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his pretensions to novelty and of the quackery by which he attempted to render them notorious; of happy satire against the aristocratic and religious patronage which he sought and obtained for schemes which were tolerated by the great because they were believed by them to be impracticable; but the truth of the principal idea itself remains almost untouched. In these instances the personal has prevailed over the abstract in the mind of the thinker; his else clear intellectual vision has been obscured by the intervention of his own recollections, loves, resentments, or fancies; and the real outlines of the subject have been overgrown by the exuberent fertility of the region which bordered upon them.

The same causes diminished the immediate effect of Mr. Hazlitt's political writings. It was the fashion to denounce him as a sour Jacobin; but no description could be more unjust. Under the influence of some bitter feeling, he occasionally poured out a furious invective against those whom he regarded as the enemies of liberty, or the apostates from its cause; but, in general, his force was diverted (unconsciously to himself) by figures and fantasies, by fine and quaint allusions, by quotations from his favourite authors, introduced with singular felicity as respects the direct link of association, but tending by their very beauty to unnerve the mind of the reader, and substitute the sense of luxury for that of hatred or anger. In some of his essays, when the reasoning is most cogent, every other sentence contains some exquisite passage from Shakspeare, or Fletcher, or Wordsworth, trailing after it a line of golden associations-or some reference to a novel, over which we have a thousand times forgotten the wrongs of mankind; till in the recurring shock of pleasurable surprise, the main argument escapes us. When, for example, he compares the position of certain political waverers to that of Clarissa Harlowe when Lovelace would repeat his outrage, and describes them as having been, like her, trepanned into a house of ill-fame near Pall Mall, and defending their soiled virtue with their pen-knives,who, at the suggestion of the stupendous scene which the allusion directly revives, can think or care about the renegade of yesterday? Here, again, is felt the want of that imagination which brings all things into one, tinges all our thoughts and sympathies with one joyous or solemn hue, and rejects

every ornament which does not heighten or prolong the feeling which is proper to the design. Even when Mr. Hazlitt retaliates on Mr. Southey for attacking his old copatriots, the poetical associations which bitter remembrance suggests almost neutralize the attack, else overpowering; he brings every "flower which sad embroidery wears to strew the laureate hearse" where patriotism is interred; and diverts our indignation and his own by affecting references to an early friendship. So little does he regard the unity of his compositions, that in his "Letter to Gifford," after a series of the most just and bitter retorts on his maligner," the fine link which connected literature with the police"—he takes a fancy to teach that " Ultra-crepidarian Critic" his own theory of the natural disinterestedness of the human mind, and developes it—not now in the mathematical style in which it was first enunciated, but “o'er-informed" with the glow of sentiment, and terminating in an eloquent rhapsody. This latter part of the letter is one of the noblest of his effusions, but it entirely destroys the first in the mind of the reader; for who, when thus contemplating the living wheels on which human benevolence is borne onward in its triumphant career, and the spirit with which they are instinct, can think of the poor wasp settled upon them, and who was just before transfixed with minikin arrows?

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But the most signal result which "the shows of things" had over Mr. Hazlitt's mind, was his setting up the Emperor Napoleon as his idol. He strove to justify this predilection to himself by referring it to the revolutionary origin of his hero, and the contempt with which he trampled upon the claims of legitimacy, and humbled the pride of kings. But if his "only love" thus sprung "from his only hate," it was not wholly cherished by antipathies. If there had been nothing in his mind which tended to aggrandizement and glory, and which would fain reconcile the principles of liberty with the lavish accumulation of power, he might have desired the triumph of young tyranny over legitimate thrones; but he would scarcely have watched its progress "like a lover and a child." His feeling for Bonaparte was not a sentiment of respect for fallen greatness; not a desire to trace "the soul of goodness in things evil;" not a loathing of the treatment the Emperor received from "his cousin kings” in the day of

adversity; but entire affection mingling with the current of the blood, and pervading the moral and intellectual being.* Nothing less than this strong attachment, at once personal and refined, would have enabled him to encounter the toil of collecting and arranging facts and dates for four volumes of narrative;-a drudgery too abhorrent to his habits of mind as a thinker, to be sustained by any stimulus which the prospect of wealth or reputation could supply. It is not so much in the ingenious excuses which he discovers for the worst acts of his hero, even for the midnight execution of the Duke d'Enghein, and the invasion of Spain, that the stamp of personal devotion is obvious, as in the graphic force with which he has delineated the short-lived splendours of the Imperial Court, and "the trivial fond records" he has gathered of every vestige of human feeling by which he could reconcile the Emperor to his mind. The first two volumes of the "Life of Napoleon," although redeemed by scattered thoughts of true originality and depth, are often confused and spiritless; the characters of the principal revolutionists are drawn too much in the style of caricatures; but when the hero throws all his rivals into the distance, erects himself the individual enemy of England, consecrates his power by religious ceremonies, and defines it by the circle of a crown, the author's strength becomes concentrated, his narrative assumes an epic dignity and fervour, and glows with "the long-resounding march and energy divine." How happy and proud is he to picture the meeting of Napoleon with the

*Proofs of the singular fascination which the idea of Bonaparte created on Mr. Hazlitt's mind abound in his writings. One example of which suffices to show how it mingled with his most passionate thoughts-his earliest aspirations, and his latest sympathies. Having referred to some association which revived the memory of his hap piest days, he breathes out into this rhapsody:-"As I look on the long-neglected copy of the Death of Clorinda, golden dreams play upon the canvass as they used when I painted it. The flowers of Hope and Joy springing up in my mind, recall the time when they first bloomed there. The years that are fled knock at the door and enter. I am in the Louvre once more. The Sun of Austerlitz has not set. It shines here, in my heart; and he the Son of Glory is not dead, nor ever shall be to me. I am as when my life began."-See the Essay on Great and Little Things:" Table Talk, vol. ii., p. 171.

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Pope and the grandeurs of the coronation! How he grows wanton in celebrating the fêtes of the Tuileries, as "presenting all the elegance of enchanted pageants," and laments them as "gone like a fairy revel!" How he "lives along the line" of Austerlitz, and rejoices in its thunder, and hails its setting sun, and exults in the minutest details of the subsequent meeting of the conquered sovereigns with the conqueror! How he expatiates on the fatal marriage with "the deadly Austrian,” (as Mr. Cobbett justly called that most heartless of her sex) as though it were a chapter in romance, and added the grace of beauty to the imperial picture! How he kindles with martial ardour as he describes the preparations for the expedition against Russia; musters the myriads of barbarians with a show of dramatic justice; and fondly lingers among the brief triumphs of Moskwa on the verge of the terrible catastrophe! The narrative of that disastrous expedition is, indeed, written with a master's hand; we see the "Grand Army" marching to its destruction through the immense perspective; the wild hordes flying before the terrour of its "coming;" the barbaric magnificence of Moscow towering in the far distance; and when we gaze upon the sacrificial conflagration of the Kremlin, we feel that it is the funeral pile of the conqueror's glories. It is well for the readers of this splendid work, that there is more in it of the painter than of the metaphysician; that its style glows with the fervour of batttle, or stiffens with the spoils of victory; yet we wonder that this monument to imperial grandeur should be raised from the dead level of Jacobinism by an honest and profound thinker. The solution is, that although he was this, he was also more-that, in opinion, he was devoted to the cause of the people; but that, in feeling, he required some individual object of worship; that he selected Napoleon as one in whose origin and career he might impersonate his principles and gratify his affections; and that he adhered to his own idea with heroic obstinacy when the "child and champion of the republic" openly sought to repress all feeling and thought, but such as he could cast in his own iron moulds, and scoffed at popular enthusiasm even while it bore him to the accomplishment of his loftiest desires.

If the experiences and the sympathies which acted so powerfully on the mind of Hazlitt, detract somewhat from

his authority as a reasoner, they give an unprecedented interest and value to his essays on character and books. The excellence of these works differ not so much in degree as in kind from that of all others of their class. There is a weight and substance about them, which makes us feel that amidst all their nice and dexterous analysis, they are, in no small measure, creations. The quantity of thought which is accumulated upon his favourite subjects; the variety and richness of the illustrations; and the strong sense of beauty and pleasure which pervades and animates the composition, give them a place, if not above, yet apart from the writings of all other essayists. They have not, indeed, the dramatic charm of the old "Spectator" and "Tattler," nor the airy touch with which Addison and Steele skimmed along the surface of many-coloured life; but they disclose the subtle essences of character, and trace the secret springs of the affections with a more learned and penetrating spirit of human dealing than either. The intense interest which he takes in his theme, and which prompts him to adorn it lavishly with the spoils of many an intellectual struggle, commends it to the feelings as well as the understanding, and makes the thread of his argument seem to us like a fibre of our own moral being. Thus his essay on "Pedantry," seems, within its few pages, to condense not only all that can be said, but all that can be fell, on the happiness which we derive from the force of habit, on the softening influences of blameless vanity, and on the moral and picturesque effect of those peculiarities of manner, arising from professional associations, which diversify and emboss the plain ground-work of modern life. Thus, his character of Rousseau is not merely a just estimate of the extraordinary person to whom it relates, but is so imbued with the predominant feeling of his works that they seem to glide in review before us, and we rise from the essayist as if we had perused the "Confessions" anew with him, and had partaken in the strong sympathy which they excited within him during the happiest summers of his youth. Thus, his paper on "Actors and Acting," breathes the very soul of abandonment to impulse and heedless enjoyment, affording glimpses of those brief triumphs which make a stroller's career "less forlorn," and presenting mirrors to the stage in which its grand and affecting images, themselves reflected from nature, are yet farther prolonged and multiplied. His

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