Then, in 1817, he published his Characters of Shakespeare, which he dedicated to Charles Lamb; in 1818 he reprinted a series of lectures (at the Surrey Institute) on the English poets; in 1819-20 he delivered from the same platform two courses more—on the Comic Writers and the Age of Elizabeth. He wrote for The Liberal, The Yellow Dwarf, The London Magazine-(to which he may very well have introduced the unknown Elia)-Colburn's New Monthly; he returned to the Chronicle in 1824; in 1825 he published The Spirit of the Age, in 1826 The Plain Speaker, the Boswell Redivivus in 1827; and in this last year he set to work, at Winterslow, on a life of Napoleon. That was the beginning of the end. He had no turn for history, nor none for research; his methods were personal, his results singular and brief; he was as it were an accidental writer, whose true material was in himself. His health broke, and worsened ; his publishers went bankrupt; he lost the best part of the £500 which he had hoped to earn by his work; and though, consulting none but anti-English authorities, he lived to complete a book containing much strong thinking and not a few striking passages, it was a thing foredoomed to failure: a matter in which the nation, still hating its tremendous enemy, and still rejoicing in the man and the battle which had brought him to the ground, would not, and could not take an interest. Two volumes were published in 1828 (Sir Walter's Napoleon appeared in 1827), and two more in 1830; but the work of writing them killed the writer. His digestion, always feeble, was

1 Both the Characters and the English Poets were reviewed by Gifford in the Quarterly. The style of these 'reviews' is abject; the inspiration venal; the matter the very dirt of the mind. Gifford hated Hazlitt for his politics, and set out to wither Hazlitt's repute as a man of letters. For the tremendous reprisal with which he was visited, the reader is referred to the Letter to William Gifford, Esq., in the first volume of the present Edition. If he find it over-savage: probably, being of to-day, he will let him turn to his Quarterly, and consider, if he have the stomach, Gifford and the matter of offence.

* He lived to rejoice in the Revolution of July; but of the great movement in the arts-of Henri Trois et sa Cour and Hernani, of Delacroix and Barye, of Géricault and Bonington and de Vigny, and the rest of its heroes-he seems to have known nothing. That was his way. The new did not exist for him. A dissenter by birth and conviction, he yet cared only for the past, and the elder 'glories of our blood and state' were to him, not shadows but, the sole substantial things he could keep room for in the kingdom of his mind.

ruined; and in the September of 1830 he died. He was largely, I should say, a sacrifice to tea, which he drank, in vast quantities, of extraordinary strength. However this be, his ending was (as he'd have loved to put it) as a Chrissom child's.' 1

IV

Thus much, thus all-too little, of his course in print. For his life, despite his many bursts of confidence,' the admissions of his grandson, and the discoveries of such friends as Patmore, the half of it, I think, has to be told to us. This was not his fault, for he was in no sense secretive: he would no more lie about himself than he would lie about Southey or Gifford. His trick of drinking was, while it lasted, public; he proclaimed with all his lungs his frank and full approval of the fundamentals of the Revolution and his preference of Bonaparte before all the Kings in Europe; he despised Shelley the politician, and rejected Shelley the poet, and he cherished and made the most he could of his resentment against Coleridge and Wordsworth, though his disdain for concealment perilled his friendship with Lamb, and well nigh cost him the far more facile regard of Leigh Hunt; while, as for Byron, he so bitterly resented the 'noble Lord's' pre-eminency that he made no difference, strongly as he contemned the Laureate, between the Laureate's Vision of Judgment, a piece of English verse immortal by the sheer force of its absurdity, and that other Vision of Judgment, which is one of the great things in English poetry. 'Twas much the same in life. Poor Mrs. Hazlitt, though she was well-read, of no account as an housekeeper, fond of incongruous finery,' and capable of child-bearing withal, was, one may take for granted, not distinguished as a woman. Now, her husband, thinker as he approved himself, was very much of a male. Who runs may read of his early loves-Miss Railton and the rest; 'tis history-at any rate 'tis history according to Wordsworth 2-that once, in Lakeland, he so dealt with the local beauty

1 'Tis a pleasure to remember that Lamb was with him to the end-was in his death-chamber in the very article of mortality. We have all read Carlyle on Lamb. The everlasting pity is that we shall never read Hazlitt on Carlyle.

2 Him Shelley calls a solemn and unsexual man.'

that he came very near to tasting of the local pond; when Patmore walked home with him to Westminster, after his first lecture in the Surrey Institute, the wayside nymphs flocked to his encounter, and— (so Patmore says)-he knew them all; 1 he has himself recorded the confession that in the matter of mob-caps and black stockings and red elbows-in fact, on the score of your maid-servant-he could flourish a list as long, or thereabouts, as Leporello's. I know not whether he lied or spoke the truth; 2 but I can scarce believe that he lied. I should rather opine that on this point, as on others, Hazlitt, a gross and extravagant admirer (be it remembered) of J.-J. Rousseau, was, and is, entirely credible. We may take it that his veracity is beyond reproach. But 'tis another matter with his taste; and for that I can say no more than that I have listened to so many confidences:

From some we loved, the loveliest and the best

That from his Vintage rolling Time has pressed:

that I hold it for merely unessential.

But the man who habitually hugs his housemaid is, whether he boast of it or not, no more superior to consequences than another : especially if he have, as Hazlitt had, an ardent imagination and a teeming waste of sentiment. And so Hazlitt found. About 1819 he ceased from consorting with his wife; and in 1820 he lodged with a tailor, one Walker, in Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane. Walker, a most respectable man, had daughters, and one of these, a girl well broken-in, it would seem, to the ways of 'gentlemen'—a girl with a dull eye, a 'sinuous gait,' and a habit of sitting on the knees of 'gentlemen'; a girl, in fine, who is only to be described by an old and sane and homely but unquotable designation-this poor half-harlot took on our Don Juan of the area, and brought him to utter grief. He looked at passion, as embodied in Sarah Walker, until it grew to be the world to him; he went about like a man drunken and dazed, telling the story of his slighted love to anybody

1 Much as years afterwards, according to a certain Nicolardot, the expertest of their kind were on the list' of old Ste.-Beuve.

2 His grandson describes him as 'physically incapable' of any but a transient fidelity to anybody.

that would listen to it; 1 now he raved and was rampant, now was he soul-stricken and heart-broken; he swore he'd marry Walker whether she would or not, and to this end he persuaded his wife to follow him to Edinburgh, and there divorce him-pour cause, as the lady and her legal adviser had every reason to believe; 2 and having achieved a divorce, which was no divorce in law, and been finally refused by the young woman in Southampton Buildings, he set to work assiduously to coin his madness into drachmas, and wrote, always with Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his eye, that Liber Amoris which the unknowing reader will find in our Second Volume. It is a book by no means bad—if you can at all away with it. Indeed, it is unique in English, and the hundred guineas Hazlitt got for it were uncommonly well earned. But to away with it at all—that is the difficulty; and, as it varies with the temperaments of them that read the book, I shall discourse no more of it, but content myself with noting that, in writing the Liber Amoris, Hazlitt wrote off Sarah Walker.3 He had been in love with a housemaid, but he had been very much more in love with his love; and, having wearied all he knew with descriptions of his feelings, he wrote those feelings down, cleared his system, and became himself again. "Twas Goethe's way, I believe-his and many another's; the world will scarce get disaccustomed to it while there are women and writing men. What distinguishes Hazlitt from a whole wilderness of self-chroniclers is the fulness of his revelation. It is extraordinary; but, even so, Rousseau had shown him the way. And perhaps the simple truth about the Liber is that it is the best Rousseau-the best and the nearest to the Confessionsdone since Rousseau died.

Sarah Hazlitt married no more; but her husband did. In 1824

1 He confessed that one day he told it half a dozen times or so to persons he had never seen before: once, twice over to the same listener.

2 It cost Hazlitt a crown, perhaps less; and he arranged-apparently with Mrs. Hazlitt-to be taken in the act! After this the knowledge that Mr. and Mrs. Hazlitt took tea together, pendente lite, and that then and after his second espousals Hazlitt supplied this very reasonable woman with money, astonishes no more, but comes as a kind of anticlimax.

That damsel presently married in her station. She seems to have been a decent woman according to her lights, and to have lived up honestly to her ideals, such as they were.

he took to wife a certain Mrs. Bridgewater. She was Scots by birth, had lived much abroad, had married and buried a Colonel Bridgewater, was of excellent repute, and had about £300 a year; and with her new husband and his son by Sarah Stoddart-(who had an idea that his mother had been wronged, and seems to have been a most uncomfortable travelling companion)-she toured it awhile in France and Italy. On the return journey the Hazlitts left her in Paris; and when the elder, writing from London, asked her when she purposed to come home to him, she replied that she did not purpose to come home to him: that, in fact, she had done with him, and he would see her no more. So far as I know, he never did; so that, as his grandson says, this second marriage was but 'an episode.' Apparently it was the last in his life; for neither Mrs. Hazlitt attended him in his mortal illness, nor was there any woman at his bed's head when he passed.

V

It is told of him that he was dark-eyed and dark-haired, slim in figure, rather slovenly in his habit; that he valued himself on his effect in evening dress; that his manners were rather ceremonious than easy; that he had a wonderfully eloquent face, with a mouth as expressive as Kean's, and a frown like the Giaour's own1-that Giaour whom he did not love. He worshipped women, but was awkward and afraid with them; he played a good game of fives, and would walk his forty to fifty miles a day; he would lie abed till two in the afternoon, then rise, dally with his breakfast until eight without ever moving from his tea-pot and his chair, and go to a theatre, a bite at the Southampton, and talk till two in the morning.2 That he excelled in talk is beyond all doubt. Witness after witness is here

There was a laughing devil in his sneer

That raised emotions both of rage and fear;
And where his frown of hatred darkly fell,

Hope, withering, fled-and Mercy sighed farewell.

2 These details are Patmore's, and, even if they be true, are not the whole truth. Hazlitt loved solitude and the country, had to write for a living, wrote with difficulty, and left no inconsiderable body of work.