very doubtful if I could; not at all expecting to finish it, but merely to pass away the time; however, in a couple of hours, I made a very fair copy, which I intend to let remain as it is. It is a side face, a good deal like yours, which was one reason of my doing it so rapidly. I got on in such a rapid style, that an Englishman, who had a party with him, came up, and told me, in French, that I was doing very well. Upon my answering him in English, he seemed surprised, and said, ' Upon my word, sir, you get on with great spirit and boldness; you do us great credit, I am sure. He afterwards returned; and after asking how long I had been about it, said he was the more satisfied with his judgment, as he did not know I was a countryman. Another wanted to know if I taught painting in oil. I told him that I stood more in need of instruction myself; that that sort of rapid sketching was what I did better than any thing else; and that, after the first hour or two, I generally made my pictures worse and worse, the more pains I took with them. However, seriously, I was much pleased with this kind of notice, as however confident I may be of the real merit of my work, it is not always so clear, that it is done in way to please most other people. This same sketch is certainly a very singular thing, as I do not believe there are ten people in the world, who could do it in the same way. However, I have said enough on the subject. I shall go on with this business as I find it succeed. I intend to copy a composition of Rubens in this manner, which I can do at intervals, without interfering with my regular work. The copy of Titian's Mistress, and the other, which I began from him, I purpose finishing in the six following days; and another copy of Titian, in the six after that, which will be four out of the five which I am doing for R. I shall want another fortnight for the copy of Guido; and it will take another fortnight, if I do that for Northcote. This will make fourteen weeks: I have been here seven already. I will now enumerate the pictures I have done, or am doing: 1. The Death of Clorinda, completed; 2. Portrait of a Man in Black, by Titian, nearly finished; 3. Titian's Mistress; this will take four days more to finish it; 4. Portrait of another Man in Black, by the same, not yet begun; 5. Christ Crowned with Thorns, by Guido, not begun; 6. Hippolito de Medici. As I have six hours to work every morning, from ten till four, I intend to give an hour to making rough copies for myself. In this way I shall make a sketch of the head I mentioned; and I propose doing a Holy Family, from Raphael, (a very small picture,) and a larger copy, from Rubens, in the same way. My love to all.

"Your's affectionately,

"W. HAZLITT."

As the mere private and exclusively domestic history of the life of any man, whose works are to be the instruction of posterity, is a merely secondary matter, we have devoted but little space to the actual biography of Mr. Hazlitt. All that need be known on this subject is detailed in these volumes. But it is our duty to disseminate, as widely as possible, the opinion that one distinguished and popular writer has of another; we, therefore, need offer no excuse for thus extracting the thoughts of Mr. Edward Lytton Bulwer on the genius of William Hazlitt.

"The present century has produced many men of poetical genius, and some of analytical acumen; but I doubt whether it has produced any one who has given to the world such signal proofs of the union of the two as the late WILLIAM HAZLITT. If I were asked his peculiar and predominant distinction, I should say that, above all things, he was a CRITIC. He

possessed the critical faculty in its noblest degree. He did not square and measure out his judgments by the pedantries of dry and lifeless propositions-his taste was not the creature of schools and canons, it was begotten of Enthusiasm by Thought. He felt intensely;-he embued, he saturated himself with the genius he examined; it became a part of him, and he reproduced it in science. He took in pieces the work he surveyed, and reconstructed the fabric in order to show the process by which it had been built. His criticisms are therefore eminently scientific; to use his own expression, his art lifts the veil from nature.' It was the wonderful subtlety with which he possessed himself of the intentions of the author, which enabled him not only to appreciate in his own person, but to make the world appreciate, the effects those intentions had produced. Thus, especially, in his Characters of Shakspeare's Plays,' he seizes at once upon the ruling principle of each, with an ease, a carelessness, a quiet and unstrained fidelity,' which proves how familiarly he had dwelt upon the secret he had mastered. He is, in these sketches, less eloquent and less refining than Schlegel, but it is because he has gazed away the first wonder that dazzles and inspires his rival. He has made himself household with Shakspeare, and his full and entire confidence that he understands the mysteries of the host in whose dwelling-place he has tarried, gives his elucidations, short and sketch-like as they are, the almost unconscious simplicity of a man explaining the true motives of the friend he has known. Thus, in the character of Hamlet,' on which so many have been bewildered, and so many have been eloquent, he employs little or nothing of the lavish and exuberant diction, or the elaborate spirit of conjecture that he can command at will. He utters his dogmas as unpretendingly as if they were common-places, and it is scarcely till he brings the character of Hamlet,' as conceived by him, into sudden contrast with the delineation of the two master actors of his time, that you perceive how new and irresistible are his conclusions:

"The character of Hamlet is itself a pure effusion of genius. It is not a character marked by strength of will or even passion, but by refinement of thought and sentiment. Hamlet is as little of the hero as a man can well be: but he is a young and princely novice, full of high enthusiasm and quick sensibility-the sport of circumstances, questioning with fortune and refining on his own feelings, and forced from the natural bias of his disposition by the strangeness of his situation. He seems incapable of deliberate action, and is only hurried into extremities on the spur of the occasion, when he has no time to reflect, as in the scene where he kills Polonius, and again where he alters the letters which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are taking with them to England, purporting his death. At other times, when he is most bound to act, he remains puzzled, undecided, and sceptical, dallies with his purposes, till the occasion is lost, and always finds some pretence to relapse into indolence and thoughtfulness again. For this reason he refuses to kill the king when he is at his prayers, and by a refinement in malice, which is, in truth, only an excuse for his own want of resolution, defers his revenge to some more fatal opportunity, when he shall be engaged in some act that has no relish of salvation in it.'

"He is the prince of philosophical speculators, and because he cannot have his revenge perfect, according to the most refined idea his wish can form, he misses it altogether. So he scruples to trust the suggestions of the ghost, contrives the scene of the play to have surer proof of his uncle's guilt, and then rests satisfied with his confirmation of his suspicions, and the success of his experiment, instead of acting upon it. Yet he is sensible of his own weakness, taxes himself with it, and tries to reason himself out of it Still he does nothing; and this very speculation on his own infirmity only affords him another occasion for indulging it.

It is not for any want of attachment to his father, or abhorrence of the murder, that Hamlet is thus dilatory, but it is more to his taste to indulge his imagination in reflecting upon the enormity of the crime, and refining on his schemes of vengeance, than to put them into immediate practice. His ruling passion is to think, not to act: and any vague pretence that flatters this propensity instantly diverts him from his previous purposes.'

"More subtle and ingenious, though pleasant and half burlesque, are his comments upon the subordinate characters in the Midsummer Night's Dream. It is a happy refinement, that Snug the joiner is the moral man of the piece, who proceeds by measurement and discretion in all things.' What can be finer, yet more quietly painted, than the contrast between Ariel and Puck? And how startling, yet how true on reflection (and how much reflection did it demand to produce the truth!) the remarks

"Romeo is Hamlet in love. There is the same rich exuberance of passion and sentiment in the one, that there is of thought and sentiment in the other. Both are absent and self-involved, both live out of themselves in a world of imagination. Hamlet is abstracted from every thing; Romeo is abstracted from every thing but his love, and lost in it. His 'frail thoughts dally with faint surmise,' and are fashioned out of the suggestions of hope, the flatteries of sleep.' He is himself only in his Juliet; she is the only reality, his heart's true home and idol. The rest of the world is to him a passing dream.'

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

6

"Passing from his 'Characters of Shakspeare' to his other various Essays, we shall find in Hazlitt the same one predominating faculty-the Critical; but adorned and set off with a far greater richness and prodigality of style. He was singularly versatile. His taste encircled all things-Literature, Art, Philosophy, and Manners. I confess, that in the collection of Essays called the Round Table,' it is with a certain uneasiness that I regard his imitation of the tone and style of the essayists of Queen Anne's day. His genius, to my taste, does not walk easily in ruffles and a bag-wig; the affectation has not that nameless and courtly polish which distinguished Addison, or even the more reckless vivacity of Steele. The last thing that Hazlitt really can be called is the wit about town.' He is at home in the closet-in the fresh fields—in the studies at the theatre, but he seems to me awkward when he would assume an intimacy with Belinda and Sir Plume. I am glad, therefore, when this affectation wears itself away, which it does, in a great part, after the preliminary Essays. Nothing can be more delightful than the freshness of thought and feeling which appears in the ninth Essay on The Love of the Country.' It breathes of a man released from cities. I doubt, however, its philosophy, when it resolves the love of the country into association only. The air, the fragrace, and the silence of woods and

fields, require no previous initiation, and would delight us, even if all our earliest and happiest associations were of Liquorpond Street and Cheapside. Scattered throughout these Essays is a wealth of thought and poetry, beside which half the cotemporaries of their author seem as paupers. Hazlitt's remarkable faculty of saying brilliant things, in which the wit only ministers to the wisdom, is very conspicuous in all. His graver aphorisms are peculiar in this :-they are for the most part philosophical distinctions. Nothing can be more in the spirit of true philosophy than this-Principle is a passion for truth: an incorrigible attachment to a general proposition.'*

"His views of literary men are almost invariably profound and searching. His refutation of Madame de Staël's common-place definitions of Rousseau's genius are triumphant. But as I have elsewhere + said, he does not seem to me equally felicitous with respect to the characters of men of action. His observations on Burke and Pitt, for instance, are vehemently unjust. All his usual discrimination, his habit of weighing quality with quantity, and binding judgment with forbearance, which render him impartial and accurate as to poets, desert him the instant he comes to politicians. He has said somewhere that a good patriot must be a good hater.' That may be possible, but a good hater is a bad philosopher. I pass over his beautiful and well known criticisms on Art, because they open so wide a field of dispute as to render it impossible to finish the contests they provoke in the time to which I am limited. His perceptions are always keen and glowing, but I think he was scarcely so learned a critic of Art as he was a subtle and brilliant one. His work on 'Human Actions' is full of valuable hints and ingenious distinctions; but I imagine that he has not fully embodied his own conceptions, and it seems to me, also, that he has somewhat mistaken the systems of the Utilitarian or Helvetian Philosophy. It is often clear that his disputes with the masters of these schools are merely verbal, and I do not think it would be impossible to reconcile with the theories of his antagonists, the whole of his elaborate reasonings on the mysteries of SYMPATHY. I conclude this to have been one of his earliest works, and it has not the same compression and energy of style which characterizes his lighter and later essays, while it often pretends to their ornament and eloquence.

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

"When Hazlitt died, he left no successor; others may equal him, but none resemble. And I confess that few deaths of the great writers of my time ever affected me more painfully than his for of most of those who, with no inferior genius, have gone before him, it may be said that in their lives they tasted the sweets of their immortality, they had their consolations of glory; and if fame can atone for the shattered nerve, the jaded * Essay on "Good Nature." ↑ “England and the English.”

spirit, the wearied heart of those who scorn delight and love laborious days,'-verily, they had their reward. But Hazlitt went down to dust without having won the crown for which he had so bravely struggled; the shouts of applauding thousands echoed not to the sick man's bed; his reputation, great amongst limited circles, was still questionable to the world. He who had done so much for the propagation of thought-for the establishment of new sectaries and new schools-from whose wealth so many had filled their coffers,-left no stir on the surface from which he sank to the abyss :-he who had vindicated so nobly the fame of others -what critic to whom the herd would listen had vindicated his? Men with meagre talents and little souls could command the ear of thousands, but to the wisdom of the teacher it was deafened. Vague and unexamined prejudices, aided only by some trivial faults, or some haughty mannerism of his own, had steeled the public-who eagerly received the doctrines filched from him second-hand-to the wisdom and eloquence of the originator. A great man sinking amidst the twilight of his own renown, after a brilliant and unclouded race, if a solemn, i an inspiring and elating spectacle. But Nature has no sight more sad and cheerless than the sun of a genius which the clouds have so long and drearily overcast, that there are few to mourn and miss the luminary when it sinks from the horizon.

"The faults of Hazlitt have been harshly judged, because they have not been fairly analysed-they arose mostly from an arrogant and lordly sense of superiority. It is to this that I resolve his frequent paradoxeshis bold assertions-his desire to startle. It was the royalty of talent, which does not measure its conduct by the maxims of those whom it would rule. He was the last man to play the thrifty with his thoughtshe sent them forth with an insolent ostentation, and cared not much what they shocked or whom they offended. I suspect that half which the unobservant have taken literally, he meant, secretly, in sarcasm. As Johnson in conversation, so Hazlitt in books, pushed his own theories to the extreme, partly to show his power, partly, perhaps, from contempt of the logic of his readers. He wrote rather for himself than others; and often seems to vent all his least assured and most uncertain thoughts-as if they troubled him by the doubts they inspired, and his only anxiety was to get rid of them. He had a keen sense of the Beautiful and the Subtle, and, what is more, he was deeply imbued with sympathies for the Humane. He ranks high amongst the social writers-his intuitive feeling was in favour of the multitude;-yet had he nothing of the demagogue in literature; he did not pander to a single vulgar passion. His intellectual honesty makes him the Dumont of letters even where his fiery eloquence approaches him to the Mirabeau.

"Posterity will do him justice—the first interval of peace and serenity which follows our present political disputes will revive and confirm his name. A complete collection of his works is all the monument he demands. To the next age he will stand amongst the foremost of the thinkers of the present; and that late and tardy retribution will assuredly be his, which compensates to others the neglect to which men of genius sometimes (though not so frequently as we believe) are doomed ;-that retribution which, long after the envy they provoked is dumb, and the errors they themselves committed are forgotten, invests with interest every thing that is associated with their names ;-making it an honour even to have been their cotemporaries, and an hereditary rank to be their descendants."

Perhaps, in the foregoing estimate of Hazlitt's genius, the glow of Mr. Bulwer's eloquence has thrown a tint a little too brilliant upon