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"Amongst the especially welcome works are 'Southey's Life', the 'Women of France, Hazlitt's 'Essays, Emerson's 'Representative Men; but it seems invidious to particularise when all are good. . . . I took up a second small book, Scott's 'Suggestions on Female Education; that, too, I read, and with unalloyed pleasure. It is very good; justly thought, and clearly and felicitously expressed.
Hudibras, in Morley's Universal Library; Poetical Works, edited by Johnson; Dowden's Essay, supra. Pepys. The Restoration Drama. Plays in the Mermaid Series; Hazlitt's Lectures on the English Comic Writers; Meredith's Essay on Comedy and the Comic Spirit; Lamb's Essay on the Artificial Comedy; Thackeray's Essay on Congreve, in English Humorists.
Malthus, he fully believes, has none of the ordinary passions, anger, pride, avarice, or the like, but declares that he must be a slave to an 'amorous complexion, and believe all other men to be made 'of the same combustible materials. This foul blow is too characteristic of Hazlitt's usual method; but indicates also the tone which could be taken by contemporary journalism.
"I was in no need of money," said Procter, "and I declined the gift; but it was hard work to make Lamb believe that I was not in an impecunious condition." Speaking of Lamb's sister Mary, Procter quoted Hazlitt's saying that "Mary Lamb was the most rational and wisest woman he had ever been acquainted with."
Every one is breathing and baiting. And he got him safe to a pastrycook's, and administered brandy cherries, which Aubrey bolted whole like pills, only entreating to return, and wanting to know how he thought the case going. 'Excellently. Hazlitt's evidence and yours ought to carry him through.
By the way, there is a passage in one of Hazlitt's essays, I thought of while you were reading, about remorse and religious melancholy. He speaks of mixing up religion and morality; and then goes on to say, that Calvinistic notions have obscured and prevented self-knowledge. Give me the essay there is a passage I want to look at.
The best of it is the Conversations with Northcote, a painter of no very great merit, but a survivor of the Reynolds studio; and these conversations very frequently and very widely diverge from painting into literary and miscellaneous matters. The second class contains the miscellaneous essays proper, and these have by some been put at the head of Hazlitt's work.
Three others followed, containing Byron's Heaven and Earth, his translation of the Morgante Maggiore, and The Blues a very slight, if not silly, satire on literary ladies; some of Shelley's posthumous minor poems, among them "I arise from dreams of thee," and a few of Hazlitt's essays, including, however, none of his best.
See ante, ii. 357, iii. 309, and post, March 23, 1783. 'Sir Joshua once asked Lord B to dine with Dr. Johnson and the rest, but though a man of rank and also of good information, he seemed as much alarmed at the idea as if you had tried to force him into one of the cages at Exeter-Change. Hazlitt's Conversations of Northcote, p. 41. Yet when he came across them he met with much respect.
Take a sponge and wipe the slate of your mind. In particular, do not harass yourself by thoughts of metre and verse forms. Second: Read William Hazlitt's essay "On Poetry in General." This essay is the first in the book entitled *Lectures on the English Poets*. It can be bought in various forms.
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