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Precisely on that scale of duration and of power stand the glitterings of rhetoric that are not worked into the texture, but washed on from the outside. Hazlitt's thoughts were of the same fractured and discontinuous order as his illustrative images seldom or never self-diffusive; and that is a sufficient argument that he had never cultivated philosophic thinking.
I myself have, in my library, eighteen volumes of Hazlitt's works, and I do not possess all that he published. Besides being an original thinker, Hazlitt excelled in conversation. He was, moreover, a very temperate liver: yet his enemies proclaimed to the world that he was wanting even in sobriety.
The nearest approach to it that I can name is Spencer's First Principles, which, however, is at least once highly inspiring. An example in which the inspiring quality predominates is Ivanhoe; and an example in which the informing quality predominates is Hazlitt's essays on Shakespeare's characters.
I remember he picked up the book I had brought off that morning to read in the train the second volume of Hazlitt's Essays, the last of my English classics and discoursed so wisely about books that I wished I had spent more time in his company at Biggleswick. 'Hazlitt was the academic Radical of his day, he said.
Next encountering Anne, he begged her to go to his mother and guard her from any alarm, until there was some certainty. "Can't we send all these people away?" she asked. "Not yet. We had better make no unnecessary disturbance. There will be time enough if anything be amiss. I am going down to Hazlitt's Gate." Anne was too late.
"'Horse-face, I have heard satirists say," Carlyle wrote of him, recalling a comparison of Hazlitt's; and the horse-face seems to be symbolic of something that we find not only in his personal appearance, but in his personality and his work. His faults do not soften us, as the faults of so many favourite writers do.
Imperious and hot-tempered though he was, Godwin made friends and kept them. Thomas Holcroft came into Godwin's life in 1786. Thanks to Hazlitt's spirited memoir, based as it was on ample autobiographical notes, no personality of this group stands before us so clearly limned, and there is none more attractive. Mrs.
Still, I will never cease advising my friends and enemies to read poetry before anything. If poetry is what is called "a sealed book" to you, begin by reading Hazlitt's famous essay on the nature of "poetry in general."
I believe that the whole of Hazlitt's lectures, on the British Poets, the Writers of the Time of Elizabeth, and the Comic Writers, were delivered in that Institution, during the years 1817 and 1818; shortly after which time the establishment appears to have been broken up. The lady's remark upon the character and expression of Keats's features is both happy and true.
He said Hazlitt was exactly the opposite of Lord Chesterfield, who advised his son, if he could not get at a thing in a straight line, to try the serpentine one. There were no crooked pathways in Hazlitt's intellect. His style is brilliant, but never cloyed with ornamentation.
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