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 produte 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 his only reality, his heart's true home and idol. The rest of the world is to him a passing dream." ท 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 ge- nius does not blind the natural delicacy and fineness of his taste. For my oyn part, I have always, from a boy, felt the moral sentiment somewhat invaded and jarred upon by the heartless treachery with which Jessica deserts her father-her utter forgetfulness of his solitude, his infirmities, his wrongs, his passions, and his age ;-and scarcely less so by the unconscious and complacent baseness of Lorenzo, pocketing the filial purloinings of the fair Jewess, who can still tarry from the arms of her lover "to gild herself with some more ducats." These two characters would be more worthy of Dryden than of Shakspeare, if the great poet had not "cloaked and jewelled their deformities" by so costly and profuse a poetry. Their language belies their souls. Passing from his Characters of Shakspeare' to his other various Essays, we shall find in Hazlitt the same one predominating faculty-the Critical; but adorned and set off with a far greater richness and prodigality of style. He was singularly versatile. His taste encircled all things-Literature, Art, Philosophy, and Manners. I confess, that in the collection of Essays called the 'Round Table,' it is with a certain uneasiness that I regard his imitation of the tone and style of the essayists of Queen Anne's day. His genius, to my taste, does not walk easily in ruffles and a bag-wig; the affectation has not that nameless and courtly polish which distinguished Addison, or even the more reckless vivacity of Steele. The last thing that Hazlitt really can be called is "the wit about town." He is at home in the closet-in the fresh 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 prelimenary Essays. Nothing can be more delightful than the freshness of thought and feeling which appears in the ninth Essay on 'The Love of the Country.' It breathes of a man released from cities. I doubt, however, its philosophy, when it resolves the love of the country into association only. The air, the fragrance, and the silence of woods and fields, require no previous initiation, and would delight us, even if all our earliest and happiest associations were of Liquorpond street and Cheapside. Scattered throughout these Essays is a wealth of thought and poetry, beside which half the cotemporaries of their author seem as paupers. Hazlitt's remarkable faculty of saying brilliant things, in which the wit only ministers to the wisdom, is very conspicuousin all. His graver aphorisms are peculiar in this :-they are for the most part philosophical distinctions. Nothing can be more striking or more in the spirit of true philosophy than this-" Principle is a passion for truth: an incorrigible attachment to a general proposition."* His views of literary men are almost invariably profound and searching. His refutation of Madame de Stael's common-place definitions of Rousseau's genius are triumphant.. But as I have elsewheret 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 England and the English.' * Essay on 'Good Nature." 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 preceptions are always keen and glowing, but I think he was scarcely so learned a critic of Art as he was a subtle and a brilliant one. His work on Human Actions' is full of valuable hints and ingenious distinctions; but I imagine that he has not fully embodied his own conceptions, and it seems to me also that he has somewhat mistaken the systems of the Utilitarian or Helvetian Philosophy. It is often clear that his disputes with the masters of these schools are merely verbal, and I do not think it would be impossible to reconcile with the theories of his antagonists, the whole of his elaborate reasonings on the mysteries of "SYMPATHY." I conclude this to have been one of his earli est 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 bim, but none resemble. And I confess that fow deaths of the great writers of my time ever effected me more painfully than his : For 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 spirit, the wearied heart of those "who scorn delight and love laborious days," verily, they had their reward. But Hazlittt 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 abysshe 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 xxxii SOME THOUGHTS ON THE GENIUS OF HAZLITT. 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 solen.n, is 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 paradoxes--his 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 thoughts-he 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 embued with sympathies for the Humane. He ranks high amongst the social writers-his intuitive feeling was in favor 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 eloquuence approaches him to the Mirabeau. Posterity will do him justice-the first interval of peace and serenity which follows our present politiccal 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 honor even to have been their cotemporaries, and an hereditary rank to be their descendants. THOUGHTS UPON THE INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER OF THE LATE WILLIAM HAZLITT. BY MR. SERGEANT TALFOURD, M. F. 1 As an author, Mr. Hazlitt may be contemplated principally in three aspects, as a moral and political reasoner; as an observer of character and manners; and as a critic in literature and painting. It is in the first character only that he should be followed with caution. His metaphysical and political essays contain rich treasures, sought with years of patient toil, and poured forth with careless prodigality,-materials for thinking, a small part of which wisely employed will enrich him who makes them his own, but the choice is not wholly unattended with perplexity and danger. He had, indeed, as passionate a desire for truth as others have for wealth, or power, or fame. The purpose of his research was always steady and pure; and no temptation from without could induce him to pervert or to conceal the faith that was in him. But, besides that love of truth, that sincerity in pursuing it, and that boldness in telling it, he had earnest aspirations after the beautiful, a strong sense of pleasure, an intense consciousness of his own individual being, which broke the current of abstract speculation into dazzling eddies, and sometimes turned it astray. The vivid sense of beauty may, indeed, have fit home in the breast of the searcher after truth, but then he must also be endowed with the highest of all human faculties, the great mediatory and interfusing power of imagination, which presides supreme in the mind, brings all its powers and impulses into harmonious action, and becomes itself the single organ of all. At its touch, truth becomes visible in the shapes of beauty; the fairest of material things appear the living symbols of airy thought; and the mind apprehends the finest affinities of the worlds of sense and of spirit" in clear dream and solemn vision." By its aid the faculties are not only balanced, but multiplied into each other; are pervaded by one feeling, and directed to one issue. But, without it, the inquirer after truth will sometimes be confounded by too intense a yearning after the grand and the lovely,—not, indeed, by an elegant taste, the indulgence of which is a graceful and harmless recreation amidst severer- studies, but by that passionate regard which quickens the pulse, and tingles in the veins, and "hangs upon the beatings of the heart." Such was the power of beauty in Hazlitt's mind; and the interfusing faculty was wanting. The spirit, indeed, was willing, but the flesh was strong; and when these contend it is not difficult to foretel which will obtain the mastery; for "the power of beauty shall sooner |