Westminster. Let those 
 who knew the personal bearing and habits of William Hazlitt, 
 conceive of a man almost a stranger to him who had only 
 exchanged words with him in a sort of official capacity let 
 the intimates of Hazlitt conceive of such a person volunteer- 
 ing to walk home with him, for the purpose of having a little 
 pleasant conversation by the way ! Nay, in my innocence, 
 I actually offered him my arm, WHICH HE TOOK ! and so we 
 walked, arm in arm, through the whole of Fleet Street, the 
 Strand, Parliament Street, etc. 
 
 The " general reader " will wonder what there was extraor- 
 dinary in this ; but the initiated will not believe it. They 
 can fancy him sitting sulkily in the stocks, or walking doggedly 
 round in the pillory ; for a superior physical force might have 
 placed him there, and being there, he was too much of a logi- 
 cian to quarrel with necessity. But to walk straight home at 
 ten o'clock at night, " in a respectable and gentlemanlike 
 manner ! " It cannot have been ! Arm in arm, too, and with 
 a very young gentleman in a point device costume ! I think I 
 hear Charles Lamb exclaim, " Why, the angel Gabriel could 
 not have persuaded Hazlitt to walk arm in arm with him for 
 half the length of Southampton Buildings." Perhaps not 
 but with a writer in " Blackivootfs Magazine " it was differ- 
 ent ; one, too, who had tacitly engaged to give a favorable 
 account of him in that terror and bugbear of his coterie. The 
 chance was not to be thrown away ; for Hazlitt, with all his 
 boasted non-conformity, piqued himself on his prudence and
 
 62 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 world-wisdom, when he thought the occasion of sufficient 
 moment to his personal comfort to call for these. In fact, 
 this trait formed the only serious stain in his personal charac- 
 ter, or rather it sprang out of that quality which was so. 
 
 Let me here, once for all, get over this only painful and 
 repugnant portion of the task I have undertaken ; for that once 
 off my conscience, I shall go forward much more to my own 
 satisfaction, and therefore to the reader's. In resolving to tell 
 what I know, or have been led to feel, of William Hazlitt, I 
 have determined to "nothing extenuate." I at once, then, 
 confess that the plague-spot of his personal character was an 
 ingrained selfishness, which more or less influenced and modi- 
 fied all the other points of his nature. 
 
 This is a hard stone to fling at a man of whom one is proud 
 to be deemed the friend in spite of it. But now that it cannot 
 hurt him, the truth may be told : nay, I verily believe that, had 
 it been told in his life-time, in the spirit in which it is told now, 
 he would have had the magnanimity not merely to admit the 
 charge, but to forgive the maker of it. And if this noble frank- 
 ness is not enough to wash out the " damned spot," it may at 
 least serve as, in fact, it did serve in practice to prevent 
 the spread of the poison to the vital parts of his character. 
 
 Let me still further guard against being mistaken by Haz- 
 litt's friends and misinterpreted by his enemies. The defect 
 which I have noticed in his character was little in amount. I 
 never knew him do a base or mean action ; and I have known 
 him do many that might fairly claim to be deemed magnani- 
 mous, in the ordinary acceptation of the term. It would be 
 the basest of libels upon Hazlitt to describe him as a mean- 
 souled man. But the tendency, the taint was there ; though it 
 seldom showed itself in overt acts, and never without a sort of 
 half-struggle to overcome it ; or in default of that, a half-os- 
 tentatious exposure of the weakness, as one of which he was 
 not merely conscious, but took to himself more shame for it 
 than his worst enemies would have cast upon him. 
 
 I shall leave it to those enemies to collect proofs and illus- 
 trations of this " original sin " of Hazlitt's temperament. I
 
 IN THE STREETS. 63 
 
 have done my self-prescribed duty in declaring the existence 
 of the evil, and shall now quit the painful and ungrateful 
 theme, after having ventured on one more remark in connec- 
 tion with it. I have said that the above-named trait in Haz- 
 litt's character was, like Othello's declension into the vale of 
 years, " not much." I will add, that like that, it was (prac- 
 tically) fatal to his peace of mind ; for he could not choose but 
 be deeply conscious of it, and this gave him an ever-present 
 sense of his own comparative unworthiness, and made him 
 listen more eagerly to the suggestions of that self-raised 
 demon, who, lago-like, was ever at his elbow, urging him on 
 to insane jealousies and suspicions of the good faith of those 
 on whom his heart and spirit yearned to rest and repose. 
 Hazlitt had strong and burning affections, which could never 
 find a fit object whereon to lean for support ; so that, like the 
 projections of a disease-worn frame, at whatever points they 
 touched external objects, they corroded, and cankered, and 
 turned to poisonous sores. Had Hazlitt believed that any one 
 human being (especially one of the other sex), whatever his or 
 her station or character, could have loved him with an un- 
 divided and unfailing love, he would have been a happy and a 
 happy-making man. But the unfounded belief which beset 
 him, that he was despised and contemned wherever he turned 
 for sympathy, and the still stronger belief that he in some sort 
 deserved to be so, made and kept him the most miserable of 
 human beings. 
 
 To return to our " progress " from Blackfriars to West- 
 minster, after Hazlitt's first lecture on the Comic Writers. I 
 remember he declined my offered arm at first which I in- 
 terpreted as an evidence of his excessive modesty ! I pressed 
 it, however, and he then took it but as if it had been a bar 
 of hot iron holding it gingerly, with the tips of his fingers, 
 much after the fashion in which he used to shake hands with 
 those friends who were inadvertent or absent enough to proffer 
 that ceremony. 
 
 Nevertheless, we talked bravely by the way (though every 
 third sentence on his part was concluded by a " Sir ") till we
 
 64 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 got to that broad part of Parliament Street opposite to the Ad- 
 miralty and the Horse Guards. Here, however, we met with 
 a rather unseemly interruption, in the form of sundry petition- 
 ers ; and I shall never forget the air of infantine simplicity 
 with which Hazlitt received and answered them. That I 
 should see anything exceptionable in the acquaintance seemed 
 not to enter his thoughts ; but his surprise and horror were 
 extreme at the breach of etiquette committed by his unhappy 
 firote'ge'es, in thus addressing him in the presence of a third 
 person ! And this feeling was evidently not on his own ac- 
 count, but on mine. His forbearance and charity for the " un- 
 fortunate " persons in question were without limits ; and he 
 did not care if all the world knew it, and witnessed the results 
 that ensued whenever his pocket was on a par with his human- 
 ity in this particular. But it by no means followed that others 
 might have reached the same philosophic pitch of benevo- 
 lence : and, with the fewest " prejudices " of any man I ever 
 knew, Hazlitt was the last to shock those of other people. His 
 consternation on the above occasion was extreme accordingly, 
 and his uneasiness and confusion were in proportion ; for he 
 found himself between the horns of a dilemma. He must 
 either run the risk of horrifying me by entertaining these not 
 very creditable applicants, or he must outrage them by a harsh 
 and unlocked for repulse. I will not say whether his humanity 
 was stronger than his sense of the bienseances j or whether he 
 might not consider the incident as a fairly-earned penalty for 
 the breach of them which / had committed, in forcing my 
 company where the desire of companionship was evidently not 
 mutual ; not to mention that it might prove a convenient guard 
 against a repetition of the intrusion. Certain it is, that the 
 claimants in question were repulsed with the gentlest hand in 
 the world. 
 
 I shall make no apology for relating this incident ; for those 
 who feel a sufficient interest in the character of the late Will- 
 iam Hazlitt to have accompanied me thus far in my recollec- 
 tions of him, are not likely to be troubled with that false deli- 
 cacy which could alone have induced or demanded the sup- 
 pression of it.
 
 IN THE STREETS. 65 
 
 I shall conclude the record of my first acquaintance with 
 Hazlitt, by referring to another incident, still more character- 
 istic than the above, of the mind and character I would help 
 to delineate. I had, as the reader has seen, been the occasion 
 of securing to Hazlitt what he considered and called " the 
 best job " he ever had as a professed author ; for, besides the 
 sum he was to receive for the delivery of the course of lect- 
 ures, he had sold the copyright of them for a handsome price. 
 I had, moreover, not merely kept his lectures from being 
 abused in " Blackwood's," but had praised them there to the 
 full amount of his expectations. 1 And, to crown the climax 
 of (so-called) obligation, I had, if I remember rightly, at his 
 earnest request, procured the consent of the committee of 
 managers to pay him in advance the whole or part of the price 
 of his services ; a benefit, in his estimation, " worth the other 
 two." Such was the relative state of things between us, when, 
 in an unfortunate article which I wrote in " Blackwood's," I 
 happened to use some phrase or illustration which he (Hazlitt) 
 had used on the same subject just before, in the " London 
 Magazine," and without referring to him as the origin of the 
 joke, or witticism, or whatever it was : for it is not worth the 
 trouble of turning to the passage for verification. 
 
 Let the reader judge of my mingled horror and astonish- 
 ment at finding, in the next number of the " London Maga- 
 zine," a ferocious personal attack on myself, almost by name, 
 in which my innocent and unconscious adoption of a worth- 
 less phrase or word of his was characterized as an atrocious 
 appropriation of his property, and the doer of it written down, 
 in so many words, a " petty-larceny rascal," and threatened 
 with redoubled vengeance in future if he did not leave off his 
 pickpocket proceedings ! 
 
 1 In order to show that Hazlitt was not unreasonable or exigent in his require- 
 ments in cases of this nature, I subjoin the note he wrote me on the occasion of my 
 sending him in MS. the article in question : 
 
 " DEAR SIR, I am very well satisfied with the article, and obliged to you for it. 
 I am afraid the censure is truer than the praise. It will be of great service if they 
 insert it entire, which, however, I hope. . Your obliged, 
 
 W. HAZLITT."
 
 66 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 Being totally unconscious of any other cause of offense 
 against Hazlitt than the above, I confess that the savage man- 
 ner in which he made his reprisals both shocked and disgusted 
 me ; and so matters rested between us for a considerable 
 length of time, and of course without any thought on my part 
 of the acquaintance being renewed ; all the ill that I had 
 heard of Hazlitt being thus confirmed to me by this (as I then 
 considered it) atrocious, because wholly unprovoked act. 
 
 It is astonishing how quickly a personal proof of this kind 
 brings conviction to one's mind on a doubtful point, when 
 nothing else can. I had heard repeated instances of Hazlitt 
 committing unprovoked outrages of this description on his 
 best friends ; but knowing and feeling them to be against nat- 
 ure, I would not allow myself to believe them. But the mo- 
 ment he committed one of a similar kind against myself, I not 
 merely believed it, but believed all the rest in virtue of it ; 
 though it was even more inexplicable, on any received princi- 
 ple of human action, than all the rest, and more against all my 
 previous experience. 
 
 I hope the reader anticipates the true explanation in my 
 case, and, through it, in all the rest. The fact is, Hazlitt (as 
 I learned afterwards) believed that I had committed against 
 him what he justly deemed an unpardonable offense. I had, 
 he thought, cut him in the street ! And whenever anything of 
 this kind happened to him, there was no limit to the " wild 
 kind of justice " which he was disposed to wreak upon the 
 offending party. I do not believe that he could have slept in 
 peace till he had righted himself, in any case of this kind ; and 
 when the individual was not one against whom he could use 
 his pen, he made his tongue the medium of reprisal. 
 
 I do not know how it may have been with Hazlitt's friends 
 in cases similar to that which I have just referred to, or how 
 it might have been with myself had I at that time ranked 
 among them ; though I believe that, even in that case, my 
 angry feelings (if I had experienced any) would have arisen 
 solely from his supposing me capable of the unspeakable 
 meanness in question. But merely as an acquaintance, and
 
 DINNER WITH HAZLITT AT JOHN SCOTT 'S. 6/ 
 
 that acquaintance sought by myself, and almost forced upon 
 him, I (on receiving the explanation of the act, and believing 
 that he was satisfied as to the alleged cause for it) thought 
 then, and think now, that he had not only a right to do what 
 he did but that there was a kind of magnanimity in flinging aside 
 all the supposed claims of obligation which I have alluded to 
 in the outset of this little history (and which were no obliga- 
 tions at all, but done purely to please and satisfy myself}, and 
 " doing himself a pleasure and a right," out of that pure and 
 irrepressible sense and love of abstract justice which are 
 among the noblest and rarest attributes of the human mind, 
 and were especially conspicuous in his. The " taste " in which 
 the thing was done is another matter, and one which, luckily, 
 Hazlitt cared nothing about ; for had he been the man to do 
 so, the world would have been without some of the noblest 
 writings of their class which it can boast. 
 
 DINNER WITH HAZLITT AT JOHN SCOTT'S. 
 
 Shortly after the period of my receiving the above explana- 
 tion of Hazlitt's supposed outrage upon me, I was sitting one 
 morning with the late John Scott, at his lodgings in York 
 Street, Covent Garden, when he told me that he was every 
 moment expecting Hazlitt to call on him by appointment ; and 
 knowing my then feelings about the attack in the magazine 
 (for it was he who had furnished me with an explanation of it, 
 and from Hazlitt's own lips), he proposed that I should meet 
 him, but not then, for he felt that it would not be safe to 
 introduce Hazlitt unprepared into the room with a man whom 
 he (Hazlitt) felt that he had outraged. In fact, so intense was 
 Hazlitt's sense of what was due to a man's immediate personal 
 feelings when face to face with him, that he would never have 
 forgiven Scott the indiscretion of bringing himself and me to- 
 gether again, without the full consent of both parties. Briefly, 
 it was settled that we should dine with Scott the same day, if 
 Hazlitt did not object ; and accordingly we met as if nothing 
 had happened : for Hazlitt's sensitiveness on matters of this 
 nature precluded the slightest allusion to the indirect occasion
 
 68 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 of our meeting, nor was it ever afterwards referred to in the 
 most remote manner ; and the rest of the day (and night) was 
 spent in talk such as I scarcely remember to have enjoyed 
 either before or since. I never knew Hazlitt so entertaining 
 and brilliant, yet so subtle, penetrating, and profound. He 
 seemed determined to make me amends for the undeserved 
 injury he had done me. It was also, I remember, the first 
 fair renewal of John Scott's intimacy with him, which had 
 been broken off for several years ; and they mutually made 
 it the occasion of such a vivid and various calling back of the 
 scenes, characters, and histories of the then, alas ! defunct 
 coterie who were accustomed to meet at Basil Montagu's, 
 Charles Lamb's, Leigh Hunt's, and all those who had once 
 " called Admiral Burney friend," that I became as familiar 
 with them all as if I had been one among them a boon the 
 bestowal of which was like adding a score of years to one's 
 life, "without the illness should attend them." Scott, too, 
 who had recently returned from a lengthened residence in 
 Italy, had many excellent things to tell, which were new to 
 Hazlitt (who was as good a listener as he was a talker) ; in par- 
 ticular, several capital ones about Lord Byron, with whom he 
 had been recently spending a week at Venice. 
 
 Two of these anecdotes I particularly remember. Until 
 their meeting at Venice, there had been an estrangement 
 between Byron and Scott, in consequence of the part the 
 latter had taken in the " Champion," relative to the publica- 
 tion of the celebrated " Farewell ; " but they were now rec- 
 onciled, and were on the water together in Byron's gondola, 
 under circumstances which led Scott to express a strong sense 
 of danger as to their position. " Oh ! " said Byron, in a tone 
 of perfect seriousness, " you need not be afraid of anything 
 happening to you while you are with n\z,forive are friends 
 now." And Scott explained that Byron had the most intimate 
 persuasion, that any of his friends who had quarreled with 
 him were never safe from some strange accident, until they 
 had ".made it up." 
 
 The other anecdote related to one of those bonnes fortunes
 
 DINNER WITH HAZLITT A T JOHN SCOTT'S. 69 
 
 on which Byron so much piqued himself. He told Scott, 
 that during the heyday of his popularity, he was on a visit 
 at a noble house in the country, where a large party of both 
 sexes was assembled ; and that among them was a lady of 
 rank, beauty, and immaculate reputation, with whom he fell 
 desperately in love, and determined to urge his passion, not- 
 withstanding the presence of her husband, to whom she was 
 evidently attached. For several days his unwearied assidu- 
 ities produced no effect beyond that of an evident desire, on 
 the lady's part, to avoid them without infringing the usages 
 of society. Two or three times, during the siege and defense, 
 Byron had taken opportunities of offering the lady a billet- 
 doux, in which he had expressed his passion in terms not, as 
 he thought, to be resisted by mortal woman, at least in the 
 class of society in which this one moved ; but on every occa- 
 sion she had contrived to avoid the proffered insult, without 
 being obliged to recognize it as such. At last, as Byron de- 
 clared, he grew desperate, and determined to run all risks 
 rather than be foiled in his pursuit. Confident in what he be- 
 lieved to be his knowledge of the female heart, he contrived 
 to be conversing with the lady, in a billiard-room that was 
 situated apart from the rest of the house, at the precise mo- 
 ment when he knew that her husband would enter the room. 
 The husband entered : at that moment Byron pressed into 
 her hand his letter ; in the alarm and confusion of the mo- 
 ment she took it concealed it hastily he instantly left her 
 and (so, at least, Byron declared) the daring ruse suc- 
 ceeded ! She " deliberated " for an instant whether or not 
 she should denounce to her husband the insulting outrage ; 
 and in that instant she was lost ! 
 
 Such was Byron's account of one of the many love-pas- 
 sages of his strange life. Let those believe it who can. 
 
 From this night it was that my intimacy with Hazlitt com- 
 menced. Henceforward, with the exception of two or three 
 brief intervals, when either Hazlitt or I was abroad, we met 
 almost daily ; and although our intercourse was wholly free 
 from conventional restraint, neither of us ever disguising or
 
 7O WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 concealing an opinion or a sentiment in deference to those of 
 the other, our intimacy was never broken, or even jarred or 
 disturbed, from the above-named period to that of his death 
 an interval of more than twelve years ! This fact may well 
 bear a note of admiration for those who knew the nature of 
 Hazlitt's mind and temperament, and the doubts, suspicions, 
 and misgivings to which they perpetually made him a prey, 
 and the total incapacity that he labored under, of abstaining 
 from acting upon those doubts and suspicions as if they were 
 demonstrated truths. 
 
 On the other hand, it is proper for me to caution the reader 
 against supposing that, at any period of our intercourse, any- 
 thing like a friendship subsisted between Hazlitt and myself, 
 in the "sentimental" sense of the phrase. It was a melan- 
 choly defect of his mind, that it was wholly incapable of either 
 exciting or entertaining any such sentiment. I have (with 
 deep reluctance) glanced at one of the natural reasons of 
 this sad deficiency. Others of an adventitious character, but 
 more than sufficient to account for it, will develop themselves 
 hereafter. In the mean time, it is no less true than it may 
 seem paradoxical, that, with the most social disposition of any 
 man I ever met with, and an active and ever present sympathy 
 with the claims, the wants, and the feelings of every human be- 
 ing he approached, Hazlitt was, even by nature, but by cir- 
 cumstance still more so, a lone man, living, moving, and hav- 
 ing his being, for and to himself exclusively ; as utterly cut 
 off from fulfilling and exercising the ordinary pursuits and 
 affections of his kind, and of his nature, as if he had been 
 bound hand and foot in a dungeon, or banished to a desert. 
 And so, indeed, he was bound in the gloomiest of all dun- 
 geons that built for us by our own unbridled passions 
 banished to that dreariest of all deserts, spread out for us by 
 seared hopes and blighted affections. 
 
 We are told that on the summit of one of those columns 
 which form the magnificent ruins of Hadrian's Temple, in the 
 plain of Athens, there used to dwell a hermit, who never de- 
 scended from his strangely-chosen abode ; owing his scanty
 
 DINNER WITH HAZLITT A T JOHN SCOTT S. 7 1 
 
 food and support to the mingled admiration and curiosity of 
 the peasants who inhabited the plain below. Something like 
 this was the position of William Hazlitt, from the period at 
 which I first became acquainted with him. Self-banished from 
 the social world, no less by the violence of his own passions, 
 than by those petty regards of custom and society which could 
 not or would not tolerate the trifling aberrations from external 
 form and usage engendered by a mind like this ; at the same 
 time, those early hopes, born of the French Revolution, which 
 first awakened his soul from its ante-natal sleep, blighted in 
 their very fruition, and the stream that fed them flung back 
 upon its source, to stagnate there, and turn into a poisonous 
 hatred of the supposed causes of their disappointment ; his 
 spirit refused to look abroad or be comforted. Such being 
 the melancholy condition of his intellectual being at the 
 period I am speaking of, he became, as regarded himself 
 personally, heedless of all things but the immediate gratifica- 
 tion of his momentary wants or wishes ; careless of personal 
 character, indifferent to literary fame, forgetful of the past, 
 reckless of the future ; and yet so exquisitely alive to the 
 claims and the virtues of all these, that the abandonment of 
 his birthright in every one of them opened a separate canker 
 in his heart, and made his life a living emblem of that early 
 death which it foretokened. 
 
 Thus (like the hermit alluded to above) perpetually sur- 
 rounded by objects of interest, beauty, and grandeur, and en- 
 abled by the elevated position which his noble intellect gave 
 him, to look abroad over them all with the ken of an almost 
 superhuman intelligence, he yet dwelt amidst them all "a man 
 forbid ; " self-exiled from that social intercourse which he was 
 born to brighten and to love ; rejected and reviled by his own 
 heart and affections ; dreaded, and therefore hated, by his 
 foes ; feared, and therefore not loved, even by his (so-called) 
 " friends : " with such a man, so constituted and so circum- 
 stanced, there could exist no reciprocity of personal sentiment, 
 no fair interchange of affection, and, therefore, no true friend- 
 ship. So that (recurring to the immediate occasion of the fore-
 
 72 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 going remarks) I repeat, these Recollections must not be re- 
 ceived as the blind tribute of an overweening affection, seeking 
 to defend from obloquy a sort of other self ; but, as a free-will 
 offering, urged by a sense of justice towards a man whose 
 errors and weakness have been " monstered " into the attri- 
 butes of a demon ; while his many rare and excellent qualities 
 his noble simplicity of heart and mind his irrepressible 
 love of truth and justice and his almost sublime hatred of 
 that oppression and wrong which a systematic violation of 
 those had so long spread abroad over human hopes and insti- 
 tutions throughout the world : all these were overlooked or 
 disregarded, or, when not so, were held up to the world as their 
 direct opposites as themes for obloquy, rather than claims 
 to admiration. 
 
 PERSONAL BEARING AND ITS CAUSES. 
 
 Hazlitt is considered by some of his friends to have had 
 many points of intellectual character and temperament in 
 common with Rousseau. But I do not know how they would 
 set about to make out the resemblance, except in one isolated 
 feature that of the morbid feeling which possessed Hazlitt 
 as to the sinister effects of his personal appearance and man- 
 ner, on ordinary observers. Rousseau fancied that his friends 
 were always hatching plots and conspiracies against him ; in 
 like manner, Hazlitt fancied that everybody (except his friends) 
 who looked upon him, perceived something about him that 
 was strange and outre. 
 
 There was about as much and as little foundation for the 
 feeling in the one case as the other : it was in fact the result 
 of a consciousness in both that there -was something within, 
 which each would have desired to conceal. But there was 
 this vital difference between the two, that in the case of Rous- 
 seau the weaknesses and errors of which he feared the dis- 
 covery and promulgation, were such as all men consent to be 
 ashamed of: whereas, in the case of Hazlitt, his extreme 
 sensitiveness pointed at failings that could hurt nobody but 
 himself. Moreover, what he chiefly feared from the eyes of
 
 PERSONAL BEARING AND ITS CAUSES. 73 
 
 the world was, that they should see in him, not himself, but 
 that effigy of him which the inventions of his political and 
 personal enemies had set up ; he feared that vulgar eyes 
 would discover in him, not the man he was, but the " pimpled 
 Hazlitt " that his Tory critics had placarded him on every 
 bare wall that knew no better throughout the empire. 
 
 There are few things that exercise a more marked and un- 
 equivocal influence over the lives and characters of men of 
 great susceptibility of temperament, than any personal pecul- 
 iarity, especially when it is one obvious to all the world : 
 witness the case of Byron, to whose lameness might probably 
 be traced every one of the leading events and features of his 
 strange and melancholy career.. And the same might per- 
 haps be said of Hazlitt, with this aggravating qualification 
 that in his case the peculiarity was wholly imaginary, except 
 in so far as the imagination, while acting upon his mind, made 
 that into a fact which had else been only a figment of his own 
 brain. If Hazlitt had not in his moody mpments fancied him- 
 self a mark for vulgar and ignorant wonder " to point the slow 
 unmoving finger at," he might have been living among us now, 
 one of the most delightful ornaments of social life, and the 
 noblest examples of the advancing spirit of his day and coun- 
 try the pride and pleasure of his friends, and himself the 
 happy witness of the coming on of that glorious dawn of bet- 
 ter things which his own writings have materially helped to 
 bring about. 
 
 The result of this morbid imagination this one idea 
 which haunted him like a visible phantom this falsehood, 
 which knowing it to be such, he nevertheless palmed off upon 
 himself as a palpable truth, till at last he believed it the 
 result of this was, that, with the most social disposition in 
 the world, and with social qualities of unsurpassed amount 
 and value, Hazlitt, during the latter years of his life, lived 
 almost alone in the woj-ld, simply because he could not per- 
 suade himself to seek that social intercourse which he had 
 lost the power of purchasing at the ordinary price, of comply- 
 ing with all the minutiae in the received usages of modern life
 
 74 WILLIAM IIAZLITT. 
 
 and manners. He felt, in this respect, like a man who is trav- 
 elling in a strange or savage country, with his pockets full of 
 gold, for which nobody will give him bread in exchange, be- 
 cause his coin has not the conventional stamp of the place, or 
 because the people he has to deal with set no value on any- 
 thing but those smooth shells and glittering beads with which 
 he has neglected to provide himself. 
 
 There can be little doubt that Hazlitt's manner, superin- 
 duced upon him by his own morbid mistake as to his personal 
 appearance, had more to do with his peculiar and painful des- 
 tiny, as regards the private relations of life, than any one but 
 himself would perhaps have been willing to admit. And 
 therefore it is that it becomes a point worthy of especial notice 
 in these Recollections. Indeed, there probably never occurred 
 a more striking example of the vast influence of external 
 trifles over the moral and intellectual condition of man ; nor 
 can I conceive a finer theme for the pen of Hazlitt himself to 
 have descanted upon and illustrated ; for he was even more 
 intensely aware of the facts of the case, and of their causes 
 and consequences, than if any one else had been, the subject 
 of them. And this knowledge was a perpetual aggravation of 
 the evil, without, on the other hand, contributing in the smallest 
 degree to its cure. It was one of those fatal cases in which 
 the sufferer " weeps the more because he weeps in vain." 
 
 Nothing could be more curious, and at times affecting, than 
 to observe (as those who thoroughly knew Hazlitt might often 
 do) the working of these feelings, in his occasional intercourse 
 with society. It might be supposed, perhaps, that the exter- 
 nal deference and respect, not to mention the personal hom- 
 age and admiration, of a man like Hazlitt, were reserved for 
 the distinguished philosophers, men of science, poets, schol- 
 ars, and statesmen of the day. Alas ! the Chancellor Oxen- 
 steirn himself had not a more contemptuous notion of the 
 means and materials it takes to make " a great man," in the 
 estimation of the world (whether of fact or of opinion) which 
 great men are destined to govern. Accordingly, in the pres- 
 ence of these, even the most deservedly celebrated among
 
 PERSONAL BEARING AND ITS CAUSES. 75 
 
 them, Hazlitt felt himself perfectly at ease and on an equality. 
 But bring him face to face with one of those sleek favorites of 
 fortune who are supposed to find especial favor in fair eyes, or 
 (above all) one of those happily constituted persons who com- 
 bine the several attributes and peculiarities of manner, look, 
 attire, etc., which go to form the "gentleman" of modern 
 times, and he was like a man awe-struck, and confounded 
 with a sense of his own comparative insignificance. 
 
 I remember once gaining his leave to introduce to him a per- 
 son whose only error in these respects was, that he carried them 
 all to the verge of coxcombry ; but who, en revanche, had the 
 most earnest and sincere admiration for Hazlitt, and was, in all 
 other respects, a cultivated and accomplished man. My friend 
 had long solicited me to bring about this meeting ; and though, 
 in the early part of my acquaintance with Hazlitt, I had 
 avoided it, as a service of danger to all parties, I soon found 
 that it might be effected, not only without any peril to my 
 friend, but with real gratification to Hazlitt himself, who had 
 the most unmingled admiration for the qualities in question, 
 unimpaired by the slightest touch of envy towards the owner 
 of them. 
 
 The meeting took place at Hazlitt's chambers ; and after a 
 little of the same sort of blank embarrassment and school-boy 
 shyness that one may fancy a country recluse might have 
 exhibited on being called upon to sustain a personal interview 
 with George the Fourth, I never knew Hazlitt spend a happier 
 evening, or one more entirely free from those occasional fall- 
 ings back into his other and less natural self, which were at 
 once the sin and the curse of his social life. With the excep- 
 tion of this one occasion, I do not know that I have ever 
 passed an evening with him, the intellectual enjoyment of 
 which was not at intervals broken in upon by looks passing 
 over his noble countenance, which, where they did not move 
 the observer to terror or wonder, could not fail to excite the 
 deepest pain and pity. But on the evening I am referring to, 
 I particularly remarked that nothing of this kind occurred. . 
 
 The reason of this, on after reflection, became obvious to
 
 76 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 me. Our talk was, almost without exception, on the ordinary 
 topics of the passing hour the public and social events of 
 the day, the theatres, the actors and actresses, our mutual 
 friends (not forgetting their weaknesses), a little" scandal about 
 Queen Elizabeth ? in short, anything and everything but 
 books, book-making, book-learning, and those exclusively lit- 
 erary themes which Hazlitt liked less than any others that 
 could be started. The consequence was, that old associations 
 and painful recollections never once came back to him ; broken 
 friendships and buried affections found no unoccupied place 
 in his mind on which to cast their shadows ; present annoy- 
 ances were crowded out of doors ; future contingencies were 
 as if they could never happen ; and the too often moody, 
 gloomy, constrained, and taciturn recluse, was (to the no small 
 astonishment of my other friend) free and fresh-hearted as a 
 school-boy among his mates gay and voluble as a bird in 
 spring making the room echo with those shouts of laughter, 
 in the thorough heartiness of which no one surpassed him. 
 
 T.he strange and unhappy mistake of Hazlitt, respecting the 
 effect of his manner and bearing on casual observers, was 
 peculiarly active in regard to women ; nor could any evidences, 
 however strong and unequivocal (and the reader will see here- 
 after that such were far from wanting), remove or weaken this 
 feeling, which amounted to nothing short of monomania. In 
 proof of this I could, if the nature of the case permitted, al- 
 lege numerous instances in which the most indisputable marks 
 of female favor and distinction (whether accorded to his intel- 
 lectual pretension or not, no matter), were looked upon and 
 resented by him as personal affronts ! In his numerous "af- 
 fairs of the heart " (for, like his favorite, John Buncle, he was 
 always in love with somebody or other), to the fair one's indif- 
 ference he was indifferent, and continued to love on : if she 
 recognized his homage and was angry at it, he accepted the 
 token as a kind of involuntary compliment ; but if she smiled 
 on him, he was confounded and cured ! It was clear that 
 she meant, first to entangle, and then to laugh at and insult 
 him !
 
 PERSONAL BEARING AND ITS CAUSES. 77 
 
 I may have some singular matter to unfold in connection 
 with this part of my subject hereafter. In the mean time, the 
 curious reader is growing anxious for the removal of the veil 
 which hides this supposed Mokannafrom view. What will he 
 or she say, when, in dropping it, I exhibit a form of excellent 
 symmetry, surmounted by one of the noblest heads and faces 
 that ever symbolled forth a refined, lofty, capacious, and pen- 
 etrating intellect. 
 
 The truth is, that for depth, force, and variety of intellectual 
 expression, a finer head and face than Hazlitt's were never 
 seen. I speak of them when his countenance was not dimmed 
 and obscured by illness, or clouded and deformed by those 
 fearful indications of internal passion which he never even at- 
 tempted to conceal. The expression of Hazlitt's face, when 
 anything was said in his presence that seriously offended him, 
 or when any peculiarly painful recollection passed across his 
 mind, was truly awful more so than can be conceived as 
 within the capacity of the human countenance ; except, per- 
 haps, by those who have witnessed Edmund Kean's last scene 
 of " Sir Giles Overreach " from the front of the pit. But 
 when he was in good health, and in a tolerable humor with 
 himself and the world, his face was more truly and entirely 
 answerable to the intellect that spoke through it, than any 
 other I ever saw, either in life or on canvas ; and its crown- 
 ing portion, the brow and forehead, was, to my thinking, quite 
 unequaled, for mingled capacity and beauty. 
 
 For those who desire a more particular description, I will 
 add, that Hazlitt's features though not cast in any received 
 classical mould, were regular in their formation, perfectly con- 
 sonant with each other, and so finely " chiseled " (as the 
 phrase is), that they produced a much more prominent and 
 striking effect than their scale of size might have led one to 
 expect. The forehead, as I have hinted, was magnificent ; the 
 nose precisely that (combining strength with lightness and 
 elegance) which physiognomists have assigned as evidence of 
 a fine and highly cultivated taste ; though there was a peculiar 
 character about the nostrils, like that observable in those of
 
 78 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 a fiery and unruly horse. The mouth, from its ever-changing 
 form and character, could scarcely be described, except as to 
 its astonishingly varied power of expresssion. which was equal 
 to, and greatly resembled, that of Edmund Kean. His eyes, 
 I should say, were not good. They were never brilliant, and 
 there was a furtive and at times a sinister look about them, as 
 they glanced suspiciously from under their overhanging brows, 
 that conveyed a very unpleasant impression to those who did 
 not know him. And they were seldom directed frankly and 
 fairly towards you ; as if he were afraid that you might read 
 in them what was passing in his mind concerning you. His 
 head was nobly formed and placed ; with (until the last few 
 years of his life) a profusion of coal-black hair, richly curled ; 
 and his person was of the middle height, rather slight, but well 
 formed and put together. 
 
 Yet all these advantages were worse than thrown away, by 
 the strange and ungainly manner that at times accompanied 
 them. Hazlitt entered a room as if he had been brought back 
 to it in custody ; he shuffled sidelong to the nearest chair, sat 
 himself down upon one corner of it, dropped his hat and his 
 eyes upon the floor, and, after having exhausted his stock of 
 conventional small talk in the words, ; ' It 's a fine day " 
 (whether it was so or not), seemed to resign himself moodily 
 to his fate. And if the talk did not take a turn that roused or 
 pleased him, thus he would sit, silent and half-absorbed, for 
 half an hour or half a minute, as the case might be, and then 
 get up suddenly, with a " Well, good morning," shuffle back to 
 the door, and blunder his way out, audibly muttering curses on 
 his folly, for willingly putting himself in the way of becoming 
 the laughing-stock of the servants ! for it was of that class 
 and intellectual grade of persons that Hazlitt alone stood in 
 awe. Of the few private houses to which his inclinations ever 
 led him, he perfectly well knew that, even if there had been 
 (which, as we have seen, there was not) anything unusual or 
 outrt in his appearance, his intellectual pretensions would 
 alone have been thought of. But there was no reaching the 
 drawing-room without running the gauntlet of the servants'
 
 PERSONAL BEARING AND ITS CAUSES. 79 
 
 hall ; and this it was that crushed and confounded him. I am 
 satisfied that Hazlitt never entered a room scarcely even his 
 own that he was not writhing under the feelings engendered 
 during his passage to it ; and that he never knocked at a door 
 without fearing that it might be opened by a new servant, who 
 would wonder what so " strange " a person could want with 
 their master or mistress. 
 
 To those who are not accustomed to the mental vagaries of 
 men of genius, this must seem like a species of insanity. But 
 there would, I think, be no difficulty in accounting for it on 
 perfectly rational principles ; at least, I am sure he would have 
 found no difficulty in doing so, even in his own case, much 
 less in that of another person. I shall not myself attempt this 
 explanation ; but I will venture to hint at the grounds of it, 
 because they belong to the subject of which I have undertaken 
 to treat. Those grounds are to be sought, as I conceive, first, 
 in that radical defect in Hazlitt's moral conformation, at which 
 I have reluctantly glanced in the outset of these Recollections. 
 Secondly, in that intensely vivid state of excitability in which 
 his intellectual faculties, and especially his imagination, at all 
 times existed, and that consequent intense perception of all 
 things within and about him, which showed him, as with a 
 microscopic eye, a thousand trifles that were invisible to ordi- 
 nary observation. Thirdly, that oppressive and overweening 
 self-consciousness which, as it were, projected the shadows 
 and lights of his own mind upon all things on which he looked, 
 and caused external objects to reflect back to him his own 
 thoughts and sensations, as if they were bodily images ; thus 
 creating an intellectual world which blended itself with the 
 physical one, and prevented him from being wholly present in 
 or occupied with either. Lastly, that despairing abandonment 
 of all attempt at self-control, which (being fully and intensely 
 conscious of it) made him stand in perpetual dread of himself, 
 uncertain that, from moment to moment, he might not be 
 tempted to commit some incredible outrage against those rules 
 and usages of civilized life, which, nevertheless, he was the 
 last person in the world to hold in contempt.
 
 80 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 The reader will, I hope, not suppose that I offer the above 
 as anything more than the materials for an'explanation of one 
 of the most curious and interesting phenomena that ever arose 
 out of the condition and operations of the human mind. The 
 explanation itself might (as I have hinted) have formed an ad- 
 mirable theme for Hazlitt's own pen; but I scarcely think 
 there is another left among us capable of handling it to any 
 satisfactory result. For myself, I will not venture to pursue 
 it further. But I will say, that, however the weakness in 
 question used to pain and even shock me, I never felt the 
 least surprise at it. On the contrary, it always struck me as a 
 natural and intelligible commentary on the peculiar mental 
 condition from which it sprang a sort of physiognomical ex- 
 pression, as easy to be interpreted as those of the face itself : 
 the only singularity of the case being, that whereas most other 
 men are able to conceal all external evidences of what is pass- 
 ing or has passed in their minds except those which are writ- 
 ten on their faces, Hazlitt was " all face." 
 
 HAZLITT'S HABITS. 
 
 Hazlitt's way of life was as little adapted to the ordinary 
 course of things in a " regular " family, as can well be con- 
 ceived. He always lived (during the period of my intimacy 
 with him) in furnished lodgings, and those of a very secondary 
 class ; the latter not from any lack of means, for he had only 
 to take his pen in hand to, as it were, coin money ; still less 
 was it from any parsimonious feeling, for he was profuse in 
 his expenditure, so far as related to the personal comforts of 
 himself and those dependent on him. But, on adopting this 
 mode of life, he fancied that his peculiar habits would have 
 subjected him to perpetual inconveniences and affronts, ex- 
 cept from those to whom the moderate stipend he paid was a 
 material object. But he was far from escaping them by this 
 expedient, of descending in the scale of social order ; for the 
 lower you descend in that scale, the less toleration there is for 
 anything that does not precisely conform to the preconceived 
 notions of the observer. In fact, this was one of the great
 
 HAZLITT'S HABITS. 8 1 
 
 mistakes that he made in "the act and practique part of life ; " 
 and it was the source of much bitterness and misery to him ; 
 for, strange as it may seem in such a man, it was not from the 
 flow and current of his own thoughts, feelings, and reflections, 
 that his daily life took its tone and color, but from the petty 
 events and outward accidents of the hour. And above all, it 
 was on the personal civility and respect of those about him, 
 that his very existence seemed to hang. Now, by keeping 
 himself among a class of persons, to a certain degree removed 
 from the mere vulgar, his name and pursuits would have 
 secured him from personal disrespect, if they did not procure 
 him the opposite ; whereas, in descending two or three steps 
 lower in the scale, the effect of his intellectual pretensions was 
 not merely nullified, but turned against him. In the former 
 case, the gazers at the celebrated author did but " wonder 
 with a foolish face of praise ; " but in the latter, they shrunk 
 from him, as if he was a wizard, or stared at him as at a wild 
 beast. And we are sadly too apt to become what people be- 
 lieve us, rather than what we seek and desire to be. 
 
 Hazlitt usually rose at from one to two o'clock in the day 
 scarcely ever before twelve ; and if he had no work in hand, 
 he would sit over his breakfast (of excessively strong black 
 tea, and a toasted French roll) till four or five in the afternoon 
 silent, motionless, and self-absorbed, as a Turk over his 
 opium pouch ; for tea served him precisely in this capacity. 
 It was the only stimulant he ever took, and at the same time 
 the only luxury ; the delicate state of his digestive organs 
 prevented him from tasting any fermented liquors, or touch- 
 ing any food but beef and mutton, or poultry and game, 
 dressed with perfect plainness. He never touched any but 
 black tea, and was very particular about the quality of that, 
 always using the most expensive that could be got : and he 
 used, when living alone, to consume nearly a pound in a week. 
 A cup of Hazlitt's tea (if you happened to come in for the 
 first brewage of it) was a peculiar thing ; I have never tasted 
 anything like it. He always made it himself ; half filling the 
 teapot with tea, pouring the boiling water on it, and then 
 6
 
 82 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 almost immediately pouring it out ; using with it a great quan- 
 tity of sugar and cream. 
 
 To judge from its occasional effect upon myself, I should 
 say that the quantity Hazlitt drank of this tea produced, ulti- 
 mately, a most injurious effect upon him ; and in all probabil- 
 ity hastened his death which took place from disease of the 
 digestive organs. But its immediate effect was agreeable, 
 even to a degree of fascination ; and not feeling any subse- 
 quent reaction from it, he persevered in its use to the last, 
 notwithstanding two or three attacks, similar to that which 
 terminated his life. 
 
 To the very few who felt a real and deep interest in this ex- 
 traordinary man, and to whom it was evident that his restless 
 and resistless passions, and his entire, and even willful, sub- 
 jection to them added to other points, to be hereafter re- 
 ferred to, in his moral and physical constitution made him 
 one of the most wretched of human beings, it was no less 
 curious than pleasing to see him luxuriating over his beloved 
 tea, in a state of deep and still repose, that nothing could 
 disturb not even the intrusion of a mere acquaintance or a 
 dun events thatj at other times, were but too apt to move 
 him from his propriety. 
 
 For the last four or five years of his life, Hazlitt never 
 touched any other liquid but tea. During the previous four or 
 five years, he used to drink large quantities of cold water. 
 I have frequently seen him take three or four quarts while 
 sitting after supper which was his favorite meal. Wine, 
 and all fermented liquors, he had forsworn before I knew him ; 
 and he religiously kept to his resolution. This, he used to 
 say, was the reason why Blackwood's people called him 
 "pimpled Hazlitt " thus holding him up to the world as a 
 dram-drinker ! J Had they told nothing but the truth of him, 
 
 1 Lord Byron took this imputation for granted, and discovered that the epithet 
 " pimpled " might also be applied to his writings ! And so it might with about 
 equal fitness : for, as his face was as clear and pale as marble, so was his style the 
 most simple and transparent of the day. Sir Bulwer Lytton, in his admirable work 
 on " England and the English,'' has inadvertently adopted the invention as if it 
 were an unquestioned fact, merely disputing the utility of alleging it. " What pur-
 
 HAZLITT'S HABITS. 83 
 
 they would not have made him out to the world as anything 
 worse than he really was ; and he did not desire to pass for 
 anything better. Whereas, by ascribing to him precisely that 
 vice which was the farthest removed from his actual habits, 
 they gained a great point against him. " Had I really been a 
 gin-drinker and a sot," I have heard him say, "they would 
 have sworn I was a milk-sop." 
 
 His breakfast and tea were frequently the only meals that 
 Hazlitt took till late at night, when he usually ate a hearty 
 supper of hot meat either rump-steak, poultry, or game 
 a partridge or a pheasant. This he invariably took at a tavern 
 his other meals (except his dinner sometimes) being as in- 
 variably taken at home. 
 
 There were three or four houses only that he frequented ; 
 for he never entered the doors of any one where his ways 
 were not well known, or where there was any chance of his 
 bill being asked for till he chose to offer payment of it. And 
 when treated in a way that pleased him in this latter parti- 
 cular, he did not care what he paid. I have known him pay 
 with cheerfulness accumulated sums of twenty or thirty pounds 
 for suppers only or chiefly. 
 
 The houses Hazlitt frequented were the Southampton Coffee 
 House, in Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane ; Munday's, 
 in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, and (for. a short period) the 
 Spring Garden Coffee House. The first of these he has im- 
 mortalized, in one of the most amusing of his Essays, "On 
 Coffee-house Politicians." Here, for several years, he used 
 to hold a sort of evening levee, where, after a certain hour at 
 night (and till a very certain hour in the morning) he was 
 always to be found, and always more or less ready to take part 
 in that sort of desultory " talk " (the only thing really deserv- 
 ing the name of " conversation ") in which he excelled every 
 man I have ever met with. But of this hereafter. Here, 
 
 pose," he asks, " salutary to literature, is served by hearing that Hazlitt had pimples 
 on his face ? " But he had no such thing ! " Throw dirt enough, and some of it will 
 stick." That was the axiom on which Hazlitt's enemies proceeded ; and there is no 
 denying that, in his case, it succeeded to a miracle. Times are changed since, and 
 the " dirt," when flung, sticks only to the fingers of the flinger.
 
 84 WILLIAM HAZLITT, 
 
 however, in that little bare and comfortless coffee-room, have 
 I scores of times see the daylight peep through the crevices 
 of the window-shutters upon " Table Talk " that was worthy 
 an intellectual feast of the gods. 
 
 When Hazlitt dined at all which was often not more than 
 two or three times a week this meal seemed only a sort of 
 preliminary to his everlasting Tea, for which he returned 
 home as soon as he had dined, and usually sat over it for a 
 couple of hours. Afterwards he almost invariably passed two 
 or three hours at one or other of the large theatres, placing 
 himself as invariably in a back corner seat of the second tier 
 of boxes, and, if possible, shrouding himself from view, as if 
 he felt himself " a weed that had no business there," in such 
 a scene of light, gayety, and artificial seeming. 
 
 To the play itself, on these occasions, he paid scarcely any 
 attention, even when he went there in his critical capacity as 
 a writer for the public journals ; for, notwithstanding the 
 masterly truth and force of most of his decisions on plays and 
 actors, I will venture to say, that in almost every case, except 
 those of his two favorites, Kean and Liston, they might be 
 described as the result of a few hasty glances and a few half- 
 heard phrases. From these he drew instant deductions that 
 it took others hours of observation to reach, and as many more 
 of labor to work out. In this respect his faculty was, I imag- 
 ine, never before equaled or even approached ; and his con- 
 sciousness of, and confidence in it, led him into a few ridicu- 
 lous blunders. Still, upon the whole, he was doubtless right 
 in trusting to these brief oracles and broken revelations, 
 rather than pursuing them to their ultimate sources as 
 most others must do if they would hope to expound them 
 truly and intelligibly : for his was a mind that would either 
 take its own course or none ; it was not to be " constrained 
 by mastery " of rule or discipline. It was a knowledge of 
 this truth, and his habit of acting on it, which constituted the 
 secret of his success as a writer.
 
 HAZLITT AS A POLITICIAN. 85 
 
 HAZLITT AS -A POLITICIAN. 
 
 Though no one could possess a more social turn of mind 
 than Hazlitt did under ordinary circumstances, I never met 
 with any other man who so little needed society. If ever 
 there was a mind " sufficient to itself," it was that of Hazlitt ; 
 and I believe that, bodily health and the appliances and means 
 of personal comfort being supposed, he could have passed his 
 life alone on a desert island, with perfect satisfaction, and even 
 with high and constant intellectual enjoyment ; for with him 
 thought and contemplation were ends in themselves, not merely 
 means to some end disjoined from them ; or, at all events, 
 they were means to the attainment of that TRUTH which was, 
 in itself, the great and all-sufficing end of his intellectual being. 
 
 What is understood by "society" in its ordinary sense, 
 Hazlitt shunned altogether ; and, above all, that " literary " 
 society in which his admirable powers of conversation qualified 
 him to shine so conspicuously. He had enough of books and 
 criticism and philosophy in the way of his profession ; it was 
 the business of his life to " coin his brain for drachmas ; " the 
 pleasures of it he wisely sought from other sources, and chiefly 
 from calling back the feelings and recollections of the Past ; 
 for it is, I think, remarkable that, though Hazlitt's views and 
 sentiments respecting mankind were " as broad and general 
 as the casing air," he never, or very rarely, employed his 
 thoughts upon the Future. 
 
 The reason, I believe, was, that he could not do so without 
 including politics in his speculations ; and this was an almost 
 interdicted subject with him ; it was touching upon a string 
 that " echoed to the seat where hate is throned." Politics 
 offered the one point which acted on his temper like mono- 
 mania. It was capable of changing him from a reasonable 
 being into a wild beast. It stirred up the bitter and rancorous 
 feelings that, to the very last, lay festering in his heart, and 
 eating into its core like some " poisonous mineral" depos- 
 ited there by the events that had terminated the French Revo- 
 lution ; and those feelings were still more firmly rooted by the
 
 86 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 subsequent downfall of his idol, Napoleon, and the restoration 
 of the Bourbons. I have heard those who knew him in his 
 early youth say, that it was the great events of the French 
 Revolution, and the new era of thought and of things that 
 they seemed to create throughout Europe, which first called 
 forth Hazlitt's intellectual faculties from that dreamy torpor in 
 which they might otherwise have lain for years longer, perhaps 
 forever. His early metaphysical work, and many remarkable 
 features of his after character, show us that those events found 
 his heart filled with all tender and kindly affections towards 
 his fellow-beings, and all high and happy hopes and aspira- 
 tions as to their ultimate destiny. What those events, or 
 rather their immediate sequents, left that heart, those only can 
 know who had for years studied it as " a book where men 
 might read strange matters." In brief, those events found 
 his bosom the birth-place of universal Love ; they left it " the 
 very heart and throne of tyrannous Hate." 
 
 I shall have more to say on this part of my subject here- 
 after. At present I glance at it accidentally, because it is the 
 pivot on which moves the whole character of Hazlitt's actual 
 life and destiny. Had his faculties and sensibilities opened 
 and developed themselves at any other period, or under any 
 other political aspect, than that of the first French Revolution, 
 he might haye been the very model of a wise and happy man. 
 But as it was, his whole intellectual being his temper, affec- 
 tions, passions, meditations, and pursuits took a sinister 
 turn from those events, which never afterwards left it, or at 
 least which was never afterwards absent when its first excit- 
 ing cause was recalled into action. On all matters but politi- 
 cal ones Hazlitt's perceptions were almost superhumanly clear 
 and acute, and his judgment was infallible. But about the 
 political prospects, tendencies, and events of the day, he was 
 like a child or a woman either utterly indifferent to them, 
 or, when not so, regarding them in a light directly opposed to 
 the true one. 
 
 I will give one or two remarkable instances of what I mean. 
 The downfall of Napoleon, and the restoration of the Bour-
 
 HAZLITT AS A POLITICIAN. 8/ 
 
 bons which every man of ordinary political sagacity and 
 foresight must have looked upon as the certain coming on of 
 that natural supremacy of the MANY over the FEW, of which 
 the first French Revolution did but furnish the rude foretaste 
 and barbarous antitype Hazlitt regarded as the final con- 
 summation of the triumph of 'legitimacy " and " Divine 
 Right." and the utter extinction of human liberty from the 
 earth. The writings and principles of Bentham and his 
 friends and followers, which have already gone far towards 
 creating a new era in human society, he looked upon and 
 treated with utter and unmingled contempt. And as to the 
 aristocracy of England, or of any other country, coming to feel 
 and admit even the political expediency, much less the natural 
 justice, of reform and social regeneration he would as soon 
 have looked for the Millennium. 
 
 The truth is, that many perhaps it may be said most of 
 the commanding and first-rate intellects that have been among 
 us, have not been so much in actual advance of their age as 
 others of an inferior grade and a different temperament. It 
 has seemed to be sufficient for them to produce the momen- 
 tum, of which others could better feel, direct, and see the re- 
 sults. It was so with Bacon. We have no evidence that he an- 
 ticipated the vast consequences to which his principles of phi- 
 losophizing have led, and the still more vast ones to which they 
 are now leading. Like Hazlitt in regard to morals, he was no 
 " perfectibility " man, in respect of science and knowledge : 
 and to anticipate that in the possible existence of which we 
 have no faith, is a moral contradiction. Though Hazlitt would 
 readily have admitted that the world has never been in the 
 same moral or intellectual condition for any two centuries to- 
 gether, and that every nation has, from time to time, differed 
 as much from itself as it has at all times differed from all 
 others, yet he laughed at those who predicated for the future 
 anything very different from that which has existed in the past. 
 He sighed and wept over what he considered as the wreck of 
 human liberty, its hopes, tendencies, and consequences, as he 
 might be supposed to have done over a mortal bride and her
 
 88 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 offspring ; seeming to forget that principles are imperishable, 
 that truth and justice are unchangeable and immortal ; and, 
 what is still more to the purpose, that the human mind has a 
 natural and necessary sympathy with these, and a cravmg after 
 them, which have the strength and the permanence of instincts, 
 and therefore cannot be wholly eradicated or suppressed. 
 
 But Hazlitt's want of hope in the future condition of his 
 fellow-beings was more a personal than an intellectual failing ; 
 a thing arising more from his own individual circumstances 
 and feelings than from the convictions or calculations of his 
 understanding. He was a disappointed man ; and despondency 
 was a disease, not a natural quality, of his mind. He had 
 nothing in after life to look forward to for himself, and he had 
 nothing to satisfy him in the present. The past was his only 
 refuge ; and even there he found little that was personally 
 gratifying to him much that was deeply painful and disap- 
 pointing, no less to his hopes than to his actual experience. 
 And a man so placed is not likely to see too much good in 
 prospect for his fellow-creatures ; for even the least despond- 
 ing among us are but too apt to " lay the nattering unction to 
 our s.ouls " (for such it is) that misery is the destined lot of 
 human nature. That we do so is at once the curse and the 
 crime of that nature ; because (like jealousy) it makes the 
 misery on which it feeds. Hope is more than a blessing it 
 is a duty and a virtue ; and in its absence we not only cannot 
 accomplish the destiny that awaits us we do not merit that 
 destiny, and therefore shrink from admitting its existence, or 
 even its possibility. 
 
 HAZLITT'S FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE. 
 
 I can call to mind only one person for whom Hazlitt seemed 
 habitually to entertain a sentiment of personal kindness and 
 esteem, and one only (among his contemporaries) for whose 
 intellectual powers he felt and uniformly expressed a general 
 deference and respect. The first of these was Charles Lamb, 
 the second was Coleridge. 
 
 Hazlitt went about (Diogenes-like) looking, by the light of
 
 HAZLITT'S FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE. 89 
 
 his acute and searching intellect, for a man made by Nature 
 in her happiest and simplest mould, and not afterwards marred 
 and curtailed of his fair proportions, on the Procrustes bed of 
 custom and society. He believed that there might be such a 
 man, because he felt that he himself retained much of the 
 character, though blended with more that deformed and de- 
 faced it. He sought such a man through the world he 
 sought him in books he sought him in the ideal places of 
 his own imagination ; but he found him in Charles Lamb 
 alone. He found there all his own exquisite sensibilities all 
 his own simplicity and sincerity of heart his uncompromis- 
 ing directness and singleness of spirit his large and liberal 
 sympathies with his kind together with all his own profound 
 sagacity of intellect and boundless range of thought. He also 
 found there that in the absence of which he would scarcely 
 have persuaded himself to believe that the other qualities 
 which he sought could exist : I mean, many of his own intel- 
 lectual weaknesses and deficiencies ; much of that restless and 
 impatient yearning after good, which is the necessary conse- 
 quence of perceiving without the power of compassing it ; not 
 a little of that willful mistaking of good for evil, and of evil 
 for good, which is the universal concomitant of such a con- 
 dition of mind ; and not a few of those crotchets of the brain 
 and heart that were never yet absent from such a brain and 
 heart, when placed in the social circumstances which had 
 accompanied Lamb and Hazlitt through life. Hazlitt found 
 all these in Charles Lamb ; and he found them almost wholly 
 uncontaminated by that " baser matter " with which he felt 
 them to be so inextricably blended in his own nature, and 
 from which he had never found them dissevered in any 
 other. 
 
 Moreover, from Lamb, and from Lamb alone, among all his 
 friends and associates, Hazlitt had never received, or even 
 suspected, except on one occasion, any of those personal 
 slights and marks of disrespect which he did not feel or fear 
 the less because he was conscious of often deserving them 
 using the phrase in its ordinary and social acceptation. From
 
 9O WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 Lamb alone, his errors, extravagances, and inconsistencies, 
 met with that wise and just consideration which his fine sense 
 of the weakness no less than the strength of our human nature 
 dictated. There was no one who spoke more freely of Hazlitt, 
 whether behind his back or before his face, than Lamb did ; 
 but Lamb never spoke disparagingly of him. Lamb, in can- 
 vassing the faults of his character, never failed to bear in 
 mind, and call to mind in others, the rare and admirable quali- 
 ties by which they were accompanied, and with which, it may 
 be, they were naturally and therefore inextricably linked. 
 
 No wonder, then, that Hazlitt felt towards Lamb a senti- 
 ment of personal kindness and esteem that was not extended, 
 even in kind, to any other individual. 1 
 
 There was but one house to which Hazlitt seemed to go, or 
 to contemplate going (which with him answered almost the 
 same purpose) with unalloyed pleasure ; and that was Charles 
 Lamb's. Almost the only other houses to which he ever 
 thought of going, after my acquaintance with him, were the 
 late Mr. Basil Montagu's, in Bedford Square, the late Mr. 
 Hume's, at Netting Hill, Mr. Northcote's, Mr. Leigh Hunt's, 
 and my own. To the first of these he continued to go, partly 
 on account of early associations, and in compliance with feel- 
 ings which had been created by many acts of kindness. But 
 he seemed to go in fear and trembling, and never without an 
 even chance of coming away raging or sulking like a madman 
 or a wild beast. There was a new footman, perhaps, who, not 
 knowing him, would leave him " kicking his heels " in the 
 hall, while he went to ascertain whether so ."strange" looking 
 a person could be admissible to the drawing-room ! And when 
 anything of this sort happened, Hazlitt was upset for the 
 
 1 I have sometimes felt that I might fairly extend this exception to myself. But I 
 have as often been prevented from doing so by the consideration, that, in order to 
 the existence of the sentiment in question, it was necessary, in this particular in- 
 stance, that the party feeling it should entertain an admiration for the intellectual 
 powers and pretensions of the object of it, little, if at all short of that which was due 
 to his own. And in my case there was too little ground for this to induce me fairly 
 to persuade myself that he felt more esteem for me than he did for the rest of his 
 friends.
 
 HAZLITT'S FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE. 91 
 
 evening ; he was dumfounded, and would sit sulking and 
 scowling silently for a quarter of an hour or so, and then get 
 up and go away, to vent his rage in the open air ;' or if he 
 stayed, it was perhaps from sheer dread of having to repass 
 the ordeal of the ceremonious bell-ringing and the supercilious 
 lackey that preceded his exit. 
 
 In fact, Hazlitt never felt himself at ease for a moment, 
 where the outward observances proper to a certain class of 
 life were strictly maintained by those about him much less 
 when they were expected from himself. Not that he over- 
 looked or desired to depreciate their value and convenience ; 
 on the contrary, they were, perhaps, never more justly, and 
 therefore highly estimated by any one. But it did not follow 
 that he could himself conform to them ; and the impossibility 
 of his doing so was the very cause of the anger and uneasiness 
 he felt whenever he found himself in the way of failing in it. 
 The origin of this incapacity, and of its sad results as regarded 
 his personal comfort, would form a curious and interesting 
 subject of inquiry, in connection with Hazlitt's intellectual 
 character ; and, in fathoming it, the most recondite features 
 of that character would develop themselves. Bat I must not 
 venture to open the inquiry here. I must only observe that 
 none but the peculiar circumstances connected with his visits 
 to the house in question, could have induced Hazlitt to over- 
 come the extreme repugnance he felt at placing himself within 
 the observation of any individuals, whether of the meanest or 
 the most exalted class, who were likely to look upon and treat 
 him according to his outward seeming. Nothing but the 
 pleasure he took in looking at the " coronet face " (as he has 
 called.it) of Mrs. M., and the Psyche-like form and features of 
 her daughter, and listening to the accomplished talk of the 
 one, and the quick wit and piquant satire of the other, could 
 have induced Hazlitt to undergo the ordeal of being formally 
 ushered into and out of a suite of spacious and well-appointed 
 drawing-rooms, by a liveried lackey who was all the while 
 (so at least Hazlitt persuaded himself) 
 
 "Wondering how the devil he got there."
 
 92 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 There were other circumstances, too, which had, during the 
 last three or four years of his life, prevented him from keep- 
 ing up his former intercourse with the enlightened and ac- 
 complished family I have referred to above. He had, in his 
 growing irritability, and the recklessness of consequences 
 which attended it, and under the influence of those unworthy 
 suspicions which always beset him when in that state of mind, 
 committed some unpardonable outrages on one or more of the 
 individual members of that family, in the form of offensive 
 personal references to them in his writings ; at the same time 
 adding to the outrage by everywhere pointing it out to the at- 
 tention of those who might otherwise have passed it over 
 unnoticed ; for his misdeeds of this kind were of so vague, 
 and often so utterly inapplicable a character, that nothing but 
 his own voluntary confession of them could have fixed them 
 upon him. And this self-accusation he never failed to furnish, 
 and often (I am satisfied) from pure regret and remorse at the 
 outrage and injustice he had committed. But the effect of it 
 was ruinous to him nevertheless, and had latterly cut him off 
 from almost all socical intercourse, but that which was indis- 
 pensable to the supply of his daily wants. 
 
 It is due to Hazlitt's memory, that I here mention his re- 
 peated expressions of a regret, almost amounting to a remorse, 
 at one in particular of those insane outrages which he had, in 
 a moment of ungovernable anger, been induced to commit, on 
 the chief member of the family I have now referred to ; a 
 man to whom he was indebted for many acts of substantial 
 kindness and service, and (what Hazlitt was still more grate- 
 ful for) that uniform evidence of personal esteem and con- 
 sideration, which showed itself in outward civility and re- 
 spect. 
 
 To Mr. Hume's, at Netting Hill, Hazlitt was now and then 
 attracted by the cordial welcome he was sure to receive there, 
 not merely from the " one fair daughter " of the worthy host, 
 but from the half dozen, who were just sufficiently tinged with 
 the literary hue to be aware of his pretensions. But an ex- 
 pedition of this kind was always a service of danger with
 
 HAZLITT'S FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE. 93 
 
 Hazlitt ; and he knew it to be so, and shrunk from it accord- 
 ingly ; for such was his John Buncle-like susceptibility touch- 
 ing the merits and virtues of any unmarried lady between 
 the ages of fifteen and fifty, who might chance to smile upon 
 him, that even while despairing over the loss of one idol, he 
 was always prepared, at a moment's notice, to cast himself at 
 the feet of another. 
 
 To Mr. Northcote's, Hazlitt went frequently, and stayed 
 long ; at one time more frequently than to any other place. 
 But his visits to Northcote were in some sort professional : 
 and whatever he did with a view to business, or to any after 
 consideration whatsoever anything which did not immediately 
 arise out of the impulse directing it he did reluctantly and 
 with an ill grace. I have several times been present when 
 Hazlitt has been at Northcote's, and has taken part in those 
 admirable conversations with the venerable artist, in which 
 he (Hazlitt) professed that he used to take such delight. But 
 I never saw him for a moment at ease there, or anything like 
 himself that self which he was when sitting in his favorite 
 corner at the Southampton, or by Lamb's or my fireside, or 
 (above all) his own. I do not mean to say, that in what he 
 has written on this subject, he has in the smallest degree ex- 
 aggerated his impressions of the intellectual qualities of North- 
 cote, or the charm of his conversation.- But these were not the 
 things on which Hazlitt's personal ease and comfort depended 
 in his intercourse with others. There were points in North- 
 cote's character for which Hazlitt felt the greatest dislike. But 
 what was of much more consequence to the mutual comfort of 
 their intercourse, he knew perfectly well that Northcote often 
 dreaded and therefore hated him ; and, when this feeling was 
 acting, only tolerated his presence, and talked to him the more 
 entertainingly, on that very account. I speak of the period 
 subsequent to Hazlitt's occasional publication, in the " New 
 Monthly Magazine," of portions of his Conversations with 
 Northcote, under the title of " Boswell Redivivus." 
 
 Hazlitt's mode of turning Northcote's conversation to a 
 business account, while the " Boswell Redivivus " was ap-
 
 94 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 pearing in the " New Monthly Magazine," was sufficiently 
 curious and characteristic. He used it more as a stimulus to 
 his own powers than in any other character, at least as related 
 to opinions and sentiments ; for, in reporting the curious facts 
 and personal anecdotes related to him by Northcote, he was 
 (as I have said elsewhere) correct, even to a literal setting 
 down of N.'s very words. When the time was at hand for 
 preparing a number of the papers, he used to ask me, " Have 
 you seen Northcote lately? Is he in talking cue ? for I must 
 go in a day or two, and get an article out of him." And, if 
 you happened to meet him anywhere on the evening of the 
 day on which he had paid one of these visits of business, he 
 was sure to be unusually entertaining. He would relate every 
 word that had passed on any noticeable topic ; and almost any 
 topic, however dry or commonplace or exhausted, was sure to 
 furnish forth something novel and curious when he and North- 
 cote got together. 
 
 The simple truth on this matter is, that it was the astonish- 
 ing acuteness and sagacity of Hazlitt's remarks that called 
 into active being, if they did not actually create, much of 
 what was noticeable in Northcote's conversation. Almost 
 everything that he said in the way of critical opinion, on any 
 topic that might be in question, was at least suggested by 
 something which Hazlitt would either drop in furtively as the 
 point arose, with a humble and deprecatory " But don't you 
 think, sir " or it was supperadded to some inconsequent or 
 questionable observation of Northcote's with an assenting 
 " Yes, sir ; and perhaps " adding the true statement of the 
 case, whatever it might be. And with these intellectual 
 promptings, the truth and acuteness of which Northcote per- 
 ceived and caught up immediately, he would go on talking "like 
 a book " (as Hazlitt used to describe it), for half an hour to- 
 gether ; and Hazlitt would sit listening in silent admiration, like 
 a loving pupil, to the precepts of his revered master he the 
 pupil, being all the while capable of teaching or confounding 
 the master, on almost every point of inquiry that could by 
 possibility come into discussion between them.
 
 tfAZLITT'S FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE. 95 
 
 The overstrained admiration which Hazlitt felt and ex- 
 pressed for the conversational powers of Northcote, has al- 
 ways seemed to me one of the most curious points in the 
 personal history of distinguished men ; and I could never sat- 
 isfactorily account for it, until now that I have set myself to 
 recollect in detail the peculiar circumstances under which the 
 conversations between these two remarkable men took place. 
 But now I seem to see the explanation of it very clearly. 
 Northcote, by having preserved his intellectual faculties in all 
 their freshness up to the very great age at which Hazlitt first 
 became acquainted with him, and those faculties having al- 
 ways included an unusual justness of tact in observing the 
 ordinary circumstances to which the daily occurrences of life 
 directed them, had acquired a vast superiority over Hazlitt in 
 his actual personal knowledge of society, and its visible and 
 superficial results on individual men. He had also an inex- 
 haustible fund of curious facts stored in his memory, in rela- 
 tion to a great number of persons about whom Hazlitt felt a 
 degree of interest and curiosity which he was wholly incapable 
 of entertaining towards living persons, however distinguished. 
 About Dr. Johnson, Sir Joshua, Burke, Goldsmith, and the 
 whole of that coterie of distinguished men of the last age, 
 Northcote had things to tell that would have furnished forth 
 half a dozen " Boswells Redivivus," in a much more apt sense 
 of the phrase than that in which Hazlitt used it ; and he told 
 them with a degree of tact, spirit, and dramatic effect that 
 has never been surpassed, if equaled, in any published detail 
 of these true gems of literary and personal history. 
 
 It was this which first attracted Hazlitt's attention towards 
 Northcote, and excited that interest in everything he said, 
 which Hazlitt never felt towards any other individual. He 
 looked upon Northcote as a connecting link the only exist- 
 ing one that he knew of between the last age and the pres- 
 ent, and attached to him a portion of that (so to speak) tradi- 
 tional respect and deference which he could never persuade 
 himself to feel for any contemporary, however distinguished, 
 or withhold from any to whom posterity had agreed to award 
 them.
 
 96 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 Another house to which Hazlitt sometimes went, but with a 
 degree of reluctance for which it would be difficult to account, 
 considering the partiality and personal interest which attracted 
 him there, was that of Mr. Leigh Hunt. And these opposing 
 influences (whatever they were) were so nearly balanced that 
 I have often known him " of twenty minds," as the phrase is, 
 whether he would go or not, for hours together, and not able 
 to settle the question at last, until it was settled by the acqui- 
 escence or refusal of somebody else to go with him. Indeed 
 this vis inertia was so strong in Hazlitt that, frequently, noth- 
 ing but the actual and near prospect of absolute destitution 
 could induce him to set about writing except in the case of 
 his having some subject in his head on which he desired to 
 write, for the mere pleasure of expressing his sentiments and 
 opinions on it : for in all other cases, the excitement derived 
 from the mere distinction and profit of his writings was fully 
 counterbalanced by the habitually contemplative turn of his 
 mind, as opposed to its active qualities, and by his utter in- 
 difference to popular opinion or applause, except in so far as 
 he felt these to be important to his immediate success as a 
 writer by profession. No wonder, then, that the quality of 
 mind I am alluding to should overcome the impulses of a 
 mere passing inclination or a pleasant association. 
 
 There was no man of whose social qualities Hazlitt thought 
 so highly as he did of Leigh Hunt's ; and no one with wh'om he 
 had connected more pleasant associations, arising out of the 
 earlier and happier part of his intellectual life. In fact, there 
 was no man to whom Hazlitt felt himself more attracted, act- 
 ively speaking, than towards Leigh Hunt no one in whose 
 society he enjoyed more of the double pleasure arising from 
 receiving and communicating intellectual excitement. Yet the 
 impulse to seek that pleasure where alone it was to be found, 
 in the instance in question, was never strong enough to over- 
 come the negative disposition to stay where he was, wher- 
 ever that might be, added to the mere imagination of the re- 
 pelling force that might possibly have met him in the quarter 
 whence the attractive one was also acting.
 
 HAZLITT'S FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE. 97 
 
 The truth I believe to be, that Hazlitt literally never quitted 
 the chair on which he placed himself when he rose in the 
 morning, and, but for the absolute necessity of providing for 
 the physical wants of his nature by his own exertions, never 
 w0#/aThave quitted it, in search of any social intercourse or 
 excitement whatever, unless moved to do so by some in- 
 ducement in which female attraction had a chief share. When 
 alone with his own thoughts and I judge from having re- 
 peatedly and purposely suffered him to remain alone with them 
 for hours together, when I have been sitting with him after 
 some long and exciting batch of talk when thus alone, I say, 
 he would sometimes subside into an entire self-absorption, 
 an utter abstraction from all but his own thoughts or more 
 probably into that vague, dreamy, and mysterious state of in- 
 tellectual existence, half repose, half enjoyment, which follows 
 high intellectual excitement of any kind in which the pleasur- 
 able has predominated a calm, so pure and serene, that it 
 seemed like a sin to call him from it to that actual reality 
 which had, for him, so little to compensate for the change. 
 
 The only other house which Hazlitt visited, which I can 
 speak of from actual observation, was my own ; and to that, if 
 I am entitled to judge at all, and may be supposed to have the 
 materials for judging in an uninterrupted intercourse of four- 
 teen years, I should say that he came in less fear of having to 
 regret that he had come (for he never went anywhere without 
 some fear of this kind), stayed with more unmingled comfort 
 and satisfaction, and went away in a better humor with him- 
 self and the world, than he did in any other case whatever. 
 And the reasons for this were simple and obvious, and of such 
 a nature that they may be stated without the risk of their be- 
 ing supposed to include any invidious comparisons as to the 
 feelings and conduct of other people in their intercourse with 
 this extraordinary man who assuredly brought upon himself 
 all the ills that he was compelled to endure in his intercourse 
 with others, and perhaps (in the ordinary sense of the word) 
 deserved them all. That I, and those belonging to me, did not 
 think so in other words, that we honored, admired, and loved 
 7
 
 98 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 the nobler and finer parts of his character, and therefore could 
 not hate or despise the weaker ones with which they were in- 
 extricably mingled, affords the simple explanation of the fact 
 I have stated, if I may believe it to be one. We saw in Will- 
 iam Hazlitt as noble a nature as any with which even books 
 had made us acquainted, and of which, in actual experience, 
 we saw few, if any other examples. And because the beau- 
 tiful qualities of his mind and heart (which we scarcely saw 
 anywhere else) were allied with a few of those deteriorating 
 and debasing weaknesses which constitute the sum and sub- 
 stance of most other hearts and minds, we saw the owners of 
 these latter think, and speak of, and treat him, as if he were 
 of unmixed baseness, and they were immaculate ! Because, 
 when angered in his personal feelings, or outraged in his 
 sense of right and justice, he spoke, or wrote, or acted under 
 the natural impulse thus created, instead of cunningly waiting 
 till his actual feelings were cooled or passed away, and his 
 sense of personal wrong forgotten, and then speaking, or writ- 
 ing, or acting, so as to reconcile a rankling desire for petty re- 
 venge with a due consideration for worldly interest, as is the 
 wont of nine-tenths of the world because of this, we heard 
 him spoken of, and saw him treated, as one not fit to form a 
 part of human society. Because, with a finer sense of the 
 graces and elegances of personal manner and appearance, 
 and a juster estimation of the virtue and value of these, than 
 almost any other man living, and a knowledge of their causes, 
 sources, and results, that would have put to shame the tact 
 and teaching of the most accomplished of May Fair Exclu- 
 sives, he was, in his own person, awkward, embarrassed, and 
 strange, to a degree that, if represented on the stage, would 
 have been deemed a clever caricature of those qualities be- 
 cause of these deficiencies (which arose in a great measure 
 from his exquisite sense of their opposites, and the high but 
 just value which he placed on them in a social point of view), 
 we saw him treated as a low-bred, vulgar cockney, or a savage 
 and saturnine recluse. Because he was (with perhaps no ex- 
 ception whatever, among men of first-rate talent at the time I
 
 HAZLITT' S FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE. 99 
 
 speak of) the only man who dared to hold by and express in 
 plain and uncompromising terms those political sentiments 
 and opinions which, at the early part of the first French Rev- 
 olution, he had adopted in common with almost all the intel- 
 lectual men of the day, his friends, teachers, and seniors the 
 Wordsworths, Coleridges, Southeys, etc. ; because, holding 
 by these opinions to the last, in spite of their ill success and 
 the politic putting of them off by those who helped to instill 
 them into him, he dared to express them in terms, if stronger, 
 yet not more violent than those in which half the world ex- 
 presses, them now that they can keep each other in counte- 
 nance ; because of this, we saw him put out of the pale of 
 critical and social courtesy, denounced as an outlaw, not en- 
 titled to the usages of civilized warfare, and only to be hunted 
 down as a savage or a wild beast. 
 
 In pursuance of this latter plan, for instance, precisely be- 
 cause he was the most original thinker of his day, we heard 
 him held up as a mere waiter upon the intellectual wealth of 
 his literary acquaintance a mere sucker of the brains of 
 Charles Lamb and Coleridge. Precisely because his face was 
 as pale and clear as marble, we saw him pointed at as the 
 "pimpled Hazlitt." Precisely because he never tasted any- 
 thing but water, we saw him held up as an habitual gin-drinker 
 and a sot ! 
 
 Not to multiply instances of this treatment of Hazlitt, we 
 saw further, what is perhaps more to the point than all else, 
 that these things, instead of passing by him unregarded or 
 unnoticed (as they would have done by many) were daily and 
 hourly acting with the most deadly effect, not merely on his 
 feelings and habits, but on his personal character, half mak- 
 ing him the monster that they represented him. 
 
 We saw these things in regard to Hazlitt ; we saw and felt 
 the miserable mischiefs they were working in his mind and 
 temper ; the intellectual martyrdom he was suffering from 
 them, but with anything but a martyr's patience ; and we 
 sought, not to compensate him for the injustice he was receiv- 
 ing elsewhere, but merely to avoid adding to the weight of
 
 100 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 that injustice, by uniformly treating him in a manner to make 
 it impossible for him to even suspect that our feelings in re- 
 gard to him were, in the smallest degree, affected by the treat- 
 ment he was constantly receiving in certain quarters. 
 
 Not indeed that he feared any such effect among the male 
 literary friends with whom he associated ; nor would he have 
 cared much, even had he seen cause for such fear among 
 them. But he scarcely believed it possible that women could 
 fail to be influenced by the purely personal attacks that were 
 made on him. And the consequence was that for days, and 
 even weeks after the appearance of any of these pretended 
 criticisms on the writings that he was so frequently putting 
 forth at the time I speak of, he scarcely dared to go near any 
 one of even his most favorite resorts, lest he should see, or 
 fancy that he saw, " Quarterly Review," or " Blackwood's 
 Magazine," written on the very face on which he went to 
 gaze in silent or in eloquent admiration. 
 
 Nay, he carried his dread of the supposed personal and 
 private results of these attacks to a pitch that, while it lasted, 
 amounted to a sort of monomania, many of the effects of 
 which would have been perfectly ludicrous, had they not been 
 so painfully the opposite to the object of them. For instance, 
 during the first week or fortnight after the appearance of 
 (let us suppose) one of " Blackwood's " articles about him, if 
 he entered a coffee-house where he was known, to get his 
 dinner, it was impossible (he thought) that the waiters could 
 be doing anything else all the time he was there, but pointing 
 him out to other guests, as " the gentleman who was so abused 
 last month in ' Blackwood's Magazine.' " If he knocked at 
 the door of a friend, the look and reply of the servant (what- 
 ever they might be) made it evident to him that he or she had 
 been reading " Blackwood's Magazine " before the family 
 were up in the morning ! If he had occasion to call at any of 
 the publishers for whom he might be writing at the time, the 
 case was still worse, inasmuch as there his bread was at 
 stake, as well as that personal civility, which he valued no 
 less. Mr. Colburn would be " not within," as a matter of
 
 DISLIKE OF WRITING. IOI 
 
 course ; for his clerks to even ascertain his pleasure on that 
 point beforehand would be wholly superfluous : had they not 
 all chuckled over the article at their tea the evening before ? 
 Even the instinct of the shop-boys would catch the cue from 
 the significant looks of those above them, and refuse to take 
 his name to Mr. Oilier. They would "believe he was gone 
 to dinner." He could not, they thought, want to have any- 
 thing to say to a person who, as it were, went about with a 
 sheet of " Blackwood's " pinned to his coat-tail like a dish- 
 clout ! 
 
 Then at home at his lodgings, if the servant who waited 
 upon him did not answer his bell the first time ah ! 't was 
 clear she had read "Blackwood's," or heard talk of it at 
 the bar of the public-house when she went for the beer ! Did 
 the landlady send up his bill a day earlier than usual, or ask 
 for payment of it less civilly than was her custom how 
 could he wonder at it ? It was " Blackwood's " doing. But 
 if she gave him notice to quit (on the score, perhaps, of his 
 inordinately late hours) he was a lost man ! for would any- 
 body take him in after having read " Blackwood's ? " Even 
 the strangers that he met in the street seemed to look at him 
 askance, " with jealous leer malign," as if they knew him 
 by intuition for a man on whom was set the double seal of 
 public and private infamy ; the doomed and denounced of 
 " Blackwood's Magazine." 
 
 This may seem like exaggeration to the reader of 1854. 
 But I assure him that it falls as far short of the truth as it 
 may seem to go beyond it ; that not one of the cases to 
 which I have alluded above but has been in substance de- 
 tailed to me by Hazlitt himself, as (according to his inter- 
 pretation of it) a simple matter of fact result of the attacks 
 in question ! 
 
 DISLIKE OF WRITING. 
 
 Hazlitt almost always wrote with the breakfast things on the 
 table ; for, as I have said before, they usually remained there 
 till he went out at four or five o'clock to dinner. He wrote
 
 102 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 rapidly, in a large hand, as clear as print, made very few cor- 
 rections, and almost invariably wrote on an entire quire of 
 foolscap ; contriving to put into a page of his manuscript ex- 
 actly the amount (upon an average) of an octavo page of print ; 
 so that he always knew exactly what progress he had made, 
 at any given time, towards the desired goal to which he was 
 travelling namely, the end of his task. 
 
 Unless what he was employed on was a review, he never 
 had a book or paper of any kind about him while he wrote. 
 In this respect, I imagine he stood alone among professional 
 authors. 
 
 With respect to Hazlitt's actual method of composition, he 
 never, I believe, thought for half an hour beforehand, as to 
 what he should say on any given subject ; or even as to the 
 general manner in which he should treat it ; but merely, 
 whether it was a subject on which he had thought intently at 
 any previous period of his life, and whether it was susceptible 
 of a development that was consistent with the immediate ob- 
 ject he might have in view, in sitting down to write on it. 
 Having determined on these points, and chiefly on the latter, 
 his pen was not merely the mechanical, but (so to speak) the 
 intellectual instrument by which he called up and worked out 
 his thoughts, opinions, and sentiments, and even the style and 
 language in which he clothed them ; it was the magician's 
 wand with which he compelled and marshaled to his service 
 the powers of his extraordinary mind, and the stores of illus- 
 trative materials which his early life had been spent in ac- 
 cumulating and laying by for use or pleasure. He never con- 
 sidered for more than a few moments beforehand the plan or 
 conduct of any composition that he had undertaken, or de- 
 termined to write whether it was a mere magazine paper, or a 
 considerable work ; he merely thought for a brief space more 
 or less, till he had hit upon an opening sentence that pleased 
 or satisfied him ; and when that was achieved, he looked upon 
 the thing as done : for everything else seemed to follow as a 
 natural consequence. In short, his pen had become, during 
 the last ten or twelve years of his life, a sort of inspiration to
 
 DISLIKE OF WRITING. 1 03 
 
 him ; and he was as sure of its answering to his claims upon 
 it, whenever he chose to make them, as if he had got all the 
 materials on which it was to work ready arranged, labeled, 
 and catalogued for use, in " the book and volume of his 
 brain." 
 
 This certainty and facility were, in some degree, the result 
 of habit and practice, no doubt ; and they are, to a certain 
 extent, enjoyed by most writers who are much accustomed to 
 composition. But the total want of premeditation with which 
 Hazlitt could produce, in a singularly short space of time, 
 an essay full of acute or profound thought, copious, various 
 and novel illustrations, and perfectly original views, couched 
 in terse, polished, vigorous, and epigrammatic language, was 
 quite extraordinary, and is only to be explained by the two 
 facts, first, that he never by choice wrote on any topic or ques- 
 tion in which he did not, for some reason or other, feel a 
 deep personal interest ; and secondly, because on all ques- 
 tions on which he did so feel, he had thought, meditated, and 
 pondered in the silence and solitude of his own heart, for 
 years and years before he ever contemplated doing more than 
 thinking of them. 
 
 When Hazlitt was regularly engaged on any work or article, 
 he wrote at the rate of from ten to fifteen octavo pages at a 
 sitting ; and never, or very rarely, renewed the sitting on the 
 same day, except when he was at Winterslow where, having 
 no means of occupation or amusement in the evening part of 
 the day, he used, I believe habitually, to write after his tea. 
 And, doubtless, one of his motives for going there when he 
 had any considerable work to get through, was the knowledge 
 that by that means alone he could persuade himself to " work 
 double tides." 
 
 This brings me to observe that Hazlitt hated writing, and 
 would never have penned a line, and indeed never did, till 
 his necessities compelled him to do so. To think was, and 
 ever had been, the business and the pleasure of his intel- 
 lectual life though latterly it had become, on many topics, 
 a fatality and a curse. But to promulgate his thoughts to per- 
 verse, or incapable, or unattending ears to
 
 104 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 " Wear his heart upon his sleeve, 
 For daws to peck at " 
 
 seemed to him at best but a work of supererogation the re- 
 sult of a silly vanity, or a shallow and empty egotism. But to 
 do this as he did, for " certain sums of money " to " coin 
 his brain for drachmas," and even to feel himself tempted, as 
 he often did, to put off false and base coin instead of the true 
 and good, because the latter would not pass current daily to 
 hawk about for sale "the immortal part of, him," merely to 
 supply the sordid wants of the mortal part this was one of 
 the troubles that (unconsciously to himself, I believe) perpet- 
 ually preyed upon his mind, and helped to make him the un- 
 happy man he was. 
 
 Hazlitt's judgment and tact as to what would suit the pub- 
 lic taste was such, that what he wrote was sure of certain sale, 
 in various quarters, and at a liberal price. So that the labor 
 of a couple of mornings in the week, upon the average, would 
 have amply supplied all his wants, had he chosen to employ 
 himself regularly with that view. Yet nothing could ever 
 persuade him to set to work till his last sovereign was gone, 
 and his credit exhausted with his landlady and his tavern- 
 keeper ; and I have repeatedly known him to leave himself 
 without a half crown to buy him a dinner, or what was still 
 more a necessary of life to him, a quarter of a pound of tea ; 
 and this at a moment, perhaps, when he had just committed 
 some escapade, in the way of revenge for some supposed in- 
 jury or slight, which had left him without a friend to whom he 
 could persuade himself to apply for the loan of one. 
 
 And what made this habit of procrastination the more re- 
 markable was, that he had an almost childish horror of owing 
 money, and was always ready to pay it away, even to the last 
 guinea, the moment he received the proceeds of any consid- 
 erable work. I do not mean that he had any particularly 
 strict notions as to the relations of debtor and creditor ; but 
 his dread of the personal consequences to which a debt to a 
 stranger made him liable, amounted to a pitch of haunting 
 terror and alarm, under which he could not live. Let me add,
 
 DISLIKE OF WRITING. 105 
 
 also, that he had a grateful and honorable sense of any un- 
 usual forbearance exercised towards him in this particular, 
 which made it a pleasure to him to pay the claim in question 
 the moment he had the means of doing so. He was also 
 scrupulous in remembering and returning any trifling sums 
 that he might have been induced to borrow of a friend, under 
 any momentary pressure of the kind alluded to above al- 
 ways provided the kindness was done in a manner that was 
 agreeable to his notions of the true art of conferring obliga- 
 tions. 1 
 
 With the exception of his early metaphysical work, and his 
 " Life of Napoleon," all Hazlitt's productions were written 
 with a double view that of their appearance in a periodical 
 work in the first instance, in parts or numbers, and their sub- 
 sequent collection into volumes. So that he got a double re- 
 muneration for nearly all of them. The whole of the " Spirit 
 of the Age," and the greater part of the " Table Talk " and 
 the " Plain Speaker," were written for and appeared anony- 
 mously in the " New Monthly Magazine." Consequently the 
 articles were written at long intervals from each other, and 
 without any one in the work having a necessary reference to 
 any of the others. They were also all written under the pres- 
 sure of the moment, and scarcely at all altered when they ap- 
 peared in a collected form. This will account for the numer- 
 ous marks of haste, oversight, and even radical error, which a 
 critical examination of all Hazlitt's productions may detect, 
 and which his own infallible tact would have discovered to a 
 larger extent than that of any one else, had he been able to 
 read them over with attention. But this he was totally incapa- 
 ble of doing ; and it was a remarkable peculiarity of his men- 
 tal habits and temperament. He never took the smallest 
 pleasure in reading over, in print, anything that he had writ- 
 ten ; on the contrary, he felt it to be a task and a trouble to 
 do so, and never did it but " on compulsion ; " -taking all the 
 consequences (and they were by no means trifling ones to 
 him) of escaping from the task. 
 
 1 See his masterly essay on The Spirit of Obligations.
 
 106 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 It must not be supposed from this fact that Hazlitt was in- 
 different about his literary reputation in the high and perma- 
 nent sense of that phrase. He had that anxious and restless 
 yearning for it which is perhaps indispensable to the very ex- 
 istence of such a reputation. And this was one of the chief 
 causes of his bitter anger and resentment at the innumerable 
 attacks that were made on his pretensions as a writer, know- 
 ing, as he did, the extensive effect which these must necessa- 
 rily produce on the progress of any reputation, much more of 
 one which was subject to so many disadvantages and draw- 
 backs, even from within its own springs and sources. 
 
 But Hazlitt's intellectual temperament had been so misera- 
 bly shaken and shattered by the events of his past life, that it 
 was physically impossible for him so to gird up his mind to 
 the duties it owed to itself, as to enable it to take that deep 
 and sustained interest in its own operations and movements, 
 in the absence of which no actual and substantive literary 
 reputation of the highest grade can ever be achieved. Hazlitt 
 (like Coleridge) was looked upon during his life, and will, per- 
 haps, hereafter be looked upon, much more with reference to 
 what he might have done under happier or more favorable 
 circumstances, than to what he actually accomplished. It 
 will be be felt, no less by posterity than it was by his contem- 
 poraries, that the writer of the " Essay on the Principles of 
 Human Action," might have been among the greatest meta- 
 physicians of age or country ; that the author of the " Table 
 Talk" and the "Plain Speaker" might have given to the 
 world a body of moral truth and wisdom that has at present 
 no substantive existence ; that the critic of Shakespeare and 
 the Elizabethan writers might have supplied, more effectually 
 than any other writer we have yet had among us, that digested 
 and enlightened estimate of our own literature which we have 
 hitherto been left wholly without ; that the critic of the 
 " British Picture Galleries " might have set forth the true 
 principles of Art in a manner and to an effect that has never 
 yet been accomplished, and in the absence of which we cafl 
 scarcely hope to see Art rise above that elegant mediocrity at 
 which it stands throughout Europe in the present day.
 
 DISLIKE OF WRITING. IO/ 
 
 I will only add on this subject, that Hazlitt's method of 
 composition, even on subjects which he was accustomed to 
 treat the most profoundly moral or metaphysical questions 
 was rapid, clear, and decisive ; so much so in the latter 
 respect, that his MS. was like a fair copy, and he scarcely 
 thought it necessary even to read it over before sending it to 
 the press. 
 
 What is still more remarkable is, that his power of composi- 
 tion was but little affected by the general state of mind he 
 might be in at the time of sitting down to his work. If he 
 could but persuade himself to begin writing on any subject 
 which he had himself chosen for discussion, he could so ab- 
 stract his thoughts from all topics but that, as to be able to 
 escape for the time from even the most painful and pressing 
 of external circumstances. 
 
 As a proof of this, I may give a passage from one of his 
 letters, written to me when he was in Scotland, whither he 
 had gone on a matter which affected and troubled him almost 
 to a pitch of insanity, and never relaxed its hold and influence 
 upon his thoughts and feelings for a single moment, except 
 when he was engaged in writing for the press. Before his 
 departure from town, he had arranged with Mr. Colburn for 
 a volume of " Table Talk," which was to consist of four hun- 
 dred octavo pages, and of which not a line was written when 
 he left London. From the day he quitted home his mind had 
 been in a state of excitement bordering (as L have said) on 
 disease, in consequence of circumstances that I may probably 
 refer to more particularly hereafter. Yet four or five weeks 
 after his departure he writes me as follows, at the end of a 
 long letter, the previous part of which offers the most melan- 
 choly evidence of what the state of his mind must have been 
 during the whole period of his absence : 
 
 " You may tell Colburn when you see him that his work is 
 done magnificently ; to wit : I. On the knowledge of charac- 
 ter, 40 pp. II. Advice to a school-boy, 60 pp. III. On pat- 
 ronage and puffing, 50 pp. IV. and V. On Spurzheim's 
 theory, 80 pp. VI. On the disadvantages of intellectual su-
 
 IO8 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 periority, 25 pp. VII. On the fear of death, 25 pp. VIII. 
 Burleigh House, 25 pp. IX. Why actors should not sit in the 
 boxes, 35 pp. In all 340 pages. To do by Saturday night : 
 X. On dreams, 25 pp. On individuality, 25 pp. 390 pages." 
 He says, in a postscript, " I have been here a month yes- 
 terday." x 
 
 During this same period, too, he had written a considerable 
 part of another work, which was afterwards published under 
 the title of the " Liber Amoris," of which he speaks as follows 
 in the above-named letter : " On the road down I began a 
 little book of our conversations, i. e. mine and the statue's. It 
 is called ' The Modern Pygmalion.' You shall see it when I 
 come back." 
 
 The three or four hours a day employed by Hazlitt in com- 
 position enabled him to produce an essay for a magazine, one 
 of his most profound and masterly Table Talks, in two or 
 three sittings ; or a long and brilliant article of thirty or forty 
 pages for the " Edinburgh Review," in about a week. But 
 when he had an entire volume or work in hand he invariably 
 went into the country to execute it, and almost always to the 
 same spot a little way-side public-house, called " The Hut," 
 standing alone, and some miles distant from any other house, 
 on Winterslow Heath, a barren tract of country on the road to 
 and a few miles from Salisbury. There, ensconced in a little 
 wainscoted parlor, looking out over the bare heath to the dis- 
 tant groves of Norman Court, some of his finest essays were 
 written ; there, in utter solitude and silence, many of his least 
 unhappy days were spent ; there, wandering for hours over the 
 bare heath, or through the dark woods of the above-named 
 domain, his shattered frame always gained temporary strength 
 and renovation. 
 
 I have sometimes regretted that I did not go down to this 
 place when he was there, and spend a week with him, as he 
 
 1 As this letter fixes the date and place of the above-named essays, several of 
 which are among the finest of his compositions, it may be interesting to add that it 
 is dated from " Renton Inn, Renfrewshire," and it bears the postmark of March, 
 1822.
 
 DISLIKE OF WRITING. 
 
 two or three times pressed me to do. But I have as often 
 pleased myself by thinking that he was much better alone at 
 those times; for he was then comparatively happy, being 
 absent from all the scenes and circumstances which were at 
 least the proximate causes of his misery, and surrounded by 
 every personal comfort and respect that a profuse expenditure 
 could command from people wholly unaccustomed to such 
 guests, and to whom his advent must have seemed like a god- 
 send : for " The Hut," though it was kept by reputable people, 
 and afforded every needful comfort, was (as I have said) a 
 mere way-side public-house, situated on a barren heath, and 
 was frequented only by a few pedestrian travellers, and by the 
 guards and coachmen of the public conveyances going that 
 road the high-road from London to Salisbury. 
 
 The admirable things which Hazlitt wrote at this place, and 
 the tone of mind in which some of them have evidently been 
 composed particularly the essay " On Living to Oneself" 1 
 might justify one in hoping that here at least he tasted of 
 that intellectual peace and contentment which, of all men 
 living, he was the best able to appreciate, and (as it should 
 therefore seem) to enjoy. But I doubt if such was really the 
 case, and whether the utmost and the best that Hazlitt could 
 do, even here, either for himself or for others, was to imagine 
 and describe and yearn after such a state of being. To feel 
 and enjoy it was not within his capacity. Even had every con- 
 
 1 The following are the opening passages of this essay : 
 
 " I never was in a better place or humor than I am at present for writing on this 
 subject. I have a partridge getting ready for my supper ; my fire is blazing on the 
 hearth ; the air is mild for the season of the year ; I have had but a slight fit of in- 
 digestion to-day (the only thing that makes me abhor myself); I have three good 
 hours before me ; and, therefore, I will attempt it." . . . . " As I look from 
 the window at the wide bare heath before me, and, through the misty moonlit air, 
 see the woods that wave over the top of Winterslow, 
 
 ' While Heav'n's chancel vault is blind with sleet,' 
 
 my mind takes a flight through too long a series of years, supported only by the pa- 
 tience of thought, and secret yearnings after truth and good, for me to be at a loss 
 to understand the feeling I intend to write about." 
 
 It appears by a foot-note that this delightful essay was " written at Winterslow 
 Hut, January i8th, igth, 1821."
 
 1 10 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 ceivable external appliance and means for such enjoyment 
 been at hand, the (so to speak) physical taste for it was want- 
 ing ; the palate was dead, and the most exquisite flavors and 
 most exciting viands conveyed no pleasure to the defeated 
 and interdicted sense. Not that his sense of intellectual en- 
 joyment had been jaded and palled by over-indulgence, or dis- 
 ordered by ill-applied stimulants. On the contrary, nothing 
 could be more pure, simple, and natural than Hazlitt's intel- 
 lectual tastes and desires, so far as they preserved their exist- 
 ence at all. But they seemed, as it were, benumbed and par- 
 alyzed into a condition of torpidity and suspended animation, 
 that nothing could awaken into life but those violent agents 
 which, like that of the galvanic power applied to the dead 
 limb, animate only to convulse and distort. 
 
 The truth is, that although Hazlitt was by nature better 
 fitted for solitude than most men, he could not, under the act- 
 ual condition and circumstances of his mind and temper, have 
 existed for any length of time out of London, or some other 
 great metropolis, where the world of life and action, of hope 
 and enjoyment, that he saw about him, might be turned into 
 passive instruments of hope and action and enjoyment to him- 
 self, in that secondary and intermediary sense in which alone 
 he could use such instruments, or any others, to such a pur- 
 pose. 
 
 I should be doing injustice to Hazlitt's reputation if I were 
 to quit this part of my subject without noticing a fact of which 
 many of his literary friends must have been aware, and which, 
 whatever may be thought of it as regards his writings them- 
 selves, and the motives and inducements of their author in 
 producing them, should remove or nullify much of the adverse 
 criticism that has been put forth respecting them. The truth 
 is, that among the few faults which have been justly found 
 with Hazlitt's style, and the mode in which he has treated his 
 subjects, nearly every one of them was introduced advisedly, 
 and with the perfect knowledge of the writer that they were 
 justly liable to the remarks made on them. His plea was, that 
 those faults were indispensable to the reception and success
 
 CONVERSATIONAL AND SOCIAL POWERS. Ill 
 
 of what he wrote to that immediate popularity, without the 
 attainment of which he could not have written at all, because 
 he could not have got paid for what he wrote. 
 
 Whether he was right or wrong in this theory is another 
 question. But it was one on which -he uniformly acted at 
 least after he had adopted literature as a profession : for the 
 work to which he himself chiefly looked and referred with 
 pride and pleasure the " Essay on the Principles of Human 
 Action " though his earliest work, is almost wholly free 
 from the faults imputed to his after productions. But the 
 consequence, as he has a hundred times declared, is that it 
 has not been read by anybody, and is to this day almost en- 
 tirely unknown. 
 
 CONVERSATIONAL AND SOCIAL POWERS. 
 
 As I have spoken of Hazlitt's conversational powers and 
 social qualities, I will here illustrate them by a few passages 
 from my diary. 
 
 EXTRACTS FROM DIARY. 
 
 May 21, 1822. On Sunday, while we (Hazlitt and myself) 
 were with John Hunt, 1 he (Hazlitt) related two or three nice 
 things about Jeffrey. One was a reply of his to Owen (of 
 New Lanark), who had been relating to him something of a 
 person who, on visiting his (Owen's) place, seemed disposed 
 chiefly to notice those of his people who were good-looking ; 
 on which Owen said, " Now, my plan is exactly the reverse of 
 this. I notice in particular those to whom nature has not 
 been so bountiful as she has been to the rest." " Ah," said 
 Jeffrey, " nature smiles on one, and Owen on the other." 
 
 On another occasion, when Owen was teasing Jeffrey about 
 his system, Jeffrey said, " But Mr. Owen, according to all 
 this that you are telling me, you, who are the founder and in- 
 ventor of this system, on the supposition of its being capable 
 of working these effects, ought to be the best man in the 
 world. Now, to tell you the truth, I don't see that you are 
 
 1 Then confined in Coldbath Fields Prison for a political offense.
 
 112 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 any better than many other people that I know. And what," 
 added Jeffrey, " do you think he had the impudence to reply 
 to this ? Why, he bade me name the persons to whom I al- 
 luded ; and when I did so he took exceptions to them, as per- 
 sons not so good as himself." 
 
 Speaking of Mrs. Siddons and Miss O'Neil, Hazlitt said it 
 was idle to compare them together ; for however excellent Miss 
 O'Neil might be, Mrs Siddons was above all excellence. He 
 added that he had said this to a party of Scotchmen at Edin- 
 burgh, and that they did not understand what he meant ; they 
 did not seem to see that there was anything in what he had 
 said characteristic either of Mrs. Siddons or of himself ; and 
 he related the story as being perfectly characteristic of them 
 that, however acute they (the Scotch) may be to a cer- 
 tain point, beyond that they cannot feel or appreciate any- 
 thing. 
 
 Speaking of Walter Scott, he said that when he was in 
 Edinburgh, Jeffrey had offered to introduce him (Hazlitt) to 
 Scott, but that he declined. He said to Jeffrey, " I should be 
 willing to kneel to him, but I could not take him by the hand." 
 Alluding to Scott's political opinions and his supposed con- 
 nection with the " Beacon " and " Blackwood's Magazine." 
 
 He afterwards said of Walter Scott, " He seems to me to 
 hang over Scottish literature just as Arthur's Seat hangs over 
 Edinburgh, like a great hulking lion." 1 
 
 Dined at 's with Hazlitt. He told some capital things 
 
 of A . When A was manager of the Italian Opera, 
 
 the King (George IV.) went one night, accompanied by Lord 
 
 Hertford, and A and Taylor lighted them, as usual, to the 
 
 royal box. On ascending the stairs Lord Hertford (who was 
 growing very infirm at this time) slipped and hurt himself, 
 and had nearly fallen down, but evidently wished it not to be 
 noticed, and jumped up again, and pretended that nothing had 
 
 happened. When they reached the royal box, A , instead 
 
 of taking this cue, which the marquis had given to all in at- 
 tendance, addressed him, and "hoped his lordship had not 
 
 1 I think he afterwards used this comparison in print.
 
 CONVERSATIONAL AND SOCIAL POWERS. 113 
 
 injured himself by the little accident on the stairs ? " The 
 marquis, evidently hurt at this notice, replied, " Accident 
 accident ? what accident ? What do you mean ? " 
 
 It was A himself who related this story of his own 
 
 blundering impertinence, but related it purely as an instance 
 of court manners of the want of gratitude in the marquis 
 for the kind interest that he (A ) had taken in his infirmi- 
 ties. " As if," said Hazlitt, " it were the place of the manager 
 of a theatre to see any deficiencies in a marquis ! " 
 
 He told another story of A having taken some people 
 
 to see Harlow's copy of the Transfiguration (which Hazlitt de- 
 scribed as very bad), and showing it to them as a prodigiously 
 fine thing ; but on one of the party (who told the story to 
 Hazlitt) saying that he thought one of the heads pointing to 
 
 it, a very bad one, he (A ) replied, " Oh, I don't mean to 
 
 say that the heads are good. I 'm not praising the Transfigura- 
 tion. I don't think anything of that; it is the copy that I 
 speak of as inimitable. Its faults are the faults of the orig- 
 inal." 
 
 He related another story of the same person (whom he de- 
 scribed as a singular embodiment of self-sufficient imper- 
 tinence). On entering a room at a friend's house, where two 
 or three persons were collected round a picture, seemingly 
 
 intent on admiring it, A walked towards the picture, but 
 
 before he had got half way to it, stopped and looked : " Aye," 
 said he, " I see a copy, evidently. I can see that from the 
 cracks in the varnish." "Thus," said Hazlitt, "throwing out 
 his impertinence before him, as a herald of his approach, and, 
 as is not uncommon with him, pitching upon as a mark of the 
 picture's youth precisely that which, if it indicated anything, 
 indicated its age." 
 
 Speaking of having just called on Andrews about a volume 
 of Maxims that he was writing, he said Andrews had spoken 
 of his (Hazlitt's) article about the Fight (between Neate and 
 the Gas Man) in the " New Monthly," and seemed to think it 
 
 was unrivaled in its way. P said, jokingly, "You mustn't 
 
 reckon too much on his opinion ; for it may have a rival be- 
 8
 
 114 WILLfAM HAZLITT. 
 
 fore long ; " alluding jestingly to one that he (P.) was writing 
 on the same subject. " Why," he said, " I am not going to 
 write another ! " 
 
 He had just dined with Haydon, and related one or two 
 things told by him (Haydon) that passed at a dinner at 
 
 C 's, where Y , the tragedian, was present. Speaking 
 
 of a recent performance of his, which, by his own account, he 
 had got through very indifferently, he said quite seriously, 
 "But, in fact, I have a kind of feverette upon me now." He 
 (Y ) afterwards told what he considered as a very interest- 
 ing story, of his having actually been addressed by name by a 
 Perfect stranger, while travelling in the Highlands of Scotland 
 a fact which he seemed to regard as the summit of human 
 celebrity. 1 
 
 Speaking of the American character, Hazlitt related a story 
 
 told him by , illustrating their coolness under uncommon 
 
 circumstances. He was spending an evening with an Ameri- 
 can family, when a young man was shown into the room. On 
 his entering, the master of the house got up and went to him, 
 saying, " Ah, George, how do you do ? " The young man re- 
 plied that he was very well, and then took his seat among the 
 rest of the persons present. After a little while something 
 was said showing that the young man who had just joined the 
 party was related to the family, and had lately been absent 
 from home. This led to inquiries from the English visitor, 
 and it turned out that the youth was the son of the host, and 
 had just arrived from China, and that this was the first meet- 
 ing after a separation of ten years ! 
 
 January 15, 1825. To-night (at the Southampton), Hazlitt 
 told some capital things about Dawethe painter. 2 Describing 
 
 1 Hazlitt afterwards related these two stories of Y to Northcote, and has re- 
 ported (in the Boswell Redivivus) N.'s characteristic commentary on the latter of 
 them. "Good God!" exclaimed N., "did he consider this as a matter of wonder, 
 that, after showing himself as a sign for a number of years, people should know his 
 face ? If an artist or an author were recognized in that manner, it might be a 
 proof of celebrity ; but as to an actor, a fellow who had stood in the pillory might 
 as well be proud of being pointed at." 
 
 1 Who was at this time at St. Petersburg, whence he afterwards returned with a 
 fortune of near half a million of money
 
 CONVERSATIONAL AND SOCIAL POWERS. 115 
 
 his essential and ingrained meanness of character, he said, 
 " He had a soul like the sole of a shoe ; " and he related some 
 things illustrative of this character. He said Dawe used to 
 lend out every farthing of his own money at usurious interest, 
 and then borrow money of his friends at no interest at all to 
 get on with ; and that once he quite abused, and almost quar- 
 reled with John Lamb, who used to lend him money, because 
 on one occasion, Lamb asked him for an acknowledgment for 
 it in case of death. Lamb wanted a stamped receipt which 
 would have cost a few pence, and Dawe thought this an 
 enormity. 
 
 He described a capital scene that had taken place at Dawe's. 
 
 There was a man named K , who was reckoned to be like 
 
 Dawe in personal appearance (both of them being remarkably 
 
 ugly), and this K had often asked Hazlitt to introduce him 
 
 to Dawe, he (K.) having a great wish to see a likeness of 
 himself. Dawe, too, had often heard of this resemblance. At 
 
 last Hazlitt took K to Dawe's house. There was a glass 
 
 over the chimney-piece in Dawe's painting-room, and on Haz- 
 litt introducing K , he described each as first giving a fur- 
 tive glance at the glass and then at each other. 
 
 Hazlitt. This is Mr. K r, Mr. Dawe. 
 
 Dawe. Very happy to see Mr. K (looking first at K. 
 
 and then at himself in the glass, and giving a sort of inward 
 smile of self-congratulation, as much as to say, " I don't see 
 any great resemblance "). I think they say we are like each 
 
 other, Mr. K . I can't say I exactly see any great 
 
 similarity (looking in the glass again). There is a little 
 something to be sure about the mouth a sort of 
 
 K . Why, no ; I don't see much resemblance myself. 
 
 There may, perhaps, be a little something in the forehead a 
 kind of 
 
 In short, each evidently piqued at the unsatisfactory nature 
 of the portrait of himself, and each wondering how anybody 
 could possibly think him like so ugly a person as the other. 
 Hazlitt made out the scene capitally ; you could see each 
 party coquetting, as it were, with his own similar in the glass,
 
 Il6 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 and comparing it, with infinite self-satisfaction, with the living 
 object before him. 
 
 There was a portrait of Holcroft which Dawe had painted, 
 and which belonged to Mrs. Holcroft, and was to be engraved 
 by Dawe for a Life of Holcroft, which Hazlitt was writing. 
 Hazlitt said that he and Mrs. Holcroft went about it one day 
 to Dawe's rooms, and caught him in the act of making a dupli- 
 cate of it. 
 
 He described very admirably a scene he had witnessed at 
 
 the M 's between Mrs. M and Dawe, illustrating the 
 
 contrast between the flowing, graceful, queen-like style and 
 manner of the one, and the little, peddling, pimping, snipped 
 manner of the other. Mrs. M. was speaking of a picture she 
 had just seen of Sir Joshua's, of a lady, which she described 
 in her fine way. " The face, Mr. Dawe, was remarkably fair 
 
 almost of a marbly whiteness, and on the cheek, to relieve 
 this, there was a slight tinge of color. The lady wore a per- 
 fectly 'white dress, and she was walking in a sort of garden 
 scene, with a white wall behind her ; and overhead there was 
 floating along one white cloud, and by her side was growing 
 one white lily." 
 
 The contrast to all this was furnished by the little snipped 
 and cut-up interruptions of Dawe, thrown in between every 
 stately pause in the description. " Ah ! Yes ! Indeed ! 
 
 Yes, very nice aye, indeed." 
 
 Speaking of Haydon to-night, he said he had just been 
 
 at O 's, and that Mrs. O had told him how it was 
 
 that her husband (who was at that time in very slender cir- 
 cumstances) had been compelled to lend him (Haydon) fifty 
 pounds. She said, " Oh, sir, my husband could not help 
 lending it to him he would have it. Why, sir, he came 
 round here, behind the counter, followed my husband up to 
 the very window, and said he must have it he could not do 
 without it, and almost seemed as if he would have taken it if 
 it had not been given to him." " And so," said Hazlitt, 
 
 " O was obliged to lend it to him, to prevent his taking 
 
 it out of the till ! "
 
 CONVERSATIONAL AND SOCIAL POWERS. 117 
 
 The following was intended by Hazlitt to form part of one 
 of his Conversations with Northcote (Bosivell Redivivus) in 
 the " New Monthly Magazine," but was suppressed by the 
 editor. It relates to Haydon, the historical painter. 
 
 " He then asked me if I had seen anything of H ? I 
 
 said, yes ; and that he had vexed me ; for I had. shown him 
 some fine heads from the Cartoons, done about a hundred 
 years ago (which appeared to me to prove that since that 
 period those noble remains have fallen into a state of con- 
 siderable decay), and when I went out of the room for a 
 moment, I found the prints thrown carelessly on the table, 
 and that he had got out a volume of Tasso, which he was 
 spouting, as I supposed, to let me understand that I knew 
 nothing of art, and that he knew a great deal about poetry. 
 
 " I said I never heard him speak with enthusiasm of any 
 painter or work of merit, nor show any love of art, except as 
 a puffing-machine for him to get up into and blow a trumpet in 
 his own praise. Instead of falling down and worshiping 
 such names as Raphael and Michael Angelo, he is only con- 
 sidering how he may, by storm or stratagem, place himself 
 beside them, on the loftiest seats of Parnassus, as ignorant 
 country squires affect to sit with judges on the bench. He 
 told me he had had a letter from Wilkie, dated Rome, with 
 three marks of admiration, and that he had dated his answer 
 'Babylon the Great,' with four marks of admiration. Stuff! 
 Why must he always ' out-Herod Herod ? ' Why must the 
 place where he is always have one note of admiration more 
 than any other ? He gave as his reasons, indeed, our river, 
 our bridges, the Cartoons, and the Elgin Marbles the two 
 last of which, however, are not our own. H. should have 
 been the boatswain of a man of war : he has no other ideas 
 of glory than those which belong to a naval victory, or to 
 vulgar noise and insolence ; not at all as something in which 
 the whole world may participate alike. I hate ' this stamp ex- 
 clusive and professional.' He added that Wilkie gave a poor 
 account of Rome, and seemed, on the whole, disappointed. 
 He (Haydon) should not be disappointed when he went, for
 
 1 1 8 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 his expectations were but moderate. ' Aye,' said Northcote, 
 ' that is like the speech of a little, crooked, conceited painter 
 of the name of Edwards, who went to Italy with Romney and 
 Humphreys, and when they looked round the Vatican, he 
 turned round to Romney and said, ' Egad, George, we 're 
 bit.' 
 
 " I said that when I heard stories of this kind, of even clever 
 men who seemed to have no idea or to take no interest except 
 in what they themselves could do, it almost inclined me to be 
 of Peter Pindar's opinion, who pretended to prefer taste to 
 genius : ' Give me,' said he, ' one man of taste, and I will 
 find you twenty men of genius.' N. replied, 'It is a pity you 
 should be of that opinion, for all your acquaintances are great 
 geniuses ; and yet, I fancy, they have no admiration for any- 
 body but themselves.' " 
 
 HAZLITT AT A PRIZE-FIGHT. 
 
 The most favorable circumstances under which Hazlitt could 
 be seen were those under which he was the most entirely 
 himself that is, during a few hours or days spent with him 
 in a country ramble, at a distance from all his accustomed 
 haunts and associations. It was then that his spirit had free 
 leave to move and meditate at its own will, and to set forth all 
 its finer qualities and attributes, undeteriorated by any of 
 those peculiar habits of feeling and of thought which had 
 been engendered by a life, the last twenty years of which had 
 been spent in a manner anything but congenial to the tone 
 and tendencies of its nature. 
 
 I passed much time with Hazlitt under these favorable cir- 
 cumstances, and will briefly refer to one or two of these pas- 
 sages in his life ; because they will show him in a very differ- 
 ent light from that in which he was ordinarily seen, even by 
 his most intimate associates ; but a light, if I mistake not, in 
 which he would always have appeared, had not the untoward 
 events of his early years cast him forever out of that steady 
 current of mingled thought and action and emotion, which 
 might and ought to have formed " the even tenor of his way "
 
 HAZLITT AT A PRIZE-FIGHT. 119 
 
 to a wise, honorable, and happy manhood, and a calm and 
 lengthened old age. 
 
 Probably most of the readers of these Recollections are 
 aware that Hazlitt was intended for an artist, and had studied 
 and practiced for some few years with this view. Had he 
 persevered steadily in this line of pursuit, there can be little 
 doubt that he would have been all that I have supposed 
 above ; and that, in being thus, the world would not have lost 
 any material portion of those of his literary works that are 
 worth preserving, and would have gained into the bargain one 
 of the greatest painters that ever lived. Those artists and 
 lovers of art who are acquainted with the half-dozen or so of 
 extraordinary portraits from Hazlitt's pencil that still exist, 
 and tbat were painted at the very outset of his brief career 
 as an artist, will, I am sure, absolve me from the charge of 
 exaggeration in the latter part of the above proposition : and 
 those who knew the character and constitution of his mind 
 will, I think, agree with me in opinion that, whatever else he 
 might have been, he must have been a great and distinguished 
 writer. This latter was a necessary consequence, from his 
 unequaled capacity for the perception of the truth in what- 
 ever presented itself to his notice, added to his irrepressible 
 passion for setting it forth as he saw it. In this age of writers, 
 Hazlitt could not have helped being a writer ; and his writ- 
 ings would probably not have possessed a single one of the 
 faults that they do possess, if he had not been a writer by 
 profession a writer for his daily bread. 
 
 But this last fact was not only the fertile cause of all the 
 errors of his writings ; it was the source of all the misery of 
 his life. Witness his two Essays on " The Pleasures of Paint- 
 ing." They alone coupled with the fact that the perform- 
 ances to which they so beautifully and interestingly refer, 
 are in their way first-rate works of art are sufficient to bear 
 me out in both the propositions I have hazarded above. They 
 show at every page a heart and mind made for the reception 
 and enjoyment of those " calm pleasures and majestic pains " 
 which constitute the sum and substance of a wise and good
 
 I2O WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 man's life, and which make the very material on which they 
 live and grow. 
 
 That exquisite sensibility to the beauties of external nature 
 and of high art which Hazlitt so eminently possessed, and 
 that sympathy with and delight in them which, however, are 
 not its necessary accompaniment, would alone have sufficed to 
 carry him smoothly and happily down the stream of life, with- 
 out the necessity for resorting to those artificial sources of 
 excitement which do but recruit and multiply the ills they mo- 
 mentarily assuage. 
 
 The unfailing recurrence of occupation, both mental and 
 bodily, which his intended profession would have furnished to 
 him, might have wholly prevented that unwholesome ponder- 
 ing over its own thoughts, which was the error and the foible 
 of Hazlitt's mind. From having in early life nothing to do 
 but to think, he used to brood over the embryo offspring of 
 his contemplations, beyond the natural and healthful term of 
 gestation, till they at last came forth maimed of their fair 
 proportions, or were overlaid and killed by too much care and 
 cherishing. 
 
 The subsequent necessity of providing by his pen for his 
 daily wants cured him of this error, so far as related to the 
 various subjects on which he wrote ; and all his best things 
 were written under the actual and immediate pressure of this, 
 his only motive for writing at least latterly. But the radical 
 error alluded to stayed by him to the last, in regard to all that 
 concerned his merely personal opinions. He thought about 
 things and people till the very faculty of thought left him, 
 and he could only feel; and he always felt according to his 
 fears, never according to his wishes or his hopes. 
 
 But I was about to speak of Hazlitt at those periods " few 
 and far between " when he was, so to speak, his own man 
 when he was all that Nature and Contemplation had made 
 him ; and when all that Passion and Circumstance had grafted 
 upon his natural character remained dormant, or was laid 
 aside. 
 
 The first time that I obtained this favorable view of him
 
 HAZLITT AT A PRIZE-FIGHT. 1 2 1 
 
 was at a very early period of our acquaintance ; and I believe 
 it contributed greatly to fix and confirm that feeling of regard 
 and interest towards him which all that I had heretofore seen 
 of him had called forth, while all that I had heard of him was 
 calculated to persuade me that his character was incapable of 
 exciting any but an opposite impression. 
 
 I had, at the period in question, the prevalent passion for 
 prize-fighting strong upon me. (Gentle reader, it is a long 
 while ago, and I know better now. Howbeit, it is the prize- 
 fighters themselves who have cured me not the preachers 
 against them.) The famous fight between the Gas Man and 
 Neate was to be fought in a few days, and it was the talk of 
 the town. Hazlitt had never seen a prize-fight, and in talking 
 with him on the subject a few nights before the appointed 
 time, I happened to say (on his expressing curiosity on the 
 matter) that, if ever he meant to see one, now was his time ; 
 for that there had never been such a one before, and never 
 would be such another. I told him that I was going ; and 
 added (half in joke, half earnest) that he could not do a better 
 thing than go with me, and make an " article " about it for the 
 New Monthly. I little thought that he would take me at my 
 word ; for the time was the depth of winter, the place of meet- 
 ing at least sixty miles from London, and on account of the 
 extraordinary interest that was excited about the event, all 
 sorts of extra difficulties and obstacles were in the way of the 
 undertaking. Moreover, what at that period were to me (a 
 very young man) only pleasant stimulants to the enterprise, 
 must, as I supposed, appear to him insurmountable impedi- 
 ments. He talked, indeed, of going, and I promised to let 
 him know the exact place and time. But that a man who 
 would certainly not have stepped across the room to see a 
 coronation, and who would often sit silent and motionless over 
 his breakfast-things till seven or eight o'clock at night, from 
 pure incapacity to take the trouble of moving off his chair 
 and putting on his shoes to go out, should, under any induce- 
 ment, even think of travelling sixty or seventy miles on a win- 
 ter's night, with the almost certainty of meeting with no com-
 
 122 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 fort or accommodation when he got there, and no probable 
 means of getting back again, perhaps, for two or three days 
 to say nothing of the expense, the previous trouble of arrange- 
 ment, etc. seemed out of the question. 
 
 However, on the morning of the day before that fixed for 
 the fight, I let him know my arrangements ; and he still said 
 he thought he should meet me at the time and place I named, 
 which was, I remember, the Golden Cross, Charing Cross, at 
 ten o'clock at night, to start by the Salisbury night-coach, 
 which arrived at the nearest town to the appointed spot at 
 about five o'clock in the morning. 
 
 As I expected, he did not make his appearance ; and after a 
 perishing ride of seven hours a nap of two or three, on the 
 coffee-room table (for not even a chair was to be had) of the 
 inn where the coach put me down with my feet (to keep 
 them warm) in the great-coat pockets of one of the six or 
 seven " strange bedfellows " with whom prize-fighting, like 
 misery, makes a man acquainted a hasty but hearty and 
 healthy breakfast and a walk of five or six miles to the spot 
 of meeting who should I see among the first persons I rec- 
 ognized on the ground but William Hazlitt ! He had wisely 
 calculated that it would never do to arrive houseless and sup- 
 perless at five o'clock on a winter's morning ; so he had 
 lounged into Piccadilly at eight o'clock over night, found a 
 vacant place in the Bristol mail got into it somehow or 
 other lighted upon a comfortable bed at the same town where 
 I had stopped slept and breakfasted comfortably and there 
 he was, lively as a bird, gossiping gayly with his friend, Joe 
 Parkes, whom he had just met on the ground and as " eager 
 for the fray " as the most interested and knowing of " the 
 fancy." 
 
 I was too anxious about the "great event" I had come 
 seventy miles to see to take much notice of its effects upon 
 Hazlitt while it was going on. But after it was over we joined 
 company ; and I then found that he had taken the most pro- 
 found metaphysical as well as personal interest in the battle ; 
 and I never heard him talk finer or more philosophically than
 
 HAZLITT AT A PRIZE-FIGHT. 123 
 
 he did on the subject which he treated and justly, I think 
 as one eminently worthy of being so considered and treated. 
 As a study of human nature, and the varieties of its character 
 and constitution, he looked upon the scene as the finest sight 
 he had ever witnessed ; and as a display of animal courage he 
 spoke of the battle as nothing short of sublime. I found that 
 he had paid the most intense attention to every part of the 
 combat, had watched the various chances and changes of its 
 progress with the eye and tact of an experienced amateur, and 
 could have given (and, in fact, afterwards did give in the 
 " New Monthly Magazine ") an infinitely better, because a 
 more characteristic and intelligible, account of its details, than 
 the professional reporters employed for that purpose. 
 
 If I mistake not, this was the faculty in which Hazlitt ex- 
 ceeded any other man that perhaps ever lived the faculty in 
 which his genius consisted. A practical musician can play 
 anything " at sight," as the phrase is. But Hazlitt could per- 
 ceive and describe " at sight " the characteristics of anything, 
 without any previous study or knowledge whatever, but by a 
 species of intellectual intuition. Other men become acquainted 
 with things progressively, and with more or less quickness and 
 precision, according to their capacity and to the attention they 
 bestow. But Hazlitt felt them at once. They did not gradu- 
 ally engrave themselves upon his perceptive faculties, but 
 struck into them at once as by a single blow. This peculiarity 
 was of universal application in respect to Hazlitt, and it was 
 the secret of his unequaled critical faculties ; for if his criti- 
 cisms themselves were often (perhaps always) more or less 
 defective, on account of the comparatively little of steady at- 
 tention that he gave to the subject of them, his critical facul- 
 ties have perhaps never been surpassed. 
 
 Our journey home from the fight offered one of those in- 
 stances which few of Hazlitt's friends can even have conceived 
 possible, and fewer still have enjoyed that of seeing him for 
 eight and forty hours together as happy as a boy or a bird ; as 
 free from all seeming consciousness of the ills which his 
 " flesh," above that of all other living men, was " heir to." as
 
 I 24 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 if some kind genius had charmed his memory and imagination 
 to sleep. Yet that no such process had taken place was clear, 
 from the delightful manner in which both those faculties were 
 called into play, in the Table Talk in which the pleasant hours 
 were passed. 
 
 Having settled to proceed together on our journey home, 
 we started immediately after the business of the day was con- 
 cluded, with the intention of sleeping at a neighboring town, if 
 we could get comfortable accommodation there, and if not, of 
 proceeding onwards towards London, and taking the chance 
 of anything that might present itself on the way. 
 
 We soon found that the latter was the only course ; and 
 having reconnoitred, and made our way out of the town, which 
 resembled nothing but a place just entered pell-mell by a be- 
 sieging army, the whole of its length being one mass of vehi- 
 cles jammed together in a motionless state, and all the path- 
 ways and interstices filled up by pedestrians, every individual 
 of the whole living mass presenting in their faces, more or 
 less, evidence of the excitement of the hour, we got upon the 
 London road, and, soon giving the go-by to the subject, which 
 we had now (for the present) had enough of, relapsed into that 
 natural and self-suggestive talk which is the only thing de- 
 serving the name of " conversation," and in which Hazlitt ex- 
 celled all men I have ever known, provided he had (as in my 
 case) a good listener, and one who could give the cue when it 
 was wanting, without ever desiring to keep the ball in his own 
 hands for a moment longer than was necessary to preserve it 
 from falling to the ground. 
 
 It was a beautiful sunshiny afternoon, I remember, with a 
 mild sharpness in the air, which Hazlitt seemed every now and 
 then to drink in and snuff up with a boyish delight, while he 
 gazed and remarked on the pleasant scenery we were passing 
 through, as if the feeling and sight of " the country " had re- 
 stored to him those times and associations which it seemed to 
 be the sole business of his ordinary every-day life (not to for- 
 get, but) to brood over with a melancholy and mortal regret. 
 Here, however, they seemed to come back like " angel " rather
 
 HAZLITT AT A PRIZE-FIGHT. 12$ 
 
 than demon visits, and to bring with them nothing but a grave 
 and quiet satisfaction. 
 
 Some remark of his on the curious manner in which smells 
 bring back to us the scenes with which they have been asso- 
 ciated in years long past, called for a remark from me which I 
 was surprised to find was entirely new to him, but the truth of 
 which he immediately admitted, namely, that certain tastes 
 produce this effect in a still more remarkable manner. I said 
 that to that day (and it is the same at this) I could never taste 
 green mustard and cress without its calling up to my mind, as 
 if by magic, the whole scene of my first school-days, when I 
 used to grow it in my little bit of garden in the inner play- 
 ground ; that every individual object there present used to 
 start up before me with all the distinctness of actual vision, 
 and to an extent of detail which no effort of memory could ac- 
 complish without this assistance ; and that nothing but the 
 visible objects of the scene presented themselves on these oc- 
 casions. 
 
 Hazlitt illustrated the fact by several instances in his own 
 case, connected with smells ; and he said that the observation 
 had been first suggested to him by Mr. Fearn, in whose meta- 
 physical work, he said, the fact was first brought to bear on 
 our mental operations. And he instanced, I remember, Mr. 
 Fearn's remark, that certain associations of ideas brought 
 back to him, as if it were actually existing, the smell of a 
 baker's shop at Bassora, as one of the finest examples on rec- 
 ord of the far-reaching powers of the human senses when 
 duly connected with the imagination. He spoke, too, I re- 
 member, in the very highest terms of Mr. Fearn's powers of 
 metaphysical investigation, describing them as second to none 
 that had ever been employed on the subject. 
 
 In talk like this, ranging from the dizzy heights of 
 
 " Fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute," 
 
 down to the level of those merely " personal themes," in dis- 
 cussing which Hazlitt was equally happy and at home, we 
 passed pleasantly over the first five or six miles of our home-
 
 126 . WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 ward journey, by which time a return chaise overtook us, and 
 the dusk coming on, we got into it, and, in an hour more, were 
 snugly housed for the night at one of those most " comfortable " 
 of all public domiciles, a third-rate country inn ; and here, in a, 
 little wainscoted parlor on the ground floor, we were soon 
 warmly and cosily ensconced by a blazing fire, with the tea- 
 things on the table, the curtains let down, an early supper 
 ordered of roast fowl and apple-pudding (of all things in the 
 world but we had had no dinner), a " neat-handed Phyllis " 
 to wait on us (which was always a great point of comfort with 
 Hazlitt), and an interminable evening before us, destined to 
 engender a volume of Table Talk, at least as pleasant and in- 
 structive (on one side, I mean) as any of those that have fol- 
 lowed it in a more tangible form ; for, as I have hinted before, 
 Hazlitt's familiar talk, when he was in the proper cue for talk- 
 ing, had all the merits of his published writings, some which 
 those never included, and not one of their faults the greatest 
 of which merits (let me add), and the source of all the others 
 that are peculiar to this kind of talk was, that not a phrase of 
 it would bear to be set forth in the trim array of printers' 
 types. 
 
 Not that I remember a single one of those phrases, even had 
 they been ever so fitted for a place in these Recollections, 
 which I must again take the liberty of repeating, profess to 
 offer the results, not the details, of my intercourse with the 
 subject of them. 
 
 One little circumstance,' however, I will mention, because I 
 think it is peculiarly characteristic of that wise and happy 
 balance between all his various faculties and mental endow- 
 ments, which so greatly contributed to give that almost oracu- 
 lar character to Hazlitt's decisions on moral and intellectual 
 questions, which, when unbiased by personal feelings and 
 prejudices, they possessed beyond those of any man that I ever 
 knew. Almost all the evidences of mental weakness that we 
 observe in distinguished men, and often much of their mental 
 strength also, arise from some one class of faculties prevailing 
 and predominating over all the rest. The understanding, the
 
 HAZLITT AT A PRIZE-FIGHT. 127 
 
 imagination, the sensibilities, the passions one or other of 
 these hold almost undivided sway in the great majority even 
 of highly gifted and highly cultivated minds ; and they not 
 merely give the tone and color, but modify the form and sub- 
 stance, of all their conceptions and operations. But with Haz- 
 litt all these qualities were so equally blended and balanced, 
 that they enabled him to see and appreciate, with a most 
 "learned spirit of human dealing," the relative value and vir- 
 tue even of the opposite qualities and attributes that pre- 
 sented themselves to his notice and observation. 
 
 But I am making a magnificent preface to a tale that many 
 of my readers may deem not worth the telling. What I was 
 going to relate was, that, during a momentary interregnum in 
 our talk, I had taken from my pocket and laid on the table a 
 volume of what does the reader imagine, of all books in the 
 world, to make one's travelling companion to a prize-fight ? 
 The " Nouvelle He'loise ! " 
 
 Gentle reader ! let me repeat, as before, it is a long while 
 ago, and in the one case equally as in the other, the passion 
 has become a thing of memory merely. I do not go a hundred 
 miles to see a prize-fight now ; and, if I did, the " Nouvelle 
 He'loise " would not be the book I should take with me. 
 
 I put the book aside, not thinking of looking into it ; for I 
 had removed it from my pocket only because it incommoded 
 me. But Hazlitt asked, "What's that?" I handed the 
 book to him, with a smile ; and I shall not forget the burst of 
 half-comic, half-pathetic earnestness with which he read the 
 title the " Nouvelle He'loise ! " And then his countenance 
 fell as he turned over the pages silently, and the tears came 
 into his eyes as he looked, for the first time, perhaps, for 
 twenty years, on words, thoughts, and sentiments on which 
 his soul had dwelt and banqueted in its early days, with a 
 passionate ecstasy only equaled by that in which they had 
 been conceived and written ; for the " Nouvelle He'loise " was 
 the idol of Hazlitt's youthful imagination, and he himself re- 
 sembled its writer more curiously and remarkably than, per- 
 haps, any one distinguished man ever resembled another.
 
 128 WILL/AM HAZLITT. 
 
 But what I was chiefly about to remark was, the delight 
 Hazlitt expressed at meeting witfi the work under such circum- 
 stances, and at the sort of feeling which he must have for it 
 who could make it his companion to such a scene as we had 
 just left. " Why, then," he said, " you actually had the ' Nou- 
 velle Heloise ' in your pocket all the while you were watching 
 those fellows this morning, mauling and hacking at each other, 
 like devils incarnate ! Well, I confess, that 's a cut above me. 
 I can ' applaud the deed ; ' but to have done it is beyond me. 
 In putting the book into my pocket, I should have had some 
 silly scruples some indelicate feelings of delicacy, come 
 across me, and I should have left it at home. It 's the highest 
 thing I remember a piece of real intellectual refinement, by 
 G d ! and I congratulate you upon it." 
 
 That this was to consider the matter too curiously, the 
 reader will perhaps think, as I thought then, or the incident 
 would not have made so strong an impression on me. I am 
 not so sure I think so now. If not, however, it is, perhaps, 
 that our thoughts grow ripe as our feelings fade away. 
 
 The above incident led, I remember, to some beautiful re- 
 marks of Hazlitt on the " Nouvelle He"loise," and on the intel- 
 lectual and personal character of Rousseau ; but I shall not 
 even attempt to detail them, for the same reason which has 
 excluded almost all similar details from these Recollections 
 namely, that it is morally impossible to relate them without 
 blending them (whether consciously or not) with the feelings 
 and opinions of the relator, in a way that must divest them of 
 all specific character, and also of that authenticity which con- 
 stitutes the only real value of such details, or keeps them 
 from degenerating into a deception and an impertinence. 
 
 I shall conclude my, perhaps, too lengthened notice of this 
 excursion, by adding that, after a hearty supper, an early bed 
 (which was a novelty to both of us), and a gossiping breakfast 
 the next morning, we mounted the first coach that passed for 
 London, arrived there in the evening, and Hazlitt (at my sug- 
 gestion) wrote in the next " New Monthly " a capital descrip- 
 tion of " The Fight," signed " Phantasies." I mention this,
 
 AT FONTHILL AND BURLEIGH HOUSE. 129 
 
 as the paper does not appear among his collected Essays ; the 
 title and subject being deemed unsuitable to the " ears polite " 
 of Mr. Colburn's book customers, and only to be tolerated in 
 the ephemeral pages of a periodical miscellany. 
 
 AT FONTHILL AND BURLEIGH HOUSE. 
 
 On another occasion, I passed eight or ten days with Haz- 
 litt, among scenes of peculiar interest, but not exactly of a 
 nature to keep him in that good humor with himself which 
 made his society so delightful, and in the absence of which, 
 though his company was always in the highest degree interest- 
 ing and instructive as a moral and intellectual study, it was not 
 what one would have chosen purely for the sake of the com- 
 panionship it afforded. 
 
 The place where I met him on this occasion was no other 
 than Fonthill Abbey, which had just been thrown open to the 
 public curiosity, after having remained up to that time a sealed 
 book from the day of its mysterious creation. I was, by the 
 favor of its new proprietor, staying in the house (with a view 
 to a detailed description of its treasures of art, and of the 
 beautiful domain surrounding it, which I was preparing for 
 the pages of a periodical work) ; and I found that Hazlitt was 
 also staying there, but was absent at the time of my arrival. 
 
 We met the next day, and were much together during the 
 time we stayed ; and though he was anything but at ease and 
 at home in those scenes of artificial luxury and overstrained 
 refinement which surrounded us here, yet the locality happened 
 to be one with which many of his early associations were con- 
 nected ; and we made several excursions in the neighborhood, 
 which afforded some of the most pleasant and profitable hours 
 I ever spent with him. 
 
 Hazlitt particularly piqued himself on his skill in cicerone- 
 ship ; and when he was in good health and spirits, there was 
 nothing pleased him better than to accompany a friend to 
 some celebrated collection of pictures, with which he himself 
 was familiar, but which the party accompanying him had not 
 seen before ; and the first place he proposed that we should 
 9
 
 130 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 go to see was Sir Richard Colt Hoare's, which is situated a 
 few miles from Fonthill. 
 
 On these occasions it was very curious and characteristic 
 to observe the manner in which the mere feelings and im- 
 pressions of his youthful enthusiasm were blended with the 
 critical knowledge and judgment of his after years, each 
 moulding and modifying the other into forms which neither 
 could have assumed of themselves, and which, if they did not 
 offer a very just estimate of the objects to which they were 
 applied, offered that which was infinitely more characteristic 
 and interesting, as illustrations of the mind and spirit in which 
 they were generated. 
 
 Not that the actual criticisms which Hazlitt pronounced on 
 these occasions when he pronounced such at all were in 
 any material degree impaired in value by the mere impressions 
 which had preceded them in his mind. But it was these latter 
 that he loved chiefly to recur to, and which, to my thinking, 
 were even more instructive and valuable than his formal crit- 
 icisms ; because, with him, the first impression was always 
 the germ and the foundation of all that he might afterwards 
 have to say or to write on any topic of this kind. It was in 
 the astonishing depth and quickness of his first insight into 
 any object of art, that his unequaled critical faculty consisted ; 
 and all his written criticisms on actual objects of art consisted 
 of the impressions thus received, long before he ever thought 
 of becoming a critic at all. Nor did he much care to modify 
 the impressions, by any after accessions of knowledge that 
 might have come to him from other sources ; which will ac- 
 count for many instances that might -perhaps be pointed out 
 in which his criticisms are erroneous or exaggerated, and 
 some in which they must be wholly unintelligible except to 
 those who are acquainted with the manner in which they have 
 been produced. Conceive, for instance, a man writing a de- 
 tailed notice of a picture that he had not seen for twenty 
 years that he then saw only once, and that he saw at a 
 period and under circumstances when, for him, all things were 
 attired in " the glory and the freshness of a dream ; " but
 
 AT FONTHILL AND BURLEIGH HOUSE, 13 r 
 
 which he was to describe when every ray of that freshness 
 and beauty had not merely "faded to the light of common 
 day," but was changed into mortal clouds and shadows, that 
 overhung the Present like a pestilence, and blotted out the 
 Future as if it were a thing not to be ! 
 
 The truth is, that Hazlitt's extraordinary critical powers 
 were available to him only by the light of the Past. His im- 
 pressions on contemporary art were as little to be depended 
 on as those on contemporary literature. The pictures that he 
 had seen at the Louvre during the Peace of Amiens, and in 
 the private galleries of England about the same period, he 
 could describe with a more intimate sense of their merits and 
 beauties than any other man ; and he could convey to others 
 that sense more vividly than even actual observation would 
 have presented it especially when he had the objects before 
 him to renew his impression of those individual details by 
 which the general impression was first created in his mind. 
 But to all other objects of a similar kind, if he did not willfully 
 close his eyes, at least he opened them only to look with that 
 vague and vacant gaze in which the perceptive powers, instead 
 of projecting themselves outward in tangible communion, as 
 it were, with the thing looked upon, seem to rest idle or para- 
 lyzed within us, and convey no distinct impressions to the sen- 
 sorium. He saw, yet saw them not. 
 
 In going through the various apartments at Sir Richard 
 Colt Hoare's, and afterwards at Burleigh House, I shall never 
 forget the almost childish delight which Hazlitt exhibited at 
 the sight of two or three of the chief favorites of his early 
 days, and the way in which he expressed that delight, not so 
 much to me as to the attendant who showed us the pictures, 
 and on whom he seemed to look with a sort of superstitious 
 respect, as if the daily looking upon objects which were 
 nothing less than sacred in Hazlitt's eyes, had transferred 
 something of their sanctity to him. 
 
 On another day, while at Fonthill, we walked over to Salis- 
 bury (a distance of twelve miles) in a broiling sunshine ; and 
 I remember, on this occasion in particular, remarking the ex-
 
 132 WILLIAM HAZL1TT. 
 
 traordinary physical as well as moral effect produced on Haz- 
 litt by the sight and feel of " the country." In London the 
 most inobservant person could scarcely pass him in the 
 street without remarking the extreme apparent debility, almost 
 amounting to helplessness, of his air and manner. He used 
 to go drooping and faltering along, like a man just risen from 
 a bed of sickness, seeming scarcely able to support himself 
 without holding by the railings or leaning against the walls ; 
 and "in variably looking prone upon the ground, to which he 
 seemed ready to fall at every step. But in the country, 
 especially upon a vast open plain or heath, like that over which 
 our path on the present occasion chiefly lay, he was like a 
 being of another species ; his step firm, vigorous, and rapid ; 
 his look eager and onward, as if devouring the way before it, 
 and his whole air and manner buoyant and triumphant, as 
 if a new sense of existence and new bodily powers had been 
 breathed into him by the objects around. 
 
 He spoke on this occasion of having repeatedly walked 
 from forty to fifty miles a day in that fashion formerly, and 
 said that he could do so now with perfect ease and pleasure. 
 Yet in London (as I have hinted elsewhere) he would sit, as 
 if nailed to his chair, from morning till late at night, day after 
 day, for weeks together merely creeping out to the theatre, 
 or the Southampton at ten or eleven o'clock at night, and 
 there taking his seat silently again, and sitting till he was 
 fairly warned away by the extinguished lights and the closing 
 doors. 
 
 Another of our excursions was to that gem of English vil- 
 lages, Stourhead, adjoining the seat of Sir Richard Colt Hoare. 
 I have never seen anything in its way so pretty as this village. 
 Indeed it was too pretty, for it gave one the idea, not of a real 
 country village, but of the imitation of one in some prince's 
 or nobleman's park ; and, knowing it not to be so, the effect 
 was odd, and, in some degree, unpleasant. It reminded one 
 of a village beauty, too well dressed to admit the belief that 
 she had been her own tire-woman ; or, in another way, it 
 looked like one of those pretty Paris grisettes who sit for half
 
 AT FO NTH ILL AND BUR LEIGH HOUSE. 133 
 
 an hour under the hair-dresser's hands before they show them- 
 selves in their shops in the morning. All the houses looked 
 as if they had just been newly colored and painted. The win- 
 dows glittered like crystal, the little green in the centre was 
 like the lawn of a Londoner's villa, and the whole picture 
 was set in the framework of a superb laurel hedge, of im- 
 mense height and depth, which ran in an unbroken line round 
 the adjoining pleasure-grounds of Sir R. Hoare. We found, 
 too, an exquisite little inn, with a landlady as trim and point-de- 
 vice in all about her as the village over which she seemed to 
 preside. Here we slept, breakfasted the next morning, and 
 then returned to the Abbey. 
 
 It was during this stay at Fonthill Abbey that I had occa- 
 sion to remark one among many other instances in Hazlitt, of 
 that peculiarity which he himself so often observed and smiled 
 at in Charles Lamb unconscious, I believe, that it existed in 
 at least an equal degree in himself, though modified by another 
 feature in his personal character. Whenever he showed spe- 
 cial signs of favor towards any one in a menial stage of life, 
 it was sure to be some out of the way being, who was the 
 laughing-stock or the pity of everybody else ; and among the 
 people of the late immense establishment of Mr. Beckford 
 who had been retained in the service of the new proprietor of 
 the place (Mr. Farquhar) was a lout of a foot-boy, who was in 
 special favor with Hazlitt. He had recently been promoted 
 from the plough-tail to the servants' hall, and had been ap- 
 pointed to take up Hazlitt's breakfast to his room in the morn- 
 ing, and to give him any information he might need connected 
 with the object of his visit to the place, which was similar to 
 mine. Now, a personal civility to Hazlitt won his heart at 
 once ; and in the case of menial servants he always took care 
 to lay the foundation for this (when he could afford to do so) 
 by a liberal gratuity beforehand. And he had done this in 
 Tom's case so effectually that the lad took him for nothing 
 less than a lord in disguise, and treated him accordingly ; at 
 the same time perceiving, by a sort of menial instinct, that 
 his benefactor was in fact not much more lordly or urbane in
 
 134 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 his mere " complement extern " than he himself was, and 
 thereupon assuming a most lackey-like superiority over him, 
 in virtue of the information which he (Tom) possessed and 
 the other party wanted. He used to direct Hazlitt as to the 
 various localities of the neighborhood ; show him about the 
 grounds ; and in one or two instances, I remember, ventured 
 to go the forbidden length of naming the name of the late 
 lord of the Abbey. Among other things, he told Hazlitt that 
 he had once (during an almost life-long servitude on the spot !) 
 actually caught a sight of the visible presence of the said 
 mysterious being, who, in his solitary wanderings about the 
 grounds of the Abbey, having encountered the unlucky ap- 
 parition of Tom in those sacred precints where he had no 
 business, instead of ordering his instant dismissal from the 
 service (which was the understood rule in such cases), in his 
 infinite magnanimity merely desired him to " get out of the 
 way." 
 
 The change which had come over the spirit of Tom since 
 the downfall at the Abbey of this more than eastern mystery 
 and despotism, had worked an amusing alteration in him, the 
 outward effects of which it was that took Hazlitt's fancy ; and 
 he used to take every opportunity that offered of talking with 
 him on subjects connected with the late and present state of 
 the place. While Tom, on his part, thus elevated to a com- 
 panionship with "gentlefolks," and seeing those spots which 
 had heretofore scarcely echoed to a human footstep suddenly 
 changed (nobody could tell why) into a bear-garden and a pub- 
 lic thoroughfare, was so completely mystified and moved from 
 his propriety as to have become, for the nonce, a " character " 
 well worth observation and study. 
 
 One great -practical point in Tom's favor with Hazlitt, I re- 
 member, was, that he used, by hook or by crook, to procure him 
 an inordinate quantity of cream for his breakfast and tea : and, 
 in order to excuse himself from any improper imputation on 
 his honesty in the affair, he used to confess, or rather to 
 boast, with great naiveti, that all " that sort of thing " was 
 now the understood privilege and " parquiset " of the estab-
 
 EVENINGS AT THE SOUTHAMPTON. 135 
 
 lishment. " Lord bless'ee, zur, we all does it now, since 
 Nabob 'a been gone away, and nobody be'nt the worse nnr 
 the wiser for it. Muster Phillips l is master now, and we does 
 just as we likes." In fact, what Hazlitt admired in Tom was 
 the simple honesty of his roguery. There was nothing Tom 
 would not have done for him such as stealing the best fruit 
 from the hot-houses harnessing the pet white ponies to the 
 pony-phaeton, and driving him round the grounds, etc., etc. 
 excusing it all with a " Lord bless'ee, zur, there 's no harm in 
 it nobody won't know nothin' about it ! " The only immo- 
 rality, in Tom's eyes, was to be found out. 
 
 EVENINGS AT THE SOUTHAMPTON. 
 
 If I were required to name the person among all Hazlitt's 
 intimates in whose society lie seemed to take the most un- 
 mingled pleasure or I should perhaps rather say, with whom 
 he felt himself most at ease and " comfortable " I should 
 say it was the late William Hone, author of the celebrated 
 " Parodies," etc. With almost everybody else Hazlitt seemed 
 to feel some degree of restraint on some point or other. With 
 some (as with Northcote for instance) he seemed to feel him- 
 self bound to listen more than he liked to listen ; with others 
 he felt called upon to talk more than it pleased him to talk. 
 With one class of persons the professed literati of the day 
 
 he tried to shine ; with another class the opposite of the 
 above he tried not to shine, but, on the contrary, to be and 
 to seem not a whit superior to those about him. In the com- 
 pany of females, whoever they might be, or of whatever class 
 
 even with those few who were uniformly kind and cordial 
 in their reception and treatment of him, and of whose respect 
 and good-will he could not reasonably doubt there was al- 
 ways apparent a dash of melancholy and despondency ; and 
 also a resentful feeling, which showed itself from time to time, 
 not in anything he said, but in the fearful expression which 
 used to pass across his face, and which he never even at- 
 
 1 The " eminent " auctioneer under whose direction the property was preparing 
 for the public sale, which shortly afterwards took place.
 
 136 WILL 2 'AM HAZLITT. 
 
 tempted to suppress or conceal an expression that can only 
 be described by saying that it gave the look of an incarnate 
 demon's to a face that, in the absence of that look, indicated 
 the highest and noblest attributes of the human intellect and 
 character. In speaking of this look, I may remark that r 
 though no obvious cause was ever apparent for it, I never re- 
 member to have once observed it without being able immedi- 
 ately to assign the cause, even though I may inadvertently 
 have given it myself for it was always something touching 
 more or less remotely or nearly the personal condition and cir- 
 cumstances of the man ; and I might add, it was almost al- 
 ways connected with one of three topics the downfall of 
 Napoleon the abuse of some deserving writer from party 
 motives and (in the case where females were present), in 
 reference to the passion of Love. On each of these topics 
 there existed a morbid part in Hazlitt's mind, which no one 
 friend, foe, or perfect stranger could touch, or even ap- 
 proach, without exciting a feeling of mingled agony and re- 
 sentment, that showed itself as I have just described. These 
 topics were strings in the noble instrument of his mind which 
 had been so early and violently overstrained, that nothing 
 could ever restore them to their healthful temperament, or 
 cause them to give out tones capable of making anything but 
 " harsh discords," or music the pathos of which was lost in 
 the pain. 
 
 But in the company of females, the dreadful look I have 
 spoken of (for such it was) used to come over Hazlitt's face 
 much more frequently than at any other time ; because the 
 great source of those agonized feelings which called it forth 
 was connected with that habitual and almost insane fear I 
 have before alluded to, that no woman could look upon him 
 without a feeling of mingled terror and distaste at least, if 
 not disgust. 
 
 If I have been tempted to notice more at length than it 
 may seem to deserve this singular feature in Hazlitt's social 
 and personal character, it is because it was fraught with an al- 
 most painfully pathetic interest, that has perhaps never been
 
 EVENINGS AT THE SOUTHAMPTON. 137 
 
 equaled, either in kind or degree, even in fictitious narra- 
 tive, except in that divine Eastern story of Beauty and the 
 Beast. 
 
 It has been my lot during the last fifteen years to associate 
 more or less familiarly with a large proportion of the most in- 
 tellectual men of an age which perhaps deserves to be charac- 
 terized as the most intellectual that the world ever knew ; and 
 I confess that no part of such intercourse has connected itself 
 with more perfectly pleasant recollections and associations 
 than do the three or four evenings that I remember to have 
 spent with Hazlitt and Hone, in the little dingy wainscoted 
 coffee-room 1 of the Southampton Arms, in Southampton 
 Buildings, Chancery Lane. There, after having dreamed and 
 lingered at home over his beloved tea from five or six o'clock 
 till ten or so at night, Hazlitt used to go every evening, for 
 years, to take his supper (or dinner, as the case might be), of 
 either cold roast beef or rump-steak and apple tart ; for he 
 rarely tasted anything else but these never by choice, unless 
 it were a roast fowl, a pheasant, or a brace of partridges, 
 when his funds happened to be unusually flourishing. And 
 there you were sure to find him, in his favorite box on the 
 right hand side of the fire-place, sitting (if alone) upright, 
 motionless, and silent as an effigy, brooding over his own 
 thoughts, and, at the same time, taking in and turning to in- 
 tellectual account every word that was uttered by the few 
 persons who used at that time habitually to frequent the 
 house, and to most of whom he was known ; at the same time, 
 casting furtive glances at the door every time it gave intima- 
 tion of opening, partly in the hope, partly in the fear, that the 
 in-comer might be some one of his own particular intimates, 
 who came there, as he knew,, solely to seek him. 
 
 I say that he looked for a companion under these circum- 
 stances with a mixed feeling of hope and fear. In fact, it was 
 always a moot point whether Hazlitt liked better to be alone 
 with his own thoughts and imaginations, or interchanging 
 
 1 Since " improved from off the face of the earth," for all purposes of old local as- 
 sociation.
 
 138 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 them with those of other people ; nor do I believe that he 
 himself could ever have decided the point satisfactorily to 
 himself in any given case. But when accident decided it, the 
 result seemed sure to be the right one always provided the 
 party disjoining him from himself did not happen to be one of 
 those three or four unlucky individuals towards whom he felt 
 a sort of constitutional antipathy as some men do to cats. 
 But such was his humane sense of the forbearance and tolera- 
 tion we owe to each other, and his delicate consideration in 
 exercising these, that even the persons in question were sure 
 to go away with the impression that they had made them- 
 selves peculiarly agreeable to him. And even if the truth 
 happened to be so exactly the other way that he could bear 
 the infliction no longer, the worst he used to do was to plead 
 illness (as he safely might for this sort of thing disturbed 
 his whole system for a day or two), get up, and go away to the 
 theatre begging they would come and sit with him some 
 other night ! 
 
 There was something in the social and intellectual character 
 of William Hone peculiarly suited to the simple, natural, and 
 humane cast of Hazlitt's mind using the latter epithet in its 
 broad and general sense, as implying a sympathy with all the 
 qualities of our nature its weaknesses no less than its 
 strengths. His manner (I speak of him when in Hazlitt's so- 
 ciety where alone I was accustomed to see him) united the 
 most perfect freedom, familiarity, and bonhomie, with that 
 delicate deference and respect which the extraordinary intel- 
 lectual powers of Hazlitt were calculated to excite in all who 
 were capable of duly appreciating them. He also never failed 
 to keep Hazlitt in that active good-humor with himself which 
 was so indispensable to his personal comfort, and to that of 
 all who conversed with him. And he effected this by a spe- 
 cies of flattery which is not merely innocent in itself, but is 
 the just meed of high intellectual superiority, and is never 
 withheld from it but by those who either envy its pretensions 
 or dispute them a flattery which consists in the instant rec- 
 ognition and allowance of any new light thrown upon the topic
 
 EVENINGS AT THE SOUTHAMPTON. 139 
 
 of converse, or any false one dispelled, in place of that petty 
 and paltry disputation for disputation's sake which is the mis- 
 erable characteristic of all ordinary English conversation 
 even of that which formally claims that name ; in short, that 
 flattery which consists in the delighted admission and recep- 
 tion of the Truth the instant it is made apparent to us, instead 
 of the dogged denial of it on that very account, and because 
 we ourselves have hitherto been blind to it, or have seen its 
 semblance in error and falsehood. 
 
 There was also about Hone a buoyancy and joyousness of 
 spirit which, wherever Hazlitt met with it, acted upon his 
 memory and imagination in a beautiful and affecting manner. 
 Himself the very type of intellectual dejection and despond- 
 ency, the mere sight of the opposites of these in others, in- 
 stead of aggravating the malady, as it does in most cases, 
 utterly dispelled it for the moment, and made him feel, not 
 joyous himself, but as if he could become so if he chose by 
 the mere force of those fine sympathies with his fellow-beings 
 which kept the constitutional melancholy of his temperament 
 from sinking into that fatal disease which it so often assumes. 
 For the effect I speak of was not a mere association of ideas, 
 carrying him back in imagination to the time when he himself 
 was buoyant and happy ; it was a complex action, arising, as I 
 conceive, chiefly out of his deep and universal sympathies with 
 human nature, but modified and blended, no doubt, by and 
 with his unconscious recollections of that period of his life 
 when "he too was an Arcadian." It was an association that 
 not merely " played round his head," but " touched his heart " 
 also. 
 
 In illustration of this sort of complex association of ideas, 
 and its effect upon a mind made up, like Hazlitt's, of almost 
 equal proportions of our intellectual and our sentient natures, 
 I will here refer to a simple fact that many of his associates 
 must have observed as well as myself, and which never oc- 
 curred without exciting in me an interest almost painful, yet 
 blended with a peculiar and touching pleasure, precisely cor- 
 responding with that which we derive from unexpected touches
 
 I4O WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 * 
 
 of nature in lyrical or pastoral poetry. I have already stated 
 that, from the time of my first acquaintance with him, Hazlitt 
 had been a determined water-drinker. No temptation ever 
 induced him to trangress his rule of life in this respect ; the 
 only rule he ever prescribed to himself, or could have been 
 likely to keep if he had. But this rule had been imposed upon 
 him by the moral certainty that his life would be the cost of 
 neglecting it ; for, in the early part of his literary career in 
 London, he had been led into an intemperate use of stimu- 
 lants, which had at length wholly destroyed the healthful tone 
 of his digestive organs, and made the utmost caution necessary 
 to prevent those attacks, under one of which he died. 
 
 Of course, in our evening meetings at the Southampton and 
 elsewhere, a glass of grog, or something of the kind, was not 
 wanting to give that social flavor to our table-talk which was 
 one of its most pleasant qualities. Indeed, Hazlitt himself 
 could never bear to see the table wholly empty of some em- 
 blem of that " taking one's ease at one's inn," which was a 
 favorite feeling and phrase with him ; and immediately his 
 supper-cloth was removed (for his corporeal enjoyment on 
 these occasions was confined to the somewhat solid but brief 
 one of a pound or so of rump-steak or cold roast beef), he 
 used to be impatient to know what we were each of us going 
 to take ; and, as each in turn determined the important point, 
 he would taste it with us in imagination. It was his frequent 
 and almost habitual practice, the moment the first glass was 
 placed upon the table after supper, to take it up as if to carry 
 it to his lips, then to stop for a few moments before it reached 
 them, and then to smell the liquor and draw in the fumes, as 
 if they were "a rich distilled perfume^" He would then put 
 the glass down slowly, without uttering a word ; and you 
 might sometimes see the tears start into his eyes, while he 
 drew in his breath to the uttermost, and then sent it forth in a 
 half sigh, half yawn, that seemed to come from the very depths 
 of his heart. At other times he would put the glass down with 
 a less dejected feeling, and exclaim in a tone of gusto that 
 would have done honor to the most earnest of gastronomes
 
 EVENINGS AT THE SOUTHAMPTON. 14! 
 
 over the last mouthful of his actual ortolan, " That 's fine, by 
 G d ! " literally exhilarating, and almost intoxicating, himself 
 with the bare imagination of it. He used almost invariably to 
 finish this movement by falling back into a brief fit of dejec- 
 tion, as if stricken with remorse at the irreparable injury he 
 had committed against himself, in having, by an intemperate 
 abuse of a manifest good, forever interdicted himself from the 
 use of it ; for no man ever needed more the judicious use of 
 stimulants, or would, if he could have borne them, have found 
 more unmingled benefit from them. But to him that which 
 could alone have medicined his mental ills, was nothing less 
 than deadly poison to his body. 
 
 I might here offer the reader some pleasant reminiscences 
 connected with those evenings at the Southampton to which I 
 have incidentally referred above. But the theme is so tempt- 
 ing, that, if I were to enter upon it formally, it would lead me 
 too far from what I desire to keep before me as the chief ob- 
 ject of attention. Besides which, Hazlitt himself has treated 
 of those evenings in so delightful a manner (in his paper on 
 " Coffee House Politicians," in vol. ii. of the " Table Talk") 
 that I may not venture to touch them after him. But there 
 are three or four individuals who used to form part of those 
 pleasant symposii, to whom the nature of these Recollections 
 calls upon me to refer more particularly than in a passing 
 paragraph. The most distinguished of these was the amiable 
 and gifted poet, so universally known to the readirig world 
 under the name of Barry Cornwall. This gentleman used 
 but seldom to grace our simple feasts " of reason," or of 
 folly, as the case might be) ; but when he did look in by ac- 
 cident, or was induced by Hazlitt's request to come, every- 
 thing went off the better for his presence ; for, besides the 
 fact of Hazlitt's being fond of his society, and, at the same 
 time, thinking so highly of his talents as always to talk his 
 best when he (Procter) was a partaker in the talk, there is an 
 endearing something in the personal manner of that exquisite 
 writer, an appearance of gentle and genial sympathy with the 
 feelings of those with whom he talks, which has the effect of
 
 142 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 exciting towards him that personal interest from which it 
 seems itself to spring, and in the absence of which the better 
 feelings and mental characteristics incident to social converse 
 are seldom if ever called forth. In Procter Hazlitt always 
 found a man of fine and delicate intellectual pretensions, who 
 was nevertheless eager and pleased to listen, with attention 
 and interest, to all the little insignificant details of his daily 
 life which so often made up the favorite theme of his con- 
 versation, and which must have seemed, to ordinary hearers, 
 the most utter and empty commonplace ; but from which 
 Hazlitt (when encouraged by the interest I have spoken of, or 
 not stilled into silence by its absence) used to extract materials 
 for constructing the most subtle and profound theories of the 
 human character, or themes for conveying the most deep- 
 thoughted wisdom, or the most pure and touching morality. 
 And, above all other themes, to Procter, and to him alone 
 (except myself) Hazlitt could venture to relate, in all their 
 endless details, those " affairs of the heart " in one of which 
 his head was always engaged, and which happily always (with 
 one fatal exception) evaporated in that interminable talk about 
 them of which he was so strangely fond. 
 
 Not that Hazlitt confined his confidences on this head to 
 Procter and myself. On the contray, he extended them to 
 almost every individual with whom he had occasion to speak, 
 if he could, by hook or by crook, find or make the occasion of 
 bringing in the topic. But, in general, he did this from a sort 
 of physical incapacity to avoid the favorite yet dreaded theme 
 of his thoughts ; and he did it with a perfect knowledge that 
 his confidential communications were a bore to nine tenths of 
 those who listened to them, and consequently that the pleasure 
 of the communication was anything but mutual. In fact, it must 
 be confessed that the details of Hazlitt's dreamy amourettes 
 had as little interest for anybody but the dreamer, as those of 
 any other dreams have. But still they were his dreams, related 
 and expounded by his own subtle and profound intellect ; and, 
 for my own part, I must say that I never listened to his ac- 
 counts of them without learning something new and worth
 
 EVENINGS AT THE SOUTHAMPTON. 143 
 
 knowing of the human mind or heart, and often not without 
 gaining glimpses and guesses into the most secret and sacred 
 of their recesses, that I might have sought in vain elsewhere, 
 or under any other circumstances whatever. I am therefore 
 the less disposed to doubt, that the interest which Proctor 
 seemed to take in the same study was not an assumed one, 
 merely put on to please the humor of one who, in the par- 
 ticular now in question, was looked upon and often treated as 
 a child, even by some of his most admiring friends. The 
 truth is, that Hazlitt was a child in this matter ; yet at the 
 same time he was a metaphysician, a philosopher, and a poet : 
 and hence the (in my mind) curious and unique interest which 
 attached to his mingled details and dissertations on this the 
 most favorite of all his themes of converse, at least in a 
 tete-a-tete j for he rarely, if ever, brought up the subject under 
 any other circumstances. 
 
 Another of Hazlitt's favorite companions at the Southampton 
 was a Mr. Mouncey, of whom he has made such pleasant 
 mention in the essay noticed above, on " Coffee House Poli- 
 ticians ; " among which latter class, however, Mouncey was 
 by no means included. Mouncey was (and is, I hope) a solic- 
 itor, of good practice, residing in a neighboring Inn of Court, 
 who never failed, when in town, to escape at night from the 
 grave vacuity and bustling nonentity of the law, to enjoy, in 
 his own quiet little box at the Southampton, over his intermin- 
 able goes of gin-and-water, the occasional converse that the 
 chances of the evening- might offer ; and it was there that 
 Hazlitt became acquainted with him, and their acquaintance 
 never extended beyond the scene of its origination. Yet 
 Hazlitt had a great respect and even personal regard for 
 Mouncey, and always seemed to take pleasure in addressing 
 and listening to him, which, however, he did invariably from 
 the opposite side of the room, and, in nine cases out of ten, 
 without the possibility of making out one half of what M. 
 said, partly from the very low tone of voice in which he was 
 accustomed to speak (as if addressing himself or his glass of 
 gin-and-water), but chiefly on account of the hour of Hazlitt's
 
 144 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 arrival being usually late enough to have allowed the aforesaid 
 goes to effect their desiderated end, of so blending together 
 into a pleasing confusion the confines of dream-land and real- 
 ity, that the happy borderer used to murmur inwardly precisely 
 like a man who talks in his sleep. 
 
 For my own part, often as I have talked and listened to 
 Mouncey with unmingled pleasure, I have no recollection of 
 having clearly understood a single sentence that he ever ut- 
 tered. Yet when you did catch a glimpse of opinion or a 
 glance of meaning, it was invariably of a nature to impress 
 you with that personal respect for the speaker which is one of 
 the rarest of all the results of desultory conversation most 
 of all, of coffee-house conversation. In fact, Mouncey was a 
 singular example of that rara avis in the Inns of Court, a man 
 of the purest simplicity and the strictest honesty of mind, di- 
 rected by sterling good sense, and modified by those high sen- 
 timents of personal honor, and that humane and liberal con- 
 sideration for the feelings of others, which constitute the 
 better part of the true " gentleman." 
 
 Another of the circumstances which made the society of 
 this person so agreeable to Hazlitt, was the fact of his having 
 been formerly acquainted with the friends and associates of 
 Hazlitt's early life Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, 
 his (M.'s) family having lived, and being then still living, I 
 believe, in the neighborhood of the Cumberland lakes. The 
 opportunity thus afforded Hazlitt of comparing notes, as it 
 were, on the personal characters of those distinguished men, 
 with one who had no literary prejudices either for or against 
 them (for Mouncey made no pretensions to a literary taste), was 
 what he had never met with elsewhere ; and he used it often 
 and freely. 
 
 Another of the Southampton companions of Hazlitt, during 
 
 my acquaintance with him, was a Mr. W e, of the India 
 
 House, a friend also of Charles Lamb's, and therefore asso- 
 ciated by Hazlitt with some of his most pleasant recollections 
 of that coterie the breaking up of which he so often regretted. 
 W e was (and I hope still is) a man of much shrewdness
 
 EVENINGS AT THE SOUTHAMPTON. 145 
 
 of observation, and considerable delicacy of taste, in matters 
 both of literature and art ; but so fastidious in his demands 
 for every sort of perfection, that Hazlitt looked upon an even- 
 ing spent with him as a kind of discipline of his critical fac- 
 ulties and judgment. For W e had no more respect for 
 
 an opinion or a dictum merely because it was Hazlitt's, than 
 if it had been anybody else's. If it struck him as just and 
 true, he at once admitted and appreciated it ; but if not, he 
 contested it as freely and pertinaciously, coming from the first 
 critical authority of his day (as he believed and acknowledged 
 Hazlitt's to be perchance with a modest mental reservation 
 in favor of one other pefson !) as if it came from a mere novice 
 or a nobody. And this habit of social intercourse, instead of 
 piquing Hazlitt, pleased and often excited him to an earnest- 
 ness of discussion and illustration that we might else have 
 been without. Accordingly, I have never heard Hazlitt talk 
 better by which I mean at once more amusingly and more 
 
 instructively than when W e formed one of the talkers 
 
 and listeners. W e, too, had a taste (of his own, like all 
 
 his other tastes and opinions) for pictures which often fur- 
 nished occasion for the display of Hazlitt's exquisite judgment 
 in respect to the higher branches of art, and his profound in- 
 sight into the principles on which their power of affecting us 
 
 rests. W e's fastidiousness, too (for he was the " Man of 
 
 Refinement " of our little knot of talkers), was not seldom a 
 pleasant topic of examination in his absence ; though it was 
 never treated of in terms that he himself might not have been 
 present to hear. 
 
 This latter fact reminds me to remark on what was deemed 
 by many of Hazlitt's friends a crying defect in his intellectual 
 character ; I mean his disposition to discuss, in their absence, 
 the qualities and characteristics of his friends and acquaint- 
 ance, with a freedom, and even severity, of criticism, which 
 were in no degree modified by the fact of the parties treated 
 of being numbered among his intimate associates. This com- 
 plaint against Hazlitt was, I am afraid, founded on something 
 worse than a mistake. It was the result of a
 
 146 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 at the best ; in some cases it originated in a desire meanly to 
 deceive others. Those who call speaking the truth of our 
 friends behind their backs an act of treachery, and consider 
 the treating of their vices, errors, and weaknesses as if they 
 were facts or abstract propositions, as a traducing of them, 
 will not be likely to see anything worse in inventing or propa- 
 gating falsehoods of them for our sport or profit. Hazlitt dis- 
 cussed the characters of his friends and acquaintance simply 
 as if they were not his friends and acquaintance, and because 
 they were so ; in other words, because they were the only 
 persons whose characters he could discuss with any founda- 
 tion of fact and truth to go upon. If we desire to know and 
 to make known the human heart and mind, are we to study it 
 only in the dark, and state what we learn of it only when every- 
 body is out of hearing ? It is only our friends and acquaint- 
 ance of whom we can by possibility know anything, of our 
 own actual knowledge and observation : and 
 
 " What can we reason but from what we know ? " 
 
 Hazlitt carried this open and free discussion of the moral 
 and intellectual qualities and characteristics of our friends 
 and intimates to a pitch that perhaps it never before reached : 
 but I do not call to mind that he ever carried it beyond the 
 legitimate bounds which it has a right to claim for itself. He 
 used it purely as an instrument of mental exercise and en- 
 tertainment ; he never sacrificed what he believed to be the 
 truth in the use of it. Moreover, he used it in reference to 
 friends and foes alike ; he used it as readily in favor of those 
 to whom it referred as against them ; and he never expected 
 or desired that anybody should feel any scruple in using it, to 
 the utmost extent of the truth, about himself. 
 
 At all events, what nobody who knew Hazlitt will deny is, 
 that of all the various sources of social converse that he was 
 accustomed to open and draw upon, no other furnished so 
 admirable a mixture of instruction and amusement as the one 
 in question. Get him to talk upon these " personal themes," 
 and his fund of facts and illustrations was only surpassed by
 
 A VISIT WITH HAZLITT TO JOHN HUNT. 147 
 
 the unequaled sagacity and acuteness with which he applied 
 them. 
 
 A VISIT WITH HAZLITT TO JOHN HUNT. 
 
 There was one man, and one only, towards whom Hazlitt 
 seemed to cherish a feeling of unmingled personal affection 
 and regard : that man was the late Mr. John Hunt, the elder 
 brother of Mr. Leigh Hunt. Of him only Hazlitt was accus- 
 tomed to speak uniformly in terms of unqualified admiration 
 and esteem, as related to his personal character, no less than 
 to his sound judgment and singular good sense. He used to 
 say that if there was an honest man in the world, it was John 
 Hunt Nor did I ever hear him speak disparagingly of him 
 in even the smallest particular of either character or conduct, 
 except on one occasion. " Look here," said he, as I went in 
 one morning as he was sitting at his breakfast, reading a 
 letter he had just received " Look here ! " handing me 
 the letter, and pointing to the seal of it, on which was a showy 
 crest or coat-of-arms " what d 'ye think of that from John 
 Hunt from the reviler of aristocratic distinctions the 
 sturdy democrat the only honest leveler and republican of 
 them all and the only one among them all who would die a 
 martyr to his opinions, if he could propagate them by doing 
 so ? " 
 
 As some of my earliest and most vivid Recollections of 
 Hazlitt are connected with this gentleman, I shall recur to 
 them here. 
 
 The first evidence Hazlitt gave me of a disposition to culti- 
 vate my society or rather to accept it for he cultivated no 
 one his mind and genius were essentially contemplative, 
 and disposed to that loneliness which contemplation asks 
 was his inviting me to accompany him one Sunday morning 
 in a visit to Mr. John Hunt, who was then confined in the 
 Coldbath Fields Prison, for a political libel which had ap- 
 peared in the " Examiner " newspaper, of which the Hunts 
 were the sole proprietors. 1 We went, and found Mr. Hunt 
 
 1 I have given, in a previous section, some details respecting the conversation 
 which took place on this visit, but no description of the visit itself.
 
 148 . WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 walking in the garden of the prison ; and I shall not forget 
 the impression his appearance and manner made on me cor- 
 responding so precisely as they did with the previous notion I 
 had entertained of his personal character. I have never seen 
 in any one else so perfect an outward symbol or visible setting 
 forth of the English character, in its most peculiar and dis- 
 tinguishing features, but also in its best and brightest aspect, 
 as in Mr. John Hunt. A figure tall, robust, and perfectly 
 well-formed ; a carriage commanding and even dignified, with- 
 out the slightest apparent effort or consciousness of being 
 so ; a head and a set of features on a large scale, but cast in 
 a perfectly regular mould ; handsome, open, and full of intelli- 
 gence, but somewhat hard and severe ; an expression of 
 bland benevolence, singularly blended with a marble coldness 
 of demeanor almost repulsive, because almost seeming to be 
 so intended : such were the impressions produced on me by 
 the first abordol John Hunt, as I saw him within his prison 
 walls. 
 
 As I afterwards 'became acquainted with Mr. John Hunt 
 and his accomplished brother, and had all my first impressions 
 confirmed about the former, I cannot let slip this occasion of 
 testifying my belief, that the wholesome and happy change 
 that has taken place in our political and social institutions 
 since the period above referred to, and is still in happy prog- 
 ress, is owing in no small degree to the excellent individuals 
 just named ; for I verily believe that, without the manly firm- 
 ness, the immaculate political honesty, and the vigorous good 
 sense of the one, and the exquisite genius and varied accom- 
 plishments, guided by the all-pervading and all-embracing 
 humanity of the other, we should at this moment have been 
 without many of those writers and thinkers on whose unceas- 
 ing efforts the slow but sure march of our political, and, with 
 it, our social regeneration as a people mainly depends. Of 
 this I am certain that without the writings of Mr. Leigh 
 Hunt himself, we should have missed a large measure of that 
 high and pure tone of political and of social feeling from 
 which everything is to be hoped in the way of progress.
 
 A VISIT WITH HAZLITT TO JOHN HUNT. 149 
 
 towards future good ; and (having which) nothing need be 
 feared in the way of retrogression towards past evil. Many 
 causes may interfere to retard the coming on of that fair 
 pageant of political and social amelioration which already 
 shines palpable and visible in the future, even like the coming 
 on of the heavenly host in the " Paradise Lost." But there, 
 in the "clear obscure" of the distance, the embodied splen- 
 dor shines, and nothing can ever again abolish or blot it out. 
 
 Returning to my visit with Hazlitt to Mr. John Hunt, in 
 the Coldbath Fields Prison, after walking and conversing 
 for some time in the prison garden, where we found Mr. Hunt, 
 he led us to his apartment. Here the first thing that struck 
 me was a picture over the mantelpiece, of an old country- 
 woman in a bonnet, which, it immediately occurred to me, was 
 one I had heard spoken of as Hazlitt's first attempt as an 
 artist. Hazlitt pointed to it with great apparent satisfaction, 
 and asked me if I had ever seen it before, or knew what it 
 was ; but he seemed to shrink from distinctly saying what it 
 was, and I was left to learn this from inquiry of Mr. Hunt 
 himself. The picture, I found, belonged to Hazlitt himself. 
 He kept it as a precious relic, not of his success, but of his 
 failure, as a painter to which art he had at one time in- 
 tended to devote himself. The reader will, probably, call to 
 mind some beautiful reminiscences of this picture in his essay 
 " On the Pleasures of Painting." The picture itself is a 
 striking production, evincing remarkable powers of pictorial 
 effect, and not inferior in the force of its light and shade to 
 some of Rembrandt's efforts of a similar kind. I have never 
 seen the picture since, and yet it is one of those very few 
 which dwell in my memory, as if they were actually present to 
 the bodily sight. It represented the head and shoulders 
 merely of a very old country-woman, in a plain black bonnet, 
 which shaded the upper half of the face, so as to leave the 
 features almost black, and only to be distinguished by fixed 
 attention ; while the lower half of the face was in a full light. 
 The expression (which was perfect in its way) was that of the 
 utter stillness, and vacuity of extreme old age. The skin was
 
 150 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 greatly elaborated, but so as to produce the general and uni- 
 form effect, and the oneness, of nature and of Rembrandt, not 
 of the dry and hard detail of Denner or Holbein. But the 
 peculiarity of the picture consisted in the extraordinary effect 
 of the light and shade. The handling by which this effect 
 was produced was coarse yet elaborate bold and forcible, 
 yet perfectly undecided, and that of a novice. But the whole 
 was natural and true, in a remarkable degree, and it proved to 
 demonstration that if Hazlitt had devoted and applied himself 
 steadily to the art, he would greatly have distinguished him- 
 self in it. It proved, too, that he would have distinguished 
 himself in precisely that way in which the leading features of 
 his mind enabled him afterwards to shine as a writer namely, 
 in the perception and setting forth of the actual and simple 
 truth, in relation to whatever he might take in hand ; but es- 
 pecially of the truth as to human character. 
 
 The extreme apparent diffidence of Hazlitt in pointing my 
 attention to this picture, reminds me to observe here, that it 
 was the same in respect to everything else that he did. He 
 had in his possession, at this time, two noble copies, made by 
 himself, from two of Titian's finest portraits in the Louvre 
 the Young Venetian Nobleman with the Glove ; and the Hyp- 
 polito di Medici. They used to hang in or stand about his 
 rooms, without frames, and covered with dirt : and I had seen 
 and spoken of them several times, before I learned (which I 
 did by mere accident), that they were painted by himself. Not 
 that he underrated, or took a slight interest in them. On the 
 contrary, he made no scruple of declaring them to be the best 
 copies of Titian that he had ever seen ; and they were the 
 only things to which I ever knew him attach any value, or feel 
 the least desire to retain a property in. With the exception 
 of these pictures, he never, during the whole of my acquaint- 
 ance with him, possessed a single object di property not 
 even a favorite book. But these he cherished with a per- 
 sonal fondness that seemed to give them in his eyes all the 
 character of living objects ; they seemed necessary to his very 
 existence, and to preserve, as it were, that personal identity
 
 A VISIT WITH HAZLITT TO JOHN HUNT. 151 
 
 with his early life, in the absence of which he would scarcely 
 have felt that he continued to live at all, at least, to any of the 
 real and valuable purposes of life. They were like keepsakes 
 given to him by those twin brides of his soul, the Ideals of 
 Truth and Beauty, which he had wedded in his youth, only to 
 love and worship for a day, and then to be widowed from for- 
 ever, and weep over their grave for the rest of his existence. 
 For such was, in fact, the secret cause of that profound mel- 
 ancholy which hung upon Hazlitt's mind like an incubus, and 
 was the mortal disease that sunk him to a premature grave. 
 
 I afterwards possessed these two pictures, having pur- 
 chased them at a sale of the property of Haydon, who valued 
 them, and had purchased them of Hazlitt, when the latter had 
 been forced, under some momentary pecuniary pressure, to 
 sell them. 
 
 I do not remember anything in my intercourse with Hazlitt 
 which gave me so much pleasure, as being thus enabled to 
 preserve and restore these pictures to him. He used every 
 now and then to come to me on purpose to look at them, as 
 he had done in the case of Haydon when they were in his 
 possession. I remember he would stand and gaze on them 
 with a look of deep sadness, not unmixed with pleasure, and 
 almost with tears in his eyes as one may imagine a fond 
 parent gazing on the grave of his buried hopes but he 
 never said anything about wishing to have them, otherwise I 
 should have offered them to him immediately. I, on the other 
 hand, never thought of offering them spontaneously, knowing 
 that, with all his frankness and delicacy in appreciating an act 
 of good-will of this kind, he would not have been able to 
 avoid attributing it in part to the want of my setting a due 
 value on the pictures. At last he came one day, and after 
 looking earnestly at the pictures for some time, he began, in 
 that roundabout, awkward, and hesitating way, which he al- 
 ways fell into when he was not quite sure of his ground : 
 
 " I say, Patmore, do you care about those pictures ? " 
 
 " How do you mean?" said I, though I anticipated what was 
 coming.
 
 152 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 "Why I mean" said he, hesitatingly "that is 
 would you like to part with them ? " 
 
 " Part with them ? " I said, repeating his words, and not 
 knowing very well how to reply without the risk of hurting his 
 self-love one way or the other and there is nothing like 
 awkwardness for engendering its like " Part with them ? 
 Why, I " and I hesitated about coming to the point as much 
 as he did. 
 
 "Aye," continued he "that is, not unless you like 
 only I " (and here he seemed to get farther than ever from 
 the mark) "I that is, I think I can get you a good sum for 
 them if you 've a mind to part with them." 
 
 " If that 's what you mean," I said, " I have not a mind to 
 part with them. I thought, perhaps, you wanted them for 
 yourself." 
 
 "Why, that's it," said he. " The fact is, so and so (nam- 
 ing some one whom I now forget), has been speaking to me 
 about them. He '11 give you forty or fifty pounds down for 
 them, I think ; and will let me have them back again when I 
 like. What do you say ? " 
 
 I said, " I '11 not sell them if that 's what you mean 
 \>\iiyou may have them if you like." 
 
 " Well," said he, " what shall I give you for them ? " 
 
 " Nonsense ! " I replied ; " nothing or anything you like " 
 for I did not like to press his acceptance of them after 
 he had told me what he thought of doing with them. 
 
 " Well shall I give you ten pounds for them ' out and out,' 
 on the chance of getting fifty ? " 
 
 " Yes if you like." 
 
 "But I 've got no money." 
 
 " Well give it me when you like." 
 
 " No I '11 give you a bill at two months (I think it was). 
 I shall have money then." 
 
 I could hardly help smiling at this proposal ; but I did not 
 dare to do so, as he was very sensitive on points of this 
 kind. 
 
 " But may I take them with me now ? " he asked, hesitat- 
 ingly "I '11 bring you the bill by and by."
 
 A VISIT WITH HAZLITT TO JOHN HUNT. 153 
 
 " To be sure," I said, fairly smiling out at the idea of the 
 bill, but not venturing to refuse it. 
 
 Accordingly, he took away his two favorites under his arm.; 
 evidently delighted to have them once again in his possession; 
 for he had more regard for them than for all his writings put 
 together. 
 
 The next day he brought me a promissory note duly drawn 
 and which of course was not duly paid. That it was paid 
 ultimately, I need not say. Had it been otherwise, the reader 
 would have heard nothing of the details, at leas't, of this little 
 story. About seven or eight months afterwards, when I had 
 almost forgotten the bill he had given me, he called on me, 
 and, holding out a ten-pound note, said, " Have you got that 
 bill ? " and I believe he never parted with a bank-note so 
 readily as he did on this occasion. 
 
 Returning for a moment to our visit to John Hunt, in Cold- 
 bath Fields Prison, I remember, as if it had happened but 
 yesterday, the precise spot on which we met him in the prison 
 garden ; the dreary and prison-like look of the garden itself, 
 without a tree or a shrub in it ; with nothing alive but long 
 rows of sickly cabbages and lettuces, that seemed to be pin- 
 ing for the free air that passed hundreds of feet above their 
 heads an " unreal mockery " of a garden that seemed, to 
 a true garden, what the melancholy " liberty " of walking in it 
 was to liberty itself. I remember, too, the extreme cleanli- 
 ness of the narrow and interminable passages through which 
 we passed to the prisoner's cell, and that it struck me as 
 something shocking like the unnatural tameness of the 
 birds and animals in the island of Juan Fernandez a species 
 of refinement in cruelty. The cell itself, too, I see before me 
 as I write with its lofty ceiling, which made the area look 
 twice as small as it really was ; its square iron-barred window, 
 on the right-hand wall as you entered, raised out of the reach 
 of any access either from within or without ; the little blank 
 fire-place opposite to the door ; and the no-furniture, consist- 
 ing of a table and two chairs. Being an optimist, I have often 
 thought since that the statesmen of that day were the people
 
 154 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 of all others to inculcate the blessings and the love of politi- 
 cal liberty. To imprison for two years in a place like this one 
 of the most honest, honorable, and pure-minded men that 
 ever lived, for expressing a political opinion that they did not 
 approve, was a pretty sure way of making him a patriot and 
 an advocate of freedom, if he had not been so before. There 
 is nothing like Evil for teaching the value and the virtue of 
 Good nothing like Wrong for demonstrating and confirming 
 Right. 
 
 OPINIONS AND CRITICAL ESTIMATES. 
 
 It often used to occasion me no less surprise than regret to 
 find that Hazlitt did not duly appreciate the genius and writ- 
 ings of Mr. Leigh Hunt ; or rather let me confine the remark 
 to Mr. Hunt's writings for his genius and talents were not 
 underrated by Hazlitt. That their results were sometimes 
 disparaged, or their merits overlooked, is to be attributed to 
 various causes, arising out of the personal character of the 
 two men, and their intimacy with each other. If Hazlitt had 
 not been in habits of personal intercourse with Hunt, he would 
 have estimated his literary efforts justly. But, with Hazlitt, 
 " to know a man truly, was to know himself" and therefore 
 not to know that which is but an offset and emanation from 
 him. Probably no man ever formed a just critical estimate of 
 the writings of his personal intimate. It is scarcely possible 
 to do so even of one's contemporary, though he may be per- 
 sonally unknown to us. There never was a more just and en- 
 lightened critical spirit abroad than that which prevails in the 
 present day. Yet not one of our estimates of contemporary 
 genius will be exactly confirmed by posterity which is the 
 only final and infallible judge in such matters. But for a man 
 to estimate the literary character of his personal intimate, or 
 his personal enemy, is not in human nature. He might almost 
 as reasonably hope to estimate his own. And yet we are apt 
 to think we know more about our friends not to mention 
 ourselves than strangers can possibly do. And so, perhaps, 
 we do. We know too much, and therefore do not know any
 
 OPINIONS AND CRITICAL ESTIMATES. 155 
 
 part accurately, still less the whole which, to be seen and 
 measured justly, must be seen at a certain distance, and as a 
 whole. 
 
 Hazlitt saw in Mr. Leigh Hunt's writings and saw with 
 an almost preternatural acuteness of vision what we have no 
 right to see at all, and what none but his personal intimates 
 do or can see the secret workings and results of those per- 
 sonal feelings (call them failings if you please their owner is 
 too wise as well as too liberal in his self-knowledge to be of- 
 fended at the phrase) which more or less beset and modify the 
 mental operations of every deep and original thinker, and still 
 more of one (as in the instance before us) whose personal feel- 
 ings blend with and give color to all his meditations. 
 
 At a very early period of Mr. Leigh Hunt's literary career, 
 his remarkable social qualities had gathered round him a 
 coterie of that class of admirers who are too apt to take the 
 form of adulators, and who, in this latter phase of their char- 
 acter, are not merely inclined, but impelled, to overlook the 
 loftier qualities and attributes of their idol, in order to monster 
 his smaller merits, or metamorphose his errors and short-com- 
 ings into beauties and virtues. 
 
 The consequence for a time was, that the young and hap- 
 pily-constituted writer 
 
 " To persons gave up what was meant for mankind ; " 
 
 never wholly deserting or misusing his high calling, but not 
 seldom postponing its duties to the delights of social success 
 and individual admiration ; confiding (as every man of genius 
 is impelled and bound to do) in his own judgment and his own 
 consciousness, as to the uses and applications of those fine 
 qualities and capacities of his mind which his adulators failed 
 to see or to comprehend ; but believing in and abiding by them 
 in all the rest. 1 
 
 This state of things a happy one perhaps for him whom 
 they touched most nearly, but a sad one for those who already 
 
 1 I gather these details and impressions from Hazlitt. I had not the pleasure of 
 Mr. Leigh Hunt's acquaintance at the time referred to.
 
 156 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 looked to him for the due exercise of his high and rare powers 
 of affording mingled instruction and delight to his fellow-creat- 
 ures has long since given place to one more consonant to 
 the nature and tendency of those powers, and their just claims 
 to the distinctions which they confer on their possessor ; and 
 I*only recur to it now to account for the insufficient impression 
 which Hazlitt entertained of the writings of Mr. Hunt, and 
 their future influence on the moral and intellectual character 
 of the age. Hazlitt saw and grieved at the state of things I 
 have described ; then grew vexed and angry at it (these lat- 
 ter feelings being not wholly unmixed, I am afraid, with a 
 touch of personal envy at the " earthlier happy " condition of 
 his friend as compared with his own) ; till at last his personal 
 feelings blended and interfered with all his impressions re- 
 specting the writings of his friend and fellow-laborer, and 
 gave to his judgment that sinister bias which it was so apt to 
 take, or rather so incapable of escaping, on all questions of 
 contemporary merit and distinction. 
 
 It is true that Hazlitt has in numerous instances, and in 
 various quarters, used the influence of his pen and his crit- 
 ical powers to disseminate opinions, just, as far as they go, 
 respecting the literary pretensions of this delightful and ac- 
 complished writer. He, perhaps, did more for Mr. Hunt's 
 reputation in this respect than any other writer of his day. 
 But, besides having done this more as a set-off against the 
 gratuitous calumnies of his enemies and maligners than as a 
 spontaneous tribute to the merits of the man, he has fallen 
 miserably short, as I conceive, of conveying a clear and full 
 impression of Mr. Hunt's intellectual pretensions, and still 
 more so in estimating the actual, and anticipating the future, 
 results of those pretensions upon the social character and con- 
 dition of this country. 
 
 But it will, I fear, be felt that I am transgressing the true 
 limits of my design. Returning to more purely personal 
 matters, I may say, that though Hazlitt took great pleasure in 
 Mr. Hunt's society, it was not the kind of social intercourse he 
 best liked. It was one in which each party sought to shine
 
 OPINIONS AND CRITICAL ESTIMATES. 157 
 
 in the eyes of each other, or of the persons present, if any. 
 And though this desire is perhaps more successful in produc- 
 ing the power and the result it aims at than any other means, 
 yet to shine in conversation is not to enjoy it ; to talk brill- 
 iantly, or to hear brilliant talk, is not to talk or to listen with 
 the heart ; it includes and supposes none of that effusion of 
 individual feeling, and that exercise and interchange of human 
 sympathy none of that "flow of soul" in the absence of 
 which, talk (be it even that of the brightest wits and choicest 
 spirits of the time) is but " as a tinkling cymbal," or as the 
 tittle-tattle of club-compelled exquisites and tea-drinking 
 Abigails. 
 
 How delightful is the kind of talk I have alluded to ! It is, 
 of all intellectual enjoyments, at once the most perfect and 
 the most ennobling ; because it is of all others the least im- 
 paired by those debasing contradictions and weaknesses which 
 blend more or less with all our pleasures even with this 
 and cloud their brightness, while they weaken their force and 
 fullness. This welling forth of the springs of affection and of 
 passion in the human heart has always seemed to me precisely 
 analogous to the singing of birds ; a spontaneous and invol- 
 untary effusion from the hidden and mysterious sources of de- 
 light ; rising in beauty and in melody with the character of its 
 utterer, from the poor twittering of the sparrow on the house- 
 top, to the intense and passionate warbling of the nightingale 
 in the deep recesses. of a solemn wood at midnight; but in 
 each case created, called forth, and modified by something ex- 
 ternal from its source ; sinking into and growing out of that, as 
 the waves in water, or the sounds of a wind-swept lute ; and 
 in no case to be thoroughly enjoyed except (as with the birds) 
 between co-mates in kindness and in love. When the night- 
 ingale, in the antique story, sought to rival the music of the 
 human minstrel, she put forth miracles of bright sounds, but 
 her heart burst in the unnatural struggle. And thus it is with 
 us " human mortals." One man may rouse and stir an as- 
 sembled nation by his eloquence ; another may teach a great 
 multitude by his knowledge ; a third may " keep the table in
 
 158 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 a roar " by his wit ; a fourth may lap his hearers in Elysium 
 by his fancy or imagination ; and so forth. But there is no 
 real enjoyment of talk except in a tete-a-tte between friends 
 or lovers ; no free pouring forth of the feelings and affections 
 that make up our intellectual being, except where there exists 
 that frank interchange of sympathy which prompts us to listen 
 with as eager an interest as we feel in speaking, and which at 
 the same time satisfies us that we, in our turn, are listened to 
 with a corresponding pleasure. 
 
 If there was any general subject on which the critical opin- 
 ions of Hazlitt were to be distrusted, it was that of the merits 
 and defects of his distinguished contemporaries in literature 
 and art. In fact, most of what he had to say on these topics 
 was so moulded and modified by the personal feelings and prej- 
 udices engendered by his early associations, and by the posi- 
 tion in which those placed him in reference to the rest of the 
 world, that they scarcely deserve the name of deliberate opin- 
 ions. During the latter years of his life Hazlitt labored 
 under a total incapacity of reading any work, however brief, 
 consecutively and completely. He had spent, he used to say, 
 the first half of his life in doing nothing but read ; and it was 
 hard if he might not employ the remainder in turning his read- 
 ing to account. He used to say, too, that after he began to 
 write, reading became a task instead of an enjoyment ; and 
 he never pretended to do anything voluntarily but what it 
 pleased him to do. 
 
 This was all very well for a man of leisure, and competence 
 to afford that leisure ; but it was an awkward propensity for 
 one to indulge in who undertook to review the writings of 
 those who did not begin to write till their reviewer had left off 
 reading. 
 
 I do not believe Hazlitt ever read the half of any one work 
 that he reviewed not even the Scotch novels, of which he 
 read more than of any other modern productions, and has 
 written better, perhaps, than any other of their critics. I am 
 certain that of many works that he has reviewed, and of many 
 writers whose general pretensions he has estimated better
 
 OPINIONS AND CRITICAL ESTIMATES. 159 
 
 than anybody else has done, he never read one tithe ; and 
 even what he did read was not the most characteristic portion, 
 or that best calculated to afford ground for a fortunate guess. 
 No wonder then that his " Spirit of the Age " should be dis- 
 figured by such a copious mixture of false criticism and per- 
 sonal prejudice. But then, on the other hand, where else is 
 to be found, in the same space and on a similar subject, such 
 an amount of happy illustration, sound criticism, and search- 
 ing truth. 
 
 The fact is that Hazlitt's half-random guesses, founded on 
 a furtive and momentary glance, went nearer to the pith of 
 the matter in question, whatever it might be, than the elab- 
 orate and lengthened examinations of ordinary men. And 
 in this respect there was a remarkable conformity between his 
 mental and his bodily perceptions. He never fairly looked at 
 anybody ; and yet, having once seen a person, he not only 
 never forgot him afterwards, but could describe him to oth- 
 ers with all the effect of an actual picture, and could trace 
 " the mind's observance in the face," with a sagacity almost 
 superhuman. I never knew him mistaken even in his physi- 
 ognomical guesses, much less in his deliberate estimates, 
 on which, by the bye, if on anything, he especially piqued 
 himself. " I am infallible (I have heard him say), in reading 
 a face." 
 
 The only one among his contemporaries with whose writ- 
 ings Hazlitt was really acquainted was Sir Walter Scott ; and 
 for him he felt a degree of admiration as a writer, that, so far 
 from being equaled, was scarcely shared, even in kind, by 
 that called forth in the case of any other writer of the present 
 or the last age. Indeed, Scott only needed to have been born 
 a hundred years ago to have held, in Hazlitt's estimation, a 
 rank second only to that of Shakespeare ; for in that case he 
 would not have been compelled to mix up with his feelings of 
 love and admiration those counteracting ones arising out of 
 Scott's politics, and their results upon his position in society. 
 He would only then have seen in him what the world will see 
 a hundred years hence a Shakespeare in the universality of
 
 160 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 his sympathies with human nature and human life, though not 
 in the profounder points of his poetry and his philosophy. 
 As it was, Hazlitt saw what there was for love and admiration, 
 but he saw it in the pet of the Tories, the patron of " Black- 
 wood's " and the "Beacon," the upholder of the divine right of 
 kings, the disparaging biographer of Napoleon, and (" though 
 last, not least in his dear hate ") the Scotchman. 
 
 There was something singularly interesting, and even affect- 
 ing, in the perpetual struggle which took place in Hazlitt's 
 mind on the subject of this great man who was now scarcely 
 below a divinity, and the next hour almost a shame and a blot 
 upon humanity, according to the view from which he was con- 
 templated ; now drawing all human hearts together in one 
 bond of mutual sympathy now trampling upon the best feel- 
 ings and affections of them all for the imaginary benefit and 
 aggrandizement of one, or half a dozen ! squandering the 
 " birthright " of the human race for the miserable " mess of 
 pottage " that was to keep alive for a little longer the bedrid- 
 den dotage of " divine right " and " legitimate " authority ! 
 
 True it is that Scott did not 
 
 " To party give up what was meant for mankind ; " 
 
 he did but give up the tithe to his party, devoting the great 
 body of the harvest of his intellect to the instruction, delight, 
 and benefit of the whole human race ; nay, putting forth as 
 beautiful and subtle an effort of his genius to vindicate the 
 right of a poor fish-wife to enjoy her dram as ever he did to 
 make good the title of a legitimate monarch to his throne. 
 Yet Hazlitt hated him for reserving that tithe almost as much 
 as if he had bestowed the whole. But he did this on the 
 principle, that a single ill word from a wise and good man 
 does more to injure a character or a cause, than a whole vol- 
 ume from the pen or the lips of a knave. 
 
 With the exception of those living writers, and, indeed, of 
 those particular passages in their works which touched him 
 privately and individually, Hazlitt scarcely ever referred to a 
 contemporary work unless as a matter of business, or opened
 
 OPINIONS AND CRITICAL ESTIMATES. l6l 
 
 its pages except as a task ; and of no one of those writers, ex- 
 cept Scott, had he (as I have said), read a tithe of their pro- 
 ductions. Yet he has written elaborate critical estimates of 
 about twenty of the most distinguished, in his " Spirit of the 
 Age." And if you take those estimates only for what they 
 are worth, and with that degree of qualification with which all 
 his critical writings must be taken, it will be found that they 
 are, at the very least, as complete and satisfactory as any 
 others that are to be met with elsewhere, touching the same 
 writers. 
 
 But the truth is, that in no case whatever could Hazlitt's 
 estimates of persons be taken implicitly ; because it was im- 
 possible for him to prevent and he never for a moment 
 tried to prevent his own intense personal feelings from 
 blending with and giving a color to such estimates. And ol 
 living persons of those who came, as it were, into hourly 
 intellectual contact with him, by breathing the same air and 
 treading on the same earth he could not even form, much 
 less set forth, a fair and unbiased opinion. What I have to 
 say, therefore, as to his personal opinions of his contempora- 
 ries is offered purely for what it is worth, and as illustrative of 
 his own personal character, not of theirs as a thing curious 
 and interesting to know, but not to be brought against the 
 reputations to which it refers, as a set-off from the just award 
 they had received at the hands of the most enlightened public 
 opinion that any age has boasted within the compass of hu- 
 man annals at least in literary matters. 
 
 Having, in justice to others no less than to Hazlitt himself, 
 premised thus much, I shall state a few of his personal opin- 
 ions, or rather feelings, about the most conspicuous among his 
 contemporaries, whether personal acquaintances of his own or 
 not ; and this without inquiring how far those opinions may 
 agree with or differ from his published ones on the same sub- 
 ject respectively. 
 
 Hazlitt looked upon Lord Byron as a lord ! a clever 
 and accomplished one but nothing more. He considered 
 that Byron occupied the throne of poetry by the same sort of 
 ii
 
 1 62 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 " divine right " by which " legitimate " kings occupy their 
 thrones. His poetry he regarded, for the most part, as a sort 
 of exaggerated commonplace the result of a mixture of 
 personal anger and egotism, powerful and effective only from 
 the excess of passion it embodied of passion in the vulgar 
 sense of that word. He was " in a passion " with himself, and 
 with everything, and everybody about him ; and being under 
 no personal or moral restraints of any kind, the exhibition of 
 this emotion became sufficiently striking and interesting to 
 amount to the poetical. 
 
 I remember having occasionally played at whist with a per- 
 son who, on any occurrence of extraordinary ill-luck, used to 
 lay his cards down deliberately, and bite a piece out of the 
 back of his hand ! This person was, under ordinary circum- 
 stances, the very ideal of a " gentleman " bland, polished, 
 courteous, forbearing, kind, and self-possessed to an extraor- 
 dinary degree ; and his personal appearance in every respect 
 corresponded with his manners and bearing ; so that the oc- 
 casional exhibitions of passion that I have alluded to were 
 perfectly awful. Hazlitt's own passions sometimes produced 
 similar results. I have seen him more than once, at the Fives 
 Court in St. Martin's Street, on making a bad stroke or miss- 
 ing his ball at some critical point of the game, fling his racket 
 to the other end of the court, walk deliberately to the centre, 
 with uplifted hands imprecate the most fearful curses on his 
 head for his stupidity, and then rush to the side wall and lit- 
 erally dash his head against it ! The sight in both these cases 
 was terrific ; but, then, anybody could have produced it by 
 using the same bodily action. 
 
 Now, Hazlitt seemed to think that Lord Byron's poetry was 
 something on a par with these merely physical exhibitions of 
 bodily passion. He was in one habitual passion with his 
 poverty, with his lameness, with his loss of caste in society, 
 and, above all, with the " Edinburgh Review," for having told 
 him the truth about his boyish verses ; and, accordingly, his 
 whole life and conversation were one continuous " unpacking 
 of his heart with words," for want of daring or being able to
 
 OPINIONS AND CRITICAL ESTIMATES. 163 
 
 use sharper weapons against himself and his fellow-beings. 
 Anybody might have written his poetry (so Hazlitt thought and 
 said) if they could only have worked themselves up to an 
 equal amount of personal rage and hatred against himself and 
 all mankind. 
 
 Such was Hazlitt's general opinion of Byron ; and there is 
 no denying that it is true of a certain part of his poetry of 
 the bad part of it in other words, of that part which is not 
 poetry at all ; of the blasphemy, the profligacy, the inde- 
 cency, the utter and elaborate wickedness, the " malice pre- 
 pense " against all the human race, all of which are so pain- 
 fully conspicuous in almost every part of that shame and 
 scandal of the age "Don Juan." And it is not very far 
 from the truth of much of that portion of his works which 
 embody (however blended with other things) his own indi- 
 vidual character. But it is scarcely needful to say how utterly 
 false and unfair it is when applied to his poetry as a general 
 proposition how ridiculously inapplicable it is to the lofty 
 grandeur and severe beauty of his tragedies (hitherto wholly 
 unappreciated) ; to the profound and subtle philosophy, and 
 the burning passion (using the word in its poetical sense), of 
 the " Manfred ; " to the sublime imaginations and beatific vis- 
 ions of many parts of the supernatural Dramas ; to the un- 
 equaled descriptions and imagery of the " Childe Harold ;" to 
 the soul-melting pathos and perfect purity of the " Stanzas to 
 Thirza," the "Dream," etc. It is in virtue of these, and in 
 spite of the mere personal egotism and vulgar malice of much 
 of his writings, that Byron enjoys and deserves his high rep- 
 utation, and will continue to enjoy it while Milton and Shakes- 
 peare maintain theirs. 
 
 To the powers of Shelley, and to their poetical results, 
 Hazlitt did as little justice as to those of Byron. And in this 
 instance I could never very clearly account to myself for the 
 personal cause of his dislike, which in every other similar 
 instance there was no difficulty in doing. Scott was a Tory ; 
 Byron was a lord ; and it will be seen hereafter, that in the 
 various other cases in which he withheld the due meed of
 
 164 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 honor from his distinguished contemporaries, there was some 
 personal feeling or other capable of explaining, if not of ex- 
 cusing, the injustice. But in the case of Shelley, I could 
 never make out any better reason than that he had seen him 
 and did not like his looks ! 
 
 " I do not like thee, Doctor Fell, 
 The reason why I cannot tell ; 
 I do not like thee, Doctor Fell." 
 
 This was a favorite mode with Hazlitt of forming his per- 
 sonal opinions ; and one which, in his case, was not a very 
 dangerous one, on account of his intuitive skill in reading 
 "the mind's observance in the face." But there can be no 
 doubt that in this instance he grossly and strangely deceived 
 himself. If ever any human being was gifted with " the vis- 
 ion and the faculty divine" Shelley was so gifted. Yet all that 
 Hazlitt chose to see in him were certain supposed corollaries 
 from his personal appearance and physical conformation. Shel- 
 ley's figure was tall and almost unnaturally attenuated, so as 
 to bend to the earth like a plant that has been deprived of its 
 vital air ; his features had an unnatural sharpness, and an un- 
 healthy paleness, like a flower that has been kept from the 
 light of day ; his eyes had an almost superhuman brightness, 
 and his voice a preternatural elevation of pitch and a shrillness 
 of tone ; all which peculiarities probably arose from some 
 accidental circumstances connected with his early nurture and 
 bringing up. 1 But all these Hazlitt tortured into external 
 types and symbols of that unnatural and unwholesome craving 
 after injurious excitement, that morbid tendency towards in- 
 terdicted topics and questions of moral good and evil, and 
 that forbidden search into the secrets of our nature and ulti- 
 mate destiny, into which he strangely and inconsequentially 
 resoived the whole of Shelley's productions. His vast and 
 vivid insight into the possible future, as springing out of and 
 moulded by the present and the past ; his gorgeous and glow- 
 ing imagination ; his universal philanthrophy the patriotism 
 of one whose all-embracing spirit could know no country but 
 
 1 This description is Hazlitt's, not mine : I never saw Shelley.
 
 OPINIONS AND CRITICAL ESTIMATES. 1 6$ 
 
 the world ; his daring yet devout faith in good, as the neces- 
 sary offspring and end of evil ; his intense sympathy with all 
 natural beauty, as the living type, the visible image, of that 
 which is intellectual ; his wonderful affluence and pomp of 
 language, altogether unrivaled by any other writer, ancient 
 or modern : all these Hazlitt seemed to overlook in Shelley. 
 
 There is but one intelligible explanation of this ; and it is 
 that, in fact, Hazlitt had read little or nothing of all the various 
 poetical wealth to which I have referred. And such I believe 
 to have been the case ; for though I have often heard him speak 
 disparagingly of Shelley as a poet, I never heard him refer to a 
 single line or passage of his published writings. 
 
 For Hazlitt's dislike and disparagement of the author of 
 " Lalla Rookh," there is not much difficulty in accounting. 
 He (Moore) was understood to have discouraged, and ulti- 
 mately broken off, Lord Byron's connection with Leigh Hunt 
 and Hazlitt in " The Liberal ; " an undertaking which, had it 
 been cordially taken up by Byron and his friends, might, Haz- 
 litt thought, have produced great results. Hazlitt attributed 
 the strangling in its birth of this promising offspring of the 
 new " Spirit of the Age " to the personal envy, and consequent 
 ill-offices, of Moore and he never forgave him though 
 more, I believe, from a public than a private and personal feel- 
 ing on the matter. 
 
 But what Hazlitt could forgive less was an insulting refer- 
 ence which Moore has made (in his " Rhymes on the Road ") 
 to one of Hazlitt's intellectual idols, Rousseau, who, with the 
 heroine of the "Confessions," Madame de Warens, he (Moore) 
 calls "low people." Referring to "Les Charmettes" he says 
 of its former celebrated inhabitants, 
 
 " And doubtless 'mong the grave and good, 
 And gentle 1 of their neighborhood, 
 If known at all, they were but known 
 As strange, low people, low and bad, 
 Madame herself to footmen prone, 
 And her young pauper all but mad." 
 
 1 Meaning well-born.
 
 1 66 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 This outrage upon Hazlitt's early associations was more 
 than he could bear. It drove him "all but mad;" and he 
 never after lost an opportunity, public or private, of venting his 
 indignation against the perpetrator of it. Nor would it be easy 
 to repel the cannonade of argument and invective by which he 
 sought to demonstrate that it was an outrage, no less against 
 fact and justice than against feeling and common honesty. 1 
 
 I must not refrain from adding my belief, that Hazlitt's in- 
 dignation, though not engendered, was in some degree height- 
 ened, by his Rousseau-like suspicion that the poet's sneer at 
 Rousseau was partly intended to point at himself a sus- 
 picion not wholly without plausible grounds at the time, con- 
 sidering that he was convinced (whether justly or not I have 
 no means of knowing) that his (Hazlitt's) connection with 
 " The Liberal " had just been dissolved by the remonstrances 
 of Moore, on the very grounds urged against Rousseau, namely, 
 that it was " discreditable " to his " noble " friend to have to 
 do with people who were so " poor " as to make the connec- 
 tion desirable to them in a pecuniary point of view ; so " low " 
 as to lodge in a second floor ; and so " bad " as to have been 
 seen speaking to " improper " females by the light of the gas- 
 lamps. 
 
 It is very painful to me to put on record the personal opin- 
 ions and feelings of Hazlitt respecting his early friends and 
 associates, Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth, particularly 
 the two latter, men from whose writings I have received more 
 delight and instruction than from those of any other two living 
 men, or indeed from all others united, Hazlitt alone excepted ; 
 men also for whose personal characters I have ever cherished 
 a degree of respect amounting to reverence. But I must not 
 shrink from my purpose, nevertheless. And I need not fear 
 that its execution will in the smallest degree affect either the 
 literary or the personal estimation of the distinguished men to 
 whom it refers, even in the eyes of those who are disposed to 
 treat Hazlitt's decisions as oracles ; because the reasons for 
 the disparaging opinions I am about to record of them will ac- 
 
 1 Particularly in his Essay in the Plain Speaktr on " The Spleen of Party."
 
 OPINIONS AND CRITICAL ESTIMATES. 167 
 
 company and explain those opinions, and throw the odium of 
 them (if any there be) where it really ought to rest. 
 
 But my task is not the less painful on this account, but 
 rather the more so, since its faithful execution must neces- 
 sarily expose the miserable weaknesses and errors of a man of 
 whose intellectual powers I thought no less highly than I do 
 of the men they were employed to disparage, and with a view 
 to the redemption of whose personal character from the un- 
 merited odium which has been heaped upon it, these pages 
 have partly if not chiefly been written. 
 
 The truth is that, in the case of Coleridge, Southey, and 
 Wordsworth alone, Hazlitt seemed to have willfully repudi- 
 ated that guiding and pervading spirit of his personal charac- 
 ter, the love of truth and justice for themselves alone. And 
 what made the matter in appearance worse was, that he had 
 seemed to do this from a personal feeling alone ; so, at least, 
 the case was represented by those who made it part of the 
 business of their lives to ^z/^represent the motives, feelings, 
 and actions of this much-maligned and ill-appreciated man. 
 Many extravagant and ridiculous stories were related, or 
 rather whispered about vaguely, all of them more or less dis- 
 creditable to the personal character of Hazlitt, as the immedi- 
 ate cause of his alienation from the distinguished friends of 
 his early life : and in the most discreditable of them all there 
 was, I have been led to believe, some truth. I allude to a 
 story relating to Hazlitt's alleged treatment of some pretty 
 village jilt, who, when he was on a visit to Wordsworth, had 
 led him (Hazlitt) to believe that she was not insensible to his 
 attentions ; and then, having induced him to " commit " him- 
 self to her in some ridiculous manner, turned round upon him, 
 and made him the laughing-stock of the village. There is, I 
 believe, too much truth in the statement of his enemies, that 
 the mingled disappointment and rage of Hazlitt on this occa- 
 sion led him, during the madness of the moment (for it must 
 have been nothing less), to acts which nothing but the sup- 
 position of insanity could account for, much less excuse. And 
 his conduct or this occasion is understood to have been the
 
 1 68 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 immediate cause of that breach between him and his friends 
 above-named (at least Wordsworth and Southey), which was 
 never afterwards healed. 
 
 But I am bound to declare that their treatment of him on 
 this occasion was not the cause of his subsequent feelings 
 towards these distinguished men, or of his treatment of them 
 as arising out of those feelings. It was not the petty anger 
 arising out of a sense of some trifling personal injustice (even 
 if he entertained any such feeling, which he scarcely could in 
 the case in question), that could make Hazlitt either blindly 
 insensible to the claims of such men as Wordsworth and 
 Southey, or willfully unjust to those claims, whether personal 
 or intellectual. 
 
 But there was one offense call it a crime for such it was 
 in his estimation which could make him both blindly insen- 
 sible and almost deliberately unjust to the claims, whatever 
 they might be, of those whom he deemed guilty of it. He 
 felt an almost boundless sympathy with the weaknesses of 
 our nature, and an equally unlimited toleration for almost all 
 their natural results. But there was one of those results for 
 which, believing it to be in some //^natural, he entertained a 
 hatred that can scarcely be conceived by those who have not 
 been accustomed to witness and watch the consequences of 
 violent passions, when habituated from earliest youth to work 
 their own will, without a touch of restraint or self-assistance. 
 Against the man who could steal from his fellow-man to pre- 
 serve his own life, or even to gratify his passing desires, Haz- 
 litt could feel little, if any, of that anger and resentment 
 which honest men are expected, and for the most part accus- 
 tomed, to look upon almost as one of their social duties. 
 But against the man who could deliberately set himself to as- 
 sist in robbing THE HUMAN RACE of its birthright, merely 
 in consideration of the "mess of pottage " that he was to get 
 for his pains against the individual who could (reversing the 
 deed of the immortal Roman), plunge his country into the 
 gulf to preserve or benefit himself in a word, against the 
 political apostate, Hazlitt cherished a hatred so bitter and in-
 
 OPINIONS AND CRITICAL ESTIMATES. 169 
 
 tense, that it blended with the very springs of his life, and 
 colored every movement and affection of his mind. And such 
 men he considered Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth to 
 have been, when they deserted the principles of the French 
 Revolution, and set themselves, heart and soul, to oppose its 
 " child and champion," Napoleon Bonaparte. But when they 
 showed themselves (as the two former did in an especial man- 
 ner) the most powerful, persevering, and effective of all the 
 literary opponents of that idol of Hazlitt's hopes and admira- 
 tion, his anger and resentment against them amounted to a de- 
 gree of rage, that made him reckless of all justice, and of all 
 consequences a fanaticism of hatred, which can only be 
 compared to, and has, perhaps, only been paralleled by, that 
 odium theologicum which has at intervals desolated the na- 
 tions with flame and bloodshed, in behalf of a religion of 
 peace. 
 
 In Coleridge, on whom, from the very dawning of his in- 
 tellectual faculties, Hazlitt had been accustomed to look al- 
 most as the heaven-appointed apostle of human liberty, sent 
 forth to preach its doctrines and promulgate its beauties and 
 virtues in words of more than mortal eloquence, he sud- 
 denly beheld the Pitt-appointed editor of the " Morning Post' 
 newspaper the writer of daily diatribes, which not merely 
 advocated and advised, but at last actually caused and created, 1 
 that Tory crusade against freedom which ultimately consigned 
 it to twenty years more of outrage and violence, and ended by 
 debauching and debasing its noblest champion into its deadli- 
 est foe. 
 
 This was bad enough for Hazlitt ; though the peculiar 
 character of Coleridge's intellect, and the " transcendental " 
 changes to which it was liable, might have prepared him for 
 the possibility at least of something of this kind, especially 
 when it is borne in mind that Coleridge had already aban- 
 
 1 Such, at least, was the deliberate opinion of one of the greatest statesmen of 
 his day, Charles Fox, who declared in his place in the House of Commons, that the 
 war against France had been caused by the Morning Post the dictum being ex- 
 clusively directed to Coleridge's writings there
 
 I/O WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 doned (on a point of conscience), the profession to which he 
 had been bred the church and had no means but his pen 
 of escaping from absolute destitution. But when Hazlitt saw 
 the severe, the single-hearted, the simple-minded Southey a 
 man whose almost ascetic habits preserved him from the pos- 
 sibility of want, and, on the other hand, whose varied and 
 available talents and acquirements, and his singular industry, 
 gave him the certain means of satisfying wants tenfold beyond 
 any that he could even comprehend as such when he saw 
 this man suddenly, from the minstrel of Joan of Arc and the 
 immortalizer of Wat Tyler, emerge into the most fertile, the 
 most ingenious, the most persevering, and the most efficient of 
 all the literary supporters, advocates, and apologists (as the 
 case might be), of those recognized abuses on which corrupt 
 power at that time rested its sole hope of continuance and 
 perpetuation ; in short, when he beheld, in the late fanatic to 
 liberty, the furious denouncer of Reformers as " worse than 
 housebreakers," when he saw the late scorner of all kings, 
 and despiser and maligner of courts, changed into the special- 
 pleading advocate of divine right and legitimacy, the bower- 
 down at levees, and he poet-laureate and panegyrist of George 
 the Fourth, it half unseated his reason, and rendered him, on 
 these topics, scarcely accountable for what he wrote or said. 
 
 But it must be especially stated, that even under these cir- 
 cumstances, and inflamed as he was against Southey with a 
 feeling of something like personal revenge, for his desertion 
 of a cause, for his (Hazlitt's) consistent devotion to which he 
 was suffering a daily martyrdom of mingled obloquy and pri- 
 vation, he never once, to the best of my recollection, either in 
 print or otherwise, treated Southey as a dishonest man, but 
 only as a weak, a vain, a self-willed, and a mistaken one. He 
 sometimes wrote and oftener spoke of Southey with a degree 
 of contempt and disparagement that amounted to the ridicu- 
 lous, when compared with his great natural powers, his noble 
 acquirements, and the vast literary results which have pro- 
 ceeded from them. But if pressed (though not otherwise, I 
 confess), he admitted a saving clause in favor of his sincerity
 
 OPINIONS AND CRITICAL ESTIMATES. \"J\ 
 
 and love of truth. Whereas, in the case of Coleridge, his 
 feelings carried him to the opposite extreme ; for while he ex- 
 aggerated his estimate of the intellectual powers of that ex- 
 traordinary man to an almost superhuman pitch, he treated 
 the chief public uses which he made of those powers as the 
 results of the most shameless hypocrisy and the most despic- 
 able cant. 
 
 With respect to Wordsworth, Hazlitt's estimate of him, 
 both as a writer and a man, was much nearer to the truth than 
 in either of the other two cases ; for the worst that Words- 
 worth had done in the way of political apostasy was, to accept 
 an obligation from a party he despised, and thus cut himself 
 off from the will as well as the power to use his pen against 
 them. He never used it for that party ; nor did Hazlitt ac- 
 cuse him of having ever gone a single step from the pure, 
 even, and dignified tenor of his way, either to gain or to keep 
 the good that he chose to accept from evil hands. On the 
 contrary, the worst that Hazlitt had to say of Wordsworth 
 was, that he was a poet and nothing more ; meaning thereby 
 that he was incapable of taking any personal interest in the 
 actual wants, desires, enjoyments, sufferings, and sentiments 
 of his fellow-men ; and that, so long as he could be permitted 
 to wander in peace and personal comfort among his favorite 
 scenes of external nature, and chant his lyrical ballads to an 
 admiring friend, and make his lonely excursions into the mys- 
 tic realms of imagination, and enjoy unmolested the moods 
 of his own mind, the human race and its rights and interests 
 might lie bound forever to the footstools of kings, or be half- 
 exterminated in seeking to escape thence, for anything that he 
 cared, or any step that he would take to the contrary, unless 
 it were to write an ode or a sonnet on the question, and keep 
 it in his desk till the point had settled itself. In short, Hazlitt 
 seemed to look upon Wordsworth as a man purged and ethe- 
 realized, by his mental constitution and habits, from all the 
 every-day interests and sentiments with which ordinary men 
 regard their fellow- men, and incognizant of any claims upon 
 his human nature but such as have reference to man in the
 
 1/2 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 abstract ; and that, while he could secure leisure to dream and 
 dogmatize and poetize on this latter theme, the living world 
 and its ways were matters wholly beneath his notice. 
 
 The pertinacity with which Hazlitt used to insist on this 
 pretended selfism of Wordsworth this alleged repudiation, 
 and even hatred, of interests and sympathies external from 
 those engendered by his own contemplation of his own mind, 
 and the malicious pleasure with which he used to dwell on 
 and recur to anecdotes which he deemed illustrative of this 
 characteristic, were very remarkable. One anecdote, in par- 
 ticular, I remember to have heard him repeat many times, and 
 always with a feeling of bitterness and acharnement which 
 was evidently the result of a strong and cherished personal 
 dislike. It merely related to some disparaging observation 
 which Wordsworth was said to have made (for Hazlitt did not 
 pretend to have heard it himself so that the whole story was 
 probably a fabrication or a blunder of the relator) on some- 
 body's admiring and pointing Wordsworth's attention to a 
 cast from some beautiful Greek statue in Haydon's painting- 
 room ; the ridiculous and wholly gratuitous inference being, 
 that Wordsworth hated to look on anything beautiful or ad- 
 mirable that did not bear the impress of his own mind, and 
 that he desired everybody else should do the same ; in short, 
 that he hated everything in the world but his own poetry, 
 and that he never enjoyed a moment of personal satisfaction 
 but when he was (as Hazlitt used disparagingly to phrase it), 
 " mouthing it out " to the gaping ears of ignorant worshipers, 
 and fancying that all the human race would soon be doing the 
 same. 
 
 It may seem something more than superfluous almost im- 
 pertinent for me to deprecate the idea that my own impres- 
 sions regarding the illustrious man above-named were in the 
 smallest degree affected by what I have now related. But I 
 cannot help doing so nevertheless. Had my debt of personal 
 gratitude to Wordsworth as a poet been less deep than it is, 
 I might perhaps have been in some degree influenced by Haz- 
 litt's disparaging notions of him as a man ; for I knew nothing
 
 OPINIONS AND CRITICAL ESTIMATES. 173 
 
 of Wordsworth myself; and we are but too apt to take a 
 malicious pleasure in seeing reduced nearer to our own level 
 the general character of those whom we admit to soar above 
 us in some particular. Even had Wordsworth been only the 
 greatest of modern poets, I might perhaps have yielded my 
 belief to Hazlitt's pertinacious exhibitions of him as any- 
 thing but great as a man. But, happily, the beauty, the charm, 
 and the virtue of Wordsworth's poetry is, that it for the most 
 part affects the reason as a personal thing that it touches us 
 as if it were a matter between the poet and ourselves, and 
 thus engenders a feeling little, if at all, differing in spirit and 
 effect from that individual gratitude which even the worst of 
 mankind are proud and pleased to owe and to pay, in return for 
 personal benefits and obligations. Almost all other poets may 
 be appreciated and enjoyed without any other benefit than 
 that appreciation and enjoyment ; but it is impossible to ap- 
 preciate and enjoy Wordsworth without being wiser, better, 
 and happier after the enjoyment has ceased. And the man 
 who makes us permanently happier than we could have been 
 without his aid, has our personal gratitude as much as if he 
 had effected the object by a personal boon. The man whom 
 Wordsworth's poetry has lifted from the debasement and de- 
 spondency of spirit in which it may have found him, and en- 
 dowed him with the "riches fineless " of a heart and mind 
 capable of creating their own wealth by the happy alchemy of 
 a purified and purifying imagination (and there are many such 
 men living), feels himself as much bound to the poet by per- 
 sonal ties of gratitude and love, as if he had lifted him from 
 actual poverty, and given him the means of worldly com- 
 petence and comfort. And that the poet who has done this 
 in innumerable instances could be the man Hazlitt believed 
 and sought to represent Wordsworth, is not to be conceived 
 on any recognized principle of the human mind, or any ex- 
 perience that we possess of its qualities and operations. 
 
 Moreover, I do not recollect a single instance in which Haz- 
 litt's depreciating stories of Wordsworth were drawn from 
 his own personal experience. They were founded on the
 
 1 74 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 mere idle or malicious gossip of people who could see nothing 
 in Wordsworth but his reputation, and who gathered their 
 notions of that from the early pages of the " Edinburgh Re- 
 view ; " and they were turned, by Hazlitt's perverse ingenuity, 
 to those self-tormenting purposes to which he was so prone, 
 whenever his personal feelings took part against his better 
 knowledge and judgment. 
 
 The writings of Bulwer had not attracted Hazlitt's attention 
 till just before his death. As I have said before, he never 
 read a line of any living writer, except when called upon to do 
 so as a matter of business either with a view to an article 
 in the " Edinburgh Review," or when a new work was sent to 
 him to criticise for any other periodical. At last, on my re- 
 peatedly urging him to do so, he read " Paul Clifford," and he 
 thought so highly of it, that he at once made up his mind to 
 read all Bulwer's novels, with the intention of discussing their 
 merits in the "Edinburgh Review." And I believe he wrote to 
 Mr. Jeffrey proposing the subject as he always did in similar 
 cases before going to work. 
 
 So the matter rested for some time Hazlitt, in the interim, 
 often expressing his anxiety to get "the job," as he called 
 it if it were only that he might have a sufficiently strong 
 inducement to read the works of which " Paul Clifford " had 
 given him so attractive a foretaste. Shortly after this period, 
 Mr. Jeffrey retired from the ostensible management of the 
 " Edinburgh Review " which was confided to Mr. Macvey 
 Napier ; and on that gentleman visiting town, Hazlitt pro- 
 posed to him personally the subject of Bulwer's novels. I 
 saw him immediately after he had spoken to Mr. Napier on 
 this matter ; and I found that there was a hitch somewhere ; 
 though in what particular point of literary, personal, or polit- 
 ical demerit on the part of Bulwer the difficulty turned, Haz- 
 litt could never learn. Certain it is, however, that Hazlitt 
 anxiously desired to write the review in question ; that he ex- 
 pressly proposed it to Mr. Napier (as I believe he had done 
 to Mr. Jeffrey before though of this I am not quite certain), 
 and that it was positively and finally refused the subject be- 
 ing an interdicted one.
 
 OPINIONS AND CRITICAL ESTIMATES. 175 
 
 The literary public must draw their own conclusions from 
 this little fact in the secret history of one of our great critical 
 tribunals. I cannot help them to any further means of arriving 
 at the solution of the mystery ; nor should I have thought of 
 making any allusion to it here, had it not proved what may be 
 satisfactory to the numerous admirers of Bulwer as a novelist 
 namely, that even the perusal of one only of his works 
 conveyed a due impression of his powers to the greatest critic 
 of the day. Hazlitt also stated to me, on this curious point 
 of literary history, that in his interview with Mr. Napier, that 
 gentleman had mentioned to him that Mr. Campbell had more 
 than once pointed Mr. Jeffrey's attention to Bulwer's novels, 
 as a fit subject for a conspicuous notice in the Review, but 
 that the same obstacle (whatever it was) had existed at that 
 time. 
 
 Of Walter Savage Landor, Hazlitt entertained a very high 
 opinion, even before the production of his noble work, the 
 " Imaginary Conversations;" but Mr. Lander's intimate con- 
 nection and friendship with Southey created that personal 
 feeling about him in Hazlitt's mind which always prevented 
 his judgment from forming an unbiased decision. That the 
 fierce republican, and the poet of the " Vision of Judgment," 
 should be able to set their horses together, seemed to throw a 
 doubt on the sincerity, as well as the stability, of the opinions 
 of both. On the appearance, however, of the " Imaginary 
 Conversations," Hazlitt lost all doubt of Landor's sincerity 
 and political honesty, and attributed the contradiction in ques- 
 tion to one of those crotchets of the brain with which genius 
 is so apt to be haunted. The book was one after his own 
 heart ; and some parts of it he considered finer than anything 
 else from a modern pen. There were, however, many parts 
 which he looked upon as pure raving, and others which seemed 
 as if they were put forth in that spirit of arrogant and insolent 
 assumption of superiority over all the rest of the world, past 
 and present, which was peculiarly obnoxious to Hazlitt's es- 
 sentially diffident nature. He did not think that the fate of 
 a nation was to be settled by a phrase, or the character of a
 
 176 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 whole people predicated in the stroke of a pen. Not that he 
 had any respect for a name. But he hesitated to set aside the 
 award of a whole generation ; and for that of ages he enter- 
 tained what might almost have been deemed a superstitious 
 reverence, but that it was founded on deep and accurate obser- 
 vation of the causes and qualities which lead to a national rep- 
 utation. He believed, indeed, that a people is infallible in its 
 decisions, on all questions of fact and of national feeling of 
 course, provided it have the fair means and materials for 
 forming its decision ; and therefore, that to dispute " Public 
 Opinion" is to dispute an identical proposition. Prove to 
 him, for example, that the actual government of any given 
 state is supported by public opinion, fairly and properly so 
 called, and his inference was that that was the form of govern- 
 ment fitted for the people governed by it. And so of any 
 other question, moral, political, or literary any question in 
 which the imagination and the feelings take part. 
 
 It followed that Mr. Landor's dogmatic mode of abolishing 
 a reputation of ages' standing by a breath of his mouth, or 
 creating one by the same summary process where nobody else 
 had ever seen a vestige of the materials for it, did not fall in 
 with Hazlitt's notions of what was just and fitting. Hence the 
 violent and, in some degree, unjust portions of an article 
 which he wrote on the " Imaginary Conversations " in the 
 " Edinburgh Review." He was, however, not answerable, he 
 told me, for the whole of that article, alterations and additions 
 having been made in it after it left his hands. 
 
 Subsequently Hazlitt was personally introduced to Landor, 
 at his residence at Florence ; and he returned to England 
 with an improved and heightened opinion of his great talents, 
 and with all the prejudices he had formerly entertained against 
 his personal character almost entirely removed. 
 
 Among his literary contemporaries there was none to whom 
 Hazlitt did more justice than to the exquisite writer known to 
 the reading public as Barry Cornwall. His personal intimacy 
 with that writer commenced, I believe, almost immediately 
 after the appearance of the " Dramatic Scenes ; " and it en-
 
 OPINIONS AND CRITICAL ESTIMATES. 177 
 
 dured, without breach, till Hazlitt's death a period of pretty 
 nearly twenty years. I doubt if the same can be said of any 
 one other of his intimacies I mean the unbroken continuance 
 of it. But there is as in what case is there not ? between 
 the writings of that delightful poet and his personal character 
 a beautiful correspondence and relationship, which, to those 
 who know him, cause them to act and react upon each other, 
 till the result is a pervading sense of gentle sweetness of tem- 
 perament, and genial goodness of heart, which those petty 
 pains and discrepancies that are so apt to disturb the current 
 of our ordinary intercourse are incapable of suffering. To 
 quarrel about trifles with a man who has added to our intel- 
 lectual wealth to the extent that Barry Cornwall has, is diffi- 
 cult under any circumstances ; but to do so when every feature 
 of his poetry is reflected in his personal character is impos- 
 sible ; and not even Hazlitt could do it, who could quarrel 
 upon a look, a movement, or a shadow. I have twenty times 
 seen him try to do it always by " making the meat " on 
 which his incipient anger was to be nourished. But his ef- 
 forts at self-tormenting always ended where they began in 
 feeling, at least, if he could not see, the error and injustice of 
 his suspicions. 
 
 In speaking of the justice which Hazlitt rendered to the lit- 
 erary pretensions of Barry Cornwall, I must be understood to 
 mean that comparative measure of it which alone he was in 
 the habit of meting out to his contemporaries, when called 
 upon to do so professionally as a critic, or personally when 
 speaking of them in conversation. In referring to the char- 
 acteristics of Barry Cornwall's writings, Hazlitt was not un- 
 just or stinting in his praise. But with the amount of his 
 beauties as a poet, he was as little acquainted as he was with 
 that of any other of his contemporaries for the simple rea- 
 son, as before stated, that he had not read a twentieth part of 
 them. What he had read he fully appreciated ; but beyond 
 that he had not only nothing to say, but he felt nothing. And 
 this is as if one should profess to understand and appreciate 
 12
 
 178 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 Milton by reading his " Lycidas," or Pope by his Epistles or 
 his Satires. 
 
 Among all Hazlitt's acquaintance and friends, there was not 
 one more tolerant and considerate towards him, or more kind 
 and generous to the last, than was Barry Cornwall. He was 
 among the very few some " two or one " to whom Haz- 
 litt knew and felt that he might always resort, at a moment 
 of real need or difficulty, without fear of meeting with unkind- 
 ness or repulse ; or, what was more obnoxious to him, that 
 miserable modicum of remonstrance and " good advice " which 
 people are so apt to dole out as an obligate accompaniment to 
 the strain, whose music is thus turned into the elements of 
 discord. 
 
 For Sheridan Knowles, Hazlitt felt great personal kindness 
 and regard. He was never more entirely at ease than in the 
 company of that natural and happily constituted man. They 
 had met very early in life, and some of Hazlitt's least unhappy 
 associations were connected with his intercourse with Knowles, 
 who, having always felt an almost reverential admiration for 
 Hazlitt's talents and writings, was accustomed to express what 
 he felt in no stinted terms. They seldom met Knowles liv- 
 ing in Scotland up to the period of Hazlitt's death. But when 
 the latter visited London they were a good deal together : and 
 when Hazlitt was in Scotland, Knowles accompanied him in 
 a short visit to the Highlands, and was his factotum in all 
 matters and arrangements connected with a course of lectures 
 Hazlitt delivered on Poetry, in Glasgow and elsewhere. 
 
 It was at Hazlitt's lodgings that I first met this distin- 
 guished dramatist and excellent man ; and the commencement 
 of our acquaintance involved so characteristic a feature of 
 Knowles's mind, that I may be excused for referring to it 
 more particularly. On my looking in at Hazlitt's on the even- 
 ing in question, he told me that Knowles was in town, and 
 was coming to spend the evening with him ; and he begged 
 me to stay. From what Hazlitt had often said to me of 
 Knowles, I had a great wish to see him ; but it so happened 
 that I had, not long before, written in " Blackwood's Magazine "
 
 OPINIONS AND CRITICAL ESTIMATES. 179 
 
 a detailed criticism on " Virginius," which I now feel to have 
 been much too severe in its unfavorable parts, and of which 
 (as I learned from Hazlitt) Knowles believed me to be the 
 writer. I therefore reminded Hazlitt of this fact, and pre- 
 pared to take my departure at once being as little disposed, 
 on my own account as on Knowles 's, to stand the brunt of a 
 meeting which I believed Hazlitt to have proposed in forget- 
 fulness of the above circumstance. 
 
 But Hazlitt would not hear of my going, and agreed to take 
 the consequences of the meeting upon himself. Accordingly 
 I stayed, and presently Knowles came. Almost immediately 
 after mentioning my name, Hazlitt alluded to the criticism in 
 question ; and I can never forget the frank, cordial, and 
 manly manner in which Knowles treated the thing ; for he 
 took it up at once, as a stumbling-block necessary to be moved 
 out of the way before we could make any approach to that 
 hearty communion and good-fellowship which became the 
 company in which we met. There was not a word of that 
 cant of commonplace authorship which pretends to bow to 
 the justice of severe criticism, and to deprecate that which is 
 otherwise. On the contrary, he told me frankly, and at once, 
 that until Hazlitt had told him who the article was written by, 
 he had always looked upon it as the effusion of some personal 
 enemy, who wished and sought to do him all the harm he 
 could in his new career of authorship ; but that since Hazlitt 
 had assured him that such was anything but the case, he had 
 taken a totally different view of the remarks that he now 
 believed most of the censure to be just, and did not feel any- 
 thing like anger or resentment on the subject. 
 
 The cordial and hearty terms and tone in which this feeling 
 and belief were expressed made it impossible to doubt their 
 sincerity, or to withhold one's esteem for the frank good-nat- 
 ure from which they sprang. Nor has a cordial acquaintance 
 and intimacy, subsisting up to the present time, tended in any 
 degree to change this impression ; while the subsequent writ- 
 ings of this distinguished man have convinced me that my 
 first impressions of his talents as a dramatic writer did him
 
 t8o WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 manifest injustice in some particulars, and fell far short of his 
 merits in others. 
 
 There was no one in whose welfare and success as a writer 
 Hazlitt seemed to feel more personal interest than in those of 
 Sheridan Knowles ; and this interest was heightened, rather 
 than repressed, by an impression he entertained, that there 
 was a singular absence in Knowles of that mental and moral 
 correspondence between the writer and his productions which 
 we are so apt to expect, and so disappointed and perplexed at 
 not finding. I never knew Hazlitt wholly at fault as to the 
 intellectual qualities of any man, or unable to assign some 
 reasonable or plausible explanation of the results of those 
 qualities, except in the case of Sheridan Knowles. He says, 
 in his " Spirit o the Age : " " We should not feel that we had 
 discharged our obligations to truth and friendship if we were 
 to let this volume go without introducing into it the name of 
 the author of 'Virginius.' This is the more proper, inasmuch 
 as he is a character by himself, and the only poet now living 
 that is a mere poet. If we were asked what sort of a man 
 Mr. Knowles is, we could only say, he is the writer of ' Vir- 
 ginius.' His most intimate friends see nothing in him by 
 which they could trace the work to the author." 
 
 I know of nothing more unlike Hazlitt's usual sagacity and 
 penetration than this unmeaning and, at the same time, con- 
 tradictory award. Knowles, he says, is " a mere poet ; " by 
 which it is impossible to guess what he means. Then he is, 
 essentially and by way of distinction, " the sort of man " that 
 you would describe as "the writer of 'Virginius.'" And, 
 finally, "his most intimate friends " cannot discover any cor- 
 respondence between the author so designated and the work 
 from which the designation is derived ! What follows, too, 
 though more just, is not much more specific or discriminative. 
 "Virginius," says Hazlitt, is " the best acting tragedy that has 
 been produced on the modern stage ; " and " Mr. Knowles is 
 the first tragic writer of the age ; " but " in other respects he 
 is a common man." 
 
 What is the explanation of all this contradiction ? For if
 
 ORIGIN OF THE "LIBER AMOR IS." l8l 
 
 we can find one, it will unquestionably involve a characteristic 
 feature in the extraordinary mind that it is the chief business 
 of these pages to illustrate. That explanation, as it seems to 
 me, is to be found in the following words, which conclude 
 Hazlitt's hasty glance at the author of " Virginius : " " We 
 have known him almost from a child, and we must say he ap- 
 pears to us the same boy-poet that he ever was." 
 
 Now, Sheridan Knowles is not many years younger than 
 Hazlitt would have been were he alive now perhaps six or 
 seven ; consequently, the very earliest of the associations of 
 Hazlitt's opening intellect were connected with the idea of 
 " the boy-poet ; " and he neither would nor could consent to 
 dissipate those early associations, a single train of which was 
 worth the whole sum and substance of his after life. For 
 Knowles's benefit and pleasure Hazlitt would have had the 
 world regard him as another Shakespeare, if it pleased. But 
 for him (Hazlitt) Knowles could never be anything higher 
 or better than the frank and warm-hearted friend and com- 
 panion of those few opening years of his life which he could 
 alone recall with any feelings of satisfaction. 
 
 ORIGIN OF THE " LIBER AMORIS." 
 
 I scarcely know whether or not it will be thought that the 
 proper time has arrived for explaining the true origin of the 
 strange, and, to all but those who are more or less acquainted 
 with its history beforehand, the utterly unintelligible work 
 above named the " Liber Amoris." The prevalent opinion 
 on such purely personal matters seems to be, that a profound 
 silence should be preserved on them until such time as all 
 those who know anything about them have passed from the 
 scene ; or, at all events, that those who can alone furnish 
 the true materials for such records cannot be permitted to 
 tell their tale ; while those who avowedly know nothing 
 about the matter may talk of and discuss it to their heart's 
 content. 
 
 Yet the world has lately begun to feel that Moore, for in- 
 stance, having accepted, had almost as little right to destroy
 
 1 82 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 the autobiography that Byron intrusted to his care, to be 
 published after his death, as he had to destroy the man him- 
 self during his life. 
 
 Hazlitt's personal reputation has suffered more, even in the 
 estimation of wise and good men, from the publication of the 
 " Liber Amoris," than from anything else that his enemies or 
 himself have written or said or done against him. And the 
 simple reason is, that the real history and origin of the book 
 remain to this day a mystery to all but a few individuals, some 
 of whom are afraid and others ashamed to speak of it ; and 
 that, consequently, it has been made the fertile topic on which 
 Hazlitt's personal enemies, and the lovers of literary scandal 
 in general, have propagated all sorts of ridiculous fictions and 
 fabrications, all more or less discreditable to the persons to 
 whom they relate, and none that I have ever heard having the 
 smallest foundation in fact. 
 
 For my own part, I should have been disposed to tell the 
 truth on this strange and interesting episode in Hazlitt's life, 
 whatever that truth might have been ; because the design of 
 these pages is to furnish, so far as I possess the materials, a 
 true, not a favorable picture of the mind and heart to which 
 they relate. But seeing, as I do, in the materials of this little 
 history, nothing that is morally discreditable to any of the 
 parties connected with it, much that is honorable to all, and 
 (in the personal details of it, as it regards Hazlitt himself) 
 something as touching as anything I am acquainted with in 
 the actual history of the human heart, I do not feel that I have 
 a right wholly to suppress those materials, in deference to the 
 false or the pretended delicacy of those who never use the word 
 but in an indelicate sense. 
 
 The story of Hazlitt's love for the female who is the subject 
 of the " Liber Amoris," could he himself have delivered it to 
 the world in the form of " a round unvarnished tale," would 
 have made one of the most beautiful and affecting chapters in 
 the Romance of Real Life, that was ever put on paper ; 
 one that it would have been impossible to peruse without the 
 reader's heart being softened by a sense of its own weakness,
 
 ORIGIN OF THE " LFBER AMORIS." 183 
 
 while it was elevated and purified by a perception of the moral 
 grandeur and beauty to which its affections may lift it. 
 
 There is nothing in poetry more truly poetical, nothing more 
 ennobling by the strength of its passion, while it is no less 
 softening and humanizing by the depth and darkness of its 
 pathos, than much of what is contained in a series of letters 
 written to me by Hazlitt, during the time when he was most 
 under the influence of the devouring passion to which I am now 
 referring. And as to the truth and reality of every word there 
 written, none who knew him will believe that anything but the 
 very intensity of that reality could have impelled him to write 
 them at all. Such was his almost physical incapacity of writ- 
 ing a letter on any subject, however imperatively his worldly 
 occasions might require one, that I suppose all the rest of the 
 correspondence of his whole literary life would scarcely make 
 up the amount of what I received from him during the three 
 months he was absent in Scotland, in consequence of cir- 
 cumstances arising out of the affair in question : and this 
 during the period when he was employed on, a.nd had actually 
 completed in six weeks, an entire volume of his most remark- 
 able Essays. 
 
 It is from these letters that I shall furnish some brief but 
 sufficiently explanatory materials for the true history of the 
 " Liber Amoris." And if any one, with these materials for 
 judgment and scrutiny before him, can entertain towards the 
 man to whom they relate any less kindly feelings than those 
 arising out of pain and pity, he must have formed strange 
 notions on the constitution of, and little sympathy with, our 
 common nature. 
 
 As the extracts I shall give will, so far as is needful, tell 
 their own story, I shall only premise further, that the heroine 
 of this romance of real life was the daughter of persons of re- 
 spectable character and connections, in whose house Hazlitt 
 lodged for a considerable length of time immediately previous 
 to the date of the following letters ; and that her personal ap- 
 pearance and manner were scarcely overrated, even in the 
 lover's estimate of them which may be gathered from the let- 
 ters themselves.
 
 184 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 I give these extracts in the order in which the letters they 
 are taken from reached me, so far at least as this can be 
 made out by the post-marks ; for nearly all the letters are 
 without date. 
 
 EXTRACTS OF LETTERS FROM W. HAZLITT TO P. G. PATMORE 
 (DATED BETWEEN MARCH AND JULY, 1822). 
 
 " What have I suffered since I parted with you ! A raging 
 fire in my heart and in my brain, that I thought would drive 
 me mad. The steamboat seemed a prison a hell and the 
 everlasting waters an unendurable repetition of the same idea 
 my woes. The abyss was before me, and her face, where 
 all my peace was centred all lost ! I felt the eternity of 
 punishment in this world. Mocked, mocked by her in whom 
 I placed my hope writhing, withering in misery and despair, 
 caused by one who hardens herself against me. I wished for 
 courage to throw myself into the waters ; but I could not even 
 do that and my little boy, too, prevented me, when I thought 
 of his face at hearing of his father's death, and his desolation 
 in life 
 
 " You see she all along hated me (' I always told you I had 
 no affection for you '), and only played with me. 
 
 " I am a little, a very little, better to-day. Would it were 
 quietly over, and that this form, made to be loathed, were hid 
 out of sight of cold, sullen eyes. I thought of the breakfasts I 
 had promised myself with her, of those I had had with her, 
 standing and listening to my true vows ; and compared them 
 to the one I had this morning. The thought choked me. The 
 people even take notice of my dumb despair, and pity me. 
 What can be done ? I cannot forget her, and I can find no 
 other like what she seemed. I should like you to see her, and 
 learn whether I may come back again as before, and whether 
 she will see and talk to me as an old friend. Do as you think 
 best." 
 
 " I got your letter this morning, and I kiss the rod, not only 
 with submission, but with gratitude. Your rebukes of me and
 
 ORIGIN OF THE "LIBER AMORIS." 185 
 
 your defense of her are the only things that save my soul from 
 hell. She is my soul's idol, and, believe me, those words of 
 yours applied to the dear creature (' to lip a chaste one and 
 suppose her wanton ') were balm and Capture to me. 
 
 " Be it known to you, that while I write this, I am drinking 
 ale l at the Black Bull, celebrated in " Blackwood's." It is ow- 
 ing to your letter. Could I think her 'honest,' I am proof even 
 against Edinburgh ale ! She, by her silence, makes my ' dark 
 hour,' and you dissipate it for four and twenty hours 
 
 " I have seen the great little man, 2 and he is very gracious 
 to me. I tell him I am dull and out of spirits, but he says he 
 cannot perceive it. He is a person of infinite vivacity. My 
 Sardanapalus is to be in. 8 
 
 " In my judgment, Myrrha is just like , only I am 
 
 not like Sardanapalus. 
 
 " Do you think if she knew how I love her, my depressions 
 and my altitudes, my wanderings and my pertinacity, it would 
 not melt her ? She knows it all ! I don't believe that any 
 human being was ever courted more passionately than she has 
 been by me. As Rousseau said of Madame d'Houdetot (for- 
 give the allusion), my soul has found a tongue in speaking to 
 her, and I have talked to her in the divine language of love. 
 Yet she says she is insensible to it. Am I to believe her or 
 you ? You ; for I wish it to madness." 
 
 " The deed is done, and I am virtually a free man 
 
 What had I better do in these circumstances ? I dare not 
 write to her I dare not write to her father. She has shot me 
 through with poisoned arrows, and I think another ' winged 
 wound ' would finish me. It is a pleasant sort of balm she has 
 left in my heart. One thing I agree with you in it will re- 
 main there forever but yet not long. It festers and con- 
 sumes me. If it were not for my little boy, whose face I see 
 
 1 He had not for years previously touched anything but water, except his beloved 
 tea, nor did he afterwards, up to the period of his last illness. 
 
 2 Jeffrey. 
 
 3 An article in the Edinburgh Review on Byron's tragedy so called.
 
 1 86 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 struck blank at the news, and looking through the world for 
 pity, and meeting with contempt, I should soon settle the 
 question by my death. That is the only thought that brings 
 my wandering reason to an anchor that excites the least in- 
 terest, or gives me fortitude to bear up against what I am 
 doomed to feel for the ungrateful. Otherwise, I am dead to 
 all but the agony of what I have lost. She was my life it is 
 gone from me, and I am grown spectral. If it is a place I 
 know, it reminds me of her of the way in which my fond 
 heart brooded over her. If it is a strange place, it is desolate, 
 hateful, barren of all interest for nothing touches me but 
 what has a reference to her. There is only she in the world 
 'the false, the fair, the inexpressive she.' If the clock 
 strikes, the sound jars me, for a million of hours will never 
 bring peace to my breast. The light startles me, the dark- 
 ness terrifies me I seem falling into a pit, without a hand to 
 help me. She came (I knew not how) and sat by my side, and 
 was folded in my arms, a vision of love and joy as if she 
 had dropped from the heavens, to bless me by some special 
 dispensation of a favoring Providence to make me amends 
 for all. And now, without any fault of mine but too much love, 
 she has vanished from me, and I am left to wither. My heart 
 is torn out of me, and every feeling for which I wished to live. 
 It is like a dream, an enchantment it torments me, and 
 makes me mad. I lie down with it I rise up with it and 
 I see no chance of repose. I grasp at a shadow I try to 
 undo the past, or to make that mockery real and weep with 
 
 rage and pity over my own weakness and misery 
 
 " I had hopes, I had prospects to come the flattering of 
 something like fame a pleasure in writing health even 
 would have come back to me with her smile. She has blighted 
 all turned all to poison and driveling tears. Yet the barbed 
 arrow is in my heart I can neither endure it nor draw it 
 out, for with it flows my life's blood. I had dwelt too long 
 upon Truth to trust myself with the immortal thoughts of 
 
 love. That might have been mine and now never 
 
 can: these are the two sole propositions that forever stare
 
 ORIGIN OF THE "LIBER AMORIS." l8/ 
 
 me in the face, and look ghastly in at my poor brain. I am in 
 some sense proud that I can feel this dreadful passion. It 
 makes me a kind of peer in the kingdom of love. But I could 
 have wished it had been for an object that, at least, could have 
 
 understood its value and pitied its excess The 
 
 gates of Paradise were once open to me, and I blushed to 
 enter but with the golden keys of love ! I would die but 
 her lover my love of her ought not to die. When I am 
 dead, who will love her as I have done ? If she should be in 
 misfortune, who will comfort her ? When she is old, who will 
 look in her face and bless her ? . . . . Oh, answer me, 
 to save me if possible for her and from myself! 
 
 " Will you call at Mr. 's school, and tell my little boy 
 
 I '11 write to him or see him on Saturday morning. Poor little 
 fellow ! " 
 
 " Your letter raised me a moment from the depths of de- 
 spair ; but, not hearing from you yesterday or to-day (as I 
 hoped), I am gone back again. You say I want to get rid of 
 her. I hope you are more right in your conjectures about her 
 than In this about me. Oh, no ! believe it, I love her as I do 
 my own soul : my heart is wedded to her, be she what she 
 may; and I would not hesitate a moment between her and an 
 angel from heaven. I grant all you say about my self-tor- 
 menting madness ; but has it been without cause ? Has she 
 not refused me again and again with scorn and abhorrence ? 
 . . . . ' She can make no more confidences ! ' These 
 words ring forever in my ears, and will be my deathwatch. 
 My poor fond heart, that brooded over her, and the remains 
 of her affections, as my only hope of comfort upon earth, can- 
 not brook or survive this vulgar degradation. Who is there 
 so low as I ? Who is there besides, after the homage I have 
 paid her, and the caresses she has lavished on me, so vile, so 
 filthy, so abhorrent to love, to whom such an indignity could 
 have happened ? When I think of this (and I think of it for- 
 ever, except when I read your letters) the air I breathe stifles 
 me. I am pent up in burning impotent desires, which can
 
 1 88 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 Ind no vent or object. I am hated, repulsed, bemocked, by 
 all I love. I cannot stay in any place, and find no rest or in- 
 terruption from the thought of her contempt, and her ingrati- 
 tude. I can do nothing. What is the use of all I have done ? 
 Is it not that my thinking beyond my strength, my feeling 
 more than I ought about so many things, has withered me. up, 
 and made me a thing for love to shrink from and wonder at ? 
 Who could ever feel that peace from the touch of her hand 
 that I have done ; and is it not torn forever from me ? My 
 state is, that I feel I shall never lie down again at night, nor 
 rise up of a morning in peace, nor ever behold my little boy's 
 face with pleasure while I live, unless I am restored to her 
 favor. Instead of that delicious feeling I had when she was 
 heavenly kind to me, and my heart softened and melted in its 
 own tenderness and her sweetness, I am now inclosed in a 
 dungeon of despair. The sky is marble, like my thoughts ; 
 nature is dead without me, as hope is within me ; no object 
 can give me one gleam of satisfaction now, or the prospect of 
 it in time to come. I wander, or rather crawl, by the sea-side ; 
 and the eternal ocean, and lasting despair, and her face, are 
 before me. Hated, mocked by her on whom my heart by its 
 last fibre hung. I wake with her by my side, not as my sweet 
 companion, but as the corpse of my love, without a heart in 
 her cold, insensible, or struggling from me ; and the worm 
 gnaws me, and the sting of unrequited love, and the canker of 
 a hopeless, endless sorrow. I have lost the taste of my food 
 by feverish anxiety ; and my tea, which used to refresh me 
 when I got up, has no moisture in it. Oh ! cold, solitary, 
 sepulchral breakfasts, compared to those which I made when 
 she was standing by my side ; my Eve, my guardian angel, 
 
 my wife, my sister, my sweet friend, my all Ah ! 
 
 what I suffer now, shows only what I have felt before. 
 
 " But you say, ' The girl is a good girl, if there is good- 
 ness in human nature.' I thank you for those words, and I 
 will fall down and worship you, if you can prove them true ; 
 and I would not do much less to him that proves her a 
 demon.
 
 ORIGIN OF THE "LIBER AMORIS." 189 
 
 " Do let me know if anything has passed : suspense is my 
 greatest torment. I am going to Renton Inn, to see if I can 
 work a little." 
 
 " I ought to have written you before ; but since I received 
 your letter I have been in a sort of hell. I would put an end 
 to my torments at once, but that I am as great a coward as I 
 am a fool. Do you know that I have not had a word of an- 
 swer from her since ? What can be the reason ? Is she of- 
 fended at my letting you know she wrote to me ? or is it some 
 new amour ? I wrote to her in the tenderest, most respectful 
 manner poured my soul at her feet and this is the way 
 she serves me ! Can you account for it, except on the ad- 
 mission of my worst suspicion ? God ! can I bear to think of 
 her so or that I am scorned and made a sport of by the 
 creature to whom I have given my very heart ? I feel like 
 one of the damned. To be hated, loathed as I have been all 
 my life, and to feel the utter impossibility of its ever being 
 otherwise while I live, take what pains I may ! I sit and cry 
 my eyes out. My weakness grows upon me, and I have no 
 hope left, unless I could lose my senses quite. I think I 
 should like this. To forget ah! to forget there would be 
 something in that to be an idiot for some few years, and 
 then wake up a poor, wretched, old man, to recollect my misery 
 as past, and die ! Yet, oh ! with her, only a little while ago, 
 I had different hopes forfeited for nothing that I know of." 
 
 " I was in hopes to have got away by the steamboat to- 
 morrow, but owing to .... I cannot, and may not be in 
 town till another week, unless I come by the mail, which I am 
 strongly tempted to do. In the latter case, I shall be there on 
 Saturday evening. Will you look in and see, about eight 
 o'clock ? I wish much to see you, and her and John Hunt, 
 and my little boy, once more ; and then, if she is not what 
 she once was to me, I care not if I die that instant." 
 
 Many of the letters in the " Nouvelle He*loise " are among
 
 IQO WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 the most beautiful and affecting effusions which exist in those 
 works of fiction that concern themselves with sentiment and 
 passion rather than with incident and action. But I venture 
 to say that there is nothing in the " Nouvelle He'loise " equal 
 in passion and pathos to the foregoing extracts. And the 
 reason is, that the latter are actual and immediate transcripts 
 from the human heart. In this respect, the letters from which 
 these extracts are taken are, perhaps, more beautiful and 
 touching than anything of their kind that was ever given to 
 the world. But I am far from doubting that innumerable 
 others exist, equaling them in all the qualities in which they 
 excel ; for real and intense passion levels all ranks of intel- 
 lect, laughs learning and worldly wisdom to scorn, and invests 
 the commonplaces of life with the highest attributes of poetry 
 and eloquence. 
 
 Perhaps the published writings most resembling these letters 
 in the depth and intensity of the passion they embody and 
 convey, are the celebrated letters addressed by Mary Wool- 
 stoncraft to Imlay. 
 
 HAZLITT'S MARRIAGE. 
 
 The ceremony, so much talked and written about, at length 
 was solemnized on Sunday morning, the ist of May, 1808, at 
 St. Andrew's Church, Holborn ; the married couple afterwards 
 breakfasted at Dr. Stoddart's, and then proceeded to Winters- 
 low. The only persons present at the marriage, so far as I 
 can collect, were Dr. and Mrs. Stoddart, and Mr. and Miss 
 Lamb ; but I strongly suspect that there were other guests, 
 of whom there is no remaining record. 
 
 Lamb, in a letter to Southey, dated August 9, 1815, more 
 than seven years after the event, thus alludes to his having 
 been present : " I was at Hazlitt's marriage, and had like to 
 have been turned out several times during the ceremony. Any- 
 thing awful makes me laugh." 
 
 It was not an every-day kind of business this, with William 
 Hazlitt for bridegroom, and Charles Lamb for best man, and 
 Miss Lamb for bridesmaid and all of a Sunday morning !
 
 HAZLITT S MARRIAGE. 191 
 
 I wonder whether Elia appeared at the altar in his snuff- 
 colored smalls ? I wonder whether Miss Lamb wore, after 
 all, the spring dress, or the China-Manning silk, or a real white 
 gown ? I wonder in what way Lamb misbehaved, so as to 
 leave so strong an impression on his own mind years after ? 
 To have been in St. Andrew's that day, and to have seen the 
 whole thing from a good place, would have been a recollection 
 worth cherishing ; and there are plenty of men and women 
 living who are old enough to have done so, though of those 
 who mixed in that " set " so early, scarcely one. 
 
 Mrs. Hazlitt's property at Winterslow, which had been 
 left to her by her father, with a reversionary interest in what 
 he bequeathed to Mrs. Stoddart for her life, was settled 
 upon herself at her brother's instigation, and much to my 
 grandfather's annoyance. There was about I2o/. a year al- 
 together. 
 
 Mr. Hazlitt and the Doctor had never been very good 
 friends ; and the Doctor's new politics, and the new pros- 
 pects in Malta, arising out of his conversion to the more 
 fashionable lay-creed of the day, had produced a decided 
 estrangement before 1806 or 1807. He had set his face 
 against the threatened alliance between the families, and was 
 very anxious to get his sister out of the way of temptation, 
 and marry her more suitably, or more in conformity with his 
 own personal views, in Malta. 
 
 When he had found that there was no help for it, he had 
 tried to behave with civility to his future brother-in-law, and 
 had asked him to his house, when he settled again in England. 
 But there was no real heartiness, I am afraid, in the friend- 
 ship ; and Mr. Hazlitt was not blind to the fact. Relations 
 i id not improve subsequently ; the breach grew wider and 
 \vi ler. 
 
 The story goes, too, that Mr. Hazlitt said of an ephemeral 
 newspaper speculation of Dr. Stoddart's, that if any one 
 wanted to keep a secret, he could not do better than put it in 
 the " Correspondent ! " Mr. Hazlitt himself has related the 
 anecdote, which is no doubt sufficiently authentic ; and of
 
 1 92 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 course, if it came to the Doctor's ears, it was not a thing apt 
 to make their communications friendlier. 
 
 No two people could be more opposite in their characters 
 than the Doctor and Mrs. Hazlitt. She hated formality and 
 etiquette, while he was all formality and etiquette. 
 
 There is an anecdote rather to the purpose, which may 
 at this time of day, perhaps, be repeated without offense. 
 Lieutenant Stoddart, their father, in the old days at Salisbury, 
 would sometimes be drinking his grog when his children were 
 in the room, and he would say to John, " John, will you have 
 some ? " to which John would answer, " No, thank you, 
 father ; " than he would say to Sarah, " Sarah, will you have 
 some ?" to which she would reply, "Yes, please, father." 
 
 Not that she ever indulged to excess, but she was that sort 
 of woman. Her brother and Lord B., then Mr. B., had been 
 fellow-collegians at Oxford, and Mr. B. and the Stoddarts were 
 sufficiently intimate to warrant Miss S. (not the Doctor) in 
 calling him by his Christian name. When Mr. B. became 
 Lord B., and a high officer of state, she wrote to him to use 
 his influence for somebody, and she was the plain, downright, 
 impervious kind of woman, who did not perceive any impro- 
 priety in still keeping up the old familiarity of address. Her 
 
 letter beginning "My dear H " had to be intercepted by 
 
 a judicious friend. 
 
 Mr. Hazlitt had rather admired these traits of character in 
 her, meeting her occasionally at Lamb's or her brother's, be- 
 fore their marriage, and it still remained to be seen whether 
 they would be equally acceptable to him now that she was 
 more than a friend to him. I have heard that her unaffected 
 good sense was one of the things which made him resolve he 
 would have her. 
 
 One evening, at Mitre Court Buildings, when my grand- 
 father had escorted Miss Stoddart to the theatre, and had 
 brought her back afterwards, Charles called for warm water, 
 which Miss Lamb did not seem very anxious to produce. But 
 Miss Stoddart unconsciously hunted out the kettle, and set it 
 to boil, not at all to Miss L.'s satisfaction. But Mr. Hazlitt,
 
 9 REMOVAL TO LONDON. 193 
 
 the tradition runs, was highly pleased, as it seemed to him 
 to show an honesty and sterlingness of character. 
 
 This connection with the Stoddarts, thus begun in 1808, 
 was, however, of service in more than one respect ; it certainly 
 tended to infuse into the Hazlitt blood certain southern char- 
 acteristics, among them a taste for formality and method ; for 
 my grandmother, with all her inattention and repugnance to 
 domestic matters, was by no means destitute of a love of 
 order, and her brother John was a precisian. The Celtic ele- 
 ment may have been thought by some to predominate hitherto 
 too exclusively, to the disadvantage and sacrifice of what are 
 understood as the conventional gentilities. My great-grand- 
 father was an Irishman, and my grandfather after him ; nor 
 am I quite positive that the Irish blood is extinct in us Haz- 
 litts to this day, notwithstanding a second intermarriage with 
 the Reynells, a quarter of a century later on. 
 
 REMOVAL TO LONDON. 
 
 In 1812, a few months after the birth of their second but 
 only surviving child, my grandfather and grandmother removed 
 from Winterslow to London, and rented number 19 York 
 Street, Westminster, of Mr. Jeremy Bentham. It was a 
 house which had belonged, as tradition said, to Milton ; from 
 the parlor windows was a view of Mr. Bentham's own res- 
 idence and garden, which backed upon the house of Milton. 
 It is not improbable that originally the garden formed part of 
 the poet's premises. 
 
 My grandfather came to town with very little book-knowledge, 
 with no introductions, with very small independent resources, 
 and with shy and unsocial habits. He had thought upon many 
 subjects, and had committed some of his notions to paper ; 
 but his books mere not popular, and their sale scarcely paid 
 the printer's bills. He had renounced the profession of paint- 
 ing, because he had no hope of acquiring in it sufficient ex- 
 cellence and rank to please himself ; and here he was, about 
 to fight his way, and win bread for three mouths, in that to 
 him new and strange vocation, popular authorship, which de- 
 13
 
 194 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 manded just what he lacked, fluent expression and brilliant 
 commonplace. He had a very fair stock of ideas to start 
 with ; but it was in the faculty of evolving them and clothing 
 them in attractive phraseology that his weakness was. 
 
 These were the difficulties by which he felt that he was sur- 
 rounded. Then there were certain counterbalancing advan- 
 tages. His wife had a moderate competence ; he knew the 
 Lambs, the Stoddarts, and his brother's other friends ; and 
 his former publications, if they had brought him no money, at 
 least brought him a share of celebrity, and introduced him to 
 two or three of the booksellers. 
 
 He had not looked very far and wide out into the world, but 
 he had penetrated very deeply into the recesses of his own 
 good and warm heart, and had watched for years the subtlest 
 operations of the human mind. With him, to know himself 
 was to know others. 
 
 Such books as he was acquainted with, he had mastered. 
 He had gone with the eye of an analyst through Hobbes and 
 through Locke. He was familiar with Chaucer and Boccaccio. 
 He was versed in the writings of Taylor and Barrow. He was 
 at home in Fielding and Smollett, in Richardson and Mrs. 
 Inchbald. He had " The New Heloise " by heart. But of 
 the volumes which form the furniture of gentlemen's libraries, 
 he was egregiously ignorant, and at any time would have 
 cheerfully confessed his deficiency in the kind of information 
 which is served up to the public of all countries by its authors. 
 Mr. Hazlitt's resources were emphatically internal ; from his 
 own mind he drew sufficient for himself ; and he had to see 
 now, in the thirty-fourth year of his age, whether he had 
 enough there to hold the world with, too. 
 
 The prospect did not seem, on the whole, very bright and 
 encouraging for a man whose politics were those of the minor- 
 ity, who never read a book through after he was thirty, and 
 who, in original composition, could scarcely at the outset see 
 his way two sentences before him. 
 
 He inaugurated his change of plans, that is to say, his final 
 settlement in the metropolis, promisingly enough. During
 
 HAZLITT AS A REPORTER. 195 
 
 the first year of his residence in London he deMvered, at the 
 Russell Institution, a series of lectures on the English philos- 
 ophers and metaphysicians, ten in number. He was merely 
 turning to account, of course, his early studies at home, sup- 
 plemented and strengthened by later excursions, in the long 
 winter evenings at Winterslow, into the writings -of Hobbes, 
 Locke, and other masters of the English school. 
 
 HAZLITT AS A REPORTER. 
 
 A kind of indication that the lectures at the Russell Institu- 
 tion were not pecuniarily remunerative, is that Mr. Hazlitt 
 was induced shortly afterwards to seek an engagement on the 
 " Morning Chronicle " as a parliamentary reporter. This was 
 an occupation which was calculated to suit neither his tastes 
 nor his health ; it involved late hours, and the gallery at that 
 time was a hot-bed of intemperance. My grandfather's health 
 had never been robust, and the sedentary life of a hard student 
 had still further impaired it. 
 
 Like many other reporters, he was not a short-hand writer. 
 He had no knowledge of stenography, or at best, no compe- 
 tent knowledge. He took notes of a very hurried description, 
 restricting himself to general heads and salient points ; and if 
 he was not able, after his turn, to make out what he had 
 written very satisfactorily, yet he had a memory which was 
 retentive and accurate enough for that purpose ; and I doubt 
 whether anything worth preserving was lost through him. 
 The complaint which I have heard made was, that he gave 
 speakers credit for delivering better grammar and sense than 
 was really the case ; and this is a complaint which has at- 
 tached so far to all reporters in all times. My friend, Mr. 
 John Payne Collier, has a MS. copy of Coleridge's " Christa- 
 bel," in' Miss Stoddart's handwriting, which belonged to my 
 grandfather, and with which were bound up, oddly enough, 
 some blank leaves, serving him for his reporting notes. I also 
 possess a volume of them; and very strange specimens of cal- 
 ligraphy they are, considering that Mr. Hazlitt, as a rule, wrote 
 a beautifully clear hand.
 
 196 WILLIAM HAZLITT 
 
 He ran another danger, which was that of losing the thread 
 of the debate, while he was listening to some favorite orator. 
 He is said to have been so fascinated once by the eloquence 
 of Plunket, that he omitted to take any notes at all of his 
 speech. He himself tells a little anecdote of these days : 
 
 " I have heard Sir Francis Burdett say things there [in the 
 House of Commons] which I could not enough admire ; and 
 which he could not have ventured upon saying, if, besides his 
 honesty, he had not been a man of fortune, of family, of char- 
 acter, aye, and a very good-looking man into the bargain ! " 
 
 His career as a reporter was soon terminated by his utter 
 dislike to the employment, and by the injury which his consti- 
 tution suffered from the use of stimulants, in which he followed 
 what was an universal propensity in his day among the mem- 
 bers of the press. Some carried it to a greater excess than 
 others. It was not necessary that he should carry it very far ; 
 his physical strength was unequal to much indulgence of any 
 kind. 
 
 When he gave up the gallery, he did not leave the press, 
 but transferred his services to the critical department of 
 the " Chronicle," occasionally contributing political articles. 
 Among these latter were the celebrated " Illustrations of Ve- 
 tus," which appealed in the " Chronicle " at the close of 1813, 
 and attracted considerable attention. 
 
 He experienced great difficulty in the first instance, when 
 he began to write for the newspapers ; but he found that 
 where the strong necessity for doing a thing was present to 
 him, he managed to surmount all obstacles. 
 
 He says himself : " I had not till then [about 1812] been in 
 the habit of writing at all, or had been a long time about it ; 
 but I perceived that with the necessity the fluency came. 
 Something I did took, and I was called upon to do a number 
 of things all at once. I was in the middle of the stream, and 
 must sink or swim. I had, for instance, often a theatrical 
 criticism to write after midnight, which appeared the next 
 morning. There was no fault found with it at least, it was 
 as good as if I had had to do it for a weekly paper. I only did
 
 FULL OF WORR-. 197 
 
 it at once and recollected all I had to say on the spot, because 
 I could not put it off for three days, when perhaps I should 
 have forgotten the best part of it. Besides, when one is 
 pressed for time, one saves it. I might set down nearly all I 
 had to say in my mind while the play was going on. I know 
 I did not feel at a loss for matter the difficulty was to com- 
 press, and write it out fast enough." 
 
 He succeeded Mr. Mudford as theatrical critic on the 
 "Chronicle," quite at the commencement of 1814. Mr. Mud- 
 ford procured a place on the " Courier," of whose columns he 
 availed himself to make known to the public that " it was im- 
 possible for any one to understand a word Mr. Hazlitt wrote." a 
 
 FULL OF WORK. 
 
 I find newspaper-work his mainstay during 1814 and 1815. 
 He wrote regularly for the " Chronicle," and occasionally for 
 the " Champion " and " Examiner." The review of Words- 
 worth's " Excursion " in the last is his. 
 
 Wordsworth had sent Lamb a copy of the poem, and one 
 day, while Lamb was out, Martin Burney came and took the 
 book away. My grandfather wanted the copy for his review, 
 and had sent Martin in search of it. Lamb, when he found 
 that the volume had disappeared, and learned the circum- 
 stances, was very much annoyed ; 2 and my grandfather, 
 understanding that he had taken offense, came to his rooms 
 and " blew up " him and Mary well. " Blow up " is Lamb's 
 own word ; and Lamb (in a letter to a friend) adds, that he 
 supposed it would come to a breach. Which was, in fact, the 
 case. 
 
 In the correspondence between Lamb and Wordsworth 
 there are several references to this affair. Lamb had been in- 
 vited to write a paper on " The Excursion " in the " Quar- 
 terly," and as there was some delay about it, he explained to 
 
 1 Mr. W. Mudford was at one time editor of the Courier. He is the author of a 
 work on the Battle of Waterloo, and others. There is an account of him in Jerdan's 
 A utobiogmphy . 
 
 2 Lamb was full of crotchets. He once made an extravagant outcry, because 
 Coleridge came while he was away, and took Luther's Table 7 alk.
 
 198 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 the author that it arose through Hazlitt's " unlucky detention 
 of the book." At the same time he put in a word for his friend. 
 " His remarks," he could not help saying, " had some vigor in 
 them, particularly something about an old ruin being too 
 modern for your primeval nature, and about a lichen}' 1 In 
 his next letter to the poet, he wrote : " Your experience 
 about tailors seems to be in point blank opposition to Burton, 
 as much as the author of ' The Excursion ' does, toto ccelo, 
 differ in his notion of a country life from the picture which 
 W. H. has exhibited of the same." 
 
 The criticism, which, according to Lamb, wore a look of 
 haste, made no difference whatever in the relations between 
 Hazlitt and Wordsworth, which had never been cordial, or, 
 with the exception of the short visit to Nether-Stoweyin 1798, 
 and to Grasmere in 1803, at all intimate. I am afraid that 
 Wordsworth's letters to Lamb contained sometimes severe 
 things about W. H., and it cannot but be observed that if 
 Lamb wants to fire off a sly epigram against W. H., he gener- 
 ally does so in his Grasmere parcel. 
 
 HAZLITT AND HAYDON. 
 
 My grandfather had become acquainted in 1812 with Hay- 
 don, the historical painter. He met him, one day, at North- 
 cote's, whom he had known since his youth, and who lived at 
 39 Argyll Street, Regent Street. 
 
 On this occasion they left the house together, it seems, and 
 walked some distance, my grandfather expatiating on Shakes- 
 peare's " Macbeth." This was the commencement of their 
 knowledge of each other, but they never became intimate. 
 My grandfather unluckily could not be induced to form a very 
 exalted estimate of Haydon's powers, and Haydon recipro- 
 cated by attempting to paint upon paper a man whom he was 
 incapable of understanding. 
 
 Haydon was an extraordinary egotist, and was therefore 
 very jealous of egotism, when he observed it in other people. 
 He congratulated himself, I find, on being a better Christian 
 than Shelley, Keats, and the rest of that school. " Luckily for
 
 HAZLITT AND HAYDON. 199 
 
 me," he says, " I was deeply impressed with the denunciations, 
 the promises, the hopes, the beauty of Christianity ; " and 
 again, he observes : " I never heard any skeptic, bvt Hazlitt, 
 discuss the matter with the gravity such a question de- 
 manded." I suspect that Haydon would have found it diffi- 
 cult to maintain his position, if Mr. Hazlitt had confronted 
 him with " How do you know, sir, that I am a skeptic ? " 
 Perhaps Haydon may be said to have been a little too lavish 
 of his animadversions. He was not peculiarly proof against 
 criticism, nor very indifferent to what people said about him, 
 and he might, with advantage to himself, have given an exam- 
 ple of forbearance and tenderness. Besides, he should not 
 have associated with a set whose religious opinions were so 
 repugnant to his own ; there was the great risk that he might 
 be mistaken for one of them. I have not seen Mr. Haydon's 
 picture of Christ, in which he introduced Mr. Hazlitt " looking 
 at the Saviour as an investigator, Keats in the background, 
 and Wordsworth ' bowing in reverence and awe.' " It is 
 singular enough that he should have selected two " skeptics " 
 for such a purpose as this, even though one of them was only 
 brought in by virtue of his critical faculty. This happened in 
 1817, just before the artist removed to Lisson Grove North. 
 
 A little prior to this, the notorious " Catalogue Raisonnde " 
 of the British Institution was published, and was reviewed by 
 Mr. Hazlitt in the " Examiner" for 1816. He called it "the 
 most extraordinary that ever appeared in a country making 
 pretensions to civilization," and declared that " the day after 
 it came out, it ought to have been burnt by the common hang- 
 man." Here he had all lovers of art on his side and Mr. 
 Haydon. Northcote, however, was so delighted with it, that 
 he ordered a long candle the first evening of its appearance, 
 and went to bed to read it in ecstasy ! So he told Haydon. 
 
 Haydon's " Solomon " had succeeded in defiance of some 
 adverse criticisms upon it beforehand on the part of friends, 
 much to the painter's exultation. He sent my grandfather a 
 card for the private view. 
 
 "The greatest triumph," says he (1814), "was over Hazlitt.
 
 2OO WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 My friend Edward Smith, a Quaker, had met him in the room, 
 and Hazlitt abused the picture in his spitish humor ; but in 
 coming round he met me, and holding out his two cold fingers, 
 said, ' By God, sir, it is a victory,' [and he] went away and 
 wrote a capital criticism in the ' Morning Chronicle.' " 
 
 I have the strongest suspicion that Haydon's " greatest 
 triumph " was no triumph at all, and that the " capital criti- 
 cism in the ' Morning Chronicle ' " proceeded from the writer's 
 natural kindness of heart, for once at any rate, getting the 
 better of his judgment. To Edward Smith he could afford to 
 be more candid. If Haydon had not been a struggling and 
 poor man, the criticism might not have been so capital, for my 
 grandfather's opinion of him was by no means high. 
 
 Haydon says again : " One day I called on him and found 
 him arranging his hair before a glass, trying different effects, 
 and asking [he asked ? ] me my advice whether he should 
 show his forehead more or less. In that large wainscoted 
 room Milton had conceived, and perhaps written, many of his 
 finest thoughts, and there sat one of his critics admiring his 
 own features. Bentham lived next door. We used to see him 
 bustling away, in his sort of half-running walk in the garden. 
 
 " Both Hazlitt and I looked with a longing eye from the 
 windows of the room at the white-haired philosopher in his 
 leafy shelter, his head the finest and most venerable ever 
 placed on human shoulders." 
 
 The breach with the Lambs, after the blowing up, did not 
 last very long. They were at what was to have been a chris- 
 tening party at my grandfather's in York Street, in the Sep- 
 tember of 1814, as I collect from a passage in Mr. Haydon's 
 " Autobiography." Haydon was also there on the occasion, 
 and has recorded his impressions. He says : 
 
 " In the midst of Hazlitt's weaknesses, his parental affection 
 was beautiful. He had one boy. He loved him, doted on 
 him. He told me one night this boy was to be christened. 
 'Will ye come on Friday?' 'Certainly,' said I. His eye 
 glistened. Friday came, but as I knew 3.1J parties, I lunched
 
 HAZLITT S HOUSEKEEPING. 2OI 
 
 heartily first and was there punctually at four. Hazlitt then 
 lived in Milton's house, Westminster, next door to Bentham. 
 
 " At four I came, but he was out. I walked up and found 
 his wife ill by the fire in a bed-gown nothing ready for 
 guests, and everything wearing the appearance of neglect and 
 indifference. I said, ' Where is Hazlitt ? ' 'Oh dear, Will- 
 iam has gone to look for a parson.' ' A parson ! why, has he 
 not thought of that before ? ' ' No, he did n't.' ' I '11 go and 
 look for him,' said I ; and out I went jnto the Park, through 
 Queen's Square, and met Hazlitt in a rage coming home. 
 ' Have ye got a parson ? ' ' No, sir, these fellows are all out.' 
 ' What will you do ? ' ' Nothing.' " 
 
 Nothing was done that day, but a good deal of company, in- 
 cluding Charles and Mary Lamb, dropped in soon afterwards, 
 and there was " good talk," but no victuals that pleased Mr. 
 Haydon. 
 
 The christening took place, however, on the 26th of Septem- 
 ber that year, at St. Margaret's, Westminster ; it was the 
 little boy's third birthday. Martin Burney and Walter Coul- 
 son were the godfathers. 1 
 
 HAZLITT'S HOUSEKEEPING. 
 
 I have heard odd accounts of that York Street establish- 
 ment. My grandmother was woefully undomestic, and my 
 grandfather "hated," to use his own words, "the formal crust 
 of circumstances, and the mechanism of society." 
 
 As for my grandfather, he had been brought up in the 
 country by parents who were in indifferent circumstances, 
 and who were not of a very methodical turn of mind. At an 
 early period, he seems to have been left a good deal to his own 
 resources and inclinations, and when very young studied 
 painting under his brother John, who was very far from being 
 a formalist, and at Paris, in the Louvre, where he had to shift 
 for himself with very slender means. We know that apart 
 
 1 While my father was quite a little fellow, he went to Mr. Black's at Millbank to 
 spend the day, and going down to the river with a bucket to get water for Black's 
 garden, he fell in, and was rescued by his host's dog Platoff .
 
 202 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 from any merely sentimental and transitory attachments he 
 may have formed, he was disappointed in love at an early age, 
 in a manner which preyed upon his spirits afterwards, and 
 that he never thoroughly rallied from the blow. Added to all 
 this, he was induced to enter into a marriage which was cer- 
 tainly not one of choice (though it was in no way forced upon 
 him), and the woman with whom he thus knit himself perma- 
 nently was one of the least domestic of her sex. She was a 
 lady of excellent disposition, an affectionate mother, and en- 
 dowed with no ordinary intelligence and information. But for 
 household economy she had not the slightest turn ; and she 
 was selfish, unsympathizing, without an idea of management, 
 and destitute of all taste in dress. 
 
 She was fond of finery, but her finery was not always very 
 congruous. A lady is living who recollects very well the first 
 visit Mrs. Hazlitt paid to her family at Bayswater. It was a 
 very wet day, and she had been to a walking match. She was 
 dressed in a white muslin gown, a black velvet spencer, and a 
 Leghorn hat with a white feather. Her clothes were perfectly 
 saturated, and a complete change of things was necessary, be- 
 fore she could sit down. 
 
 The stiff, ceremonious ways of Dr. Stoddart and his family 
 did not please her at all. When one of her nephews was 
 praised in her hearing as an example of good breeding and 
 politeness, she laughed, and exclaimed, " Oh, do you like such 
 manners ? John seems to me like an old-fashioned dancing- 
 master." 
 
 The hall at York Street was a great square place like a 
 kitchen, and the parlor where Mr. Hazlitt sat was up-stairs. It 
 was a big, wainscoted room, with two windows, which looked 
 upon the garden of Jeremy Bentham's house ; the mantel- 
 piece was an old-fashioned high piece of architecture, which 
 my grandfather had made a note-book of by covering with 
 hieroglyphical memoranda for future essays. 
 
 There was Mrs. Tomlinson, the housekeeper, and her two 
 daughters, of whom one was a single lady, the other was mar-
 
 HAZLITT'S MARRIED LIFE. 203 
 
 ried to Private , of Her Majesty's foot. 1 This gallant 
 
 soldier was frequently asked in by Mrs. T., his affectionate 
 mamma-in-law, and there was high festival below stairs on 
 these occasions. 
 
 Between the consumption of victuals and drink in the 
 kitchen, and the consumption in the parlor, where the same 
 set came to dinner about three times a week, the household 
 expenses must have been considerable, with all the discomfort 
 and absence of method observable in the arrangements. 
 
 HAZLITT'S MARRIED LIFE. 
 
 " I want an eye to cheer me, a hand to guide me, a breast 
 to lean on ; all which I shall never have, but shall stagger 
 into my grave without them, old before my time, unloved and 
 unlovely, unless . I would have some creature love me be- 
 fore I die. Oh ! for the parting hand to ease the fall ! " 
 
 The passage above cited is in the autograph MS. of an 
 "Essay on the Fear of Death," written in 1821, but it was 
 omitted in the printed version in " Table Talk." 
 
 " How few," he says again, " out of the infinite number 
 that marry and are given in marriage, wed with those they 
 would prefer to all the world ; nay, how far the greater pro- 
 portion are joined together by mere motives of convenience, 
 accident, recommendation of friends ; or, indeed, not unfre- 
 quently by the very fear of the event, by repugnance, and a 
 sort of fatal fascination." 
 
 These lines came about the same period from the same pen 
 and the same heart. My grandfather had been united to Miss 
 Stoddart for thirteen years ; but the marriage, as I had as 
 well confess at once, was not a happy one. I should even go 
 so far as to say that he had his individual case and fate in 
 view, where he speaks of marriages being brought about some- 
 times " by repugnance and a sort of fatal fascination." 
 
 Never, I suppose, was there a worse-assorted pair than my 
 
 1 Lamb's Becky was originally at my grandfather's. Was she a daughter of Mrs. 
 T ? I should think so. An apt pupil, at any rate ; for she ruled the roost at Lamb's, 
 as her mother or mistress did at 19 York Street.
 
 2O4 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 grandfather and grandmother. If they had not happened to 
 marry, if they had continued to meet at the Lambs', as of old, 
 or at her brother's, they would have remained probably the 
 best of friends. She would have appreciated better his at- 
 tainments and genius ; while in her, as Miss Stoddart, or as 
 the wife of anybody else but himself, he would have admired 
 and recognized many of the qualities which endeared to him 
 the society and conversation of Mrs. Montagu. Mrs. Hazlitt 
 was capitally read, talked well, and was one of the best letter- 
 writers of her time. She was a true wife to William Hazlitt, 
 and a fond mother to the only child she was able to rear ; but 
 there was a sheer want of cordial sympathy from the first 
 set-out. 
 
 They married after studying each other's characters very 
 little, and observing very little how far their tempers were 
 likely to harmonize ; or, more properly speaking, how far his 
 was likely to harmonize with any woman's, or hers with any 
 man's. 
 
 She might have been a blue-stocking, if she could have set 
 the right value on her husband's talents, and entered into his 
 feelings ; she might have been undomestic, if she had been 
 more like his Madonna. But, unluckily for them both, she 
 was intellectual, without reverence for his gifts ; and homely, 
 without any of those graces and accomplishments which rec- 
 oncile men to their homes. 
 
 1 believe that Mr. Hazlitt was physically incapable of fixing 
 his affection upon a single object, no matter what it might be, 
 so that it was but one. He might worship Miss Railton, or 
 Miss Wordsworth (if De Quincey is to be believed), or any- 
 body else in his mind's eye, but not in his body's eye, which 
 was at all events as potent an organ. 
 
 He comprehended the worth of constancy, fidelity, chastity, 
 and all other virtues as well as most men, and could have 
 written upon them better than most ; but a sinister influence 
 or agency was almost perpetually present, thwarting and cloud- 
 ing a superb understanding that singular voluptuousness 
 of temperament, which we find at the root of much that
 
 HAZLITT'S MARRIED LIFE. 2O$ 
 
 he offended against heaven and earth in, as well as of many 
 of the fine things we owe to his pen. 
 
 Mr. Hazlitt's moral constitution supplies, or seems to supply, 
 an illustration of the differences between the two words sen- 
 suousness and sensuality. He was not a sensualist, but he 
 was a man of sensuous temperament. A sensualist is a per- 
 son in whom the animal appetite obscures and deadens all 
 loftier and purer instincts. In the sensuous man an intense 
 appreciation of the beautiful in Nature and Art is associated 
 and intimately blended with those potent instincts which en- 
 danger virtue. 
 
 His wife had not much pretense for quarreling with him on 
 the ground of former attachments of his still lingering in his 
 thoughts, and keeping his affection in a state of tangle ; for 
 she, too, had had her little love affairs, and accepted him only 
 when her other suitors broke faith. But in truth, she was not 
 the sort of woman to be jealous ; it was not her " way of 
 looking at things," as Mary Lamb used to say of her. She 
 used, however, to tax him from time to time with having had 
 a sweetness once for Sally Shepherd. Who Sally Shepherd 
 was, is more than I can tell, unless she was a daughter of 
 Dr. Shepherd of Gateacre, whose portrait he painted in 
 1803. 
 
 Both Mr. and Mrs. Hazlitt remained tenderly devoted to 
 their little son. It was a trait in their characters which must 
 always be admired ; it was a feature in my grandfather's which 
 excited even the applause of Mr. Haydon. 
 
 The child was often a peacemaker between his parents when 
 some unhappy difference arose ; and when it came to Mr. 
 Hazlitt frequently taking up his residence, after 1819, at Win- 
 terslow Hut, my father usually spent part of his time with one, 
 and part with the other. In 1822 he was put to school at a 
 Mr. Dawson's, in Hunter Street, London ; and it was just 
 before he was going to start for this new scene that my grand- 
 father addressed to him the "Advice to a School-boy," a 
 letter full of admirable suggestion and counsel, and strongly 
 stamped with that impress of the writer's personal sentiments
 
 2O6 WILLIAM HAZLITT, 
 
 and sufferings which has individualized so large a proportion 
 of his works. 
 
 In this letter to a boy of ten, he speaks at the circumstances 
 by which he was surrounded at the moment, and points ob- 
 liquely to his own frustrated hopes of the hopes which he 
 nourished in his " sublime " youth, of happiness with a Railton, 
 or a Wordsworth, or a Windham, or a Shepherd 
 
 He says : 
 
 " If you ever marry, I would wish you to marry the woman 
 you like. Do not be guided by the recommendation ot friends. 
 Nothing will atone for or overcome an original distaste. It 
 will only increase from intimacy ; and if you are to live sep- 
 arate, it is better not to come together. There is no use in 
 dragging a chain through life, unless it binds one to the object 
 we love. Choose a mistress from among your equals. You 
 will be able to understand her character better, and she will 
 be more likely to understand yours. Those in an inferior 
 station to yourself will doubt your good intentions, and misap- 
 prehend your plainest expressions. All that you swear is to 
 them a riddle or downright nonsense. You cannot by possi- 
 bility translate your thoughts into their dialect. They will be 
 ignorant of the meaning of half you say, and laugh at the rest. 
 As mistresses, they will have no sympathy with you ; and as 
 wives, you can have none with them. 
 
 "Women care nothing about poets, or philosophers, or poli- 
 ticians. They go by a man's looks and manner. Richardson 
 calls them ' an eye-judging sex ; ' and I am sure he knew more 
 about them than I can pretend to do. If you run away with a 
 pedantic notion that they care a pin's point about your head or 
 your heart, you will repent it too late." 
 
 He was afraid that he might be taken from the little fellow, 
 and that he might be left alone in the world. " As my health 
 is so indifferent, and I may not be with you long, I wish to 
 leave you some advice (the best I can) for your conduct in life, 
 both that it may be of use to you, and as something to remem- 
 ber me by. I may at least be able to caution you against my 
 own errors, if nothing else."
 
 SARAH WALKER. 2O/ 
 
 He wished him to know what he knew, and to learn what he 
 had learned, that there might be no " bar of separation be- 
 tween them." '' I would have you, as I said, make yourself 
 master of French, because you may find it of use in the com- 
 merce of life ; and I would have you learn Latin, partly be- 
 cause I learnt it myself, and I would not have you without any 
 of the advantages or sources of knowledge that I possessed 
 it would be a bar of separation between us and secondly, 
 because there is an atmosphere round this sort of classical 
 ground to which that of actual life is gross and vulgar." 
 
 He used to give his little boy money when he went away in 
 the morning, to spend while he was away. The great hall at 
 York Street was his play-ground ; and on these occasions a 
 rather promiscuous circle of acquaintances from the neighbor- 
 hood used to be invited in to assist in the outlay of the silver^ 
 which papa had given with a strict injunction, like the old 
 French gentleman in the story-book, that it should be gone 
 before he came back a bidding which Mr. W. H. Jr., with 
 the help of his young friends, executed as a rule without diffi- 
 culty. My grandfather wished his son to grow up with gen- 
 erous notions, and this was the way, in his opinion, to set 
 about inculcating the principle and feeling upon his mind. 
 
 SARAH WALKER. 
 
 In the year 1820 Mr. Hazlitt had first taken apartments at 
 No. 9 Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane. His landlord 
 was a Mr. Walker, a tailor by trade, and a lodging-house 
 keeper. Walker was Mr. J. P. Collier's tailor. Whether he 
 was Mr. Hazlitt's tailor also, and it was thus he was led to go 
 there, I know not. 
 
 He had two daughters, Sarah and Betsy ;- and it happened 
 on the i6th August, 1820. that Mr. Hazlitt saw Sarah Walker 
 for the first time, and was smitten by her personal attractions. 
 Betsy Walker afterwards married a gentleman named Roscoe, 
 and made him an excellent wife, it is said. 
 
 To him Sarah Walker was perfect loveliness. He was in- 
 fatuated. He thought that he saw in her features a likeness
 
 2O8 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 to the old paintings of the Madonna. The girl herself must 
 have been, at any rate, of somewhat superior breeding, if not 
 looks. She felt, or pretended to feel, an interest in Mr. Haz 
 litt's works, of some of which she had copies, given to her by 
 himself. He gave her other books, but she said that his own 
 were those she chiefly prized ! She admired a statuette of 
 Napoleon which he possessed, and he gave that to her. But 
 she declined to receive it, and returned it to him afterwards, 
 with the remark that she fancied he only meant she was to 
 take care of it while he was away. In one of his conversations 
 with Miss Walker, Mr. Hazlitt took occasion to describe to 
 her the nice points of difference between the French, English, 
 and Italian 'characters, and Miss W. pretended to feel an in- 
 terest in the subject, and to express a wish to see foreign 
 countries, and to study foreign manners, if the opportunity 
 should ever present itself. 
 
 " H. But I am afraid I tire you with this prosing description 
 of the French character, and abuse of the English ? You 
 know there is but one subject on which I should ever like to 
 talk, if you would let me. 
 
 " 6". I must say you don't seem to have a very high opinion 
 of this country. 
 
 " H. Yes, it is the place that gave you birth . 
 
 " S. Do you like the French women better than the English ? 
 
 " H. No ; though they have finer eyes, talk better, and are 
 better made. But they none of them look like you. I like 
 the Italian women I have seen much better than the French. 
 They have darker eyes, darker hair, and the accents of their 
 native tongue are so much richer and more melodious. But I 
 will give you a better account of them when I come back from 
 Italy, if you would like to have it. 
 
 " S. I should much. It is for that I have sometimes had a 
 wish for travelling abroad, to understand something of the 
 manners and characters of different people." .... 
 
 Even an honest hallucination has its respectability to rec- 
 ommend or excuse it. Mr. Hazlitt's was complete and sincere 
 as any man's ever was. As to dishonorable views, I unhesi-
 
 SARAH WALKER. 2OQ 
 
 tatingly affirm, once for all, that he had them not. A careful 
 perusal of the book in which his passion is told will convince 
 anybody of so much, who goes to the task of reading it with 
 a correct knowledge of the writer's character. 
 
 Take another episode from this book, that of the flageolet. 
 She has one, but he is not sure it is good enough for her. 
 
 " S. It is late, and my father will be getting impatient at 
 my stopping so long. 
 
 " ff. You know he has nothing to fear for you ; it is poor I 
 that am alone in danger. But I wanted to ask about buying 
 you a flageolet. Could I see that you have ? If it is a pretty 
 one, it would n't be worth while ; but if it is n't, I thought of 
 bespeaking an ivory one for you. Can't you bring up your 
 own to show me ? 
 
 " S. Not to-night, sir. 
 
 " H. I wish you could. 
 
 " S. I cannot, but I will in the morning. 
 
 " H. Whatever you determine I must submit to. Good- 
 night, and bless thee ! " 
 
 " [The next morning S. brought up the tea-kettle, on which, 
 and looking towards the tea-tray, she said, ' Oh, I see my 
 sister has forgot the teapot.' It was not there, sure enough ; 
 and tripping down-stairs, she came up in a minute, with the 
 teapot in one hand and the flageolet in the other, balanced so 
 sweetly and gracefully. It would have been awkward to have 
 brought up the flageolet on the tea-tray, and she could not go 
 down again on purpose to fetch it. Something therefore was 
 to be omitted as an excuse. Exquisite witch !] " 
 
 It appears that my grandfather was not the first person of 
 position whom this " exquisite witch " had entranced. There 
 must have been a good deal in her, surely ? 
 
 She confessed to my grandfather the existence of another 
 attachment, one day, when he pressed her. 
 
 " H. .... Is there not a prior attachment in the 
 case ? Was there any one else that you did like ? 
 
 " S. Yes ; there was another. 
 
 " H. Ah ! I thought as much. Is it long ago, then ? 
 14
 
 210 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 " S. It is two years, sir. 
 
 " H. And has time made an alteration, or do you still see 
 him, sometimes ? 
 
 " S. No, sir ; but he is one to whom I feel the sincerest af- 
 fection, and ever shall, though he is far distant 
 
 " H. But did he return your regard ? 
 
 " S. I had every reason to think so. 
 
 " ff. What, then, broke off your intimacy ? 
 
 "S. It was the pride of birth, sir, that would not permit him 
 to think of our union. 
 
 " H. Was he a young man of rank, then ? 
 
 " S. His connections were high. 
 
 " H. And did he never attempt to persuade you to anything 
 else ? 
 
 " S. No ; he had too great a regard for me. 
 
 " H. Tell me ; how was it ? Was he so very handsome ? 
 Or was it the fineness of his manners ? 
 
 " S. It was more his manner ; but I can't tell how it was. 
 It was chiefly my fault. I was foolish to suppose he could 
 ever think seriously of me. But he used to make me read 
 with him and I used to be with him a good deal, though 
 not much, neither and I found my affections engaged before 
 I was aware of it. 
 
 " H. And did your mother and family know of it ? 
 
 " S. No, I have never told any one but you ; and I should 
 not have mentioned it now, but I thought it might give you 
 some satisfaction. 
 
 " H. Why did he go at last ? 
 
 " S. We thought it better to part. 
 
 " H. And do you correspond ? 
 
 " S. No, sir. But, perhaps, I may see him again some time 
 or other, though it will only be in the way of friendship." . . . 
 
 I have thought it desirable to bring forward these passages, 
 as I shall have to do others, in order to throw a little light on 
 the character of Miss Walker. The difficulty is that we can 
 only get at that through one who, though his love of truth was
 
 SARAH WALKER. 211 
 
 so great as to lead him often to speak it to his own disadvantage 
 and disparagement, was in this case the dupe of one of the 
 most extraordinary illusions recorded in biography. The pas- 
 sion " led him like a little child " (to use his own phrase), and if 
 it was satisfied, he augured that his " way would be like that of 
 a little child." What is peculiarly striking is, that when he 
 found that she had a second admirer, for whom though absent, 
 and almost hopelessly lost to her, she entertained, as she told 
 him, a sincere and unalterable fondness, he declared that he 
 could bear to see her happy with this other, and would pro- 
 mote that object if he could ! But what he dreaded was, the 
 feeling that she had a repugnance to him, independently of this. 
 He began, perhaps, to fear that some of the " Blackwood's " 
 people had been to her and had told her that he was pimpled 
 Hazlitt, and the author of the books of which some account 
 had been given in their magazine and in the " Quarterly ! " 
 
 When Mr. Hazlitt went to 9 Southampton Buildings, he 
 was living separate from his wife. He had been doing so for 
 some little time before the. autumn of 1819, but I cannot sup- 
 ply the precise dates. 
 
 I am without exact information as to the period when Mr. 
 Hazlitt proposed a formal separation under the Scottish law ; 
 it must have been late in 1820, or early in 1821, at all events, 
 some time in the latter year. There were delays and post- 
 ponements from some cause or other, and Mr. Hazlitt himself 
 does not seem to have gone to Scotland till the beginning of 
 1822. In January of that year he was still at Stamford, and 
 wrote while there an account of his conversations with Miss 
 Walker, which he afterwards called " Liber Amoris." The 
 original MS. is dated " Stamford, January 29th, 1822." 
 
 In a letter to a friend he says, " I was detained at Stam- 
 ford and found myself dull, and could hit upon no other -way 
 of employing my time so agreeably." 
 
 He seems to have taken his departure very shortly after the 
 commencement of the new year (1822) ; for on the I7th of the 
 month I find a letter addressed to him by Miss Walker from 
 London (Southampton Buildings), in answer to one she had 
 r eceived. It was as follows :
 
 2 1 2 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 "LONDON, January 17, 1.1822 J. 
 
 "SlR, Doctor Read sent the 'London Magazine,' with 
 compliments and thanks ; no letters or parcels, except the one 
 which I have sent with the ' Magazine,' according to your di- 
 rections. Mr. Lamb sent for the things which you left in our 
 care, likewise a cravat which was sent with them. I send my 
 thanks for your kind offer, but must decline accepting it. Baby 
 is quite well. The first floor is occupied at present ; it is 
 quite uncertain when it will be disengaged. 
 
 " My family send their best respects to you. I hope, sir, 
 your little son is quite well. 
 
 " From yours respectfully, 
 
 " S. WALKER. 
 
 "W. HAZLITT, ESQ." 
 
 Upon his arrival at Edinburgh he opened a correspondence 
 with a friend, whom he had made the repository of his confi- 
 dence and his secrets at present, the sole repository, I im- 
 agine. He wrote to Mr. Patmore x when he had been in Scot- 
 land three weeks nearly, and told, him that he had written 
 twice to Miss Walker, and had had only one note from her, 
 couched in very distant terms. Mr. Hazlitt's letter (or one of 
 them rather) was written in February, 1822 ; he sent Mn Pat- 
 more a copy of it. 
 
 " You will scold me for this," he began, " and ask me if this 
 is keeping my promise to mind my work. One half of it was 
 to think of Sarah ; and besides, I do not neglect my work 
 either, I assure you. I regularly do ten pages a day, which 
 mounts up to thirty guineas' worth a week, so that you see I 
 
 should grow rich at this rate, if I could keep on so 
 
 I walk out here in an afternoon, and hear the notes of the 
 thrush, that come up from a sheltered valley below, welcome 
 in the spring ; but they do not melt my heart as they used : 
 it is grown cold and dead. As you say, it will one day be 
 
 1 If Mr. Patmore had not avowed himself in My Friends and A cquaintance to 
 be the person to whom the correspondence was addressed, I should have felt it my 
 duty to suppress his name. As it is, I do not see that there can be any object in do- 
 ing so
 
 SARAH WALKER. 213 
 
 colder Do not send any letters that come. I 
 
 should like you and your mother (if agreeable) to go and see Mr. 
 Kean in 'Othello,' and Miss Stephens in ' Love in a Village.' 
 
 If you will, I will write to Mr. T to send you tickets. 
 
 Has Mr. Patmore called ?".... 
 
 The following was the reply received : 
 
 " SIR, I should not have disregarded your injunction not 
 to send you any more letters that might come to you, had I 
 not promised the gentleman who left the inclosed to forward 
 it at the earliest opportunity, as he said it was of consequence. 
 Mr. Patmore called the day after you left town. My mother 
 and myself are much obliged by your kind offer of tickets to 
 the play, but must decline accepting it. My family send their 
 best respects, in which they are joined by 
 
 "Yours truly, 
 
 " S. WALKER." 
 
 It appears that this letter was franked, and Mr. Hazlitt could 
 not make out the writing. He had asked her whether the 
 apartments occupied by him were let yet, and she took no no- 
 tice of the question. He confessed to Mr. Patmore in this 
 letter that he half suspected her to be " an arrant jilt," yet he 
 " loved her dearly." The evening before he left for Scotland, 
 he had broken ground on the subject of a platonic attachment, 
 but she did not quite know whether that could be. " Her 
 father was rather strict, and would object." 
 
 The next letter to Patmore is of the 3oth March, 1822. He 
 was still alone at or near Edinburgh : nor was he quite sure 
 yet whether Mrs. Hazlitt was coming there to have the 
 business settled, or not. He had written to 9 Southampton 
 Buildings, once more, but his letter remained without an an- 
 swer. I shall not enter into the merely rhapsodical portions 
 of this correspondence, because their committal to paper and 
 appearance in print once must ever form a subject of regret. 
 They are the unconnected and inconsequent outpourings of an 
 imagination always supernaturally vivid, and now morbidly so. 
 But he was not drawn away entirely from other matters.
 
 214 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 These letters occasionally contain miscellaneous items of news. 
 " It is well," says he, " I had finished Colburn's work, 1 before 
 all this came upon me. It is one comfort I have done that. 
 . . . . I write this on the supposition that Mrs. H. may 
 still come here, and that I may be left in suspense a week or 
 two longer. But, for God's sake, don't go near the place on 
 my account. Direct to me at the post-office, and if I return to 
 town directly, as I fear, I will leave word for them to forward 
 
 the letter to me in London not in S. B I have 
 
 finished the book of my conversations with her, which I call 
 ' Liber Amoris.' " Yours truly, 
 
 "W. H. 2 
 
 " EDINBURGH, March 30. 
 
 " P. S. I have seen the great little man, 8 and he is very 
 gracious to me. Et safemme aussi ! I tell him I am dull and 
 out of spirits. He says he cannot perceive it. He is a person 
 of an infinite vivacity. My Sardanapalus 4 is to be in. In my 
 judgment Myrrha is most like S. W., only I am not Sardana- 
 palus. 
 
 "P. G. PATMORE, ESQ., 
 
 " 12 Greek Street, Soho, London." 
 
 I have no letter between March 3oth and April 7th. Mrs. 
 Hazlitt was still expected, but had not yet arrived. 
 
 [April 7, 1822.] 
 
 "MY DEAR FRIEND, I received your letter this morning 
 with gratitude. I have felt somewhat easier since. It showed 
 your interest in my vexations, and also that you knew nothing 
 worse than I did. I cannot describe the weakness of mind 
 to which she has reduced me. I am come back to Edinburgh 
 about this cursed business, and Mrs. H. is coming down next 
 
 week A thought has struck me. Her father has 
 
 a bill of mine for io/. unhonored, about which I tipped her a 
 cavalier epistle ten days ago, saying I should be in town this 
 
 1 The second volume of Table Talk. 
 
 2 I am quoting from the original autograph letter : in the printed copy the text 
 differs. 
 
 * Jeffrey. 
 
 4 The review of Byron's Sardanafalus in the Edinburgh.
 
 THE HAZLITT DIVORCE. 21$ 
 
 week, and ' would call and take it up,' but nothing reproachful. 
 Now if you can get Colburn, who has a deposit of 220 pp. 
 of the new volume, to come down with io/., you might call and 
 take up the aforesaid bill, saying that I am prevented from 
 coming to town, as I expected, by the business I came 
 
 about W. H. 
 
 " P. S. Could you fill up two blanks for me in an essay on 
 Burlaigh House in Colburn's hands, one, Lamb's Descrip- 
 tion of the Sports in the Forest: see 'John Woodvil,' 
 
 " To see the sun to bed, and to arise, etc. ;" 
 
 the other, Northcote's account of Claude Lorraine in his Vision 
 of a Painter at the end of his life of Sir Joshua ? . . . . 
 
 " FINAL. Don't go at all To think that I should 
 
 feel as I have done for such a monster ! 
 
 "P. G. PATMORE, ESQ., 
 
 " 12 Greek Street, Soho, London." 
 
 THE HAZLITT DIVORCE. 
 
 On Sunday the 2ist April, 1822, Mrs. Hazlitt landed at 
 Leith. She had left London on the previous Sunday in the 
 smack Superb, at 3 P. M. So it had been a week's voyage. 
 She experienced fine, dry weather. In her Diary, which she 
 entitled the " Journal of my Trip to Scotland," she gives the 
 following account of her arrival : 
 
 Sunday, ~2.\st [April]. At 5 A.M. calm. At I P. M. landed 
 safe at Leith. A laddie brought my luggage with me to the 
 Black Bull, Catherine Street, Edinburgh. Dined at three on 
 mutton chops. Met Mr. Bell at the door, as I was going to 
 take a walk after dinner. He had been on board the vessel 
 to inquire for me. After he went, I walked up to Edinburgh. 
 . . . . Returned to tea Went to bed at half- 
 past twelve. 
 
 Mr. Hazlitt casually heard of her arrival from Mr. Bell, but 
 they did not apparently meet, though Mr. H. was at the Black 
 Bull that Sunday, as will be seen presently. He wrote off to 
 Mr. Patmore on the same day :
 
 216 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 [EDINBURGH, April 21, 1822.] 
 
 " MY DEAR PATMORE, I got your letter this morning, 
 and I kiss the rod not only with submission but gratitude. 
 Your rebukes of me and your defenses of her are the only 
 
 things that save me Be it known to you that while 
 
 I write this I am drinking ale at the Black Bull, celebrated in 
 ' Blackwood.' It is owing to your letter. Could I think the 
 
 love honest, I am proof against Edinburgh ale 
 
 Mrs. H. is actually on her way here. I was going to set off 
 home .... when coming up Leith Walk I met an old 
 friend come down here to settle, who said, ' I saw your wife 
 at the wharf. She had just paid her passage by the Superb? 
 .... This Bell whom I met is the very man to negotiate 
 the business between us. Should the business succeed, and 
 
 I should be free, do you think S. W. will be Mrs. ? If 
 
 she will she shall ; and to call her so to you, or to hear 
 her called so by others, will be music to my ears such as 
 they never heard [!]..... How I sometimes think of 
 the time I first saw the sweet apparition, August 16, 1820! 
 . . . . I am glad you go on swimmingly with the N[ew] 
 M[onthly] M[agazine]. I shall be back in a week or a month. 
 I won't write to her. [No signature.] 
 
 " I wish Colburn would send me word what he is about. 
 Tell him what I am about, if you think it wise to do so. 
 
 " P. G. PATMORE, ESQ., 
 
 " 12 Greek Street, Soho, London." 
 
 The letters in the printed volume are very apt to mislead 
 such readers as they may find, for they are not printed faith- 
 fully, even as regards the sequence of events. We must 
 therefore go back to Mrs. Hazlitt's Diary, which is, I believe, 
 perfectly accurate, and certainly most minute : 
 
 Monday, -2.id [April']. .... Mr. Bell called about 
 twelve, and I went with him to Mr. Cranstoun, the barrister, 
 to consult him on the practicability and safety of procuring a 
 divorce, and informed him that my friends in England had
 
 THE HAZLITT DIVORCE. 
 
 rather alarmed me by asserting that, if I took the oath of cal- 
 umny, and swore that there was no collusion between Mr 
 Hazlitt and myself to procure the divorce, I should be liable 
 to a prosecution and transportation for perjury. Mr. Hazliti 
 having certainly told me that he should never live with me 
 again, and as my situation must have long been uncomfortable, 
 he thought for both our sakes it would be better to obtain a 
 divorce and put an end to it 
 
 Tuesday, 2^d. Consulted Mr. Gray [a solicitor] 
 
 The case must be submitted to the procurators to decide 
 whether I may be admitted to the oath of calumny. If they 
 agree to it, the oath to be administered, then Mr. Hazlitt to be 
 cited in answer to the charge, and if not defended [I told him 
 I was sure Mr. Hazlitt had no such intention, as he was quite 
 as desirous of obtaining the divorce as me], he said then, if 
 no demur or difficulty arose about proofs, the cause would 
 probably occupy two months, and cost 5o/., but that I should 
 have to send to England for the testimony of two witnesses 
 who were present at the marriage, and also to testify that we 
 acknowledged each other as husband and wife, and were so 
 esteemed by our friends, neighbors, acquaintances, etc. He 
 said it was fortunate that Mr. and Mrs. Bell were here to bear 
 testimony to the latter part. And that I must also procure a 
 certificate of my marriage from St. Andrew's Church, Holborn. 
 I took the questions which Mr. Gray wrote .... to Mr. 
 Bell, who added a note, and I put it in the penny post. Sent 
 also the paper signed by Mr. Hazlitt securing the reversion of 
 my money to the child, which Mr. Bell had given me, by the 
 mail to Coulson, requesting him to get it properly stamped 
 and return it to me, together with the certificate of my mar- 
 riage 
 
 Thursday, 2.-$th April [1822]. Mr. Bell called to ask if he 
 could be of any assistance to me. I had just sent a note to 
 Mr. Hazlitt to say that I demurred to the oath, so there was 
 no occasion to trouble Mr. Bell. In the afternoon Mr. Ritchie, 
 of the " Scotsman " newspaper, called to beg me, as a friend to 
 both (I had never seen or heard of him before), to proceed in
 
 2l8 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 the divorce, and relieve all parties from an unpleasant situa- 
 tion. Said that with my appearance it was highly probable 
 that I might marry again, and meet with a person more con- 
 genial to me than Mr. Hazlitt had unfortunately proved. That 
 Mr. Hazlitt was in such a state of nervous irritability that he 
 could not work or apply to anything, and that he thought that 
 he would not live very long if he was not easier in his mind. 
 I told him I did not myself think that he would survive me. 
 
 . . . . In the evening Mr. Bell called I then 
 
 told him of Mr. Ritchie's visit, at which he seemed much sur- 
 prised, and said if Mr. Hazlitt had sent him, as I supposed, 
 he acted with great want of judgment and prudence 
 
 Saturday, 2."]th April. Gave Mr. Bell the stamp for the 
 5o/. bill, and the following paper of memorandum for Mr. 
 Hazlitt to sign : 
 
 " I. William Hazlitt to pay the whole expense of board, 
 clothing, and education, for his son, William Hazlitt, by his 
 wife, Sarah Hazlitt (late Stoddart), and she to be allowed free 
 access to him at all times, and occasional visits from him. 
 
 " 2. William Hazlitt to pay board, lodging, law, and all 
 other expenses incurred by his said wife during her stay in 
 Scotland on this divorce business, together with travelling ex- 
 penses. 
 
 " 3. William Hazlitt to give a note of hand for fifty pounds 
 at six months, payable to William Netherfold or order. Value 
 Received." 
 
 Mr. Bell said he would go that day to Mr. Gray .... 
 then go on to Mr. Hazlitt's, and call on me afterwards ; but I 
 saw no more of him. 
 
 Sunday, 2&th April, 1822. Wrote to Mr. Hazlitt to inform 
 him I had only between five and six pounds of my quarter's 
 money left, and therefore, if he did not send me some imme- 
 diately, and fulfill his agreement for the rest, I should be 
 obliged to return on Tuesday, while I had enough to take me 
 back. Sent the letter by a laddie. Called on Mr. Bell, who 
 said that Mr. Gray was not at home when he called, but that 
 he had seen his son, and appointed to be with him at ten
 
 THE HAZLITT DIVORCE. 2 19 
 
 o'clock on Monday morning. Told me that Mr. Hazlitt said 
 he would give the draft to fifty pounds at three months in- 
 stead of six, when the proceedings had commenced (meaning, 
 I suppose, when the oath was taken, for they had already 
 commenced) but would do nothing before. Told me he was 
 
 gone to Lanark, but would be back on Monday morning 
 
 Tuesday, 3o//z April. Went to Mr. Bell after dinner, who 
 
 did not know whether Mr. Hazlitt was returned or not 
 
 In the evening, after some hesitation, went to Mr. Hazlitt my- 
 self for an answer. He told me he expected thirty pounds 
 from Colburn on Thursday, and then he would let me have 
 five pounds for present expenses ; that he had but one pound 
 in his pocket, but if I wanted it, I should have that. That he 
 was going to give two lectures at Glasgow next week, for 
 which he was to have TOO/., and he had eighty pounds beside 
 to receive for the " Table Talk " in a fortnight, out of which 
 sums he pledged himself to fulfill his engagements relative to 
 my expenses : and also to make me a handsome present, when 
 it was over (2o/.), as I seemed to love money. Or it would en- 
 able me to travel back by land, as I said I should prefer see- 
 ing something of the country to going back in the steamboat, 
 which he proposed. Said he would give the note of hand for 
 fifty pounds to Mr. Ritchie for me, payable to whoever I 
 pleased : if he could conveniently at the time, it should be for 
 three months instead of six, but he was not certain of that. 
 . . . . Inquired if I had taken the oath. I told him I only 
 waited a summons from Mr. Gray, if I could depend upon the 
 money, but I could not live in a strange place without : and I 
 had no friends or means of earning money here as he had ; 
 though, as I had still four pounds, I could wait a few days. 
 I asked him how the expenses, or my draft, were to be paid, 
 if he went abroad, and he answered that, if he succeeded in 
 the divorce, he should be easy in his mind, and able to work, 
 and then he should probably be back in three months : but 
 otherwise, he might leave England forever. He said that as 
 soon as I had got him to sign a paper giving away I5O/. a year 
 from himself, I talked of going back, and leaving everything.
 
 22O WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 . . . . I told him to recollect that it was no advantage for 
 myself that I sought .... it was only to secure some- 
 thing to his child as well as mine. He said he could do very 
 well for the child himself ; and that he was allowed to be a 
 very indulgent, kind father some people thought too much 
 so. I said I did not dispute his fondness for him, but I must 
 observe that though he got a great deal of money, he never 
 saved or had any by him, or was likely to make much provis- 
 ion for the child ; neither could I think it was proper, or for 
 his welfare that he should take him to the Fives Court, and 
 such places .... it was likely to corrupt and vitiate 
 
 him He said perhaps it was wrong, but that he 
 
 did not know that it was any good to bring up children in ig- 
 norance of the world He said I had always de- 
 spised him and his abilities He said that a paper 
 
 had been brought to him from Mr. Gray that day, but that he 
 was only just come in from Lanark, after walking thirty miles, 
 and was getting his tea 
 
 Thursday, id May [1822]. Mr. Bell called to say Mr. 
 Hazlitt would sign the papers to-morrow and leave [them] in 
 his hand. And that he should bring me the first five pounds. 
 When he was gone, I wrote to Mr. Hazlitt, requesting him to 
 leave the papers in Mr. Ritchie's hands, as he had before pro- 
 posed. 
 
 Friday, -^d May. Received the certificate of my marriage, 
 and the stamped paper transferring my money to the child 
 after my death, from Coulson, the carriage of whjch cost 
 seven shillings. Called on Mr. Gray, who said, on my asking 
 him when my presence would be necessary in the business, 
 that he should not call on me till this day three weeks 
 
 Saturday, 4th May, 1822. Mr. Ritchie called, and gave 
 me 4/., said Mr. Hazlitt could not spare more then, as he was 
 just setting off for Glasgow 
 
 Tuesday, 7th May. Wrote to my little son 
 
 Tuesday, aist May. Wrote to Mr. Hazlitt for money. 
 The note was returned with a message that he was gone to 
 London, and would not be back for a fortnight.
 
 THE HAZLITT DIVORCE. 22 1 
 
 Wednesday, 2.2.d. Called on Mr. Ritchie to inquire what I 
 was to do for money, as Mr. Hazlitt had gone off without send- 
 ing me any : he seemed surprised to hear he was in London, 
 but conjectured he was gone about the publication of his book, 
 took his address, and said he would write to him in the even- 
 ing. 
 
 It is necessary now to shut up the Diary, and to resume our 
 examination of the correspondence with Patmore, where we 
 shall find (what the Diary does not tell us) an account of Mr. 
 Hazlitt's temporary return to town. The letter which follows 
 the last from which I extracted the pertinent and illustrative 
 parts, was written, it should be recollected, on the 2ist April, 
 1822, on the very day of Mrs. Hazlitt's arrival at Leith in the 
 Superb. The next has no date, but from an expression in the 
 letter which succeeds, it may be securely assigned to the 2d of 
 June. It was posted at Scarborough, where the steamboat 
 put in by which Mr. Hazlitt had taken his passage to London. 
 
 [OFF SCARBOROUGH, 
 in the steamboat for London.] 
 
 "DEAR PATMORE, What have I suffered since I parted 
 with you ! A raging fire is in my heart and in my brain, that 
 never quits me. The steamboat (which I foolishly ventured 
 on board) seems a prison-house, a sort of spectre-ship, moving 
 on through an infernal lake, without wind or tide, by some 
 necromantic power the splashing of the waves, the noise of 
 the engine, gives me no rest, night or day no tree, no natural 
 object, varies the scene but the abyss is before me, and all 
 my peace lies weltering in it ! . . . . The people about 
 me are ill, uncomfortable, wretched enough, many of them 
 but to-morrow or next day they reach the place of their des- 
 tination, and all will be new and delightful. To me it will be 
 the same. . . . The people about me even take notice 
 of my dumb despair, and pity me. What is to be done ? I 
 cannot forget her; and I can find no other like what she 
 seemed. W. H."
 
 222 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 The arrangement of the letters in the " Liber Amoris " is 
 again incorrect and unfaithful to the order of time. In the 
 series of the original autographs, from which I quote, the next 
 letter is of the 3d June. Nothing had yet been settled, and 
 Mrs. Hazlitt had started on a tour to the Highlands and to 
 Ireland. She was in tolerably active correspondence du/ing 
 the interval with her son, Miss Lamb, Mr. Walter Coulson, 
 and her sister-in-law, Peggy Hazlitt. 
 
 The 3d of June letter, however, contains only one passage 
 which is at all to the purpose, and even that perhaps might be 
 not disadvantageously omitted. It demonstrates the over- 
 whelming force of the infatuation as well as the nervous 
 shock, and is so far worth a place. 
 
 " Do you know," he says to his correspondent, " the only 
 thing that soothes or melts me is the idea of taking my little 
 boy, whom I can no longer support, and wandering through 
 the country as beggars /" .... He finishes by saying that 
 if he could find out her [S. W.'s] real character to be different 
 from what he had believed, " I should be no longer the wretch 
 I am, or the god I might have been, but what I was before, 
 poor, plain W. H." 
 
 The next is a note, which does not occur in the printed 
 book : 
 
 [Between June 3 and June 9, 1822, but undated.] 
 
 " MY ONLY FRIEND, I should like you to fetch the MSS., 
 and then to ascertain for me whether I had better return there 
 or not, as soon as this affair is over. I cannot give her up 
 without an absolute certainty. Only, however, sound the mat- 
 ter by saying, for instance, that you are desired to get me a 
 lodging, and that you believe I should prefer being there to 
 being anywhere else. You may say that the affair of the 
 divorce is over, and that I am gone a tour in the Highlands. 
 - . . . Ours was the sweetest friendship. Oh ! might the 
 delusion be renewed, that I might die in it ! Test her through 
 some one who will satisfy my soul I have lost only a lovely 
 frail one that I was not likely to gain by true love. I am 
 going to see K , to get him to go with me to the High-
 
 THE HAZLITT DIVORCE, 22$ 
 
 lands, and talk about her. I shall be back Thursday week, to 
 
 appear in court proformd the next day 
 
 " Send me a line about my little boy. W. H. 
 
 " 10 GEORGE STREET, 
 ' EDINBURGH." 
 
 He found out K , as he had said he should do, and in- 
 duced him to accompany him to the Highlands. Their con- 
 versations appear to have been, for the most part, a mere rep- 
 etition of what we are already, to confess the truth, a little too 
 familiar with. In a letter, which he addressed to K , after- 
 wards, or which at least is thrown in the ' Liber Amoris ' into 
 an epistolary shape, he reminds him of what they talked of 
 and what they saw during this remarkable trip together. 
 
 " You remember," he says to him, " the morning when I 
 said, ' I will go and repose my sorrows at the foot of Ben Lo- 
 mond ' and when from Dumbarton Bridge its giant shadow, 
 clad in air and sunshine, appeared in view? We had a pleasant 
 day's walk. We passed Smollett's monument on the road 
 (somehow these poets touch one in reflection more than most 
 military heroes) talked of old times. You repeated Logan's 
 beautiful verses to the cuckoo, which I wanted to compare 
 with Wordsworth's, but my courage failed me ; you then told 
 me some passages of an early attachment which was suddenly 
 broken off ; we considered together which was the most to be 
 pitied, a disappointment in love where the attachment was 
 mutual, or one where there has been no return ; and we both 
 agreed, I think, that the former was best to be endured, and 
 that to have the consciousness of it a companion for life was 
 the least evil of the two, as there was a secret sweetness that 
 
 took off the bitterness and the sting of regret One 
 
 had been my fate, the other had been yours ! 
 
 " You startled me every now and then from my reverie 
 by the robust voice in which you asked the country people 
 (by no means prodigal of their answers) ' if there was any 
 trout-fishing in those streams ? ' and our dinner at Luss set 
 us up for the rest of our day's march. 
 
 " The sky now became overcast ; but this, I think, added
 
 224 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 to the effect of the scene. The road to Tarbet is superb. It 
 is on the very verge of the lake hard, level, rocky, with low 
 stone bridges constantly flung across it, and fringed with 
 birch-trees, just then budding into spring, behind which, as 
 through a slight veil, you saw the huge, shadowy form of Ben 
 
 Lomond The snow on the mountain would not let 
 
 us ascend ; and being weary of waiting, and of being visited 
 by the guide every two hours to let us know that the weather 
 would not do, we returned, you homewards, and I to Lon- 
 don." .... 
 
 He did not hear from Patmore, whom he had requested to 
 let him know how matters were going on at Southampton 
 Buildings, and he returned to Scotland without going to Lon- 
 don at all. On the 9th of June he wrote to Mr. Patmore from 
 an inn in Berwickshire : 
 
 " RENTON INN, BERWICKSHIRE. 
 [June 9, 1822.] 
 
 " MY DEAR PATMORE, Your letter raised me for a moment 
 from the depths of despair, but not hearing from you yesterday 
 
 or to-day, as I hoped, I am gone back again I 
 
 grant all you say about my self-tormenting madness, but has it 
 been without cause ? When I think of this, and I think of it 
 forever (except when I read your letters), the air I breathe 
 
 stifles me I can do nothing. What is the use of 
 
 all I have done ? Is it not this thinking beyond my strength, 
 my feeling more than I ought about so many things, that has 
 withered me up, and made me a thing for love to shrink from 
 and wonder at ? .... My state is that I feel I shall 
 never lie down again at night nor rise up of a morning in 
 peace, nor ever behold my little boy's face with pleasure, while 
 
 I live, unless I am restored to her favor I wonder, 
 
 or rather crawl, by the sea-side, and the eternal ocean, and 
 
 lasting despair, and her face are before me Do 
 
 let me know if anything has passed : suspense is my greatest 
 torment. Jeffrey (to whom I did a little unfold) came down 
 with ioo/., to give me time to recover, and I am going to
 
 THE HAZLITT DIVORCE. 22$ 
 
 Renton Inn to see if I can work a little in the three weeks 
 before it will be over, if all goes well. Tell Colburn to send 
 the " Table Talk " to him, 92 George Street, Edinburgh, un- 
 less he is mad, and wants to ruin me Write 
 
 on the receipt of this, and believe me yours unspeakably ob- 
 liged, W. H." 
 
 The next letter hardly requires a preface : 
 
 [RENTON INN, BERWICKSHIRE, 
 June 18, 1822.] 
 
 " MY DEAR FRIEND, Here I am at Renton, amid the hills 
 and groves which I greeted in their barrenness in winter, but 
 which have now put on their full green attire, that shows lovely 
 in this northern twilight, but speaks a tale of sadness to this 
 heart, widowed of its last and its dearest, its only hope. For 
 a man who writes such nonsense, I write a good hand. Mus- 
 ing over my only subject (Othello's occupation, alas ! is 
 gone), I have at last hit upon a truth that, if true, explains all, 
 and satisfies me. You will by this time probably know some- 
 thing, from having called and seen how the land lies, that will 
 make you a judge how far I have stepped into madness in my 
 conjectures. If I am right, all engines set at work at once 
 that punish ungrateful woman ! Oh, lovely Renton Inn ! here 
 I wrote a volume of Essays ; here I wrote my enamored 
 follies to her, thinking her human, and that below was not all 
 
 the fiends By this time you probably know enough 
 
 and know whether this following solution is in rerum natura 
 
 at No. 98. B Say that I shall want it [the lodging] 
 
 very little the next year, as I shall be abroad for some months, 
 but that I wish to keep it on, to have a place to come to when 
 
 I am in London If you get a civil answer to this, 
 
 take it for me, and send me word Learn first if 
 
 the great man of Penmaen-Mawr is still there. You may do 
 this by asking after my hamper of books, which was in the 
 
 back parlor Tell her that I am free, and that 
 
 I have had a severe illness. W. H.
 
 226 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 " I would give a thousand worlds to believe her anything but 
 what I suppose W. H. 
 
 "P. G. PATMORE, ESQ., 
 
 " 12 Greek Street, Soho, London." 
 
 So runs this letter, crossed and crossed again, of June i8th ; 
 there is a good deal in it which I have withheld, as irrelevant 
 and foreign to the purpose. By comparing it with the version 
 given in the " Liber Amoris," very important discrepancies 
 present themselves, probably introduced by the writer subse- 
 quently, when the correspondence was returned to him for the 
 purposes of the book. I have strictly adhered to the text as 
 it was originally composed. 
 
 MRS. HAZLITT'S DIARY RESUMED. 
 
 Sunday, gth June, 1822. Sent a letter to Mr. Hazlitt to 
 remit the money he had promised. 
 
 Monday, loth June. .... Received a note from 
 Mr. Ritchie, to say he would come the next day and ex- 
 plain about money matters to me. Had also a letter from the 
 child 
 
 Tuesday, nth June. . . . . Mr. Ritchie came. . . 
 . Told me that Mr. Hazlitt only got 567. from Glasgow, 
 and nothing from Colburn, so that he could not give me the 
 money I asked, but that he had told him whatever small sums 
 of money I wanted to go on with, he would let me have by 
 some means or other. 
 
 Thursday, i$th June [1822]. Mr. Bell called, and said 
 that Mr. Hazlitt had gone to Renton Inn, but that he would 
 remit me some money, which he showed him he had for the 
 purpose, as soon as the oath was taken, which he said he was 
 
 to give him due notice of Asked if I did not 
 
 take the oath to-morrow ? I said I had not heard from Mr. 
 
 Gray, but was in hourly expectation of it The 
 
 note came soon after, appointing the next day 
 
 Friday, \\th June. Mr. Bell called, and said he was going 
 to Mr. Gray's, and would come back for me. Returned, and
 
 THE HAZLITT DIVORCE. 22/ 
 
 said Mr. Gray informed him he could not be admitted, as he 
 would be called on with Mrs. Bell the next Friday as witnesses. 
 So I undertook to let him know when the ceremony was over. 
 [Here follows the description of the taking of the oath.] . . 
 . . On the whole, with the utmost expedition they can use, 
 and supposing no impediments, it will be five weeks from this 
 day before all is finished. Went down and reported this to 
 Mr. and Mrs. Bell : dined there. They told me that Mr. Haz- 
 
 litt took 9O/. to the Renton Inn with him Mr. 
 
 Bell undertook to send him a parcel that night with the joyful 
 intelligence of the oath being taken, as he would get it sooner 
 that way than by the post 
 
 Saturday, \$th June. Mr. Bell called, and wrote a letter 
 to Mr. Hazlitt here, and made it into a parcel, not having sent 
 to him last night, as he promised. Wrote to Peggy. Feel 
 very faint to-day. 
 
 Sunday, \6th June [1822]. . . . . Adam Bell called, 
 while I was at breakfast, to say that Mr. Hazlitt was come 
 back, and had been at their house the night before 
 
 Monday, 17 th June. Went to Mr. Bell as soon as I had 
 breakfasted. He told me that Mr. Ritchie was to bring me 
 2o/. that day in part of payment, and that the rest would be 
 paid me as Mr. Hazlitt could get it. That he had proposed 
 only ten now, but that Mr. Bell had told him that that would 
 not do, as I proposed taking some journey, and had no money. 
 Said he did not know anything about the child. Went home 
 very uneasy about him, as his holidays were to begin this day ; 
 and I fretted that he should be left there, and thought he would 
 be very uneasy if they had not sent him to Winterslow, and 
 feel quite unhappy and forsaken ; and thought on his father's 
 refusing to tell me where he was to be, till I was so nervous 
 and hysterical I could not stay in the house. 
 
 Went down to Mr. Bell's again at one, as they told me he 
 [Mr. H.] would be there about that time, that I might see 
 him myself, and know where the child was. He was not 
 come, and Mr. Bell did not like my meeting him there. I 
 told him if I could not gain information of the child, I would
 
 228 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 set off to London directly, and find him out, and leave the 
 business here just as it was. He then gave me a note to send 
 him [Mr. H.J about it, but I carried it myself, and asked to 
 see him. 
 
 They said he was out, but would return at three o'clock. I 
 left the note, and went at three. They then said he would be 
 back to dinner at four. I wandered about between that and 
 Mr. Bell's till four ; then, going again, I met him by the way : 
 he gave me io/., and said I should have more soon by Mr. 
 Bell. I said I did not like Mr. Bell ; I had rather he sent by 
 Mr. Ritchie, which he said he would. 
 
 I asked about the child, and he said he was going to write 
 that night to Mr. John Hunt about him ; so that the poor little 
 fellow is really fretting, and thinking himself neglected 
 
 Mr. Bell said that he seemed quite enamored of a letter he 
 had been writing to Patmore ; that in their walk the day before 
 he pulled it out of his pocket twenty times, and wanted to read 
 it to them ; that he talked so loud, and acted so extravagantly, 
 that the people stood and stared at them as they passed, and 
 seemed to take him for a madman - 
 
 The next twelve days were spent by Mrs. H. in the tour to 
 the Highlands and to Dublin. She returned on the 28th June. 
 
 Mr. Hazlitt, upon the conclusion of the affair, with the ex- 
 ception of certain formalities, wrote to Mr. Patmore : 
 
 " io GEORGE STREET, EDINBURGH. 
 [Jitne 18 or ;g, received June 20, 1822.] 
 
 " MY DEAR FRIEND, The deed is done, and I am virtually 
 
 a free man. Mrs. H. took the oath on Friday 
 
 What had I better do in these circumstances ?. . . . She 
 '[Miss W.] has shot me through with poisoned arrows, and I 
 think another winged wound would finish me. It is a pleasant 
 sort of balm she has left in my heart. One thing I agree with 
 you in, it will remain there forever, but yet not very long. It 
 festers and consumes me. If it were not for my little boy, 
 whose face I see struck blank at the news, and looking through 
 the world for pity, and meeting with contempt, I should soon
 
 THE HAZLITT DIVORCE. 229 
 
 settle the question by my death. That is the only thought that 
 brings my wandering reason to an anchor, that excites the least 
 interest, or gives me fortitude to bear up against what I am 
 doomed to feel for the ungrateful. Oh, answer me, and save 
 me, if possible, for her and /raw myself. W. H. 
 
 "Will you call at Mr. Dawson's school, Hunter Street, and 
 tell the little boy I '11 write to him or see him on Saturday 
 morning. Poor little fellow ! See Colburn for me about the 
 book. The letter, I take it, was from him." 
 
 [EDINBURGH, June 25, 1822.] 
 
 " MY DEAR AND GOOD FRIEND, I am afraid that I trouble 
 you with my querulous epistles ; but this is probably the last. 
 To-morrow decides my fate with respect to her j and the next 
 day I expect to be a free man, There has been a delay pro 
 forma of ten days. In vain ! Was it not for her, and to lay 
 my freedom at her feet, that I took this step that has cost me 
 infinite wretchedness ? . . . . You, who have been a fa- 
 vorite with women, do not know what it is to be deprived of 
 one's only hope, and to have it turned to a mockery and a 
 scorn. There is nothing in the world left that can give me 
 
 one drop of comfort that I feel more and more 
 
 The breeze does not cool me. and the blue sky does not allure 
 my eye. I gaze only on her face, like a marble image averted 
 from me ah ! the only face that ever was turned fondly to 
 me ! 
 
 " I shall, I hope, be in town next Friday at farthest. . . 
 . . Not till Friday week. Write, for God's sake, and let me 
 know the worst. 
 
 " I have no answer from her. I wish you to call on Roscoe a 
 in confidence, to say that I intend to make her an offer of mar- 
 riage, and that I will write to her father the moment I am free 
 (next Friday week), and to ask him whether he thinks it will 
 be to any purpose, and what he would advise me to do. . 
 . . You don't know what I suffer, or you would not be so 
 
 1 The gentleman who had married the sister, and was said to be very happy in his 
 choice.
 
 230 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 severe upon me. My death will, I hope, satisfy every one 
 before long. W. H." 
 
 A very important letter, so far as regards this very delicate 
 and painful subject, was received from Mr. Patmore in reply 
 to the above. He had made inquiries, and the result was that 
 there was the best authority for supposing Miss Walker to be 
 a person of good character and conduct, but that she was not 
 disposed to entertain any proposal on the part of Mr. Hazlitt, 
 of whom, to say the truth, after what she had seen and heard, 
 she stood in considerable awe. Nothing could be more candid 
 and blunt than the tone of Mr. Patmore's letter, and I think 
 that this candor and bluntness operated beneficially in the end. 
 But the effect was not immediate. 
 
 While Mr. Hazlitt was in correspondence with Mr. Patmore 
 and the Walkers about this unfortunate and extraordinary 
 business, his wife, as she was still, till sentence was pro- 
 nounced, was occupied in her tour. On her return to Edin- 
 burgh, she found letters from Mr. Coulson, from Peggy Hazlitt, 
 and from her son, waiting for her. 
 
 MRS. HAZLITT'S DIARY RESUMED. 
 
 Saturday,2.()tk June, 1822. Sent the child's letter to his 
 father with a note, telling him that I was just returned from 
 Dublin with four shillings and sixpence in my pocket, and I 
 wanted more money. He came about two o'clock, and brought 
 me ten pounds, and said he did not think he was indebted to 
 me my quarter's money, as he had supplied me with more 
 than was necessary to keep me He had been un- 
 easy at not hearing from the child, though he had sent him a 
 pound and ordered him to write. I remarked that the letter 
 I sent him was addressed to him, and I supposed the child did 
 not know how to direct to him. He said he would if he had 
 attended to what he told him. That he wrote to Patmore, and 
 desired him to see for the child, and convey him to Mr. John 
 Hunt's, and that in his answer he said, " I have been to the 
 school, and rejoiced the poor little fellow's heart, by bringing
 
 THE HAZLITT DIVORCE. 231 
 
 him away with me, and in the afternoon he is going by the 
 stage to Mr. Hunt's. 1 He has only been detained two days 
 after the holidays begun." .... That Mr. Prentice had 
 told him last night it [the business] was again put off another 
 fortnight ; requested me to write to Mr. Gray, to know whether 
 I should be called on next Friday, and if it would be necessary 
 for me to remain in Scotland after that time ; if not, he thought 
 I had better go on the Saturday by the steamboat, as the ac- 
 commodation was excellent, and it was very pleasant and good 
 company. That he intended going by it himself, as soon as he 
 could, when the affair was over, and therefore I had better set 
 out first, as our being seen there together would be awkward, 
 and would look like making a mockery of the lawyers here. 
 Wished I would also write to the child in the evening, as his 
 nerves were in such an irritable state he was unable to do so. 
 Both which requests I complied with. 
 
 Monday, \st July. Received a note from Mr. Gray, to say 
 I should not be called on for two or three weeks, but without 
 telling me how long I must remain in Scotland. 
 
 Saturday, 6th July [1822]. . . . . Met Mr. Hazlitt 
 and Mr. Henderson, who had just arrived [at Dalkeith Palace] 
 in a gig. Mr. H. said he had heard again from Patmore, who 
 saw the child last Tuesday, and that he was well and happy. 
 
 I told him of my last letter and its contents [He] 
 
 adverted again to the awkwardness of our going back in the 
 same boat. I told him I had some thoughts of going by boat 
 to Liverpool and the rest by land, as I should see more of the 
 country that way ; which he seemed to like. Asked me if I 
 meant to go to Winterslow ? Said, yes, but that I should be 
 a week or two in London first. He said he meant to go to 
 Winterslow, and try if he could write, 2 for he had been so dis- 
 tracted the last five months he could do nothing. That- he 
 might also go to his mother's 8 for a short time, and that he 
 meant to take the child from school at the half-quarter, and 
 
 1 At Taunton. 
 
 2 Mrs. H. had a house in the village, but Mr. H. put up at the Hut. A strangely 
 close juxtaposition ! 
 
 8 At Alphington, near Exeter.
 
 232 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 take him with him ; and that after the holidays at Christmas 
 he should return to Mr. Dawson's again. Said he had not 
 been to town [London], and that we had better have no com- 
 munication at present, but that when it was over he would let 
 me have the money as he could get it. Asked if I had seen 
 Roslin Castle, and said he was there last Tuesday with Bell, 
 and thought it a fine place. Mr. Henderson shook hands, 
 and made many apologies for not recollecting me, and said I 
 looked very well, but that from my speaking to Mr. H. about 
 
 the pictures, he had taken me for an artist The 
 
 two gentlemen passed me in their gig as I was returning. 
 
 These extracts may appear needlessly full and lengthy, but 
 they are so abundant in characteristic touches that it is difficult 
 to deal with them more succinctly. They show, what there is 
 nothing else to show, Mr. Hazlitt's peculiar temperament as 
 developed by the present transaction, my grandmother's prac- 
 tical turn and dimissal of all sentimentality, and, at the same 
 time, the strong affection of both of them for their child he 
 made the only common ground there was ever to be again, per- 
 haps that there ever had been, between the husband and the 
 wife. In the next entry there is more about the ''money. " 
 
 Wednesday, loth July [1822]. Called on Mr. Ritchie, to 
 ask if he thought I should finish the business on Monday ? I 
 told him that I wanted to know what was to be done about my 
 own payment, as Mr. Hazlitt now seemed to demur to the one 
 quarter that he had all along agreed to, and there was also the 
 2o/. that I was to have as a present. He said that he was at 
 present very much engaged in some business which would end 
 in two days more, and that then, if I was at all apprehensive 
 about it, he -would write to, or see, Mr. Hazlitt on the sub- 
 ject. 
 
 Thursday, nth July. Met Mr. Hazlitt in Catherine Street, 
 and asked him what I was to do if Mr. Gray sent in my bill to 
 me, and he said I had nothing to do with it, for that he had 
 paid Mr, Prentice 4o/., which was nearly the whole expense
 
 THE HAZLITT DIVORCE. 233 
 
 for both of them. I said that was what Mr. Ritchie, to whom 
 I had spoken about it, thought. He said Mr. Ritchie had 
 nothing at all to do with it, and I remarked that he was the 
 person he had sent to me about it, and that he did not think it 
 would finish on Monday; and [I] asked if he had heard any- 
 thing more ? He said no, but he thought it would be Monday 
 or Tuesday ; and as soon as it was done, he wished I would 
 come to him to finally settle matters, as he had some things to 
 say, and I told him I would. I was rather flurried at meeting 
 him, and totally forgot many things I wished to have said, 
 which vexed me afterwards. 
 
 Friday, \ith July. On my return [from a walk to Holy- 
 rood House] I found a note from Mr. Gray, appointing' next 
 Wednesday for my attendance, and desiring a " payment of 
 2O/. towards the expense." I took it to Mr. Bell's ; he and 
 Mr. Hazlitt went out at the back door as I went in at the front. 
 I gave the message to Mrs. Bell, who told me Mr. Hazlitt had 
 been to Mr. Gray's 
 
 Saturday, i^th July. Met Mr. Hazlitt at the foot of my 
 stairs, coming to me. He said that Mr. Gray was to have the 
 
 money out of what he had paid Mr. Prentice I told 
 
 him he need not be uneasy about meeting me in the steamboat, 
 for I did not intend to go that way. Asked him if he thought 
 it a good collection of pictures at Dalkeith House [this is so 
 characteristic !] ; he said no, very poor. .... 
 
 Wednesday, \*]th July. Mr. Bell called between ten and 
 eleven He had come, by Mr. Gray's desire, to ac- 
 company me to the court, and was himself cited as a witness. 
 [Mrs. H. then describes going to the court, but the proceed- 
 ings were pro forma, as the depositions had been arranged to 
 be taken at Mr. Bell's private residence.] Returned, and wrote 
 a note to Mr. Hazlitt, to have in case he was out, saying that I 
 
 would call on him at two o'clock I left it Saw 
 
 Mr. Hazlitt at four o'clock ; he was at dinner ; but I stopped 
 and drank tea with him. [!] He told me that all was done now, 
 unless Mrs. Bell should make any demur in the part required 
 of her Said he would set off to London by the mail
 
 234 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 that night, though he thought he should be detained by illness 
 or die on the road, for he had been penned up in that house for 
 five months .... unable to do any work ; and he thought he 
 had lost the job to Italy, but to get out of Scotland would seem 
 like the road to paradise. I told him l he had done a most in- 
 judicious thing in publishing what he did in the [New Month- 
 ly] Magazine about Sarah Walker, particularly at this time, 
 and that he might be sure it would be made use of against him, 
 and that everybody in London had thought it a most improper 
 thing, and Mr. John Hunt was quite sorry that he had so 
 committed himself. 
 
 He said that he was sorry for [it], but that it was done with- 
 out his knowledge or consent. That Colburn had got hold "of it 
 by mistake, with other papers, and published it without send- 
 ing him the proofs. He asked me where I should be in town, 
 and I told him at Christie's. He inquired what kind of people 
 they were. I told him a very respectable quiet young couple 
 lately married. He desired me to take care of myself, and 
 keep up a respectable appearance, as I had money enough to 
 do so. He 2 wished he could marry some woman with a good 
 fortune, that he might not be under the necessity of writing 
 another line; and be enabled to provide for the child, and do 
 something for John; and that now his name was known in 
 the literary world, he thought there was a chance for it, though 
 
 he could not pretend to anything of the kind before 
 
 I left Mr. Henderson with him, pressing him to accompany 
 him to the Highlands ; but he seemed, after some hesitation, to 
 prefer going to London, though I left the matter uncertain. He 
 [Mr. Henderson] had been dawdling backward and forward 
 about it for three weeks, wishing to have the credit of taking 
 him there, but grudging the money, though he was living upon 
 us for a week together in London. 
 
 1 The italics are mine. This passage must find room here, in spite of my 
 scruples. The affair was well known, and was soon in print in the Liber A moris. 
 To conceal it would be useless ; and all that I can do is to place it in its true light 
 before the world. Mrs. H. was a plain-spoken woman, without any false delicacy 
 about her. She was perfectly acquainted with the whole history of the matter. 
 
 1 The italics are mine. The John referred to presently was, of course, his 
 brother. This passage is very remarkable.
 
 THE HAZLITT DIVORCE. 235 
 
 Mr. Hazlitt said that, if he went to Winterslow, he would 
 take the child, as he wished to have him a little with him ; so 
 I thought he had better go with the first that went, as I did 
 not think of staying in town more than two or three weeks, 
 and then making some stay at Winterslow, and proceeding 
 afterwards to Crediton. 1 He said we could settle that best in 
 town. 
 
 Mrs. Dow [Mr. H.'s landlady] brought in the bill, which he 
 just looked at and said, " Is that the whole, ma'am ? " " Yes, 
 sir ; you had better look over it, and see that it is correct, if 
 you please." " That, ma'am," he said, " is one of the troubles 
 I get rid of. I never do it." " You are a very indolent man, 
 sir." " There is a balance of twenty-four shillings, ma'am ; 
 can you have so much confidence in me as to let me have 
 that ? " " No, sir, I can 't do that, for I have not the money." 
 " I shall be glad then, ma'am, if you will let me have the four 
 shillings, and you may pay the pound to Mrs. Hazlitt on Sat- 
 urday, as when it comes, she will be here." " Yes, sir, and 
 Mrs. Hazlitt may look over the bill, if she pleases." 
 
 Thursday, \%th Jitly [1822]. She returned with the four 
 shillings, saying she had been to two or three places to get 
 
 that Went to Mr. Ritchie, who gave me the note 
 
 of hand for fifty pounds at six months, dated 6th May, and the 
 
 copy of memorandums signed by Mr. Hazlitt He 
 
 said he had expected him and Mr. Henderson to supper last 
 night, but they did not come. I told him he wished to go to 
 
 London by the mail, and probably had done so He 
 
 said he must repeat that he thought we had taken the step 
 
 most advisable for both parties Called at his [Mr. 
 
 H.'s] lodgings to inquire if he went by the mail. Mrs. Dow 
 
 said yes ; he left there about eight o'clock Called 
 
 at the coach-office, and they said Mr. Hazlitt did not go by 
 the mail. Saw the waiter at the inn door, who said he went 
 by the steamboat at eight o'clock this morning 
 
 1 Where Mr. H.'s relations were settled ! This is also a curious part of the busi- 
 ness. My grandmother was intimate and friendly with the Hazlitts to the last, and 
 frequently visited them here.
 
 236 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 Carried back Mrs. Bell's book. Mr. Bell said I was a great 
 fool to have acceded to his wish for a divorce, but that it was 
 now done, and he thought I had better get some old rich 
 Scotch lord, and marry here. " I was now Miss Stoddart, and 
 was I not glad of that ?" " No ; I had no intention of marry- 
 ing, and should not do what he talked of." He said I must 
 needs marry ; and I told him I saw no such necessity 
 
 This is the conclusion. Mrs. Hazlitt sailed on the following 
 day, at 2 p. M., in the smack Favorite from Leith. I have also 
 done with the Patmore correspondence, of which I have only 
 two other letters, post-marked July 3 and July 8, 1822, but both 
 destitute of interest and illustration. 1 
 
 The divorce was a separation a mensa et thoro, and my 
 grandfather had accomplished what he desired, the severance 
 of his connection with a lady who, he conceived, did not un- 
 derstand or value him, and who had her independent means of 
 support. But it was not a parting forever. Strangely enough, 
 there does not seem to have been any ill-will on either side in 
 the matter. They were to meet again. 
 
 It should be remembered that they had a strong tie remain- 
 ing, which they could not or would not cut. It was my father 
 their only surviving child. They were both fondly attached 
 to him, Mr. Hazlitt in his way, and Mrs. Hazlitt in hers, and 
 he was often a channel of communication between his disu- 
 nited parents. 
 
 Let me leave this subject of the " Liber Amoris " for good, 
 with one observation, that it does not seem that the passion 
 left a very deep or lasting impression on his mind. It was a 
 piece of Buncle-ishness, which soon evaporated, and we hear, 
 fortunately, very little of it afterwards, and then only in casual 
 and half unintelligible allusions. As for the dissolution of 
 
 1 Yet there is a passage in one of them where he tells Mr. P. he thinks he shall 
 come home by the mail, and asks him to come in and see him, about eight o'clock 
 which I shall quote, because it demonstrates his deep affection and respect for one 
 of the most worthy men that ever lived John Hunt. He says : " I wish much to 
 see you and her, and John Hunt and my little boy once more ; and then, if she is 
 not what she once was to me, I care not if I die that instant."
 
 HAZLITT'S LAST DAYS. 237 
 
 that marriage-bond, it was decidedly the best course to have 
 taken, and it was a mere piece of diplomacy after all. There 
 were no tears shed on either side. It was a stroke of business. 
 Let it pass. Majora canernus. 
 
 HAZLITT'S LAST DAYS. 
 
 Mr. Hazlitt removed, about 1827, from Down Street to 40 
 Half-Moon Street, Piccadilly ; and here he lodged, when in 
 town, during a couple of years. 
 
 It happened, when the MS. of the second volume of " Napo- 
 leon " was almost ready for the printer, some burglars, who 
 had got at the back of the premises through Shepherd's 
 Market, tried to break in, and put Mr. Hazlitt into a great state 
 of terror. He posted off the next morning to the " Atlas " 
 office with his MS., and begged that it might be taken care of 
 till the printer wanted it ; and he had not even then, when the 
 danger or alarm was all over, and his treasure was secure, 
 quite overcome his excitement. I owe this anecdote to a 
 gentleman who became acquainted with Mr. Hazlitt towards 
 the close of his life, and who was an eye-witness of his arrival, 
 MS. in hand, at the newspaper office. 
 
 To another friend, whom he met with the adventure fresh 
 in his mind, he said, " You know, sir, I had no watch, and 
 they would n't have believed I had no watch and no money 
 and, by G , sir, they 'd have cut my throat." 
 
 His industry never flagged. He was unceasingly occupied. 
 His health was by no means reestablished, and his spirits 
 were sadly indifferent ; but he went on, in spite of every ob- 
 stacle, with the activity and continuity of a beginner. 
 
 In 1829 he shifted his quarters from 40 Half-Moon Street, 
 to 3 Bouverie Street, Fleet Street, where he occupied (with 
 his son) a first floor. 
 
 There was an alarm of fire while he was here, and the busi- 
 ness was to get their pictures away the copies of Titian and 
 the " Death of Clorinda." He was cross with my father 
 (ill-health improves nobody's temper) for being so cool ; but 
 he himself did nothing but act the by-stander with great sue-
 
 238 ' WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 cess. They were temporarily deposited, till the danger was 
 over, at the Sussex Coffee House over the way. 
 
 At Bouverie Street he wrote numerous papers in the " Atlas," 
 two or three in the " New Monthly," one or more m the " Ex- 
 aminer," and two in the "Edinburgh Review" Flaxman's 
 " Lectures on Sculpture " and Wilson's " Life of Defoe.' 
 The latter is in the " Review " for January, 1830. 
 
 Lamb, in the postscript of a letter to Wilson, November 15, 
 1829, says : " Hazlitt is going to make your book a basis for 
 a review of De Foe's novels in the ' Edinbro'.' I wish I 
 had health and spirits to do it." 
 
 It seems that it was his greatest wish to make a paper on 
 Bulwer's novels in the " Review," and he spoke upon the 
 subject to Jeffrey, and, after his retirement from the editor- 
 ship, to his successor, Mr. Napier. But there was a difficulty 
 felt and intimated, in connection with the proposal, both by 
 Jeffrey and Napier. Mr. Hazlitt could never learn what it 
 was ; but he had to give up the notion. He regretted this the 
 more, inasmuch as he had read " Paul Clifford," and been 
 pleased with it ; and he was anxious, as Mr. Patmore has it, 
 to "get the job," if it was only to furnish him with a motive 
 for going through the others. 
 
 He was now bringing to completion his Magnum Opus, 
 which, since his strength had begun visibly to decline, after 
 his telling illness of 1827, he was fondly solicitous of seeing 
 off his hands and in type. The finishing touches were put to 
 the third and fourth volumes at the latter end of 1829, under 
 the roof of Mr. Whiting the printer, of Beaufort House, in 
 the Strand ; * and the second and concluding portion of the 
 " Life " was at length launched safely in 1830. The sale of 
 the former volumes had been very inconsiderable, and the 
 publication of the remainder did not greatly help it on, I am 
 afraid. It came after Sir Walter's, and did not go off at all 
 well. 
 
 But the author's chief aim was not present gain so much 
 
 1 Perhaps, after the alarm of fire at Bouverie Street, he thought the MS. safer at 
 Mr. Whiting's.
 
 HAZLITT'S LAST DAYS. 239 
 
 as posthumous identification with a subject, which he con- 
 sidered, as time went on, would grow in interest, and would 
 be judged, as it deserved. 
 
 I have understood, however, that he was to have had for 
 the copyright a considerable sum (5oo/.), of which he received 
 only a portion (i4o/.) in a bill, which, when the affairs of 
 Messrs. Hunt and Clarke became hopelessly involved, was 
 mere waste paper. 
 
 Mr. Hazlitt was dreadfully harassed by this disappoint- 
 ment. To him, as to most literary men, especially where 
 there is sickness and growing incapacity for application, a sum 
 of some hundreds of pounds was of the utmost moment, and 
 the loss of it entailed the greatest possible inconvenience and 
 personal worry. 
 
 I have no inclination to go into the painful details, and I 
 shall merely mention that the pecuniary crisis, which Mr. Haz- 
 litt had hoped to avert, was accelerated by a knavish account- 
 ant, introduced to him (in ignorance of his real character, 
 doubtless) by Mr. Hone. Mr. Hazlitt's strength and spirits 
 were completely shattered by this deplorable and shameful 
 affair. He removed in the beginning of 1830 to 6 Frith 
 Street, Soho, and there he was now threatened with a return 
 of his old enemies, dyspepsia and gastric inflammation. 
 
 His early friends, the Reynells, took leave of him to go over 
 to Havre, where they had arranged to settle ; and he was 
 then poorly, and under the care of a M. Sannier. This was 
 in June. There is a letter from Lamb to the first Mrs. Haz- 
 litt, dated June 3, 1830, respecting a suggestion she wished 
 made to my grandfather through Lamb, on a point in which 
 the unhappy circumstances inspired her with the deepest 
 motherly interest and anxiety her son's establishment in 
 life. 
 
 It has never been printed, and I may therefore insert it : 
 
 [jfune 3, 1830.] 
 
 " DEAR SARAH, I named your thought about William to 
 his father, who expressed such horror and aversion to the
 
 240 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 idea of his singing in public, that I cannot meddle in it directly 
 or indirectly. Ayrton is a kind fellow, and if you choose to 
 consult him, by letter or otherwise, he will give you the best 
 advice, I am sure, very readily. / have no doubt that Mr. 
 Burners objection to interfering was the same with mine. 
 With thanks for your pleasant long letter, which is not that 
 of an invalid, and sympathy for your sad sufferings, 1 I re- 
 main, In haste, 
 
 " Yours truly, 
 " Mary's kindest love. [CHARLES LAMB.] 
 
 "MRS. HAZLITT, 
 
 "At Mr. Broomhead's, 
 
 " St. Anne's Square, Buxton." 
 
 The " thought " was that William should go with Mr. 
 Braham the singer, and that he should adopt the profession. 
 But his father's insuperable repugnance to the choice of any 
 line of life lingered with him till the last ; he wanted to see 
 him a gentleman, and to be able to leave him independent of 
 the world. 
 
 In the course of the summer, my grandfather grew weaker 
 and worse, and the services of Dr. Darling and Mr. Lawrence 
 were volunteered. Still he was able to think and write a 
 little. He composed a paper on " Personal Politics," in view 
 of the then recent deposition of Charles X. and the overthrow 
 of the Bourbon dynasty in France. It was something, he 
 thought, to have been spared to witness that. The possibility 
 of their recall occurred to him. 
 
 " Even then," he wrote, " I should not despair. The Rev- 
 olution of the Three Days was like a resurrection from the 
 dead, and showed plainly that liberty too has a spirit of life in 
 it ; and that the hatred of oppression is ' the unquenchable 
 flame, the worm that dies not.' " 
 
 The end was near. He had struggled with death through 
 August and a part of September, and seemed to live on by a 
 pure act of volition. But he was sinking. He asked those 
 who were with him to fetch his mother to him, that he might 
 
 1 Mrs. H. was beginning to labor under frequent and severe attacks of rheu- 
 matism.
 
 HAZLITT'S LAST DAYS. 241 
 
 see her once more. He knew that he was going fast. But his 
 mother could not come to him ; she was in Devonshire, and 
 heavily stricken in years. 
 
 As he lay there, on his dying bed, he mentioned to Lamb, 
 who was by, that William was engaged to Kitty, 1 and said that 
 the idea gave him pleasure. 
 
 One Saturday afternoon in September, when Charles Lamb 
 was in the room, the scene closed. He died so quietly that 
 his son, who was sitting by his bedside, did not know that he 
 was gone till the vital breath had been extinct a moment or 
 two. 
 
 His last words were : " Well, I 've had a happy life." 
 
 " In my grandmother's handwriting I find this contemporary 
 memorandum : 
 
 "Saturday, i8th September, 1830, at about half-past four in 
 the afternoon, died at his lodgings, No. 6 Frith Street, Soho, 
 William Hazlitt, aged fifty-two years, five months, and eight 
 days. 
 
 " Mr. Lamb, Mr. White, Mr. Hessey, and his own son were 
 with him at the time." 
 
 In a letter written by a friend to his sister in Havre, on the 
 following Tuesday, there is a reference to the loss which his 
 acquaintance, his son, and literature had sustained on that 
 1 8th of September, 1830. 
 
 " Of the events which have occurred here since your de- 
 parture," Mr. W. H. Reynell writes, "none will astonish you 
 more, or at least affect you more, than the death of poor Haz- 
 litt ; though the uncertain state in which he has been for the 
 last two months ought to have prepared his friends for the 
 worst. It appears, however, from all accounts, that his son 
 has entertained a very different opinion, or at least caused a 
 very different opinion to be entertained. His father died on 
 Saturday, and on Friday William told me that he was much 
 better ; and even on the following day (the day he died) gave 
 out that he was in no danger, but that he had something in his 
 mind, which would kill him if he did not dispel it. I hear that 
 
 1 Miss Catherine Reynell. They were married June 8, 1833. 
 16
 
 242 WILL/AM HAZLITT. 
 
 Mr. Lawrence and another medical man were present, besides 
 Dr. Darling, who had been attending him throughout, and 
 who, they think, had not treated him judiciously. Mr. Hone 
 called in Broad Street on Saturday afternoon to inform me of 
 the melancholy event. My father will be very much shocked 
 to hear of the departure of his old friend so suddenly." 
 
 Talfourd observes : 
 
 " Hazlitt's death did not so much shock Lamb at the time, 
 as it weighed down his spirits afterwards, when he felt the 
 want of those essays which he had used periodically to look 
 for with eagerness in the magazines and reviews, which they 
 alone made tolerable to him ; and when he realized the dismal 
 certainty that he should never again enjoy that rich discourse 
 of old poets and painters with which so many a long winter's 
 night had been gladdened, or taste life with an additional 
 relish in the keen sense of enjoyment which endeared it to 
 his companion." 
 
 HAZLITTIANA. 
 
 Like Dr. Johnson, Mr. Hazlitt addressed everybody as Sir. 
 The youngest and most intimate of his friends was not exempt 
 from this rule, unless Mr. Hazlitt happened to be in an unusu- 
 ally happy and cordial humor. Mr. C. H. ReynelPs sons, 
 whom he knew as well as his own child, were almost invaria- 
 bly saluted in what would now appear a ludicrously formal 
 manner ; but indeed this mode of allocution had not gone out 
 then so entirely as it has in our day. 
 
 He was accustomed to speak low, like Coleridge, with his 
 chin bent in and his eyes widely expanded ; and his voice and 
 manner, as a rule, were apt to communicate an impression of 
 querulousness. His was the tone of a person who related to 
 you a succession of grievances. 
 
 But when he entered on a theme which pleased or animated 
 him, or when he was in the presence of those whom he knew 
 well, and trusted, he cast off a good deal of this air, and his 
 demeanor was easy, yet impassioned. 
 
 " In person," writes the late Mr. Justice Talfourd, " Mr.
 
 HAZLITTIANA. 243 
 
 Hazlitt was of the middle size, with a handsome and eager 
 countenance, worn by sickness and thought ; and dark hair, 
 which had curled stiffly over the temples, and was only of late 
 years sprinkled with gray. His gait was slouching and awk- 
 ward, and his dress neglected ; but when he began to talk he 
 could not be mistaken for a common man. In the company of 
 persons with whom he was not familiar his bashfulness was 
 painful ; but when he became entirely at ease, and entered on 
 a favorite topic, no one's conversation was ever more delight- 
 ful. He did not talk for effect, to dazzle, or surprise, or annoy ; 
 but with the most simple and honest desire to make his view 
 of the subject entirely apprehended by his hearer. There was 
 sometimes an obvious struggle to do this to his own satisfac- 
 tion : he seemed laboring to drag his thought to light from its 
 deep lurking place ; and, with modest distrust of that power 
 of expression which he had found so late in life, he often be- 
 trayed a fear that he had failed to make himself understood, 
 and recurred to the subject again and again, that he might be 
 assured he had succeeded." 
 
 Where Talfourd speaks of his " intense sense of his indi- 
 vidual being," he intends, however, I should think, an euphu- 
 ism for what somebody else more candidly terms " ingrained 
 selfishness." In some people egotism is simply delightful. In 
 children it is not unpleasant very often. We rather like it in 
 diarists. But in the main it is an unamiable quality, there is 
 no doubt ; and where a great man is discovered to be an egotist, 
 and to love himself best, society takes all the worse offense. 
 It is a surprising frailty. 
 
 Some admirer of his was astonished to find that his con- 
 versation was so ordinary. Could this be the author of " Table 
 Talk ? " It was a gentleman who evidently expected Hazlitt 
 to speak essays. Enough for him to have to write them ! He 
 considered himself off duty when he was not at work on some- 
 thing he had thought of. 
 
 Haydon the painter was scandalized at surprising him once 
 looking at himself in the glass. Did Mr. Haydon never look 
 at himself in the glass ?
 
 244 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 Southey, in the " Doctor," takes occasion to observe, as 
 something which had come to him upon report, " that Mr. 
 Hazlitt saw his likeness in one of Michael Angelo's devils." 
 The writer evidently meant mischief or wit ; but was not very 
 successful, if so, in attaining either. 
 
 My grandfather, it is well known to -all who understood him 
 often said things half in jest (did the author of the " Doctor " 
 never do so ?) ; and this, if said by him at all, was in one of 
 these semi-serious moods. But it was Mr. Southey's cue to 
 interpret him literally. The injustice done to a person on the 
 other side of the question was of course scarcely worth con- 
 sidering : a fling at a Jacobin and a friend of Mr. Leigh Hunt 
 was no harm, even if the joke was not very good or very true. 
 
 Mr. Patmore has fallen rather wide of the mark here. What 
 he chooses to characterize as demoniacal \ft my grandfather's 
 expression, was, in the main, assuredly nothing more than 
 grimace and willfulness. I do not pretend to dispute that bit- 
 ter, gloomy recollections did not haunt his brain upon occasion, 
 and darken his brow, producing a lowering passionate expres- 
 sion ; but I am convinced, from all that I have learned and 
 understood from those who were as good judges as Mr. Pat- 
 more, that the latter has seriously, nay grossly, misconceived 
 the truth here ; and that these physiognomical phenomena 
 were, oftener than not, mere tricks to mislead people, as they 
 must have misled Mr. Patmore, into the persuasion that some 
 satanic train of thought was going on within. 
 
 Leigh Hunt used to describe my grandfather's shake of the 
 hand as something like a fish tendering you his fin. The same 
 gentleman, on meeting him abroad, was surprised at the change 
 in his appearance. He used to wear his hair long and curly, 
 and then he had had it cropped, finding that it was beginning 
 to turn gray. 
 
 When Leigh Hunt was in Italy, my grandfather, then newly 
 married to his second wife, paid him a visit and dined with 
 him. It seems that Mr. Hunt had been piqued by the manner 
 in which my grandfather on one or two occasions, in those fits 
 of spleen which sometimes came over him, retorted on him ;
 
 HAZLITTIANA. 245 
 
 and L. H. became anxious to prove to Mr. Hazlitt that he 
 could do the same if he chose. He selected the present op- 
 portunity to do so, and before dinner was served, L. H. said to 
 Mrs. Hazlitt, " I have something to show Hazlitt, but I will 
 not let him see it till after dinner, as it might spoil his appe- 
 tite." " Oh ! " said Mrs. H., " it will do him good." There- 
 upon Hunt gave Hazlitt a paper in which he had spoken his 
 mind pretty freely on the sore subject, and Hazlitt sat down 
 in a chair and read it through. When he had done, he ob- 
 served, " By God, sir, there 's a good deal of truth in it." 
 
 He used to visit Leigh Hunt, when the latter resided at 
 Hampstead, in the Vale of Health. The country thereabout 
 was much more lonely than now, and he used to be so nervous 
 of meeting with some dangerous adventure, that Mr. Hunt was 
 generally obliged to send some one to see him as far as the 
 London road. 
 
 He was untidy in his dress as a rule, and with this untidi- 
 ness went, as is mostly the case, a prodigality. He never en- 
 joyed the credit of having new clothes. He appeared to best 
 advantage when he was attired for some special occasion. A 
 gentleman (since dead) who knew him well during the last thir- 
 teen years of his life, said that he was never more astonished 
 than when he saw Mr. Hazlitt accoutred in readiness to go to 
 dinner at Mr. Curran's. He wore a blue coat and gilt buttons, 
 black smalls, silk stockings, and a white cravat, and he looked 
 the gentleman. But he did not often do himself this justice ; 
 the processes of the toilet proved irksome. His second wife 
 coaxed him for a time into conforming to the gentilities, but it 
 was not for long, I fear. She abandoned the attempt in de- 
 spair. An indifference to conventionalities had set in ever since 
 his one great disappointment in life. 
 
 Montaigne the essayist had a cloak which he prized as hav- 
 ing belonged to his father. He used to say that when he put 
 it on he felt as if he was wrapping himself up in his father. 
 There is still to this day preserved in our family just such a 
 cloak as that of Montaigne ; it is the one in which Mr. Hazlitt 
 went habitually to the play. His son values it, though he may
 
 246 WILLIAM HAZLITT. 
 
 not go so far as Montaigne went in his fine and fanciful en- 
 thusiasm. 
 
 I have understood that this cloak (of blue cloth with a red 
 lining and a cape) was made on the supposed model of one 
 worn by Mr. Patmore. Mr. Hazlitt found, however, to his sur- 
 prise and chagrin, that although Patmore's garment passed un- 
 questioned at the doors of the opera, his own, on some techni- 
 cal ground, was refused admittance. 
 
 His diet was usually spare and plain. I have before me one 
 of the bills of Mr. Carter, his landlord at Winterslow Hut. It 
 is for the month of August, 1821 ; and among the items tea 
 and rice are conspicuous. His breakfast seems to have cost 
 him eighteen pence, his supper the same, and his dinner from 
 eighteen pence to four shillings. There is one entry of wine, 
 " twelve shillings : " he must have had company on the 25th 
 of the month, for he did not take wine. 
 
 He met my mother one day in Piccadilly, and as he looked 
 more out of spirits than usual, she asked him if anything was 
 the matter. He said, " Well, you know, I 've been having 
 some hot boiled beef for my dinner, Kitty a most uncom- 
 fortable dish." 
 
 He had had a pheasant for dinner one day when my mother 
 saw him, and it turned out that he had been at a total loss to 
 know what to order, and so had ordered this pheasants that 
 day being ten shillings a-piece in the market. " Don't you 
 think it was a good deal to give?" she asked. "Well, 1 
 don't know but what it was, Kitty," he replied, opening his 
 eyes in his way, and tucking his chin into his shirt-collar. 
 
 He would eat nobody's apple-pies but my mother's, and no 
 puddings but Mrs. Armstead's, of Winterslow. Mrs. A. con- 
 trived to persuade him that she had the art of making egg 
 puddings without eggs. 
 
 His natural gastric weakness, which is hereditary in the 
 family, was a constant torment to him ; and his love of all 
 good things in the eatable way, and abstinence (during a long 
 term of years) from every description of liquid, except tea and 
 water, tended to aggravate the constitutional tendency to this 
 class of disorder.
 
 HAZLITT1ANA. 247 
 
 But it was a way of his to complain of indisposition some- 
 times, when he called anywhere, and the people of the house 
 were not as pleasant as usual, or something was said which 
 put him out of temper with them and himself. It did not sig- 
 nify very much which side was in fault, so long as matters 
 went amiss, and he did not happen to be in the best cue. 
 
 A great deal depended on the humor he was in. He saw 
 things with a different eye, he judged people from a different 
 light. He was two different men in his own person the Mr. 
 Hazlitt of Mr. Southey's " Doctor " and the " Liber Amoris," 
 and the Mr. Hazlitt, metaphysician, philosopher, philanthro- 
 pist, who desired to see some prospect of good to mankind 
 according to the condition of his mental equilbrium and his 
 immediate frame of liver. 
 
 On such occasions as I have alluded to, he would get up, 
 say he was very ill, with his chin in and his eyes wide open, 
 and make the move to go, with a " Well, good-morning." 
 
 Mr. Hazlitt was to be seen to best advantage where he was 
 least seen at Winterslow. There, in the maturity of his 
 genius and fame, he spent many a happy month, living his 
 youth over again in spirit and memory. 
 
 A visit to the theatre in Mr. Hazlitt's company was not al- 
 ways the most comfortable thing in the world. He had a slow 
 way of moving on such occasions, which, to less habitual play- 
 goers, was highly trying. He took my mother to the play one 
 evening, when he was in Half-Moon Street it must have 
 been in 1828 : there was a great crowd, but he was totally un- 
 moved by that circumstance. At the head of the staircase he 
 had to sign the Free Admission Book, and perfectly uncon- 
 scious that he was creating a blockade, he looked up at the 
 attendant in the middle of the operation a rather lengthy 
 one with him and said, " What sort of a house is there to- 
 night, sir ? " It was a vast relief to his two companions, my 
 mother and her elder sister, when they had run the gauntlet 
 of all this, and were safe in their places.
 
 THOMAS CAMPBELL.
 
 (From Maclise Gallery.')
 
 THOMAS CAMPBELL. 
 
 THE " NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE." 
 
 Y first personal introduction to Campbell took place 
 in 1830, at the house of a person with whom, by one 
 of those temporary caprices to which, in his latter 
 years, he so habitually yielded, Campbell had con- 
 tracted an intimacy as little suitable, it might have been sup- 
 posed, to his refined literary tastes and fastidious personal 
 habits, as it certainly was to the general tone of his intel- 
 lectual character ; for the person to whom I refer, though 
 possessing considerable talents and extensive influence in 
 connection with the newspaper press, was a man of coarse 
 mind, and of almost ostentatiously profligate personal habits. 
 Not but there were features in Campbell's mind and charac- 
 ter capable of accounting for this temporary intimacy. In the 
 first place, it must be admitted that, notwithstanding the ex- 
 cessive fastidiousness of his taste and habits in all matters 
 connected with his position and reputation as the first of living 
 poets (for such at that time he was considered), Campbell par- 
 took of that propensity to which another kind of kings are 
 said to be addicted that of a lurking fondness for "low com- 
 pany ; " not " low " in this case, in the ordinary sense of the 
 term, as implying persons of low condition and mean mental 
 endowments, but as indicating that freedom from conventional 
 restraints which always springs from a low tone of moral sen- 
 timent, when accompanied by an open and bold-faced repudia- 
 tion of those principles of personal conduct which form the
 
 252 THOMAS CAMPBELL. 
 
 basis of all cultivated society. And Campbell's mind had a 
 strong tendency to throw off the restraints in question, without 
 the strength of will to do so, even if his high tone of moral 
 feeling had not stood in the way of the step which it cer- 
 tainly would have done. 
 
 The person at whose house I met Campbell, was also a furi- 
 ous republican ; and it is probable that the apparent and I be- 
 lieve real sincerity of his political views and opinions, and the 
 daring and uncompromising way in which he advocated them, 
 both with his pen and tongue, went far to gain for him the 
 political sympathy of Campbell the only sympathy to which 
 he ever frankly yielded ; if, indeed, it was not the only one 
 that he ever strongly felt. Campbell was, in fact, a thorough 
 republican at heart ; and not the less so for many of his other 
 qualities, both personal and intellectual, being more or less 
 moulded and colored by the aristocratic principle, and some of 
 them being the very quintessence of that principle. 
 
 There was another attraction in this quarter, which, as it 
 points at a characteristic feature in Campbell's idiosyncrasy, I 
 may venture to refer to, as having exercised no little influence 
 in making the house in question the scene of his frequent 
 visits, when (as during his later years) attractions of a more 
 intellectual character had somewhat loosened their hold upon 
 him. The worthy host was the father of ''two fair daugh- 
 ters ; " one a piquant and sparkling brunette, with black eyes 
 and raven hair, a commanding figure, and endowed with the 
 full complement of flirtation power proper to her complexion ; 
 the other, a tender, delicate, and shrinking blonde, whose 
 winning softness of look, and pensive repose of manner, aided 
 by melting blue eyes and golden hair, contrasted (almost to a 
 pitch of strangeness) with the wild and vivacious character of 
 her brilliant and bewitching sister. 
 
 This united presence gave a zest to the early part of Camp- 
 bell's evenings at the house of his friend , which height- 
 ened by its contrast, the frank and cordial, but coarse joviality 
 and good-fellowship of their close : for there was a redeeming 
 bonhomie about the host, and a 
 
 " Total, glorious want of vile hypocrisy,"
 
 THE "NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE." 253 
 
 that in some degree glossed over the open and even ostenta- 
 tious profligacy of his opinions, and the habits of life which 
 grew out of them. 
 
 There was still another reason which took Campbell to the 
 house of this gentleman at the time I am speaking of, which 
 (as it breaks no " confidences ") must not be excluded from 
 Recollections, one object of which is to furnish materials for 
 the private and personal history of the literature of our time, 
 and for correcting some of the errors and supplying the over- 
 sights of that history. There is a work in two volumes octavo, 
 entitled " Life of Mrs. Siddons, by T. Campbell, Esq.," and 
 another in the like form entitled " Life of Sir Thomas Law- 
 rence, by T. Campbell, Esq.," both of which productions, if I 
 am not greatly misinformed (and my authority was the party 
 better than any one else but Campbell himself acquainted with 
 the facts), were entirely prepared and composed by the gentle- 
 man above alluded to who was an extremely rapid and off- 
 hand writer, and was much employed by "popular" publishers 
 when called upon at a pinch to supply the cravings of the lit- 
 erary market, on any particular topic of the moment, before 
 its more legitimate resources could be brought to bear. If the 
 party in question was to be believed, the only share the al- 
 leged author of the above-named works had in their production 
 was that of " overlooking " the MS., " looking over" the proof 
 sheets, and permitting his name to stand rubric in the title- 
 page. 
 
 The uninitiated reader must not suppose that I am disclos- 
 ing any private secrets in this case. One of the modes in 
 which Campbell himself reconciled (both to himself and others) 
 this necessity of his literary and social position, was by mak- 
 ing no mystery of the case, or caring that others should do so. 
 " So far as the reading public is concerned," he argued, " all 
 that my name does to these works is, to stand sponsor for 
 heir facts, dates, and so forth ; and for those I think I can 
 
 safely depend on . For the rest, I am too poor to stand 
 
 upon the critical niceties of literary casuistry. Besides, those 
 who are fools enough to suppose that I could write such loose,
 
 254 THOMAS CAMPBELL, 
 
 disjointed, shambling stuff, as those books are for the most 
 part composed of, are not worth caring about. And the rest 
 of the world will learn the truth, somehow or other, soon 
 enough for the safety of my poetical reputation, which is the 
 only one I ever aimed at." 
 
 It is with a loving eye to that reputation, and a sincere be- 
 lief that Campbell himself would have thanked anybody who 
 had made the disclosure thus publicly, even during his life- 
 time, that I allow it to form part of these personal records of 
 the literary history of the nineteenth century. 
 
 This seems the proper place for me to notice the exactly 
 similar case of his (nominal) editorship of the " New Monthly 
 Magazine." When a proposition was made to him through a 
 friend, some years before, to undertake that office, he must 
 have felt, and, indeed, I believe, he openly declared, that he 
 was the last person in the world to be the conductor of what 
 aimed at being a " popular " literary miscellany. In tempera- 
 ment indolent, capricious, and uncertain, yet hasty, sensitive, 
 willful, and obstinate in giving his will its way ; his habits of 
 composition slow to a degree of painfulness ; his literary taste 
 refined, even to fastidiousness ; and, above all, his personal 
 position as the friend and associate of nearly all the distin- 
 guished litterateurs of the day, and his almost morbid sensi- 
 tiveness on the point of giving pain, or even displeasure, to any 
 of them, Campbell was, and knew himself to be, the ideal of 
 what the proffered office required its occupant not to be. 
 
 On the other hand, he knew the money value of his name in 
 the literary market, and was too shrewd to overlook the fact 
 that that was the secret of the proprietor's application to him. 
 Moreover, he could not fail to know that his literary position 
 would enable him to do great good to the magazine, in the way 
 of attracting or procuring contributors whom no mere pecu- 
 niary considerations could attach to such a work. 
 
 Finally, what was he to do? In this land of gold-worship- 
 ers, where money is " the be-all and the end-all," not only of 
 a man's social position, but of his personal estimation, Camp- 
 bell found himself with an extremely small fixed income, and
 
 THE " NE W MO NTH L F MA GAZINE." 255 
 
 wholly incapable of materially adding to it by any legitimate 
 literary employment to which his habits would permit him to 
 apply himself. He made no scruple, therefore, of accepting 
 the liberal offer that was made to him by the proprietor (of, I 
 believe, 6oo/. a year) for editorship and his own contributions, 
 leaving entirely to Campbell himself the number and amount 
 of the latter. 
 
 Whether or not Campbell, at the moment of his accepting 
 the editorship of the " New Monthly Magazine," had formed 
 any specific views or notions as to the duties that were ex- 
 pected or required of him, or that he was capable of render- 
 ing, is difficult to conjecture. Equally problematical is it 
 whether the proprietor, in making the proposition, had looked 
 at Campbell in any other light than as the possessor of at once 
 the most extensive and the most unquestioned reputation of 
 any literary man of the day. Certain it is, however, that the 
 first two months of the experiment demonstrated to both par- 
 ties the entire unfitness of the poet for the anything but poet- 
 ical office he had undertaken. Luckily, the same brief period 
 had also satisfied both parties, by the unequaled success of 
 the experiment in a business point of view, that the bargain 
 was, in that respect, a fair one ; and as the proprietor had 
 taken the precaution of providing, in case of accidents, an 
 active and industrious -working editor (in the person of Mr. 
 Cyrus Redding), the arrangement continued for ten years, to 
 the mutual satisfaction and discontent of both parties ; the 
 public, in the mean time, caring nothing about the matter, 
 beyond the obtaining (as they unquestionably did) a better 
 magazine for their money than had ever before been pro- 
 duced. 
 
 I will here give two or three illustrative anecdotes of the 
 Campbell Editorship of the New Monthly, arising out of 
 my own anonymous connection with the magazine before I 
 became personally acquainted with Campbell. Among my 
 first proffered contributions were the two first numbers of a 
 series of papers, having for their object to illustrate the birth, 
 growth, and gradual development of the passion of Love, by
 
 THOM4S CAMPBELL. 
 
 means of brief passages in the (supposed) life of the (sup- 
 posed) writer ; and, in order to go to the root of the matter, 
 and to show that, at one period of our lives at all events, the 
 passion is a purely intellectual one, uninfluenced by feelings 
 of sex, the first story related to two school-boys of nine or ten 
 years of age, one of whom " wasted the sweetness " of his 
 nascent affection on " the desert air " of the other's utter in- 
 difference and disdain. Quite anticipating the possibility of 
 .this reminiscence of my school-days being thought too " inno- 
 cent," not to say too puerile, for a grave magazine but little 
 thinking of the objection that woutdbe made to it I accom- 
 panied it by the second number of the series, which was a 
 love story quite selon les regies, so far as regarded the relations 
 of sex, however unorthodox in other respects. 
 
 Here is the reply I received to my communication. The 
 style is quite regal in point of form, and, like all the others 
 that I received on similar occasions, it is in the hand-writing 
 of Campbell himself : 
 
 " To the writer of the articles entitled ' ,' the Editor of 
 
 the ' New Monthly Magazine's ' compliments. The Editor 
 admires the writer's talents, and attaches not the slightest mis- 
 conception to the nature of the feelings described in the first 
 number ; but he thinks that many persons, from ignorance, or 
 prejudice, or ill-nature, may object to the description of the at- 
 tachment in the first number, and he declines accepting it. 
 He will, nevertheless, not only be happy but grateful for the 
 writer's permission to publish the second number, and requests 
 to be favored with his further communications." 
 
 Now it is impossible to believe, in the face of this decision, 
 that the writer, who was excessively clear-sighted when he 
 did take the trouble to look into anything, could have read the 
 paper in question which was simply what I have described 
 it above. The probabilities are, that he never even saw it 
 that, being glanced at by the worthy proprietor of the maga- 
 zine (through whose hands all communications for the editor 
 passed), and found to relate throughout to two school-boys, it 
 was thought too simple food for the intellectual appetites of
 
 THE " NE W MONTHL Y MA GAZINE." 257 
 
 grown-up readers, and was therefore, to prevent accidents, in- 
 tercepted on its way : a species of sifting which I believe 
 everything underwent before it reached the ordeal from which 
 there was no appeal. If I am right in this conjecture, the 
 note I have given was probably the result of a suggestion from 
 the same quarter, born of some vague feeling, generated by 
 that rapid bird's-eye glance which gathers its impressions of a 
 book from a single chapter, and a magazine article from a 
 single page, and is seldom very far wrong though now and 
 then, of course, ridiculously so. 
 
 About the same time with the above, I commenced another 
 series of papers in the magazine, entitled " Letters from Eng- 
 land." They related to " everything in the world " connected 
 with English life, literature, art, etc., and in order to give a 
 little adventitious novelty and lightness to topics so hackneyed, 
 the letters were written ostensibly under the character of a 
 Frenchman. But the disguise was so transparent, and so 
 loosely worn, that it was difficult to conceive nor was it de- 
 sired by the wearer that any one should be otherwise than 
 willfully deceived by it. Yet here is the editorial Introduction 
 by which the series was ushered to the attention of the readers 
 of the New Monthly. 
 
 " These letters are, we understand, the production of a dis- 
 tinguished Frenchman, whose original MS. journal has been 
 obligingly submitted to us by a friend for publication. The 
 editor admits them on account of the ability which they seem 
 to possess. 1 For this special consideration he makes, in this 
 one instance, a departure from his general rule, of not insert- 
 ing any communications bearing the stamp of national preju- 
 dice. But he protests against being responsible for a single 
 sentiment they contain." 
 
 Now this, like the note preceding it, may safely, I think, be 
 attributed to a suggestion emanating from the imperium in 
 imperio which the proprietor of the magazine himself was wise 
 enough to maintain in his own literary domain. As these let- 
 
 1 Here the secret of non-perusal peeps out. "Seem to possess!" So that they 
 may or they may not possess it, for anything he knows about them. 
 17
 
 258 THOMAS CAMPBELL. 
 
 ters were intended, after their appearance in the magazine, to 
 be reprinted as a substantive work, 1 and it was their publisher's 
 policy that they should (in the first instance, at least), be con- 
 sidered by the public as the bond fide productions of a for- 
 eigner, he probably took the preliminary precaution of " in- 
 sinuating the plot into the boxes," through the plastic medium 
 of the responsible editor of the New Monthly, who was the 
 most tractable person in the world, when his own personal 
 feelings did not interfere to make him exactly the reverse. Be 
 this as it may, I must deny having had anything to do with 
 this note, beyond the fact of the letters being, as I have said, 
 ostensibly written under the character of a foreigner. 
 
 The third anecdote I shall cite illustrative of Campbell's ed- 
 itorship of the New Monthly relates to a series of papers en- 
 titled " The Months," 2 which had for their object to note, for 
 present recognition and future recollection, the various facts 
 and incidents of country and of town life which mark the pas- 
 sage of each month respectively. I had accordingly noted, in 
 connection with the country life of April, the return of the shy 
 and solitary cuckoo so at least I had called it, and had par- 
 ticularly referred to its extreme rarity as an object of actual 
 sight a characteristic which Wordsworth has so beautifully 
 marked when calling it " a wandering voice" But this Nat- 
 ural History did not accord with the supposed rural experience 
 of the editor, who appended to the passage a note signify- 
 ing that his contributor was a little at fault on this point, as 
 he (the editor) had frequently " seen whole fields blue with 
 cuckoos " the cuckoo being of a dusky brown color, and be- 
 ing never by any chance seen two together, except when cal- 
 low in the nest ! 
 
 I need scarcely add that these little blunders and oversights 
 are noted merely as among the minor " Curiosities " of our 
 periodical literature, and are by no means intended to call in 
 
 1 They were afterwards published by Mr. Colburn, in two volumes, under the 
 title of Letters on England. 
 
 * Afterwards republished as a volume by Mesi rs. Whittaker, under the title of 
 Mirror of the Months.
 
 HAZLITT AND NORTHCOTE. 259 
 
 question or disparage the general merits of a joint management 
 that, taken altogether, raised the " New Monthly Magazine " 
 to a pitch, not merely of popularity, but of actual desert, which 
 had never before been attained by any work of a similar nature. 
 In fact, the accession of Campbell's name to the New Monthly 
 may be fairly cited as marking an era in our magazine litera- 
 ture. 
 
 Since the foregoing Recollections were written, I have 
 looked.over Mr. Cyrus Redding's Reminiscences, in the " New 
 Monthly Magazine," with the view of either confirming or cor- 
 recting my own impressions derived from an unbroken con- 
 nection with the magazine during the whole of Mr. Campbell's 
 (nominal) editorship. The unscrupulous disclosures of Mr. 
 Redding on this subject in his entertaining papers, more than 
 confirm all that I have said on it. In one place he speaks of 
 the editorship as " consisting in a negative, not a positive, 
 realization of the duty ; " and he adds as follows : " I do 
 not believe the poet ever read through a single number of the 
 magazine during the whole ten years of his editorship." 
 
 HAZLITT AND NORTHCOTE. 
 
 Though Campbell's nominal editorship of the " New Monthly 
 Magazine " was pretty nearly a sinecure in respect of the actual 
 work it exacted from him, it was on that very account the 
 source of frequent and serious annoyance to him, from the 
 scrapes it thus got him into with his personal friends and ac- 
 quaintances, arising out of that want of due watchfulness and 
 care as to the personal bearing of the articles admitted into it, 
 which it was impossible for anybody but Campbell himself to 
 exercise, because none else could know the precise points to 
 which the necessary attention in this respect was required to 
 be directed. One of these scrapes, the particulars of which I 
 was made acquainted with at the time by the two persons 
 chiefly interested in it, was so characteristic, in all its features, 
 of all the parties concerned, that I will relate it here. It refers 
 to a series of papers which the late William Hazlitt was writ-
 
 260 THOMAS CAMPBELL. 
 
 ing at the time in the New Monthly, entitled " Boswell Redi- 
 vivus," and which professed to report his (Hazlitt's) conversa- 
 tions with Northcote the painter. 
 
 As I was more than once present at the conversations so 
 professed to be reported, and as Hazlitt has himself disclosed 
 the fact that these reports are by no means to be taken aupied 
 de la lettre as regards the precise portions to be attributed to 
 the speakers respectively, there can be no impropriety in stat- 
 ing my belief that, generally speaking, very little dependence 
 is to be placed on them in this particular, when they relate to 
 opinions and sentiments, and especially when they relate to 
 personal feelings about living individuals with whom Hazlitt 
 was acquainted ; and that Hazlitt often puts his own feelings 
 and opinions into the mouth of Northcote, and -vice -versd. 
 Sometimes this was done consciously and purposely, some- 
 times not ; often merely to give spirit and verisimilitude to the 
 dialogue ; not seldom to vent a little malice prepense under a 
 guise that would give it double pungency and force. I do not 
 believe this was ever done with a view to escape the odium 
 and reprisals which a system of literary personality is sure to 
 engender ; for Hazlitt never put the slightest curb upon his 
 inclinations in this respect. But in regard to the facts and 
 anecdotes related in these conversations, I believe Hazlitt to 
 have been scrupulously exact in his reports. 
 
 Northcote, on his part, had an irrepressible propensity to 
 speak unpalatable truths of his acquaintances and friends, 
 whether dead or alive. In fact, it was his forte to say bitter 
 and cutting things of every one friend, foe, or stranger 
 who came under his notice in the course of conversation ; and 
 he knew perfectly well that Hazlitt listened to his talk with 
 the view of giving portions of it to the public. He knew also 
 that Hazlitt was wholly without scruple as to what he might 
 put forth, provided it was either characteristic of the speaker, 
 or true of the person spoken of, and that the parts most per- 
 sonally offensive would be those most acceptable to the read- 
 ing public. 
 
 All this Northcote knew ; and yet he gave Hazlitt full per-
 
 HAZLITT AND NORTHCOTE. 26 1 
 
 mission to make any use he pleased of what might have passed 
 between them in these desultory conversations of course, 
 with this ostensible restriction, that he (Hazlitt) must take 
 care to omit anything that might get the speaker into disgrace 
 with his personal friends ; though Northcote must have also 
 known that this was virtually no effectual restriction at all 
 or, if it would have been so to most men, it was none to Haz- 
 litt in a case of this nature. The truth is, that Northcote 
 chuckled over the wounds he thus inflicted by the hand of 
 another ; and when the ill consequences (as in the instance 
 I am about to relate) threatened to come home to himself, 
 he never scrupled to offer up his instrument as a sacrifice, if 
 that would serve, and then, if necessary, reconcile the matter 
 to him in the best manner he could, as he had done to the 
 other suffering parties. 
 
 It has seemed necessary to premise thus much in explana- 
 tion of what follows. 
 
 In one of the chapters of " Boswell Redivivus " there oc- 
 cur some passages relating to the celebrated dissenting clergy- 
 man, Dr. Mudge, one of the great ornaments of Sir Joshua 
 Reynolds's coterie, which show him in a light anything but 
 favorable. They give him ample credit for his great talents 
 and learning, but place his sincerity and consistency as a 
 teacher of religion in a very questionable point of view, and 
 relate personal anecdotes of him that are anything but credit- 
 able. Now that Hazlitt, in setting down these passages, did 
 anything but repeat what Northcote had told him, no one will 
 doubt who was acquainted with his excellent memory and his 
 mental habits. As little can it be disputed that the facts, if 
 such they be (of which I am wholly uninformed), related of 
 Dr. Mudge's private life and habits, were highly worthy of 
 being placed on record, as matters of literary history in one 
 of its most interesting features that of the private and per- 
 sonal character of celebrated literary men. But the crime of 
 Hazlitt, in Northcote's eyes, was not to have known, as if by 
 instinct, what Hazlitt, so far from being bound to know, could 
 not possibly have been acquainted with, except through the
 
 262 THOMAS CAMPBELL. 
 
 direct information of Northcote himself namely, that he 
 (Northcote) had particular and personal reasons for desiring 
 not to be suspected of being the expositor of these obnoxious 
 truths, which, but for him, might have remained unknown or 
 forgotten. 
 
 The effect of this exposure, painful as it was, partook of 
 the ludicrous, to those who could not put much faith in the 
 sincerity of the feelings exhibited by Northcote on the oc- 
 casion. I remember calling on him a few days after the ap- 
 pearance of the paper in question No. VI. of the series. 
 He knew that I was in the habit of seeing Hazlitt almost 
 daily ; and the moment I entered the room (he was not in his 
 usual painting room, but had retreated into the little inner 
 room adjoining it, as if in dread of the personal consequences 
 of what had happened) I perceived that something serious was 
 the matter. 
 
 " I am very ill, indeed," said he, in reply to my inquiry as 
 to his health. " I did not think I should have lived. That 
 monster has nearly killed me." 
 
 I inquired what he meant. 
 
 " Why, that diabolical Hazlitt. Have you seen what lies 
 he has been telling about me in his cursed Boswell Redi- 
 vivus ? I have been nearly dead ever since the paper ap- 
 peared. Why, the man is a demon. Nothing human was 
 ever so wicked. Do you see the dreadful hobble he has got 
 me into with the Mudges ? Not that I said what he has put 
 down about Mudge. But even if I had who could have 
 supposed that any one in a human form would have come here 
 to worm himself into my confidence, and get me to talk as if 
 I had been thinking aloud, and then go and publish it all to 
 the world ! Why, they will think we go snacks in the paltry 
 profits of his treachery. It will kill me. What am I to do 
 about it ? I would give a hundred pounds to have the paper 
 canceled. But that would do no good now. It has gone all 
 over the world. I have never had a moment's rest since it 
 appeared. I sent to Mr. Colbuni to come over to me about 
 it ; but he took no notice of my message, so I went over to
 
 HAZLITT AND NORTHCOTE. 263 
 
 him. But they would n't let me see him ; and all I could get 
 out of his people was, that they would tell him what I said. 
 I told them to tell him that it would be the death of me. But 
 Campbell has been a little more civil about it. I wrote him a 
 letter such a letter ! I '11 show it you. And he has replied 
 very handsomely, and seems to be touched by my situation. 
 At any rate," added he, bitterly, " I have put a spoke into the 
 wheel of that diabolical wretch Hazlitt." 
 
 And then he showed me the letter he had written to Camp- 
 bell, and Campbell's reply. I think I never read anything 
 more striking in its way than his letter to Campbell. Though 
 brief, it was a consummate composition pathetic even to the 
 excitement of tears painting the dreadful state of his mind 
 under the blow which the (alleged) treachery of Hazlitt had 
 given to it, and treating the thing as a deliberate attempt to 
 " bring his gray hairs in sorrow to the grave." I particularly 
 seem to remember that these very words were used in it. The 
 whole tendency of the letter was to create an inference in 
 Campbell's mind that the thing had come upon the writer like 
 a thunder-clap, and that even in regard to those parts of the 
 Conversations which were truly reported (which he denied to 
 be the case in the matter in question), he was the most be- 
 trayed and ill-used person in the world. And all this in the 
 face of the fact that the paper of which he complained was 
 the sixth of a series that had appeared in the (then) most 
 popular literary periodical of the day that they had all ap- 
 peared there with his full knowledge and consent that he 
 had, ever since the commencement of them, been almost daily 
 complimented on the conspicuous figure he was cutting in his 
 new character of the best converser of the day and that a 
 considerable portion of what had appeared of the " Boswell 
 Redivivus " up to that time had consisted (on Northcote's 
 part, at least) of depreciating estimates of many of the most 
 conspicuous living writers, artists, etc. 
 
 It is, of course, with reference to these facts that 1 have 
 spoken of Northcote's feelings as "ludicrous," on this un- 
 looked-for exposure of truths of which he did not wish to be
 
 264 THOMAS CAMPBELL. 
 
 known as the author : for the astonishing force and pungency 
 of unpalatable truths that he put forth about every living indi- 
 vidual of whom he spoke (sometimes in their presence, and 
 even to themselves), 1 and the double edge and effect that 
 were given to his words by the exquisitely simple and na'ive 
 manner in which he uttered them as if an inspired infant 
 were speaking was the characteristic of his talk. And he 
 knew all this better than anybody could tell him, and evidently 
 prided himself upon it. 
 
 Campbell's reply to Northcote was, I remember, in a tone 
 precisely correspondent with the letter which called for it. 
 He declared his unmitigated horror at the outrage that had 
 been committed on Northcote's feelings ; absolved himself 
 from all participation in it by naively stating that he had not 
 seen a line of the paper till its publication, having been ab- 
 sent from town on other business ; and declared that " the 
 diabolical Hazlitt should never write another line in the mag- 
 azine during his management of it." These, I think, were his 
 very words. 
 
 " And so," said Northcote, when I had read Campbell's re- 
 ply " and so I am to be assassinated, a worthy family is to 
 be outraged in their dearest feelings, and a whole neighbor- 
 hood thrown into consternation, because he (Campbell) chooses 
 to neglect his duties, or depute somebody else to do them who 
 is incompetent to the task ! " 
 
 Nothing could be more characteristic than this effusion, 
 apropos to a letter which had every appearance of being writ- 
 ten under feelings of sincere and poignant regret at the occa- 
 sion to which it referred. But all Northcote chose to see in 
 it was the fact that somebody else was in fault as well as the 
 original culprit : for as to he himself having had any hand in 
 the mischief (at least in an objectionable point of view) 
 this seemed never to enter his thoughts. He sowed the seeds 
 
 1 In talking to Hazlitt once about the attacks on The Cockney School, in Black- 
 wood's (which, by the bye, he greatly approved), he said to him, " I think, Mister 
 Hazlitt, you yourself are the most perfect specimen of the Cockney School that I 
 ever met with:" and then he went on to give him "satisfying reasons" for thin 
 opinion !
 
 INCAPACITY FOR FRIENDSHIP. 26$ 
 
 of the most bitter personal truths in the most fertile soil for 
 their growth and propagation namely, the current "table- 
 talk" of the hour and then was lost in wonder and dismay 
 at finding some of them bear the unexpected fruit of a per- 
 sonal inconvenience to himself. 
 
 The sequel of the history of these Conversations includes 
 the most characteristic point of all. Not very long after the 
 incident I have referred to above, the Conversations were re- 
 published in a separate form, with large and valuable additions 
 from the same source, and obtained through the same means 
 and agent ; and this with the knowledge and tacit consent of 
 Northcote himself, and with all their obnoxious truths unex- 
 punged, excepting those in which Northcote's own personal 
 connections were concerned ; and the " diabolical Hazlitt '' 
 continued to write as usual in the New Monthly, under Camp- 
 bell's (ostensible) editorship ! 
 
 INCAPACITY FOR FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 At the time of my first personal acquaintance with Camp- 
 bell, he resided in Middle Scotland Yard, and my introduction 
 to him, as before referred to, speedily led to an invitation to 
 one of those pleasantly assorted little dinner-parties half 
 literary, half social followed by a more miscellaneous as- 
 semblage in the evening, in which, at one time, he liked to in- 
 dulge. But under his own roof, Campbell altogether repudi- 
 ated that unrestrained "good fellow "-ship which he did not 
 scruple to encourage and to act elsewhere. 
 
 Here is the first note I received from him in his private 
 capacity, and almost the only one, except those of a similar 
 kind ; for our acquaintance (as I have said) never extended to 
 anything like that intimacy which begets an epistolary corre- 
 spondence. 
 
 " i MIDDLE SCOTLAND YARD, WHITEHALL 
 "26 May, 1830. 
 
 " MY DEAR SIR, If you and Mrs. Patmore will favor me 
 with your company to dinner, on Tuesday next, the first of 
 June, you will meet, I trust, the Bard of Memory, and the
 
 266 THOMAS CAMPBELL. 
 
 present editor of the ' Edinburgh Review,' together with our 
 friend . An American professor and his lady will com- 
 plete the proposed symposium 
 
 " Of yours, very truly, 
 
 "T. CAMPBELL." 
 
 Campbell was an excellent host for a small and well-assorted 
 literary dinner-party. He combined all the qualities proper 
 to that difficult office, without a single counteracting one ; the 
 highest intellectual position and pretensions, without the 
 smallest disposition to make them apparent much less to 
 placard them ; a ready wit and a fine turn for social humor, 
 without the slightest touch of that vulgar waggery which so 
 often accompanies and neutralizes these, and is the bane of all 
 the intellectual society into which it is allowed to intrude ; a 
 graceful, easy, and well-bred manner and bearing, without any 
 vestige of stiffness on the one hand, or boisterousness on the 
 other ; finally, a perpetual consciousness of his position and 
 duties as master of the house, yet an entire apparent forget- 
 fulness of these in the pleasure he took in the presence of his 
 friends. 
 
 There was but one little drawback from Campbell's perfec- 
 tion as a host, and that did not show itself till that period of 
 the evening when such drawbacks are tolerated, or, at least, 
 used to be twenty years ago, when such toleration was some- 
 times needed. On returning from the after dinner table to the 
 drawing-room, Campbell was apt to take his place beside the 
 prettiest woman in the room, and thenceforth to be non est in- 
 ventus for the rest of the evening and the company. 
 
 My personal intercourse with Campbell did not (as I have 
 said) extend beyond that of a pleasant acquaintanceship ; nor 
 do I believe that the social intercourse enjoyed with him by 
 any one of his (so-called) friends did or could amount to much 
 more ; for, with all his amiable and attractive qualities, he was 
 evidently a man so entirely self-centred, so totally free from 
 personal and individual sympathies, that a friendship with him, 
 in anything more than the conversational sense of the term, 
 was out of the question.
 
 INCAPACITY FOR FRIENDSHIP. 267 
 
 Campbell was, in this respect, the ideal of a poet sympa- 
 thizing with, and, as it were, capable of reproducing by and to 
 his imagination effigies and incarnations of, all our human nat- 
 ure in all its phases of good or evil, of beauty and deformity ; 
 and (like a god) " seeing that all was good." But, as a set-off 
 against this godlike gift, he was utterly unable to transfer or 
 transfuse his affections, even for a single moment, to any of 
 the actual types of our actual humanity that he found about 
 him in the real world of flesh and blood. 
 
 It will, I think, be found to hold universally, that they who 
 have sympathized with mankind intensely and profoundly be- 
 fore they could possibly have had valid human grounds for 
 doing so, either from self-knowledge or from experience in 
 other words, that they who have proved themselves to be poets 
 before they were men in anything but intuition and instinct 
 can never be men at all, in the human sense of the phrase ; 
 that, in proportion as the poetical temperament is present and 
 becomes developed, the possessor of it must submit to the 
 sad distinction of standing apart and aloof from the rest of 
 mankind, unloving and unloved ; and that when the tempera- 
 ment in question is great in amount, and greatly developed at 
 a very early age (as in the cases of Campbell, Keats, Chatter- 
 ton, etc.), the owner of it must be content to accept his rich 
 dower as a substitute for all things else that appertain to man 
 as a member of human society. In proportion as the poet ap- 
 proaches the ideal of that condition, he typifies man in the ab- 
 stract ; and he who possesses all things in common with all 
 men, cannot feel anything in common with any individual man. 
 Judging from what he did, or created, while among us, as com- 
 pared with the " appliances and means " afforded him by what 
 is called fact and experience, Chatterton was perhaps the 
 greatest born poet that ever lived ; and Chatterton had nothing 
 in common with mankind, but his marvelous intellect and his 
 misery. 
 
 Of the only other truly great poets that the world has seen 
 Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and Goethe nothing is on 
 record that would seem distinctly to impugn the opinion I
 
 268 THOMAS CAMPBELL. 
 
 have ventured to advance ; and if applied to the personal char- 
 acters of the few real poets of our own day, whether living or 
 dead, it will meet, I think, with anything but contradiction. 
 At all events, in the case of Campbell, it is not to be gainsaid. 
 And Campbell was greatly more of a poet in faculty than he 
 was in fact and performance. Few men have approached 
 nearer to a poet in the former respect than he did ; and it was 
 only his almost morbid delicacy of taste, of tact, and of ear, 
 and his extreme fastidiousness, which prevented him from 
 turning his powers to much greater practical results than he 
 did. No man ever enjoyed so high and wide a poetical repu- 
 tation upon so slender an amount of actual performance. And 
 yet no man ever deserved his reputation more truly than 
 Campbell did. Had it not been so, he would have done more ; 
 and, perhaps, have done better. But he had none of that vul- 
 gar hungering and hankering after fame which, write what 
 they will to the contrary, no real poet ever felt as anything 
 more than a momentary aspiration. Campbell knew and felt 
 that he was a poet ; and as the world in some sort assented to 
 his own faith on this point, he was content " to know no 
 more." 
 
 Let it be observed, too, that Campbell never for an instant 
 prostituted his high and holy calling to the necessities of his 
 worldly condition. The literary drudgery to which he sub- 
 mitted during the whole of his life included no line of verse. 
 It is probably true that, from the time when his poetical taste 
 and judgment became matured, nine tenths even of the little 
 poetry he did write consisted of 
 
 "Lines that dying he would wish to blot" 
 
 In fact, from the period when he regarded his critical taste as 
 having reached maturity, he scarcely wrote a line of poetry at 
 all. Though this probably arose partly from that constitu- 
 tional indolence, and Epicurean love of ease, which were lead- 
 ing features of his temperament. But I do not believe that 
 any personal or worldly considerations would have induced 
 Campbell to tamper with the gift which stood him in stead of
 
 CAMPBELL AND LORD AND LADY BYRON. 269 
 
 all mundane ones, and made them all look poor and mean by 
 comparison. 
 
 Returning to the personal results of the poetical tempera- 
 ment in. Campbell, and their effects as seen in his intercourse 
 with the world, I may remark, that if they prevented him from 
 becoming the friend of any man, they made him the acquaint- 
 ance and boon companion for the time being of all, from 
 the poet on his prophetic tripos and the prince on his throne, 
 to the beggar in his rags and the infant in its native simplicity. 
 Destitute himself of actual living sympathy with either, he 
 nevertheless, or perhaps on that very account, attracted the 
 sympathies of each and all, by reflecting the true image of 
 themselves in the clear cold mirror of his impassible spirit. 
 
 The result of this was, that when Campbell was in good 
 health and spirits, or was made so for the nonce by those arti- 
 ficial means which during the latter part of his life were neces- 
 sary to his personal comfort, he was the most popular person 
 in the world, whatever class of society he frequented ; and 
 though I cannot believe that anybody ever loved him to the 
 amount even of ordinary friendship, everybody liked him, no- 
 body feared him, and half those with whom he came into ac- 
 cidental contact fancied him to be an ordinary person like 
 themselves, and 
 
 " Wondered with a foolish face of praise " 
 
 at the vast reputation of one so little different from the Thom- 
 sons and Johnsons of their ordinary acquaintance. 
 
 CAMPBELL AND LORD AND LADY BYRON. 
 
 On one of the occasions when I met Campbell at the house 
 of the gentleman before alluded to, we had a long and most 
 earnest conversation on a topic which at that time occupied 
 universal attention, no less in general than in literary society 
 the quarrel between Lord Byron and his wife ; and I was 
 not a little surprised that Campbell had taken up the cause of 
 Lady Byron in the spirit, not of an impartial judge, or even 
 of one who fancied or pretended that he was such, but of a
 
 2/O THOMAS CAMPBELL. 
 
 paid and unscrupulous advocate ; the fee, in this case, being 
 the personal compliment on the part of the lady, of having 
 sent for him, and confided to him her version of the true 
 nature of her grievances. This was of course done under 
 the seal of inviolable secrecy ; so that, while it was absolutely 
 impossible, from what Campbell said, to judge for oneself as 
 to the validity of the alleged enormities of his " friend " 
 Byron, his tone and words in referring to them, and the solemn 
 earnestness with which he pronounced his own opinion as to 
 the justice of Lady Byron's treatment of her husband, and at 
 the same time the alleged impossibility of his giving any rea- 
 sons for the faith that was in him on the matter in question 
 were calculated to produce, and in my case did produce, an 
 impression which nothing but facts, testified in plain words by 
 unbiased witnesses, ought to produce ; and (I cannot help 
 thinking) the production of such an impression ought not to 
 have been attempted, even by a prosecutor, much less by an 
 advocate, in the absence of the power or the will to confirm 
 it by unquestionable facts. 
 
 It was impossible to escape the frightful inference which 
 Campbell's words on this occasion were calculated to produce ; 
 while, at the same time, it was impossible to feel safe in ad- 
 mitting that inference, or even to feel absolutely certain that it 
 was the one he intended. 
 
 I can compare the effect which Campbell produced upon me 
 on this occasion only to that which was sought to be produced 
 on the jury in a celebrated criminal trial a few years ago, when 
 (as it has since been universally admitted) the advocate over- 
 stepped even the extremest limits of his professional duty, 
 by attempting to screen his client at the risk of an innocent 
 person's life ; and which attempt, while it did but heighten 
 public indignation against the guilty party, it would scarcely 
 be too much to say, actually destroyed the innocent life 
 against which it was so heedlessly and unjustifiably directed. 
 
 Whether the dark and fearful insinuations so studiously 
 propagated by Campbell on the occasion I have alluded to 
 above, and doubtless, therefore, on every other which offered
 
 PERSONAL CHARACTER. 2/1 
 
 itself, and supported by similar ones from other quarters, were 
 not the " apple-pips " that killed poor Byron before his time, 
 may be fairly made the subject of question when (if ever) the 
 point becomes one capable of being freely and fearlessly dis- 
 cussed. 
 
 PERSONAL CHARACTER. 
 
 The personal character of Campbell exhibited that true test 
 and constant accompaniment of a high degree of the poetical 
 temperament when it stops short of the highest, the power 
 to dispense with the world and society, without the power or 
 the desire to shun or abandon them. His mind was self- 
 centred and self-dependent, yet social, and fond of the excite- 
 ment of external thoughts and things. The objective and the 
 subjective contended too strongly and too constantly within 
 him to admit of his being a poet of the first order, in whom, 
 instead of contending, they balance and strengthen each 
 other. But that very contention it was which placed him in 
 the highest rank of the second order ; it would even have 
 given him the capacity of attaining the first place in that rank 
 if he had also possessed the power of sustaining his volition 
 at the required pitch. But in this point of his personal char- 
 acter and temperament lay Campbell's great deficiency as a 
 poet. He had never sufficient control over himself, never 
 sufficient command of his intellectual condition and move- 
 ments, to be sure he might not be tempted, at a moment's 
 warning, to abandon the wide and populous solitude of his 
 little study at Sydenham, or the sweet society of his own 
 " Gertrude of Wyoming," while she was growing there in all 
 her ineffable beauty, 1 for the boisterous good-fellowship and 
 and noisy revelry of his friend Tom Hill's after dinner table, 
 with its anomalous olla-podrida of " larking " stockbrokers, 
 laughing punsters, roaming farce-writers, and riotous prac- 
 tical jokers. These were occasionally embellished and kept 
 in check, it is true, by the refined wit and elegant scholarship 
 of a Moore and a Rogers, the rich and racy humor of a 
 Dubois, the easy and gentlemanly pleasantry of a Horace 
 
 1 His Gertrude of Wyoming was entirely written at Sydenham.
 
 2/2 THOMAS CAMPBELL. 
 
 Smith, the mild and bland good-nature and good-fellowship 
 of a Perry, etc. Still, even when any of these, or such as 
 these, were present, there must have been an unwholesome 
 jumble of contradictions, which, like the mixing of wines, de- 
 feated the appropriate effect of each, even when it did not 
 turn all to mischief. 1 
 
 There is no doubt that Campbell liked these anomalous 
 orgies, though he could not but hate or despise many of their 
 component parts. It is true, also, that the alternative of soli- 
 tude was indispensable to his love of society ; while the con- 
 verse of the proposition would be anything but true. On the 
 contrary, the more he had courted and cultivated solitude, the 
 more warmly she would have responded to his love till at 
 length he might have fairly wedded her, and the world would 
 have had cause to bless the union, for the offspring it would 
 have yielded. Whereas in weakly alternating between solitude 
 and society, he failed to serve either truly ; though, during the 
 period of his health and vigor, he may be truly said to have 
 loved both, and it would have been very difficult for himself 
 to have determined which he loved best. The rest of the 
 world, however those of them, at least, who took sufficient 
 interest in him to " look into his deeds with thinking eyes " 
 could have had no difficulty on this point. To them it must 
 have been obvious that there was about Campbell, when in 
 any society but that of a quiet and not ill-assorted tete-a-tete, 
 or a pleasant little dinner-party at his own house, an uneasy 
 and ill-disguised restlessness and want of repose, and an oc- 
 casional absence, which plainly told that the home of his spirit 
 .was elsewhere. 
 
 To sum up this speculation in a word (for I am afraid the 
 reader will not accept it as anything more decisive, especially 
 as coming from a mere acquaintance) Tom Campbell was 
 a very good fellow, and a very pleasant one withal : but he 
 
 1 I am speaking here from conjecture merely, as regards everything but the names 
 of the guests ; for though I afterwards became intimately acquainted with Camp- 
 bell's worthy neighbor and host of Sydenham, these famous meetings were at an 
 end long before my time.
 
 PERSONAL CHARACTER. 2/3 
 
 prevented Thomas Campbell from being a great poet, though 
 not from doing great things in poetry. 
 
 There were, however, other small features in Campbell's in- 
 tellectual character, each of which would alone have prevented 
 him from attaining poetical greatness. His intense self-con- 
 sciousness (which the world ridiculously translated into per- 
 sonal vanity) would alone have been sufficient for this ; for it 
 rendered him incapable of wholly escaping from himself, while 
 it prevented him from fairly appreciating other states and 
 stages of being. 
 
 Another of these qualities was his extreme, and even finical, 
 fastidiousness. For though this quality of mind did not pre- 
 vent him from originating high thoughts, and great and noble 
 imaginations, it wholly incapacitated him from reflecting them 
 in their height and greatness, by causing him to detect, with a 
 morbid keenness and microscopic power of vision, those in- 
 evitable defects of execution which a perfectly natural and 
 healthy intellectual vision would not have discovered. For 
 what, after all, can the best written poetry be but a sort of 
 cast from the sculptured images of the poet's mind ? And 
 what are the best casts of the finest sculpture when placed be- 
 side the originals themselves ? Nevertheless, for those who 
 have never seen, and never can see, the originals (and in that 
 condition are all ordinary mortals, as regards the original types 
 of the poet's creations) good casts are of little less value and 
 virtue than the original marbles themselves. But Campbell, 
 in fastidiously scraping away from his casts all the little in- 
 equalities and defects left or made by the necessary manipu- 
 lation of the working, the joinings in the mould, and the air- 
 bubbles and impurities in the material of which the cast was 
 formed, destroyed at the same time much of the pure and 
 natural contour and texture of the original, and with it that 
 truth, both of detail and of general effect, the presence of 
 which forms so large an element in our admiration of works of 
 high art. 
 
 As a corollary from that want of repose which marked 
 Campbell's intellectual character, there was a total absence in 
 18
 
 274 THOMAS CAMPBELL. 
 
 him of that passion for the beauties of external nature, and 
 that consequent love of a country life, which have marked al- 
 most all great poets. His mind was of the true metropolitan 
 order, and his " retreat " at Sydenham was a retreat in the 
 military sense of the phrase a movement called for by the 
 exigences of his position in the battle of life. The solitude 
 that was necessary to the health and growth of his poetical 
 temperament he could have created for himself in great cities, 
 as well as he could have found it in a desert ; and he did so 
 create it there till he " found himself famous ; " but when that 
 happened, the defects of his idiosyncrasy came out. He then 
 ceased to feel any excitement apart from populous assemblies 
 of men and women acknowledged no movement but in the 
 march of human events from day to day saw no beauty but 
 in the living human face heard no music but in the speaking 
 human voice in short, knew no salvation out of the pale of 
 great cities. In fact, when once Campbell was fairly recog- 
 nized as the greatest of living English poets, he was never 
 so happy as when he was occupied in matters which a great 
 poet would have regarded as toys or troubles organizing a 
 club, or founding a university, or standing forth as the sav- 
 iour of an effete people that could not save itself. 
 
 It is true (as I have said) that Campbell sought his poetical 
 inspiration in the solitude of his own thoughts and contempla- 
 tions, and found it there. But he sought it as a duty and a 
 task, though at the same time as a relief ; and he tound it in 
 infinitely less abundance and purity than he would have done 
 had his habitual course of life been more consonate with the 
 requirements of that poetical temperament which he un- 
 doubtedly possessed in a very high degree and a very pure 
 form, and not a few of the results of which attain a pitch of 
 perfection that has never been surpassed. 
 
 While thus glancing at that feature of Campbell's intellect- 
 ual character which was ill-naturedly translated into " personal 
 vanity," I must not omit to state that it was confined exclu- 
 sively to his intercourse with women, and also, I believe, to 
 the latter years of his life, after the death of his wile. But it
 
 PERSONAL CHARACTER. 2~$ 
 
 grew upon him as he grew in years, and at length became, or 
 was deemed so by those who were his friends for their own 
 sakes, the besetting weakness of his life, and occasionally led 
 him into positions somewhat undignified, it is true, for his real 
 friends and admirers to witness, or for his enemies (if he had 
 any) to point at and placard. Still, absolutely alone as Camp- 
 bell was, as regards family relationship, during the latter years 
 of his life, it was but a spurious philosophy, and a question- 
 able friendship, that would have debarred him from exercising 
 and thus keeping alive, those semblances of sympathy which 
 alone bound him to society, and stood him in stead of that 
 poetical world in which he had heretofore dwelt, but which 
 had latterly slipt from under his feet, leaving nothing in its 
 place but that childlike love of the beautiful, the bright, and 
 the unattainable, which, as it always precedes and heralds the 
 growth of the poetical temperament, not seldom, under one 
 form or other, follows its decay, and strews flowers upon its 
 grave. During the whole period of the youth, the manhood, 
 and the mature vigor of his intellect, Campbell was essen- 
 tially and emphatically a poet ; never attempting to blend that 
 holy character and calling even with that of the sage or the 
 philosopher, still less with that of the mere worldling or the 
 mere trifler. He never was an ordinary man, pursuing the 
 common aims and ends of men by the ordinary means. He 
 stood apart from the world and its ways, but without openly 
 impugning or repudiating them ; never shunning society, yet 
 never embracing it ; never out of the world, yet never truly in 
 it ; seeking and receiving nothing at its hands (in his intellect- 
 ual character I mean), yet ever ready to help, or advance, or 
 do it good. 
 
 In all these things Campbell exhibited the true and sure 
 tests and characteristics of a born poet. How little reasonable 
 then, how little humane, to exact or expect from such a man, 
 at the close of such a career, when he felt all these posses- 
 sions slipping away from him, and leaving no mere worldly 
 equivalents in their place, that he should relapse, or rather 
 be transformed, into a mere ordinary man, with the common-
 
 276 THOMAS CAMPBELL. 
 
 place habits and associations of his time and circumstances ! 
 The natural and therefore the fitting change was that which 
 really happened to him. Ceasing to be the POET, he re- 
 lapsed once more into the little child from which the poet 
 had emerged ; " pleased with the rattle " of hollow flattery ; 
 " tickled with the straw " of real or pretended admiration ; 
 crying now and then for the moon, till hushed to sleep by the 
 fondlings of mock affection or mercenary kindness ; and then 
 dreaming, childlike (as not even the poet can till he again be- 
 comes a child), of the wonders and glories and virtues 
 
 " Of that imperial palace whence he came. " 
 
 APPEARANCE OF CAMPBELL AND ROGERS. 
 
 The following description of Campbell's personal appear- 
 ance was written during his life-time, and formed part of what 
 was intended as a series of Sketches from Real Life, taken at 
 one of the chief resorts of the literary and other celebrities of 
 the day : 
 
 "The person of this exquisite writer and delightful man is 
 small, delicately formed, and neatly put together, without 
 being little or insignificant. His face has all the harmonious 
 arrangement of features which marks his gentle and elegant 
 mind ; it is oval, perfectly regular in its details, and lighted up 
 not merely by ' eyes of youth,' but by a bland smile of intel- 
 lectual serenity that seems to pervade and penetrate all the 
 features, and impart to them all a corresponding expression, 
 such as the moonlight lends to a summer landscape : the 
 moonlight, not the sunshine ; for there is a mild and tender 
 pathos blended with that expression, which bespeaks a soul 
 that has been steeped in the depths of human woe, but has 
 turned their waters (as only poets can) into fountains of beauty 
 and of bliss. 
 
 "There are persons whom we cannot help associating to- 
 gether in our imagination, without feeling or being able to 
 fancy any sufficient reason for doing so. When we see one, 
 we think of the other, as naturally and necessarily as if they 
 stood to each other in the relation of mutual cause and effect.
 
 APPEARANCE OF CAMPBELL AND ROGERS. 
 
 The poets Campbell and Rogers hold this imaginary relation- 
 ship in many more minds, we suspect, than ours, or we should 
 not have felt it to be worth a passing word of mention, much 
 less have made it the reason, as we shall now do, of placing 
 them as companion portraits in our literary gallery. But 
 there is, in fact, a curious and beautiful assimilation between 
 the minds and persons of the bards of Hope and of Memory, a 
 similitude in dissimilitude, and one of a nature which corre- 
 sponds as curiously with the subject of their best known 
 works, HOPE and MEMORY ; the one looking eagerly onward, 
 as if life were in the future only ; the other looking anxiously 
 back, as if all but the past were a shadow or a dream. In the 
 mind of the bard of Memory we see the same natural grace 
 and elegance, the same cultivation and refinement, the same 
 delicacy of taste, and the same gentle and genial cast of sym- 
 pathy with his fellow beings and with external things, that we 
 find in the bard of Hope. And when twenty years more of 
 mingled joy and sorrow shall have passed through the heart 
 and over the head of the latter, we may look to see as little 
 difference in the personal attributes of the two, or rather, the 
 bard of Hope will have gently subsided into the bard of 
 Memory the living type of the latter having, in the common 
 course of nature, cast off the ' mortal coil ' which holds him 
 reluctantly to a state of being ' where nothing is but what is 
 not.' 
 
 "It must not be supposed from the above, that we see or 
 fancy any actual physical resemblance between the person and 
 features of Mr. Campbell and those of Mr. Rogers. If we 
 did, our visual organs would be essentially unfitted for the 
 task we have imposed upon them. All we mean to intimate is, 
 that a similar conformation of mind and temperament, modi- 
 fied by similar trains of thought, feeling, and study, have im- 
 parted to these two accomplished men, not a similarity, but a 
 correspondence, in the general expression of the symbols by 
 which their intellectual characters respectively interpret them- 
 selves to our bodily senses. Nobody will see any 'family like- 
 ness ' between them ; but every one duly qualified to catch
 
 2/8 THOMAS CAMPBELL. 
 
 1 the mind's observance in the face,' will perceive in each the 
 evidences of equally high intellectual cultivation, expended 
 upon a soil similarly composed in its chief attributes, and cal- 
 culated to produce flowers and fruits of a similar generic char- 
 acter, however differing in species or individual instances. 
 Finally, the main difference and dissimilarity they may ob- 
 serve will be, that in the one case (of the bard of Memory) the 
 passions have yielded themselves willing servitors to that mild 
 philosophy of the heart and senses which can alone subdue 
 without subverting them ; whereas in the bard of Hope they 
 still burn with a bright intensity that would consume the altar 
 on which they are kindled, were it a shrine less pure and holy 
 than a poet's heart. 
 
 " Begging indulgence for yielding to the temptation of stray- 
 ing so far from the mechanical limits of our task, we return to 
 them by pointing to the head and face of Mr. Rogers, as an 
 object of peculiar interest and curiosity to those who are stu- 
 dents in such living lore. There is something preternatural 
 in the cold, clear, marbly paleness that pervades, and, as it 
 were, penetrates his features to a depth that seems to preclude 
 all change, even that of death itself. Yet there is nothing in 
 the least degree painful or repulsive in the sight, nothing that 
 is suggestive of death, or even of decay but, on the con- 
 trary, something that seems to speak beforehand of that im- 
 mortality at which this poet has so earnestly aimed, and of 
 which he is entitled to entertain so fair a hope. It is scarcely 
 fanciful to say that the living bust of the author of ' Human 
 Life,' ' The Pleasures of Memory,' etc., can scarcely be looked 
 upon without calling to mind the bust of marble, sculptured 
 by some immortal hand, which he so well deserves to have 
 consecrated to him in the Temple of Fame." 
 
 The following characteristic letters have never appeared in 
 print, except in the ephemeral pages of a newspaper. The 
 first was sent to me in MS., by Campbell, to be used as I 
 might think fit, and I inserted it in a popular weekly journal 
 of the day.
 
 APPEARANCE OF CAMPBELL AND ROGERS. 279 
 
 "TO THOMAS MOORE, ESQ. 
 
 " MY DEAR MOORE, A thousand thanks to you for the kind 
 things which you have said of me in your ' Life of Lord Byron,' 
 but forgive me for animadverting to what his lordship says, 
 at page 463 of your first volume. It is not every day that one 
 is mentioned in such joint pages as those of Moore and Byron. 
 
 " Lord Byron there states that, one evening at Lord Hol- 
 land's, I was nettled at something, and the whole passage, if 
 believed, leaves it to be inferred that I was angry, envious, 
 and ill-mannered. Now I never envied Lord Byron, but, on 
 the contrary, rejoiced in his fame ; in the first place from a 
 sense of justice, and in the next place, because, as a poetical 
 critic, he was my beneficent friend. I never was nettled in 
 Lord Holland's house, as both Lord and Lady Holland can 
 witness ; and on the evening to which Lord Byron alludes, I 
 said, ' Carry all your incense to Lord Byron,' in the most per- 
 fect spirit of good-humor. I remember the evening most 
 distinctly one of the happiest evenings of my life, and if 
 Lord Byron imagined me for a moment displeased, it only 
 shows me that, with all his transcendant powers, he was one 
 of the most fanciful of human beings. I by no means im- 
 peach his veracity, but I see from this case that he was sub- 
 ject to strange illusions. 
 
 " What feeling but that of kindness could I have towards 
 Lord Byron ? He was always affectionate towards me, both in 
 his writings and in his personal interviews. How strange 
 that he should misunderstand my manner on the occasion al- 
 luded to and what temptation could I have to show myself 
 pettish and envious before my inestimable friend Lord Hol- 
 land. The whole scene, as described by Lord Byron, is a 
 phantom of his own imagination. Ah, my dear Moore, if we 
 had him but back again, how easily could we settle these mat- 
 ters. But I have detained you too long, and, begging pardon 
 for all my egotism, I remain, my dear Moore, 
 
 " Your obliged and faithful servant, 
 
 " T. CAMPBELL. 
 
 " MIDDLE SCOTLAND YARD, WHITEHALL, 
 " Feb. 18, 1830."
 
 280 THOMAS CAMPBELL. 
 
 " SIR, I am obliged to you for discrediting a silly para- 
 graph from the ' Sligo Observer,' which is quoted in your paper 
 to-day. 
 
 " It charges me with having abstracted the MS. of the ' Ex- 
 ile of Erin ' from the papers of the late Duke (you call him 
 marquis) of Buckingham. If my character did not repel this 
 calumny, I could refute it by the fact that I never in my life 
 had access to any papers of either a Duke or Marquis of 
 Buckingham. I wrote the song of the ' Exile of Erin ' at 
 Altona, and sent it off immediately from thence to London, 
 where it was published by my friend, Mr. Perry, in the ' Morn- 
 ing Chronicle.' With the evidence of my being the author of 
 this little piece I shall not trouble the world at present. Only 
 if my Irish accuser has any proof that George Nugent Rey- 
 nolds, Esq., ever affected to have written the song, he will 
 consult the credit of his memory by not blazoning the anec- 
 dote, for if he asserted that the piece was his own, he as- 
 suredly told an untruth. I am inclined to believe, however, 
 that the ' Sligo Observer's' proffered witnesses are not emi- 
 nently blessed with good memories, for they offer to testify 
 that they heard Mr. Reynolds for years before his death, and 
 prior to my publication of the song, repeat and sing it as his 
 own. If the matter comes to a proof, I shall be happy to 
 prove that this is an utter impossibility, for I had scarcely 
 composed the song, when it was everywhere printed with my 
 name ; and it is inconceivable that Mr. Reynolds could have 
 had credit for years among his friends for a piece which those 
 friends must have seen publicly claimed by myself. 
 
 " But the whole charge is so absurd, that I scarcely think 
 the ' Sligo Observer ' will renew it. If they do, they will only 
 expose their folly. I am, sir, 
 
 " Your obedient servant, 
 
 " THOMAS CAMPBELL. 
 
 " MIDDLE SCOTLAND YARD, WHITEHALL, 
 " Junt 16, 1830."
 
 THE COUNTESS OF BLESSINGTON.
 
 (From Maclise Gallery.)
 
 COUNTESS OF BLESSINGTON. 
 
 AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY. 
 
 FIRST saw Lady Blessington under circumstances 
 sufficiently characteristic of her extraordinary per- 
 sonal beauty at the period in question about five 
 or six and twenty years ago to excuse my referring 
 to them somewhat in detail, though they do not fall within the 
 immediate scope of these Recollections ; for it was not till 
 several years afterwards that I became personally acquainted 
 with the subject of them. It was on the opening day of that 
 Royal Academy Exhibition which contained Lawrence's cele- 
 brated portrait of Lady Blessington one of the very finest 
 he ever painted, and universally known by the numerous en- 
 gravings that have since been made from it. In glancing 
 nastily round the room on first entering, I had duly admired 
 this exquisite portrait, as approaching very near to the perfec- 
 tion of the art, though (as I conceived) by no means reaching 
 it, for there were points in the picture which struck me as in- 
 consistent with others that were also present. Yet I could 
 not, except as a vague theory, lay the apparent discrepancies 
 at the door of the artist. They might belong to the original ; 
 though I more than doubted this explanation of them ; for 
 there are certain qualities and attributes which necessarily 
 imply the absence of certain others, and consequently of their 
 corresponding expressions. 
 
 Presently, on returning to this portrait, I saw standing be- 
 fore it, as if on purpose to confirm my theory, the lovely orig-
 
 284 COUNTESS OF BLESSINGTON. 
 
 inal. She was leaning on the arm of her husband, Lord 
 Blessington, while he was gazing in fond admiration on the 
 portrait. And then I saw how impossible it is for an artist to 
 " flatter " a really beautiful woman, and that, in attempting to 
 do so, he is certain, however skillful, to fall into the error of 
 blending incompatible expressions in the same face ; as in fact 
 even Lawrence's portraits of celebrated " beauties " invari- 
 ably do. He was either not content to represent them as 
 they really were, or incapable of doing so. They one and all 
 (and the one now in question more than most others) include 
 an artificial and meretricious character, which is wholly in- 
 compatible with the presence of perfect female beauty, either 
 of form or expression. 
 
 I have seen no other instance so striking, of the inferiority 
 of art to nature when the latter reaches the ideal standard, as 
 in this celebrated portrait of Lady Blessington. As the ori- 
 ginal stood before it on the occasion I have alluded to, she 
 fairly " killed " the copy, and this no less in the individual de- 
 tails than in the general effect. Moreover, what I had be- 
 lieved to be errors and shortcomings in the picture were 
 wholly absent in the original. There is about the former a 
 consciousness, a "pretension," a leaning forward, and a look- 
 ing forth, as if to claim or court notice and admiration, of which 
 there was no touch in the latter. 
 
 So strong was the impression made upon my mind by this 
 first sight of one of the loveliest women of her day, that, 
 although it is five or six and twenty years ago, I could at this 
 moment place my foot on the spot where she stood, and before 
 which her portrait hung a little to the left of the door as 
 you entered the great room of the old Royal Academy. 
 
 I have never since beheld so pure and perfect a vision of 
 female loveliness, in what I conceive to be its most perfect 
 phase, that, namely, in which intellect does not predominate 
 over form, feature, complexion, and the other physical attri- 
 butes of female beauty, but only serves to heighten, purify, 
 and irradiate them ; and it is this class of beauty which can- 
 not be equaled on canvas.
 
 AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY. 285 
 
 There is another class of beauty which may be, and which, 
 indeed, often is, surpassed by the painter's art. This is the 
 class formerly adopted by Westall as the ideal of female 
 beauty, but now grown obsolete by the progress of a more 
 pure, because a more natural, taste in art. This class or face, 
 though not uncommon in nature, and more prevalent among 
 ourselves than in any other modern people, may readily be 
 surpassed by art, and often is so, because its beauty is that 
 of form merely. It is not only distinct from expression, but 
 incompatible with it, or nearly so with what is understood 
 by expression in a general sense ; incompatible, because if 
 expression of any complicated kind be given to it, the perfec- 
 tion of form is changed, and its beauty for the time being dis- 
 sipated. 
 
 This class of beauty was not the ideal of the ancients ; still 
 less of the great Italian masters. There is no touch of it in 
 any of those antique remains that are recognized as typical of 
 the goddess of beauty least of all in the most famous of all 
 
 the Venus dei Medici. 
 
 Some of Correggio's heads are the highest examples in ex- 
 istence of the true ideal of female beauty the beauty of ex- 
 pression ; but there is not one of them that is not surpassed 
 by actual nature at any given time. This was the ideal of 
 Lawrence. It was this which he tried to surpass whenever 
 it came before him, instead of merely to represent it ; and the 
 result was that the more signal the instance which presented 
 itself to him, the more signally he failed, by giving that 
 peculiar expression (not to be safely described) which is in- 
 compatible with any ideal of female beauty, because incom- 
 patible with the simultaneous existence of those intellectual 
 and moral qualities on which this highest phase of female 
 beauty depends. And he never failed more signally than in 
 the celebrated portrait which has called forth these remarks, 
 
 a portrait which owes its celebrity to the fiat of those who 
 nad not seen the original at the time it was painted. 
 
 At this time Lady Blessington was about six-and-twenty 
 years of age ; but there was about her face, together with
 
 286 COUNTESS OF BLESSINGTON. 
 
 that beaming intelligence which rarely shows itself upon the 
 countenance till that period of life, a bloom and freshness 
 which as rarely survive early youth, and a total absence of 
 those undefinable marks which thought and feeling still more 
 rarely fail to leave behind them. Unlike all other beau- 
 tiful faces that I have seen, hers was, at the time of which 
 I speak, neither a history nor a prophecy ; not a book to read 
 and study, a problem to solve, or a mystery to speculate upon, 
 but a star to kneel before and worship a picture to gaze 
 upon and admire a flower the fragrance of which seemed to 
 reach and penetrate you from a distance, by the mere looking 
 upon it ; in short, an end and consummation in itself, not a 
 promise of anything else. 
 
 Lady Blessington had not, at the period I have just spoken 
 of, done anything to distinguish herself in the literary world ; 
 though the fine taste in art and the splendid hospitalities of 
 her husband, and her own personal attractions and intellectual 
 fascinations, had already made their residence in St. James's 
 Square the resort of all that was most conspicuous in art, 
 literature, and social and political distinction. It would be 
 difficult to name any one among the many remarkable men of 
 that day (namely, from 1818, when her marriage with Lord 
 Blessington took place, to 1822, when they went abroad to 
 reside for several years indeed, until Lord Blessington's 
 death in 1829) who then enjoyed, or have since acquired, a 
 European reputation, with whom Lady Blessington was not 
 on terms of social intimacy, which amounted in almost every 
 case to a certain mild and subdued phase of personal friend- 
 ship that only friendship which the progress of modern 
 civilization has left among us that, namely, which may sub- 
 sist between man and woman. 
 
 A tithe only of the names of those who ranked among Lady 
 Blessington's friends at this period, and who remained such 
 during their respective lives, would serve to show that her at- 
 tractions were not those of mere beauty, or of mere wealth 
 and station. Quite as little were they those of intellectual 
 supremacy or literary distinction ; for at this period she had
 
 AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY. 287 
 
 acquired none of the latter, and at no time did she possess 
 the former. In fact, it was the mediocrity of her talents which 
 secured and maintained for Lady Blessington that unique 
 position which she held in the literary and social world of 
 London during the twenty years following her husband's 
 death. Not that she could ever have compassed, much less 
 have maintained that position, unassisted by the rank and 
 wealth which her marriage with Lord Blessington gave her, 
 or even in the absence of that personal beauty which lent the 
 crowning prestige and the completing charm to her other at- 
 tractions. But none of these, nor all of them united, would 
 have enabled her to gain and keep the unparalleled position 
 she held for the twenty years preceding her death, as the 
 centre of all that was brilliant in the intellect, and dis- 
 tinguished in the literary, political, and social life of London, 
 had she not possessed that indefinable charm of manner and 
 personal bearing which was but the outward expression of a 
 spirit good and beautiful in itself, and therefore intensely 
 sympathizing with all that is good and beautiful in all things. 
 The talisman possessed by Lady Blessington, and which drew 
 around her all that was bright and rich in intellect and in 
 heart, was that " blest condition " of temperament and of 
 spirit which, for the time being, engendered its like in all who 
 came within the scope of its influence. Her rank and wealth, 
 her beauty and celebrity, did but attract votaries to the outer 
 precincts of the temple, many of whom only came to admire 
 and wonder, or to smile and depreciate, as the case might be. 
 But once within the influence of the spell, all were changed 
 into worshipers, because all felt the presence of the deity 
 all were penetrated by that atmosphere of mingled goodness 
 and sweetness which beamed forth in her bright smiles, be- 
 came musical in the modulations of her happy voice, or melted 
 into the heart at her cordial words. 
 
 If there never was a woman more truly "fascinating" than 
 Lady Blessington, it was because there never was one who 
 made less effort to be so. Not that she did not desire to 
 please : no woman desired it more. But she never tried to do
 
 288 COUNTESS OF BLESSINGTON. 
 
 so never felt that she was doing so never (so to speak) 
 cared whether she did so or not. There was an abandon about 
 her, partly attributable to temperament, partly to her birth 
 and country, and partly, no doubt, to her consciousness of 
 great personal beauty, which, in any woman less happily 
 constituted, would have degenerated into something bordering 
 on vulgarity. But in her it was so tempered by sweetness of 
 disposition, and so .kept in check by an exquisite social tact, 
 as well as by natural good breeding as contradistinguished 
 from artificial in other words, a real sympathy, not an af- 
 fected one, with the feelings of others that it formed the 
 chief charm and attraction of her character and bearing. 
 
 IN ITALY. 
 
 My personal acquaintance with Lady Blessington did not 
 commence till her return from abroad, after her husband's 
 death. But as her social career from the period of her mar- 
 riage with Lord Blessington in 1818, up to his death in 1829, 
 was marked by features of great public interest, particularly 
 that almost daily intercourse with Lord Byron for the last nine 
 months of his strange life, which gave -rise to her published 
 " Conversations " with him, and her residence in Paris during 
 the Revolution of July, 1830, the reader may like to have be- 
 fore him a brief summary of the events of that period, as noted 
 in her own " Diary," which I have reason to believe she con- 
 tinued up to her death. 
 
 From her marriage in 1818, till the autumn of 1822, Lord 
 and Lady Blessington resided in St. James's Square, where, 
 as I have said, she formed an acquaintance, and in most cases 
 an intimacy, with a very large proportion of the literary and 
 political celebrities of that day. Here are a few of those of 
 her early friends who have already passed from the scene, or 
 still embellish it : Luttrell, William Spencer, Dr. Parr, Ma- 
 thias, Rogers, Moore, John Kemble, Sir William Drummond, 
 Sir William Cell, Conway, Sir Thomas Lawrence, the Locks 
 of Norbury Park, Sir George Beaumont, Lord Alvanley, Lord 
 Dudley and Ward, Lord Guildford, Sir John Herschell, etc. ;
 
 IN ITALY. 289 
 
 Prince Polignac, Prince Lieven, the Due de Cazes, Count 
 Montalembert, Mignet, etc. ; and among our English political 
 celebrities, Lords Grey and Castlereagh, Lord John Russell, 
 Lord Lansdowne, Lord Palmerston, Lord Hertford, Sir Francis 
 Burdett, etc. 
 
 In the autumn of 1822 the Blessingtons left England with a 
 view to a lengthened residence abroad. They stayed at Paris 
 for a week, and then proceeded rapidly to Switzerland as 
 rapidly, at least, as the princely style of their travelling ar- 
 rangements permitted ; for nothing could exceed the lavish 
 luxury with which Lord Blessington insisted on surrounding 
 his young and beautiful wife, whose simple tastes, and still 
 more her genial sympathies with all classes of her fellow- 
 beings, by no means coveted such splendor, though her excita- 
 ble temperament enabled her richly to enjoy its results. 
 
 They reached the Jura in five days ; travelled in Switzer- 
 land for about a month, and then returned, through Geneva 
 and Lyons, into Dauphiny, where, by one of those unaccounta- 
 ble fancies in which only those who are satiated with luxury 
 and splendor ever indulge, they took up their abode at a vile 
 inn (the only one the town Vienne afforded), and sub- 
 mitted for three weeks to all sorts of privations and inconven- 
 iences, in order, ostensibly, to explore the picturesque and an- 
 tiquarian beauties of the most ancient city of the Gauls and its 
 vicinity, but in reality to find in a little bracing and whole- 
 some contrast, a relief from that ennui and lassitude which, at 
 that time of day, used to induce Sybarite lords to drive 
 Brighton stages, and sensitive ladies to brave alone the 
 dangers of Arabian deserts. 
 
 From Vienne they proceeded to Avignon, at which city they 
 made a stay of several weeks, and were feted by the notabili- 
 ties of the place in an incessant round of dinners, balls, 
 soirees, etc., which, marked as they were by all the deficiencies 
 and desagrdmens of French provincial hospitality, were never- 
 theless enjoyed by Lady Blessington with a relish strongly 
 characteristic of that cordial and happy temperament which 
 19
 
 290 COUNTESS OF BLESSINGTON. 
 
 rendered her the most popular person of whatever circle she 
 formed a part. 
 
 Loitering for about six weeks more between Avignon and 
 Genoa, they arrived at the latter city at the end of March, 
 1823, and the next day Lady Blessington was introduced (at 
 his own particular request) to Lord Byron, who was residing 
 in the Casa Saluzzo, at the village of Albaro, a short distance 
 from the city. 
 
 Lady Blessington's intercourse with Lord Byron, so pleas- 
 antly and characteristically described by herself in the well- 
 known published " Conversations," and as she was accustomed 
 to describe it viva voce, and still more pleasantly and charac- 
 teristically in her own conversations at Seamore Place and 
 Gore House, formed an era in her life, and probably contrib- 
 uted not a little to the unique position which she afterwards 
 held in London society for so many years : for Byron's death 
 occurred so soon after his quitting Genoa for Greece, and the 
 last few months of his residence in Italy had been so almost 
 exclusively devoted to that friendly intercourse with- the Bless- 
 ingtons, in which he evidently took unusual pleasure, that 
 Lady Blessington may be considered as having been the de- 
 positary of his last thoughts and feelings ; and she may cer- 
 tainly be regarded as having exercised a very beneficial in- 
 fluence on the tone and color of the last and best days of that 
 most strange and wayward of men. 
 
 Lady Blessington's first interview with Byron took place at 
 the gate of the courtyard of his own villa at Albaro. Lord 
 Blessington, who had long been acquainted with Byron, had 
 called on him immediately on their arrival at Genoa, leaving 
 Lady Blessington in the carriage. In the course of conversa- 
 tion Lord Byron, without knowing that she was there, re- 
 quested to be presented to Lady Blessington a request so 
 unusual on his part in regard to English travellers, of what- 
 ever rank or celebrity, that Lord Blessington at once told him 
 that Lady B. was in the carriage with her sister, Miss Power. 
 On learning this, Lord Byron immediately hurried out to the 
 gate, without his hat, and acted the amiable to the two ladies,
 
 IN ITALY. 291 
 
 in a way that was very unusual with him so much so that, 
 as Lady Blessington used to describe the interview, he evi- 
 dently felt called upon to apologize for not being, in her case 
 at least, quite the savage that the world reported him. 
 
 At Byron's earnest request they entered the villa, and passed 
 two hours there, during which it is clear that the peculiar 
 charm of Lady Blessington's manner exercised its usual spell 
 that the cold, scorning, and world-wearied spirit of Byron 
 was, for the time being, "subdued to the quality" of the 
 genial and happy one with which it held converse and that 
 both the poet and the man became once more what nature in- 
 tended them to be. 
 
 On the Blessingtons' departure, Byron asked leave to visit 
 them the next day at their hotel, and from that moment there 
 commenced an interchange of genial and friendly intimacy 
 between Byron and Lady Blessington which, untouched as it 
 was by the least taint of flirtation on either side, might, had it 
 endured a little longer, have redeemed the personal character 
 of Byron, and saved him for those high and holy things for 
 which his noble and beautiful genius seems to have been 
 created, but which the fatal Nemesis of his early life inter- 
 dicted him from accomplishing. 
 
 Lady Blessington seems, in fact, to have been the only 
 woman holding his own rank and station with whom Byron 
 was ever at his ease, and with whom, therefore, he was him- 
 self. With all others he seemed to feel a constraint which 
 irritated and vexed him into the assumption of vices, both 
 of manner and moral feeling, which did not belong to him. 
 It is evident, from Lady Blessington's details of conversations 
 which must be (in substance, at least) correctly reported, that 
 Byron had a heart as soft as a woman's or a child's. He used 
 to confess to her that any affecting incident or description in a 
 book moved him to tears, and in recalling some of the events 
 of his early life, he was frequently so moved in her presence. 
 His treatment, also, of Lord Blessington, who received the 
 news of the death of his only son, Lord Mountjoy, just after 
 their arrival at Genoa, was marked by an almost feminine soft- 
 ness and gentleness.
 
 292 COUNTESS OF BLESSINGTON. 
 
 Byron's personal regard for Lord Blessington had its origin 
 in the same gentleness and goodness of heart. " I must say," 
 exclaimed he to Lady Blessington, at an early period of their 
 acquaintance, " that I never saw ' the milk of human kind- 
 ness ' overflow in any nature to so great a degree as in Lord 
 Blessington's. I used, before I knew him well, to think that 
 Shelley was the most amiable person I ever knew ; but now I 
 think that Lord B. bears off the palm ; for he has been as- 
 sailed by all the temptations that so few can resist those of 
 unvarying prosperity and has passed the ordeal victoriously ; 
 while poor Shelley had been tried in the school of adversity 
 only, which is not such a corrupter as that of prosperity. I 
 do assure you that I have thought better of mankind since I 
 have known Blessington intimately." 
 
 It is equally certain that he thought better of womankind 
 after his ten weeks of almost daily intimacy with Lady Bless- 
 ington at this period; and if his previous engagement with the 
 Greek Committee had not in some sort compelled him to go to 
 Greece, where his life was sacrificed to the excitements and an- 
 noyances of the new situation in which he thus placed himself, 
 it is more than probable that his whole character and course 
 of life would have been changed. For what Byron all his life 
 needed in women, and never once found, except in his favor- 
 ite sister, Mrs. Leigh, was a woman not to love or be beloved by 
 (he always found, or fancied he had found, more than enough 
 of both these), but one whom he could thoroughly esteem and 
 regard for the frankness, sweetness, and goodness of her dis- 
 position and temper, while he could entirely admire in her 
 those perfect graces and elegances of manner, and those ex- 
 quisite charms of person, in the absence of which his fastidi- 
 ous taste and exacting imagination could not realize that ideal 
 of a woman which was necessary to render his intellectual in- 
 tercourse with the sex agreeable, or even tolerable. Merely 
 clever or even brilliant women such as Madame de Stael 
 he hated ; and even those who, like his early acquaintance, 
 
 Lady J , were both clever and beautiful, he was more than 
 
 indifferent to, because, being, from their station and personal
 
 IN ITALY. 293 
 
 pretensions, the leaders of fashion, they were compelled to 
 adopt a system of life wholly incompatible with that natural 
 one in which alone his own habits of social intercourse enabled 
 him to sympathize. Those women again who, with a daring 
 reckless as his own, openly professed a passion for him (like 
 the unhappy Lady C L , or the scarcely less unfor- 
 tunate Countess G ), he either despised and shrank from 
 
 (as in the first of these instances), or merely pitied and tol- 
 erated (as in the second). But in Lady Blessington, Byron 
 found realized all his notions of what a woman in his own 
 station of life might and ought to be, in the present state 
 and stage of society ; beautiful as a muse, without the smallest 
 touch of personal vanity ; intellectual enough not merely to 
 admire and appreciate his pretensions, but to hold intellectual 
 intercourse with him on a footing of perfect relative equality ; 
 full of enthusiasm for everything good and beautiful, yet with 
 a strong good sense which preserved her from any taint of 
 that " sentimentality " which Byron above all things else de- 
 tested in women ; surrounded by the homage of all that was 
 high in intellect and station, yet natural and simple as a child ; 
 lapped in an almost fabulous luxury, with every wish antici- 
 pated and every caprice a law, yet sympathizing with the wants 
 of the poorest ; an unusually varied knowledge of the world 
 and of society, yet fresh in spirit and earnest in impulse as a 
 newly emancipated school-girl : such was Lady Blessington 
 when first Lord Byron became acquainted with her, and the 
 intercourse which ensued seemed to soften, humanize, and 
 make a new creature of him. 
 
 That I do not say this at random is proved by the fact that 
 within a very few days of the commencement of their ac- 
 quaintance Byron wrote a most touching letter to his wife 
 (though any reconciliation had at this time become impossi- 
 ble), having for its object to put her mind at ease relative to 
 any supposed intention on his part to remove their daughter 
 from her mother's care such a fear on Lady Byron's part 
 having been communicated to him. This letter (which ap- 
 pear* in Moore's " Life of Byron ") he prevailed on Lady
 
 294 COUNTESS OF BLESSING TON. 
 
 Blessington to cause to be delivered personally to Lady By- 
 ron by a mutual friend, who was returning to England from 
 Genoa. 
 
 The humanizing influence of which I have spoken lasted 
 less than three months, and shortly after its close Byron went 
 to Greece, where he died. 
 
 On quitting Genoa, in the early part of June, 1823, the 
 Blessingtons proceeded to Florence, where they remained 
 sight-seeing for three weeks, and then proceeded to Rome. 
 Here they stayed for another week, and then took up their 
 residence for a lengthened period at Naples. Having hired 
 the beautiful (furnished) Palazzo of the Prince and Princess 
 di Belvedere, at Vomero, overlooking the beautiful bay, they 
 not a little astonished its princely owners at the requirements 
 of English luxury, and the extent of English wealth, by al- 
 most entirely refurnishing it, and engaging a large suite of 
 Italian servants in addition to their English ones. 
 
 In this, one of the most splendid residences of Italy, Lady 
 Blessington again became, for nearly three years, the centre 
 of all that was brilliant among her own travelling compatriots, 
 and of much that was distinguished among the Italian no- 
 bility and litterati. 
 
 In February, 1826, they left Naples, and the next year was 
 passed between Rome, Florence, Genoa, and Pisa. The re- 
 mainder of their residence in Italy was completed by another 
 few months at Rome, and about a year more between the 
 other principal cities of Italy that the travellers had not pre- 
 viously visited. 
 
 AT PARIS. 
 
 In June of the next year (1828) we again find Lady Blessing- 
 ton at Paris, after an absence of more than six years ; and here 
 it was her destiny to witness the events of the last days of the 
 old Bourbon dynasty, and this in the almost daily presence of 
 and intercourse with those personal friends and near family 
 connections who were the most devoted and chivalrous of its 
 supporters, the Due and Duchesse de Guiche, the Due de
 
 AT PARIS. 295 
 
 Gratnmont (father of the Due de Guiche), the venerable 
 Madame Crauford, the Due de Cazes, Prince Polignac, etc. 
 
 The splendor and luxury with which Lady Blessington was 
 at this, as at all other periods of her marriage, surrounded 
 by the somewhat too gorgeous taste of her doting husband, 
 may be judged of by a brief description of her own chambre a 
 coucher and dressing-room, in the superb hotel (formerly that 
 of Marshal Ney) which they occupied in the Rue de Bourbon, 
 its principal rooms looking on the Quay d'Orsay and the Tuil- 
 eries gardens. The bed, which stood as usual in a recess, 
 rested upon the backs of two exquisitely carved silver swans, 
 every feather being carved in high relief. The recess was lined 
 throughout with white fluted silk bordered with blue embossed 
 lace, the frieze of the recess being hung with curtains of pale 
 blue silk lined with white satin. The remainder of the furni- 
 ture, namely, a richly carved sofa, occupying one entire side 
 of the room, an tscritoire, a bergere, a book-stand, a Psyche- 
 glass, and two cojfres for jewels, lace, etc., were all of similar 
 fancy and workmanship, and all silvered, to match the bed. 
 The carpet was of rich uncut pile, of a pale blue. The hang- 
 ings of the dressing-room were of blue silk, covered with lace, 
 and richly trimmed with frills of the same ; so also were the 
 toilette-table, the chaiselongue, the dressing-stools, etc. There 
 was a salle-de-bain, attached, draped throughout with white 
 muslin, trimmed with lace, and containing a sofa and berglre 
 covered with the same. The bath of white marble was in- 
 serted in the floor, and on the ceiling was painted a Flora 
 scattering flowers with one hand, and suspending in the other 
 an alabaster lamp, in the shape of a lotus. 
 
 The whole of the vast hotel occupied by the Blessingtons 
 during the first year of this their second lengthened residence 
 in Paris, was fitted up with a luxury and at a cost no less lav- 
 ish than those bestowed on the rooms I have just described. 
 But it is proper to state here that Lady Blessington herself, 
 though possessing exquisite taste in such matters, by no 
 means coveted or encouraged the lavish expense which her 
 husband bestowed upon her ; and in the case of the particular
 
 296 COUNTESS OF BLESSINGTON. 
 
 rooms just described, he so managed as not to let her see 
 them till they were completed and ready for her reception. 
 Indeed, Lady Blessington had, in all pecuniary matters, much 
 more of worldly prudence than her lord. The enormous cost 
 of entirely furnishing a hotel like that in which they now re- 
 sided, may be judged of by what was said to be the original 
 cost of the ornamental decorations of the walls alone, includ- 
 ing mirrors, namely, a million of francs. 
 
 With this year the more than queen-like splendors and 
 luxuries of Lady Blessington's life ceased. In 1829 her hus- 
 band died, leaving her a jointure of 2,5oo/. a year, and a large 
 amount of personal property in the shape of furniture, plate, 
 pictures, objects of vertu, etc. After witnessing all the excite- 
 ments of the "Three Days" of July, 1830, and partaking per- 
 sonally in some of the dangers connected with them, Lady 
 Blessington, at the close of the autumn of that year, returned 
 to England, there to reside uninterruptedly till within a few 
 weeks of her death. 
 
 HYDE PARK. 
 
 The following sketch was taken from the " Ring " in Hyde 
 Park, at the period of Lady Blessington's London life now re- 
 ferred to : 
 
 " Observe that green chariot just making the turn of the un- 
 broken line of equipages. Though it is now advancing to- 
 wards us with at least a dozen carriages between, it is to be 
 distinguished from the throng by the elevation of its driver and 
 footman above the ordinary level of the line. As it comes 
 nearer, we can observe the particular points that give it that 
 perfectly distingue appearance which it bears above all others 
 in the throng. They consist of the white wheels lightly picked 
 out with green and crimson ; the high-stepping action, blood- 
 like shape, and brilliant manage of its dark bay horses ; the 
 perfect style of its driver ; the height (six feet two) of its slim, 
 spider-limbed, powdered footman, perked up at least three 
 feet above the roof of the carriage, and occupying his eminence 
 with that peculiar air of accidental superiority, half petit-mai-
 
 HYDE PARK. 297 
 
 ire, half plow-boy, which we take to be the ideal of footman- 
 perfection ; and, finally, the exceedingly light, airy, and (if we 
 may so speak) intellectual character of the whole set-out. 
 The arms and supporters blazoned on the centre panels, and 
 the small coronet beneath the window, indicate the nobility of 
 station; and if ever the nobility of nature was blazoned on the 
 'complement extern' of humanity, it is on the lovely face 
 within lovely as ever, though it has been loveliest among 
 the lovely for a longer time than we shall dare call to our own 
 recollection, much less to that of the fair being before us. 
 If the Countess of Blessington (for it is she whom we are ask- 
 ing the reader to admire hovvbeit at second-hand, and 
 through the doubly refracting medium of plate-glass and a 
 blonde veil) is not now so radiant with the bloom of mere 
 youth, as when she first put to shame Sir Thomas LawFence's 
 chef-d^oeuvre in the form of her own portrait, what she has 
 lost in the graces of mere complexion she has more than gained 
 in those of intellectual expression. Nor can the observer have 
 a better opportunity than the present of admiring that expres- 
 sion ; unless, indeed, he is fortunate enough to be admitted to 
 that intellectual converse in which its owner shines beyond 
 any other female of the day, and with an earnestness, a sim- 
 plicity, and an abandon, as rare in such cases as they are de- 
 lightful. 
 
 " The lady, her companion, is the Countess de St. Marsault, 
 her sister, whose finely-cut features and perfectly oval face 
 bear a striking general resemblance to those of Lady B., with- 
 out being at all like them." 
 
 It is perhaps worth while to remark here, in passing, that 
 Lady Blessington's peculiar taste in dress and in equipage 
 was not only in advance of her time, but essentially correct ; 
 in proof of which it may be stated, that though their early re- 
 sults stood alone for years after they were first introduced, 
 they at last became the universal fashions of the day. Lady 
 Blessington was the first to introduce the beautifully simple 
 fashion of wearing the hair in bands, but was not imitated in 
 it till she had persevered for at least seven years ; and it was
 
 298 COUNTESS OF BLESSINGTON. 
 
 the same with the white wheels, and peculiar style of picking 
 out of her equipages ; both features being universally adopted 
 some ten or a dozen years after Lady Blessington had intro- 
 duced and persevered in them. 
 
 LETTERS TO PATMORE. 
 
 It was shortly after her return to England that I was per- 
 sonally introduced to Lady Blessington by a mutual friend, 
 and my acquaintance with her continued from that time till 
 her departure from England a few weeks before her death. 
 
 At the period of my first introduction to Lady Blessington, 
 she had just contributed to the " New Monthly Magazine " 
 (then under the direction of her friend Sir Edward Bulvver) the 
 " Conversations with Lord Byron," and they had obtained her 
 a reputation for literary talent, of which her previous efforts, 
 two slight works entitled " The Magic Lantern," and " A 
 : Tour in the Netherlands," had given little or no promise. 
 But these printed " Conversations " with Byron, characteristic 
 as they are both of him and of herself, are flat and spiritless 
 or rather, marrowless compared with Lady Blessington's 
 own viva voce conversations of him, one half hour of which 
 contained more pith and substance more that was worth re- 
 membering and recording than the whole octavo volume in 
 which the printed " Conversations " were afterwards collected. 
 In fact, talking, not writing, was Lady Blessington's forte ; 
 and the " Conversations " in question, though the slightest 
 and least studied of all her numerous productions, was in- 
 comparably the best, because the most consonant, in subject 
 and material, with her intellectual temperament, which was 
 fluent and impulsive, rather than meditative or sentimental. 
 After reading any one of her books (excepting the " Con- 
 versations ") you could not help wondering at the reputation 
 Lady Blessington enjoyed as the companion, on terms of per- 
 fect intellectual equality, of the most accomplished and brill- 
 iant writers, statesmen, and other celebrities of the day. But 
 the first half hour of her talk solved the mystery at once. Her 
 genius lay (so to speak) in her tongue. The pen paralyzed it,
 
 LETTERS TO PATMORE. 299 
 
 changing what would otherwise have been originality into a 
 mere echo or recollection what would have awakened and 
 excited the hearer by its freshness and brilliance, into what 
 wearied and put to sleep the reader by its platitude and com- 
 monplace. As a novel writer Lady Blessington was but a 
 
 better sort of Lady Stepney or Lady C B . But as a 
 
 talker she was a better sort of De Stae'l as acute, as copious, 
 as off-hand, as original, and almost as sparkling, but without 
 a touch of her arrogance, exigence, or pedantry ; and with a 
 faculty for listening that is the happiest and most indispen- 
 sable of all the talents that go to constitute a good talker ; for 
 any talk that is not the actual and immediate result of listen- 
 ing, is at once a bore and an impertinence. 
 
 I soon found, on becoming personally acquainted with her, 
 that another of the attractions which contributed to give Lady 
 Blessington that unique position in London society which she 
 held for so many years, and even more exclusively and con- 
 spicuously after her husband's death than before it, was that 
 strong personal interest which she felt, and did not scruple to 
 evince, on every topic on which she was called upon to busy 
 herself, whether it was the fashion of a cap, or the fate of 
 nations. In this her habit of mind was French rather than 
 English or rather it was Irish which is no less demon- 
 strative than the French, and infinitely more impressible. Of 
 French demonstrations of sudden interest and good-will you 
 doubt the sincerity, even while you accept and acknowledge 
 them. They are the shining small change of society, which 
 you accept for their pleasing aspect, but do not take the 
 trouble of carrying them away with you, because you know 
 that before you can get them home they will have melted into 
 thin air. But there was no doubting the cordiality and sincer- 
 ity of Lady Blessington while their outward demonstrations 
 lasted ; which is perhaps all one has any right to require in 
 such matters. 
 
 In giving a few extracts from my occasional correspondence 
 with Lady Blessington, I cannot do better than commence 
 them by one of the notes that I received from her at a very
 
 3OO COUNTESS OF BLESSINGTOh T . 
 
 early stage of our acquaintance ; because it will (in my own 
 estimation, at least) exonerate me from the charge of any un- 
 warrantable intrusion on private life in these public notices 
 of one whose social celebrity at least had acquired a European 
 reputation. 
 
 I am not able to call to mind the occasion of the following 
 graceful note, except that it related to something which had 
 appeared in a newspaper I conducted at that time : 
 
 THE COUNTESS OF BLESSINGTON TO P. G. PATMORE. 
 
 " SKAMORE PLACE, Friday Evening. 
 
 " DEAR SIR, I do not think will feel any ob- 
 jection to the mention you have made of him. Of one thing I 
 am quite sure, which is, that neither he nor I could mistake 
 the motive of any use made of our names by you. 
 
 " I am, indeed, sorry to hear that your connection with the 
 
 is coming to a crisis, if that crisis leads to a separation ; 
 
 because I wish well to the journal, and so wishing, must desire 
 your continuance in it. 
 
 " I have been wishing to see you for some time, and shall be 
 glad when you can make it convenient to call. I have reason 
 
 to think that Mr. has been misrepresented to me. But 
 
 more of this when we meet. Believe me, 
 
 " Very sincerely yours, 
 
 " M. BLESSINGTON.'' 
 
 The two following letters relate to the subject glanced at in 
 the preceding one. Circumstances make it proper that I 
 should not dissipate the little mystery that involves them, fur- 
 ther than to say that they refer to one of those literary in- 
 trigues which are met with even in the "best regulated" re- 
 public of letters : 
 
 THE COUNTESS OF BLESSINGTON TO P. G. PATMORE. 
 
 " Monday, Dec. 10, 1832. 
 
 " DEAR SIR, Since I last saw you, I have heard nothing 
 on the subject we then talked of. I have not seen the person
 
 LETTERS TO PATMORE. 301 
 
 who gave me the information I reported to you, and probably 
 shall not for some weeks or months, as I do not see him often, 
 and in the last six months have not seen him more than twice 
 or thrice. Of the truth of the intelligence he gave me I have 
 not the slightest doubt, as during two years that I have known 
 him I have never had the least cause to call his veracity in 
 question, and I believe him incapable of any underhand or un- 
 handsome conduct. As I know nothing of one of the parties, 
 and have had no reason to think favorably of the other, I must 
 give the preference of belief to the person of whom I entertain 
 a good opinion. 
 
 " Believing Mr. to be incapable of deception or mis- 
 representation, I can see no objection to your seeking an in- 
 terview with him, and stating your feelings. Mr. , in 
 
 seeking a position which he was led to believe you were on the 
 point of losing, violated no duty to you, as he was neither your 
 friend nor acquaintance ; but I am quite sure he would not 
 seek the position had he not been assured that you are to 
 leave it ; and I am equally sure that he never addressed him- 
 self to Mr. on the subject, but that it was proposed to 
 
 him by his friends, who represented themselves as being in 
 Mr. 's confidence. 
 
 " I have now told you all I know 
 
 " I shall be glad to see you, to talk over more fully your 
 future prospects, and remain, 
 
 " Dear sir, very sincerely yours, 
 
 " M. BLESSINGTON." 
 
 THE COUNTESS OF BLESSINGTON TO P. G. PATMORE. 
 
 " SBAMORE PLACE, Monday Night. 
 
 " DEAR SIR, I agree with you in believing that the whole 
 story was a plot got up by the contemptible family in question, 
 
 and that Mr. , who is, as far as I have had an opportunity 
 
 of judging, an honorable well-intentioned young man, was the 
 dupe of it. 
 
 " I wish, as an act of justice, to impress on your mind that 
 Mr. behaved in the whole affair in a very gentlemanly
 
 3O2 COUNTESS OF BLESSINGTON. 
 
 manner ; and it will give me pleasure to say as much for Mr. 
 
 " I have such a dread of even the most remote contact with 
 plotters and intriguantes, that I bless my stars I am no longer 
 exposed to the vulgar observations of the persons who have 
 already made free with my name. It will be my own fault if, 
 after the experience I have lately had, I commit myself again. 
 . . . . I shall be glad to hear that you are going on am- 
 icably, and, always anxious to be of use to you, 
 
 " Believe me, dear sir, sincerely yours, 
 
 " M. BLESSINGTON." 
 
 The following notes relate to the same early period of my 
 acquaintance with their writer. I make no apology for the 
 seeming egotism of not expunging the personal compliments 
 to myself which these and other of Lady Blessington's notes 
 contain, because my object in these Recollections is to mark 
 the intellectual character and habits of the writer : and noth- 
 ing does this more than little points of this nature. 
 
 THE COUNTESS OF BLESSINGTON TO P. G. PATMORE. 
 
 " SEAMORE PLACE, Sept. 10. 
 
 " DEAR SIR, I have this moment received a very beautiful 
 volume entitled ' The Album Wreath,' and beg you will do me 
 the favor of making my acknowledgment to Mr. Francis, 
 whose address I do not know. The present is enhanced, 
 from the circumstance of its coming to me through the me- 
 dium of yourself, of whose health and prosperity it will al- 
 ways give me pleasure to hear. 
 
 " Believe me, dear sir, 
 
 " Very sincerely yours, 
 " MARGUERITE BLESSINGTON." 
 
 The following note marks one of Lady Blessington's favor- 
 ite studies that of genealogy :
 
 LETTERS TO PATMORE. 303 
 
 THE COUNTESS OF BLESSINGTON TO P. G. PATMORE. 
 
 " SEAMORE PLACE, Wednesday. 
 
 " DEAR SIR, A great mistake has crept into the notice of 
 the death of Captain Lock. 1 He is stated to have been the 
 grandson of the Duke of Leinster. This was not the case. 
 The mother of Captain Lock was Miss Jennings, daughter of 
 the celebrated Dog Jennings so-called from having brought 
 to this country the famous marble known as the Dog of Alci- 
 baides. The brother of Captain Lock's father, the late Charles 
 Lock, Esq., married Miss Ogilvie, daughter of the Duchess 
 Dowager of Leinster. You have no idea how much impor- 
 tance people attach to such trifles as these, which after all are 
 of no consequence. I happen to have so very numerous an 
 acquaintance that I am au fait of genealogies a stupid, but 
 sometimes useful knowledge. 
 
 " I shall be glad to see you when you have leisure, and re- 
 main, Dear sir, very sincerely yours, 
 
 " M. BLESSINGTON." 
 
 THE COUNTESS OF BLESSINGTON TO P. G. PATMORE. 
 
 " SEAMORE PLACE, Monday Evening. 
 
 "DEAR SIR, By mistake I directed my note of Monday 
 morning to Camden Hill instead of Craven Hill. Have you 
 got it ? 
 
 " The forthcoming dissection of my ' Conversations,' an- 
 nounced, is said to be from the pen of Mr. ; and I think 
 
 it not unlikely, for he is a reckless person who has nothing to 
 lose, and who, if common fame speaks true, is a man 
 
 ' Who dares do more than may become a man,' 
 
 or a gentleman, at least. Having been at Genoa while we 
 were there, he is probably hurt at not being named in the 
 'Conversations.' But the truth is, Byron fought so shy of 
 admitting the acquaintance to us, though we knew it existed, 
 that I could say naught but what must have been offensive to 
 his feelings had I named him. 
 
 1 The singularly beautiful William Lock, of Norbury Park, who was drowned in 
 the Lake of Como, in sight of his newly-wedded bride.
 
 304 COUNTESS OF BLESSINGTON. 
 
 " It was one of the worst traits in Byron, to receive persons 
 in private, and then 'deny the acquaintance to those whom he 
 considered might disapprove of it. This was in consequence 
 of that want of self-respect which was his bane, but which 
 was the natural consequence of the attacks he had expe- 
 rienced, acting on a very irritable and nervous constitution. 
 
 " I have letters from Naples up to the 2d. Lord Bentinck 
 died there on that day, and is succeeded in his title and for- 
 tune by his brother, Mr. Hill, who has been our minister at 
 Naples since 1825 up to the appointment of Lord Ponsonby. 
 
 " Very sincerely yours, 
 
 " M. BLESSINGTON." 
 
 I will now give a few extracts from my later epistolary in- 
 tercourse with Lady Blessington ; the object I have in view 
 in the choice of them being, like all the rest of those Recollec- 
 tions, to mark those features of her intellectual character which 
 cannot be gathered from her published writings. 
 
 Though Lady Blessington's poetical talents were not above 
 mediocrity, she had a fine perception and an enthusiastic ad- 
 miration of the poetical faculties of others, and never missed 
 an opportunity of testifying her feelings. 
 
 THE COUNTESS OF BLESSINGTON TO P. G. PATMORE. 
 
 " GORE HOUSE, June 14, 1844. 
 
 " MY DEAR MR. PATMORE, I congratulate you on the 
 charming poems of your son. They are indeed beautiful, and 
 as fresh and original as beautiful. My friend Mr. Procter had 
 prepared me for something charming, but these poems, I con- 
 fess, surpass my expectations, although they were greatly 
 raised. I hope you will make me personally acquainted with 
 the young poet when you and he have leisure. Believe me, 
 " My dear Mr. Patmore, 
 
 " Very sincerely yours, 
 
 " M. BLESSINGTON." 
 
 The note below refers to an inquiry I had been led to make 
 relative to a criticism on " Chatsworth," said to have been
 
 LETTERS TO PATMORE. 305 
 
 written by Lady Blessington, and attributing that work to my 
 esteemed friend Mr. Plumer Ward, who had requested me to 
 learn, if possible, whether the graceful and gratifying things 
 said of him in the critique in question were really written by 
 her. 
 
 THE COUNTESS OF BLESSINGTON TO P. G. PATMORE. 
 
 "GORE HOUSE, July 6, 1844. 
 
 " MY DEAR MR. PATMORE, I have no interest whatever 
 in the beyond that of wishing it may prove a suc- 
 cessful speculation to the owner, the Baroness de Calabrella, 
 who is an acquaintance of mine. I have never written a notice 
 of any book in the paper ; and a few paragraphs of fashion- 
 able movements, communicated to the baroness at her earnest 
 request, and without any remuneration, have been the extent 
 of my aid to the paper. 
 
 " With a fervent admiration of Mr. Plumer Ward, be as- 
 sured that, had an occasion offered, I should have expressed 
 it. Believe me, My dear Mr. Patmore, 
 
 " Very truly yours, 
 
 " M. BLESSINGTON." 
 
 Few readers will expect to find a work like " Jerrold's Maga- 
 zine " lying on the gilded tables of Gore House. But the fol- 
 lowing note will show that Lady Blessington's sympathies ex- 
 tended to all classes : 
 
 THE COUNTESS OF BLESSINGTON TO P. G. PATMORE. 
 
 " MY DEAR MR. PATMORE, I have been reading with 
 great interest and pleasure your ' Recollections ' of Hazlitt. 
 They are full of fine tact and perception, as well as a healthy 
 philosophy. I wish all men of genius had such biographers 
 men who, alive to their powers of mind, could look with 
 charity and toleration on their failings. Your ' Recollec- 
 tions ' of him made me very sad, for they explained much 
 that I had not previously comprehended in his troubled life. 
 How he must have suffered !
 
 306 COUNTESS OF BLESS1NGTON. 
 
 "What a clever production 'Jerrold's Magazine' is, and 
 how admirable are his own contributions ! Such writings 
 must effect good. Very sincerely yours, 
 
 " M. BLESSINGTON." 
 
 The following little bit of domestic history refers to a matter 
 (the relinquishment of her house in St. James's Square by the 
 Wyndham Club) which reduced Lady Blessington's income by 
 five hundred a year. It may be here proper to remark that 
 nothing could be more erroneous than the impressions which 
 generally prevailed as to the supposed extravagance of Lady 
 Blessington in her equipage, domestic arrangements, etc. 
 There were few more careful or methodical housekeepers, and 
 probably no one ever made a given income go farther than 
 she did, not to mention the constant literary industry she 
 employed in increasing it. 
 
 THE COUNTESS OF BLESSINGTON TO P. G. PATMORE. 
 
 " GORE HOUSE, Saturday, April 15. 
 
 " MY DEAR MR. PATMORE, The house in St. James's 
 Square has been resigned by me to the executors of Lord 
 Blessington, Messrs. Norman and Worthington, North Fred- 
 erick Street, Dublin. They may be written to. Another party 
 is in treaty for the house a Sir W. Boyd ; so that if your 
 friend wishes to secure it, no time should be lost. There are 
 about four years of the lease to expire. The rent paid for the 
 house is 8407. a year, unfurnished and exclusive of taxes. The 
 Wyndham Club paid i,35o/. for it furnished. The furniture is 
 now in a bad state, and the executors would let it either with 
 or without the furniture, for the whole term, for little more than 
 the rent they pay. 
 
 " I regret exceedingly to hear that you have been unwell, 
 and shall have great pleasure in an opportunity of judging that 
 your health is quite reestablished, whenever you have time 
 to call at Gore House. 
 
 " Believe me, dear Mr. Patmore, 
 
 " Very sincerely yours, 
 
 "M. BLESSINGTON."
 
 SEAMORE PLACE AND GORE HOUSE. 307 
 
 THE HABITUES OF SEAMORE PLACE AND GORE HOUSE. 
 
 In recalling to mind the remarkable persons I have met at 
 the house of Lady Blessington, the most celebrated is the 
 Countess G , with whom Lady Blessington became inti- 
 mate after the death of Byron, and maintained a continued 
 
 correspondence with her. Madame G was still very 
 
 handsome at the time I met her at Seamore Place I think in 
 1832-3 ; but she by no means gave me the impression of a per- 
 son with whom Byron would be likely to fall in love ; and her 
 conversation (for I was specially introduced to her) was quite 
 as little of a character to strike or interest a man so little tol- 
 erant of the commonplaces of society as Byron. To see and 
 
 converse with the Countess G was, in fact, to be satisfied 
 
 that all Byron's share in the passion which has become so 
 famous as to render no excuse necessary for this allusion to 
 it, was merely a passive permitting himself to be loved a 
 condition of mind which, after all, is perhaps the happiest and 
 most salutary effect of woman's love upon men like Byron. 
 And it seems to have been specially so in Byron's case ; for 
 
 the period in which the G family lived Under his roof was 
 
 the only one in the whole of his recorded career to which his 
 friends and admirers can look back with feelings even approach- 
 ing to satisfaction and respect. 
 
 I remember calling on Lady Blessington one day when she 
 had just rec.eived a long letter from Madame G , a consid- 
 erable portion of which she read to me, as being singularly 
 characteristic of Italian notions of the proprieties of social life. 
 The letter was written apropos to some strictures which had 
 appeared in an English journal, on the impropriety or immoral- 
 ity of the liaison between Madame G and Byron, and on 
 
 the fact of the father and brother of the lady having resided in 
 the same house with the lovers. The peculiarity of Madame 
 
 G 's letter was the earnest, and at the same time perfectly 
 
 naive and artless way in which she contended that the main 
 point of the charge against her in the English journal was pre- 
 cisely that on which she rested her entire exculpation from
 
 308 COUNTESS OF BLESSIhGTOX. 
 
 either sin or blame. And she went on to declare, in the most 
 solemn manner, that she had never passed a night under 
 Byron's roof that ivas not sanctioned by the presence of her 
 father and brother. She concluded by earnestly begging Lady 
 Blessington to defend her character from the attacks in ques- 
 tion, on the special ground of the fact just cited ! 
 
 Among the other remarkable persons whom I met at Lady 
 Blessington's about this period were the Due and Duchesse 
 de Guiche (now Due and Duchesse de Grammont) and the 
 Baron d'Haussez ; the two former the chief persons of the 
 household of Charles X. and his family, and the latter one of 
 his ministers at the period of the famous Ordonnance. 
 
 The Duchesse de Guiche was extremely beautiful, and of 
 that class of beauty the rarity of which in France makes it 
 even more esteemed than with us, where it is much less un- 
 common : a blonde, with blue eyes, fair hair, a majestic figure, 
 an exquisite complexion, and in manner the model of a high- 
 born and high-bred French woman. She is a daughter of the 
 late General and Comtesse d'Orsay. 1 
 
 Baron D'Haussez, the Minister of Marine of Charles X., 
 gave one the idea of anything but a minister of state. He was 
 a plain, good-humored, easy-going person, with little of his 
 country's vivacity, much appearance of bonhomie, and alto- 
 gether more English than French in manner and tempera- 
 ment. 
 
 1 The late Duke de Grammont was, during the reign of the Bourbons, a captain 
 of one of the companies of the Gardes du Corp, and Lieutenant-general. He did 
 not appear to have inherited any of that gaiete de cceur and that happy spirit of 
 social enjoyment which one naturally associates with the name of Grammont. His 
 air and deportment were grave almost to severity ; his manners and tone of mind 
 were evidently tinctured by the sufferings and cruelties that his family had endured 
 during the first Revolution. Horace Walpole has drawn the character of his 
 mother, the Duchesse de Grammont, in no very favorable colors. Yet she displayed 
 a spirit and courage amounting to heroism when she was dragged before the bloody 
 tribunal of the Revolution. She was the sister of the famous Due de Choiseul, and 
 is believed to have exercised more influence over him, during his ministry, than any 
 of his contemporaries. 
 
 The Due de Guiche (now Due de Grammont) served with distinction in the Eng- 
 lish army in the Peninsula, as Captain in the toth Hussars. He is a descendant of 
 In belle Corisande.
 
 SEA MO RE PLACE AND GORE HOUSE. 309 
 
 Another of the more recent habitues of Gore House was 
 Prince (now the Emperor) Louis Napoleon, who, after his ele- 
 vation to power, treated Lady Blessington with marked dis- 
 tinction, and whose favor, together with her family connection 
 and long intimacy with several of the heads of the oldest and 
 noblest families of France, would, had she lived, have given to 
 her a position in the social circles of Paris even more brilliant 
 than that which she had so long held in London. 
 
 But by far the most remarkable person I was accustomed to 
 meet at Lady Blessington's was the late Count d'Orsay, 
 brother to the above-named Duchesse de Guiche (now Duch- 
 esse de Grammont) and uncle to the present Due de Guiche. 
 
 This accomplished nobleman and gentleman, and truly dis- 
 tinguished man, was for so long a period .of his life "the ob- 
 served of all observers " in this country, that a brief Recollec- 
 tion of him will perhaps not be thought inappropriate to these 
 pages, especially as I do not believe that any detailed notice 
 of him has been given to the world, either here or in his native 
 country, France, since his death. 
 
 It is a singular fact that many of the most remarkable men 
 of recent times those men who have exercised the most ex- 
 tensive influence over the social, political, and literary condi- 
 tion and institutions of the country to which they have at- 
 tached themselves have been strangers to that country 
 foreigners in the strictest sense of the phrase in birth, in 
 education, in physical temperament, in manners, in general 
 tone and turn of mind in all things, even in personal ap- 
 pearance. And this has been especially the case in France. 
 The most remarkable minister France ever had (Mazarin) was 
 an Italian ; her two most remarkable writers, male and female, 
 Rousseau and De Stael, were Genevese ; her most remarkable 
 actor (Talma) was (by birth at least) an Englishman ; her most 
 remarkable soldier, statesman, and monarch not three, but 
 one was a Corsican ; and the consummate man who prom- 
 ises to be almost as remarkable as his illustrious relative, and 
 has already done nearly as much good to France as he did, 
 without any of the counterbalancing mischief, is Corsican by 
 his father's side and Italian by his mother's.
 
 310 COUNTESS OF BLESSIiVGTON. 
 
 The remark is perhaps less true of England than of any 
 other European nation ; but this only makes it the more 
 worthy of record that the most remarkable man of that coun- 
 try, during an entire twenty years, so far as regards that im- 
 portant department of a nation's habits and institutions which 
 affect the immediate well-being and personal feelings of the 
 great body of its cultivated classes namely, the social con- 
 dition and manners of these classes was a foreigner ; and 
 not only a foreigner, but a Frenchman born, educated, and 
 bred up to manhood in that country between whose manners 
 and modes of thought and feeling, and those of England, 
 there has ever been a greater amount of difference and dis- 
 similarity than between those of any other two civilized people 
 under the sun. This fact is no less worthy of note by 
 Frenchmen than it is by the denizens of that nation for whose 
 mingled amusement and information these sketches are more 
 especially intended ; and it is no less creditable to one people 
 than to the other ; to the one, for having produced the all-ac- 
 complished person whose portrait I am about to sketch ; to 
 the other, for having appreciated his remarkable qualities, and 
 permitted them to exercise their just and natural influence, in 
 spite of the most rooted prejudices, and in the face of other 
 circumstances singularly adverse to the sort of influence in 
 question. 
 
 It used to be the fashion in England to describe George the 
 Fourth as " the first gentleman in Europe ; " and the rest of 
 the world seemed half inclined to admit the claim ! George 
 the Fourth, who is now pretty generally allowed (even in 
 England) to have been little better, at his best, than a graceful 
 and good-tempered voluptuary ; a shallow egotist while young, 
 a heartless debauchee when old, and at all times, young or old, 
 an exacting yet faithless friend, a bitter and implacable enemy, 
 a harsh and indifferent father, a cruel and tyrannical husband, 
 and, as an occupant of the supreme station to which he was 
 called, only praiseworthy as having the good sense to bear in 
 mind that he was the ruler not of Russia but of England. 
 
 Such thirty years ago was England's beau-ideal of that
 
 SEA MORE PLACE AND GORE HOUSE. 311 
 
 highest and noblest phase of the human character, " a gentle- 
 man." She has learned better since, and it is by a French- 
 man that the lesson has been taught her ; and if now asked 
 to point to the finest gentleman Europe has known since the 
 days of our own Sidneys, Herberts, Peterboroughs, etc., she 
 would with one accord turn to no other than the Count 
 d'Orsay, though he had nothing better to show for the dis- 
 tinction than his perfect manner, his noble person, his varied 
 accomplishments, and his universal popularity, no less with 
 his own sex than with that which is best qualified to appre- 
 ciate the character in question. 
 
 It was the singular good fortune of Count d'Orsay or 
 ~ather let us call it his singular merit, for it has arisen solely 
 from the rare qualities and endowments of his mind and heart 
 to be the chosen friend and companion of the finest wits 
 and the ripest and profoundest scholars of his day, while all 
 the idler portion of the world were looking to him merely as 
 
 " The glass of fashion, and the mould of form." 
 
 He was the favorite associate, on terms of perfect intellectual 
 equality, of a Byron, a Bulwer, and a Landor ; and, at the 
 same time, the oracle, in dress and every other species of 
 dandyism, of a Chesterfield, a Pembroke, and a Wilton. 
 
 I have heard one of the most distinguished of English lit- 
 terateurs declare that the most profound and enlightened re- 
 marks he ever met with on the battle of Waterloo were con- 
 tained in a familiar letter from the Count d'Orsay to one of his 
 friends ; and of this there can be no dispute that incompar- 
 ably the finest effigies which have yet been produced of the 
 two heroes of that mighty contest are from the hand of 
 Count d'Orsay. His equestrian statues of Napoleon and 
 Wellington, small as they are, are admitted by all true judges 
 to be among the finest works of art of modern times. 
 
 In the sister art of painting, Count d'Orsay's successes 
 were no less remarkable. His portrait of the most intellectual 
 Englishman of his time, Lord Lyndhurst, is the most in- 
 tellectual work of its class that has appeared since the death
 
 312 COUNTESS OF BLESSINGTON. 
 
 of the late President of the Royal Academy ; and there is 
 scarcely a living celebrity in the worlds of politics, of litera- 
 ture, of art, or of fashion, respectively, of whom Count 
 d'Orsay has not sketched the most characteristic likeness ex- 
 tant. Most of these latter were confined to the portfolio of 
 the late Lady Blessington, and are therefore only known to 
 the favored habitues of Gore House. But as those habitues 
 included all that was distinguished in taste and dilettantiism, 
 their fiat on such matters is final ; and it is such as I have 
 described. 1 
 
 But this " Admirable Crichton " of the nineteenth century 
 was, like his prototype just named, no less remarkable for 
 personal gifts and accomplishments than he was for those 
 which are usually attributed to intellectual qualities ; though 
 many of them depend more on bodily conformation than the 
 pride of intellect will allow us to admit. Count d'Orsay was 
 one of the very best riders in a country whose riders are ad- 
 mitted to be the best in the world ; he was one of the keenest 
 and most accomplished sportsmen in a nation whose sporting 
 supremacy is the only undisputed one they possess ; he was 
 the best judge of a horse among a people of horse-dealers and 
 horse-jockeys ; he was among the best cricketers in a country 
 where all are cricketers, and where alone that noblest of games 
 exists ; he was the best swimmer, the best shot, the best 
 swordsman, the best boxer, the best wrestler, the best tennis- 
 player ; and he was admitted to be the best judge and umpire 
 in all these amusements. 
 
 To crown his personal gifts and accomplishments, Count 
 d'Orsay was incomparably the handsomest man of his time ; 
 and, what is still more remarkable, he retained this distinction 
 for five-and-twenty years uniting to a figure scarcely inferior 
 in the perfection of its form to that of the Apollo, a head and 
 face that blended the grace and dignity of the Antinous with 
 the beaming intellect of the younger Bacchus, and the almost 
 feminine softness and beauty of the Ganymede. 
 
 The position which Count d'Orsay held in the haute monde 
 
 1 Fac-similes of many of these portraits have been published by Mitchell, Bond 
 Street.
 
 SEAMOKE PLACE AND GORE HOUSE. 313 
 
 of London society, for more than twenty years, is such as was 
 rarely held, at any other time, by any other person in this 
 country ; and this in spite of such peculiar and numerous dis- 
 advantages as no other man ever attempted to overcome, 
 much less succeeded. In the first place he was, as we have 
 seen, a Frenchman born and bred ; and he never changed or 
 repudiated the habits and manners of his native country, or in 
 any way warped or adapted them to those of the people among 
 whom he had nevertheless become naturalized. He spoke 
 English with a strong French accent and idiom, and, I verily 
 believe, would not have got rid of these if he could ; his tone 
 of thinking and feeling, and all the general habits of his mind, 
 were French ; the style of his dress, of his equipages, of his 
 personal appearance and bearing, were all essentially and em- 
 inently French. 
 
 In the next place, with tastes and personal habits magnifi- 
 cent and generous even to a fault, Count d'Orsay was very far 
 from being rich ; consequently, at every step, he was obliged 
 to tread upon some of -the shopkeeping prejudices of English 
 life. Unlike most of the denizens of this " nation of shop- 
 keepers," he very wisely looked upon a tradesman as a being 
 born to give credit, but who never does fulfill that part of his 
 calling if he can help it, except where he believes that it will 
 conduct him, if not to payment, at least to profit. The fash- 
 ionable tradesmen of London knew that to be patronized by 
 Count d'Orsay was a fortune to them ; and yet they had the 
 face to expect that he would pay their bills after they had run 
 for a " reasonable " period, whether it suited his convenience 
 to do so or not ! As if, by rights, he ought to have paid them 
 at all, or as if they ought not to have paid him for showering 
 fortune on them by his smile, if it had not been that his honor 
 would have forbidden such an arrangement, even with "a 
 nation of shopkeepers ! " Nay, I believe they sometimes 
 perpetrated the mingled injustice and stupidity of invoking 
 the law to their aid, and arresting him ! Shutting up within 
 four walls the man whose going forth was the signal for all 
 the rest of the world to think of opening their purse-strings,
 
 314 COUNTESS OF BLESSINGTON. 
 
 to compass something or other which they beheld in that 
 mirror of all fashionable requirements ! It was a little fortune 
 to his tiger to tell the would-be dandies dwelling north of Ox- 
 ford Street where d'Orsay bought his last new cab-horse, or 
 who built his tilbury or his coat ; and yet it is said that his 
 horse-dealer, his coachmaker, and his tailors, have been known 
 to shut up from sight this type and model by which all the 
 male "nobility and gentry" of London horsed, equipaged, and 
 attired themselves ! 
 
 Another of the great disadvantages against which Count 
 d'Orsay had to contend, during his whole life, was the pecul- 
 iarity of his social position. And these social disadvantages 
 and anomalies acted with tenfold force in a country where the 
 pretenses to moral purity are in an inverse ratio to the prac- 
 tice. It will scarcely be disputed that London is, at this pres- 
 ent writing, not merely the most immoral, but the most openly 
 and indecently immoral capital in Europe. Things not only 
 happen every day in England, but are every day recorded 
 there for the amusement and information of the breakfast ta- 
 bles where sit her matrons and maidens, that not only do not 
 and could not happen elsewhere, but could not be put into 
 words if they did. And yet in England it was, that because 
 Count d'Orsay, while a mere boy, made the fatal mistake of 
 marrying one beautiful woman, while he was, without daring 
 to confess it even to himself, madly devoted to another still 
 more beautiful, whom he could not marry because, I say, 
 under these circumstances, and discovering his fatal error 
 when too late, he separated himself from his wife almost at 
 the church door, he was, during the greater part of his social 
 career in England, cut off from the advantages of the more 
 fastidious portion of high female society by the indignant fiat 
 of its heads and leaders. And this was in England, where 
 people who can afford it change wives with each other by Act 
 of Parliament, giving and receiving the estimated difference of 
 the value of the article in pounds sterling ! And where such 
 an arrangement does not necessarily preclude even the female 
 parties to it from enjoying the social privileges of their class.
 
 SEAMORE PLACE AND GORE HOUSE. 315 
 
 and does not at all affect the males ! In England ! where 
 no married man in high life is thought the worse of, or treated 
 the worse, even by the female friends of his wife, for being 
 suspected of having a mistress or two. In England ! where 
 every wwmarried man in high life is compelled to keep a mis- 
 tress whether he likes it or not, unless he would put his char- 
 acter in jeopardy ! 
 
 If the explanation of this apparent anomaly in the case of 
 Count d'Orsay be asked, all that can be replied is, that his 
 supposed conduct under the difficult circumstances in which 
 he found himself was not exactly selon les regies of English 
 society. Moreover, if he really did commit a breach of these 
 rules (which, by the bye, half the world, and they by no means 
 the worst-informed half, did not believe), the scandal of a tacit 
 avowal of the breach was studiously and successfully avoided ; 
 which is a great crime in England, where you may be as im- 
 moral as you please, provided you show no signs of being 
 ashamed of it. 
 
 I will conclude these recollections of Count d'Orsay by some 
 characteristic remarks, from a letter given me by Lady Bless- 
 ington, relative to the Count's portrait of Lord Byron, which 
 forms the frontispiece to her " Conversations " with the noble 
 poet, and had previously appeared in the " New Monthly Mag- 
 azine," where the " Conversations " were first published. As 
 this is, I believe, the only passage of Count d'Orsay's writing 
 that has ever been made public, I shall give it in the original 
 French. 
 
 " Le portrait de Lord Byron, dans le dernier numdro du 
 ' New Monthly Magazine,' a attire" sur lui des attaques sans 
 nombre et pourquoi ? Parcequ'il ne coincide pas exacte- 
 ment avec les ide*es exagerdes de MM. les Romantiques, qui 
 finiront, je pense, par faire de Thomas Moore un ge"ant, pourvu 
 qu'ils restent quelque temps sans le voir. II est difficile, je 
 pense, de satisfaire le public, surtout lorsqu'il est decide* a ne 
 croire un portrait ressemblant qu'autant qu'il rivalise d'exagdr- 
 ation avec l'ide"e qu'il se forme d'un sujet ; et si jusqu'a ce jour 
 les portraits public's de Lord Byron sont passes sains et saufs
 
 316 COUNTESS OF BLESSINGTON. 
 
 d'attaque, c'est que 1'artiste ne s'e"toit attache" qu'a faire un 
 beau tableau, auquel son sujet ne ressembloit qu'un peu. Re- 
 dresser 1'espritdu public sur la re"elle apparence de Lord By- 
 ron est sans contredit plus difficile a faire, qu'a prouver que le 
 meilleur compliment que sa memoire ait rec_ue, est la convic- 
 tion intime que 1'on a, qu'il devoit etre d'un beau ide"al, pour 
 marcher de front avec ses ouvrages ; ainsi rien moins qu'une 
 perfection n'est capable de satisfaire le public litte"raire. II 
 n'en est pas moins vrai que les deux seuls portraits ve'ridiques 
 de Lord Byron pre'sente's jusqu'k ce jour au public, sont celui 
 en tete de 1'ouvrage de Leigh Hunt, et celui du ' New 
 Monthly.' Qu'ils satisfassent, ou non, la pre*sente generation 
 d'enthousiastes, peu importe, car trop gene'ralement elle est 
 influence par des motifs secondaries. On trouve dans ce mo- 
 ment des parents de Lord Byron qui se gendarment a 1'idee, 
 qu'on le decrive montant a cheval avec une veste de nankin 
 brodd et des guetres ; et qui ne peuvent digeYer qu'il soit rep- 
 re'sente' tres maigre, lorsqu'il est plus que prouve", que per- 
 sonne n'e*toit aussi maigre que lui en 1823 a Genes. Le fait 
 est qu'il paroit qu'au lieu de regarder les poetes avec les yeux, 
 il faut pour le moins des verres grossissants, ou des prismes 
 si particuliers qu'on auroit de la peine a se les procurer. 
 C'est pour cette raison qu'il est probable que 1'auteur de 
 1'Esquisse regrette de s'en etre rapporte a ses propres yeux, 
 et d'avoir satisfait toutes les connoissances pre'sentes de Lord 
 Byron, qui ont alors si maladroitement intercedes pour la pub- 
 lication de cette triste et infortune'e esquisse, qui rend le 
 ' Court Journal ' et tant d'autres inconsolables." 
 
 Lady Blessington died suddenly at Paris on June 4, 1849, 
 while in the (supposed) enjoyment of her usual health and 
 spirits. She had dined, the day before, with her friend the 
 Duchesse de Grammont, and a few days previously with 
 Prince Louis Napoleon at the Elyse"e Bourbon. 
 
 Feeling unwell on the morning of the day of her death, she 
 sent for a physician, who was a homreopathist, and as her at- 
 tack was one which demanded instant and vigorous measures,
 
 SEA MO RE PLACE AND GORE HOUSE. 317 
 
 she was, like poor Malibran under similar circumstances, lost 
 to that world to which she had administered so much pleasure 
 and instruction. Only two or three days before her death, she 
 had completed the furnishing of her new residence (Rue du 
 Cercle), and had removed into it, and all the gay world of 
 Paris were looking with anxiety for the commencement of her 
 reunions. 
 
 The following list comprises, I believe, the whole of Lady 
 Blessington's published writings, with the exception of Mag- 
 azine papers, and her contributions to her own annuals, the 
 " Keepsake " and the " Book of Beauty." 
 
 " The Magic Lantern," " A Tour in the Netherlands," 
 " Desultory Thoughts," "The Idler in Italy," " The Idler in 
 France," " Conversations with Lord Byron," " The Confes- 
 sions of an Elderly Lady," " The Confessions of an Elderly 
 Gentleman," " The Governess," " Grace Cassidy," " The Two 
 Friends," " The Victims of Society," " Meredith," " The Lot- 
 tery of Life," " The Belle of a Season," and " Strathern." 
 Several of the latter works are novels in three volumes.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Blessington, Countess of. Lawrence's 
 portrait of, 283. Patmore's first sight 
 of, 284. Beauty of, 285. Fascinations 
 of, 287. Early friends of, 288. Leaves 
 England, 289. Feted at Avignon, 289. 
 Arrival at Genoa, 290. Visits Byron 
 at Albaro, 290. Introduced to Byron, 
 291. Intimacy with Byron, 291. Her 
 happy influence on him, 292. Resi- 
 dence at Vomero, 294. At Paris, 294. 
 Splendor of her sleeping-room, 295. 
 Her jointure, 296. Description of in 
 Hyde Park, 296. " Conversations with 
 Lord Byron," 298. Talking, not writ- 
 ing, her forte, 299. Letters to Pat- 
 more, 300. Intimacy with Madame 
 Guiccioli, 307. Some of her friends, 
 308. Death, 316. Writings of, 317. 
 
 Blessington, Lord. Visits Byron at 
 Genoa, 290. Byron's regard for, 292. 
 Lavishes expense on his wife, 295. 
 
 Burleigh House. Hazlitt on its pictures, 
 131- 
 
 Byron, Lord. In a gondola with John 
 Scott, 68. Love adventure of, 69. Only 
 a lord to Hazlitt, 161. Hazlitt's opin- 
 ion of his poetry, 162. Attacked by 
 Campbell, 270. Campbell explains an 
 incident in Moore's " Life of Byron," 
 279. Visited by the Blessingtons, 290. 
 Introduced to Lady Blessington, 291. 
 Intimacy with Lady Blessington, 291. 
 Influence of Lady Blessington on, 291. 
 Moved to tears in her presence, 291. 
 Esteem for his sister. 292. Hates clever 
 women, 292. Writes a letter to his 
 wife, 293. 
 
 Campbell, Thomas. Fondness for low 
 company, 251. A thorough republi- 
 can, 252. Not the author of two books 
 that bear his name, 253. How he ex- 
 plained the act, 253. Offered the ed- 
 itorship of the " New Monthly," 254. 
 
 Knows the money value of his name, 
 254. Salary as editor, 255. A working 
 editor provided for him, 255. Note to 
 Patmore, 256. Ignorance of nature, 
 258. Getting into literary scrapes, 259. 
 Writes a letter to Northcote, 263. 
 " The diabolical Hazlitt," 264. An 
 excellent host, 266. Devoted to the 
 ladies, 266. True to his calling, 268. 
 Popularity, 269. Advocates the cause 
 of Lady Byron, 270. Draws a frightful 
 inference, 270. Easily tempted, 271. 
 Intense self-consciousness, 273. Fas- 
 tidiousness, 273. Not a lover of nat- 
 ure but of crowds, 274. Patmore's 
 description of, 276. Letter to Moore 
 about Byron, 279. Letter about the 
 authorship of the " Exile of Erin," 
 280. 
 
 D'Orsay, Count Alfred. The friend of 
 wits and scholars, 311. Remarks on 
 the battle of Waterloo, 311. His eques- 
 trian statues, 311. Excellence of his 
 sketches, 312. Handsomest man of his 
 time, 312. French in everything, 313. 
 Magnificence of his habits, 313. A for- 
 tune to tradesmen, 313. Peculiarity of 
 his social position, 315. Sent to Cov- 
 entry, 314. Letter from, 315. 
 
 Dryden, John. Lamb's opinion of, 41. 
 
 Fonthill Abbey. Hazlitt at, 129. 
 
 Guiccioli, Madame. Intimacy with Lady 
 Blessington, 307. Asks Lady Bless- 
 ington to defend her character, 308. 
 
 Haydon, Benjamin Robert. Anecdote 
 of, 114. He would have money, 116. 
 Suppressed passage about, 117. Haz- 
 litt s acquaintance with, 198. Egotism 
 of, 198. Introduces Hazlitt, Keats, 
 and Wordsworth into his picture of
 
 320 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Christ, 199. His triumph over Hazlitt, 
 200. Hazlitt asks his advice, 200. 
 Hazlitt, William. Defended by Lamb, 44. 
 Lamb's appreciation of, 46. First in- 
 terview of Patmore, 51. Personal ap- 
 pearance, 51. Plain speaking of, 54. 
 Residence, 56. Conversation with Pat- 
 more, 57. A good hater, 60. Walking 
 with Patmore, 61. Ingrained selfish- 
 ness of, 62. Abuses Patmore in the 
 "London Magazine," 65. Dines with 
 Patmore at John Scott's, 67. Intimacy 
 with Patmore, 69. Incapable of friend- 
 ship, 70. Compared with Rousseau, 72. 
 Morbid imagination, 73. A happy 
 evening, 75. Feelings for women, 76. 
 Expressive face, 77. Features of, 77. 
 How he entered a room, 78. Con- 
 founded by servants, 79. Mental vaga- 
 ries, 79. In lodgings, 80. At break- 
 fast, 81. Fondness for black tea, 81. 
 A great drinker of water, 82. "The 
 pimpled Hazlitt," 82. Takes hot sup- 
 pers, 83. Taverns frequented by him, 
 83. At the Southampton Coffee House, 
 83. At the theatre, 84. Instantaneous 
 criticism, 84. Monomania in politics, 
 85. Despondency of, 88. Friendship 
 for Lamb, 88. Happy at Lamb's par- 
 ties, 90. At Basil Montagu's, 90. Of- 
 fensive personal reference, 90. At Net- 
 ting Hill, 92. With Northcote, 93. 
 Dislike of Northcote, 93. " Boswell 
 Redivivus," 93. Conversations with 
 Northcote, 94. Suggestions to North- 
 cote, 94. What attracted him to North- 
 cote, 95. With Leigh Hunt, 96. Self- 
 absorption, 97. At Patmore's, 97. 
 What the Patmores saw in him, 98. 
 Fancied effect of personal attacks on 
 him, loo. The " Blackwood " bugbear, 
 100. Hbursof writing, ipi. Method of 
 composition, 102. Rapidity of his writ- 
 ing, 103. Hates writing, 103. Procrastin- 
 ation, 104. Horror of owing money, 204. 
 Takes no pleasure in his own articles, 
 105. What he might have been, 107. 
 Message to Colburn, 107. At " The 
 Hut," 108. Faults of his style, no. 
 Anecdotes of Jeffrey, ni. Opinion of 
 Mrs. Siddons, 112. Opinion of Scott, 
 112. Anecdote of Lord Hertford, 112. 
 Anecdotes of a manager, 113. Anecdote 
 of Haydon, 114. American coolness, 
 114. Anecdotes of Dawe, 115. How 
 Haydon borrowed money, 116. Sup- 
 pressed paper concerning Haydon, 117. 
 . As an artist, 119. Thinks he would 
 like to see a prize-fight, 121. At a prize- 
 fight, 122. Power of describing at sight, 
 123. Association in smells, 125. A 
 night at a country inn, 126. Remark 
 
 to Patmore, 128. Description of the 
 prize-fight in the " New Monthly," 128. 
 At Fonthill Abbey, 129. As a cicerone, 
 129. His first impressions, 130. At 
 Burleigh House, 131. Moral effect of 
 the country on, 132. Life in London, 
 132. Effect of civilities on him, 133. 
 Anecdote of Beckford and a servant, 
 134. A " parquiset," 134. At ease 
 with William Hone, 135. Melan- 
 choly with women, 135. The dreadful 
 look, 136. Evenings at the Southamp- 
 ton, 137. Uncertain of himself in com- 
 pany, 138. Hone's happy effect on, 
 138. Loves the smell of grog, 140. 
 Fondness for Barry Cornwall, 141. Ex- 
 tending his confidences, 142. A fa- 
 vorite companion, 143. Severity of his 
 criticisms, 145. Admiration for John 
 Hunt, 147. Visits John Hunt in pris- 
 on, 148. Excellence of one of his 
 paintings, 149. His copies from Ti- 
 tian, 150. Purchases them from Pat- 
 more, 152. Opinion of Hunt's writings, 
 155. Not a complete reader, 158. Ad- 
 miration for Scott, 159. Dislike of By- 
 ron's poetry", 162. Awful rages, 162. 
 Unjust to Shelley, 163. Why he hated 
 Moore, 165. Disparagement of the 
 Lake poets, 167. Wishes to review 
 Bulwer, 174. Opinion of Landor, 175. 
 Appreciation of Barry Cornwall's poet- 
 ry, 177. Regard for Sheridan Knowles, 
 178. "Liber Amoris," 182. Extract 
 from letters to Patmore, 184. Marriage 
 of, 190. Mrs. Hazlitt's property, 191. 
 Remark about his brother-in-law's news- 
 paper, 191. Character of Mrs. Hazlitt, 
 192. In Milton's house, 193. Pros- 
 pects not bright, 194. As a reporter, 
 195. Injured by stimulants, 196. Writ- 
 ing for the newspapers, 196. Falling 
 out with Lamb, 197. Acquaintance 
 with Haydon, 198. Haydon's opinion 
 of, 199. Haydon's supposed triumph, 
 200. Before the looking-glass, 200. Par- 
 ental affection, 200. Goes for a par- 
 son, 201. Mrs. Hazlitt's finery, 202. 
 Marriage not a happy one, 203. His 
 child a peacemaker, 205. Letter to his 
 child, 206. Kindness to his child, 207. 
 Lodges with a tailor, 207. Smitten with 
 Sarah Walker, 207. Conversation with, 
 208. Lives separate from his wife, 2 1 1. 
 Proposes a formal separation, 211. De- 
 parture for Scotland, 211. Letters to 
 Patmore, 212. Mrs. Hazlitt lands at 
 Leith, 215. Extracts from Mrs. Haz- 
 litt's diary, 216. Letters to Patmore, 
 223. Mrs. Hazlitt's diary resumed, 226. 
 Letters to Patmore, 228. More ex- 
 tracts from Mrs. Hazlitt's diary, 230
 
 INDEX. 
 
 321 
 
 Divorce obtained, 236. No ill-will, 236. 
 Alarm about MS. and pictures, 237. 
 Completing his Life of Napoleon, 238. 
 Copyright valueless to him, 239. 
 Threatened with sickness, 239. Wishes 
 his son to be a gentleman, 240. Strug- 
 gling with death, 240. Death, 241. 
 Old fashioned manners, 243. Descrip- 
 tion of his person by Talfourd, 242. 
 Remark of Southey about him, 243. 
 His shake of the hand, 244. "A deal 
 of truth in it," 245. Dress, 245. Diet, 
 246. At his best at Winterslow, 247. 
 Creating a blockade, 247. 
 
 Hazlitt, Mrs. Sarah, marriage of, 190. 
 Settlement of her property, 191. Reply 
 to her father, 192. Disposition of, 202. 
 Fond of finery, 202. Opinion of her 
 brother's manners, 202. Character of, 
 204. Goes to Scotland to get a divorce, 
 215. Extracts from her diary, 216, 226, 
 230. Divorce obtained, 236. 
 
 Hertford, Lord. Anecdote of, 112. 
 
 Hone, William. Hazlitt at ease with, 
 
 135- 
 
 Hunt, John. Hazlitt's opinion of, 147. 
 Confined for a political libel, 147. Per- 
 sonal appearance, 148. 
 
 Hunt, Leigh. Attracts Hazlitt, 96. Gen- 
 ius of, not appreciated by Hazlitt, 154. 
 Effect of his social qualities, 155. De- 
 scription of Hazlitt's shaking hand, 244. 
 Speaks his mind to Hazlitt, 245. 
 
 Jeffrey, Francis. Anecdotes of, in. 
 
 Knowles, Sheridan. Hazlitt's regard for, 
 
 178. Harshly criticised by Patmore, 
 
 179. Patmore's introduction to, 179. 
 Has an explanation with Patmore, 179. 
 Hazlitt's criticism of, 180. 
 
 Lamb, Charles. Meets Patmore at Haz- 
 litt's, 4. Not interested in Patmore's 
 book, 4. Description of, 6. His Jewish 
 look, 9. Not an uncommon character, 
 10. Personal appearance, 10. Dress, 
 10. Lamb done brown, by Words- 
 worth, it. Character of Lamb's vis- 
 itors, 12. Unconventionality of, 12. 
 On a par with his company, 13. His 
 sympathy with mankind, 13. At his 
 best at home, 13. Uncertainty of his 
 conduct, 14. Among his books, 15. 
 His dog Dash, 16. Letter to Patmore, 
 17. Letter from Patmore in reply, 20. 
 Domestic arrangements, 22. Beckey, 
 22. At Enfield, 23. Swindled by an 
 old couple, 24. Wordsworth fond of 
 sugar, 24. Self-sacrifice, 25. Bored 
 with the country, 25. London his 
 world, 26. In the country, 27. Temp- 
 
 tation of his walks, 27. Mary's saluta- 
 tion about ale, 28. Mary too anxious 
 about him, 78. Gin and water at En- 
 field Chace, 28. What would untie his 
 tongue, 29. Writing a task to him, 29. 
 Effect of stimulants to make him talk, 
 30. Letter to Patmore, 30. Intellect- 
 ual character, 33. His restlessness, 34. 
 In his book-room, 34. Restless and 
 fidgety, 35. Secret of his rambles, 36. 
 An odd correspondent, 37. Embar- 
 rassed by a portrait, 37. Delicacy for a 
 sheep-stealer, 37. Intimacy with Haz- 
 litt, 38. Joke on Almack's, 39. Anec- 
 dote of Northcote, 40. What he would 
 have done with L. E. L., 40. L. E. L. 
 in pantaloons, 40. Opinion of Bernard 
 Barton, 40. Remark to Crabbe Rob- 
 inson, 40. Discussion with Leigh 
 Hunt, 41. Opinion of Dryden, 41. 
 Pun on Adelaide Procter, 42. Remark 
 to Coleridge, 42. In at one ear and 
 out at the other, 42. Contrasted with 
 Hazlitt, 44. Letter to Southey, 44. 
 Miss Kelly hears of his death, 47. Let- 
 ter to Mrs. Hazlitt, 239. 
 
 Lamb, Mary. Her impression of Pat- 
 more's book, 4. Relations with her 
 brother, 5. " Now, Charles, you 're not 
 going to take any ale ? " 28. Restricts 
 Charles too much, 28. 
 
 Landor, Walter Savage. Hazlitt's high 
 opinion of, 175. 
 
 "Liber Amoris, an injury to Hazlitt's 
 reputation, 182. 
 
 Montagu, Basil. Hazlitt a visitor at 
 
 the house of, 80. 
 Moore, Thomas. Disliked by Hazlitt, 
 
 165. 
 Mouncey, Mr. A favorite companion of 
 
 Hazlitt, 143. Character of, 144. Early 
 
 associates, 144. t 
 
 Northcote, James. Anecdote of, 40. 
 Conversations with Hazlitt, 93. Haz- 
 lett's suggestions to, 94. What at- 
 tracted Hazlitt, 95. Propensity to say 
 cutting things, 260. Chuckles over the 
 wounds he inflicted, 261. Makes free 
 with the character of Dr. Mudge, 261. 
 "That diabolical Hazlitt," 262. An 
 old humbug, 263. Note from Camp- 
 bell, 264. 
 
 Patmore, P. G. A j'eu d'esfirtt of, 3. 
 Nervous of consequences, 3. Hazlitt 
 not displeased, 4. Charles and Mary 
 Lamb, 4. Miss Lamb's opinion of, 4. 
 Visits Lamb at Colnbrook, 5. Descrip- 
 tion of Lamb, 6. Letter of Lamb to, 
 17. Reply, 20. Conversation with
 
 322 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Lamb, 24. Letter from Lamb to, 30. 
 Extracts from Diary, 39. First inter- 
 view with Hazlitt, 51. Offers to crit- 
 icise Hazlitt in " Blackwood," 57. 
 Walks home with Hazlitt, 61. Attack 
 of Hazlitt, 65. Dines with Hazlitt at 
 John Scott's, 68. Letter from Hazlitt, 
 107. Extracts from Diary, in. Goes 
 to a prize-fight, 122. Returns to Lon- 
 don, 124. A book for a prize-fight, 127. 
 Remarks of Hazlitt, 128. At Fonthill 
 Abbey with Hazlitt, 129. At Burleigh 
 House, 131. Excursion to Stourhead, 
 132. Opinion of Mr. Mouncey, 144. 
 A visit with Hazlitt to John Hunt, 148. 
 Possesses two pictures of Hazlitt's, 151. 
 Sells pictures to Hazlitt, 152. Recom- 
 mends "Paul Clifford "to Hazlitt, 174. 
 Meets Sheridan Knowles at Hazlitt's, 
 179. Cordiality of Knowles, 179. Ex- 
 tracts of letters from Hazlitt, 184. In- 
 troduction to Thomas Campbell, 251. 
 Note from Campbell, 256. " Letters 
 from England," 257. Visits Northcote, 
 262. Note from Campbell, 265. De- 
 scription of Campbell and Rogers, 276. 
 Prints a lette_r to Moore for Campbell, 
 278. First sight of Lady Blessington, 
 284. Letters from Lady Blessington, 
 300. 
 
 Prize-fight. Hazlitt at, 122. 
 
 Procter, Adelaide. Lamb's poem on, 42. 
 
 Procter, Bryan Waller (" Barry Corn- 
 
 wall ") Hazlitt's fondness for his so- 
 ciety, 141. Hazlitt's appreciation of 
 his poetry, 177. 
 
 Reynold?, George Nugent. Concerning 
 his claim to the authorship of " The 
 Exile of Erin," 280. 
 
 Rousseau, Jean Jacques. Reference to 
 by Moore, 165. 
 
 Scott, John. Gives a dinner to Hazlitt 
 and Patmore, 67. Anecdotes of By- 
 ron, 68. 
 
 Scott, Sir Walter. Hazlitt's feelings 
 towards, 112 Hazlitt's intellectual 
 admiration of, 159. 
 
 Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Hazlitt's dislike 
 of, 164. 
 
 Siddons, Mrs. Sarah. Hazlitt's opinion 
 of, 112. 
 
 Talfourd, Thomas Noon. Description 
 of Hazlitt, 242. 
 
 Walker, Sarah References to in Haz- 
 litt's letters, 184-189. Hazlitt smit- 
 ten with, 207. Her interest in Haz- 
 litt, 208. Conversation with Hazlitt, 
 208. Letters to Hazlitt, 212. 
 
 Winterslow, Hazlitt at, 103. 
 
 Wordsworth, William. Description of 
 Lamb, ir. Hazlitt's estimation of, 
 171. Lamb's critique on '' The Ex- 
 cursion," 198.
 
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