_To elevate and surprise._ Frequently quoted by Hazlitt from the
Duke of Buckingham’s _The Rehearsal_, Act I. Sc. 1.
‘_But I told him_,’ _etc._ _Henry V._, Act II. Sc. 3.
313. ‘_Sufficient to the day_,’ _etc._ _S. Matthew_, vi. 34.
‘_’Twould thin the land_,’ _etc._ _The Beggar’s Opera_, Act III.
Sc. 4.
314. ‘_Anon as patient_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act V. Sc. 1.
MR. MACREADY’S MACBETH
Macready played Macbeth for the first time on June 9, 1820. Cf. this
with the notice of Kean’s Macbeth (vol. VIII. p. 204).
315. ‘_Air-drawn dagger_,’ _etc._ _Macbeth_, Act III. Sc. 4.
‘_Thick-coming fancies._’ _Ibid._ Act V. Sc. 3.
‘_Docked and curtailed._’ Cf. ‘We know that they [bishops] hate
to be dockt and clipt.’ Milton, _Reformation in England_, I.
‘_Twa lang Scotch miles._’ Cf. ‘We think na on the lang Scots
miles.’ _Tam O’Shanter_, 7.
‘_Oh Hell-kite, all?_’ _Macbeth_, Act IV. Sc. 3.
_David Rizzio._ See vol. VIII. p. 459.
315. _The Lord of the Manor._ A comic opera by General John Burgoyne
(1722–1792), produced in 1780.
_The Libertine._ An opera attributed to Isaac Pocock, produced in
1817. See vol. VIII. p. 370.
_Mr. Contrast._ In _The Lord of the Manor_.
‘_A speaking face._’ Hazlitt was perhaps thinking of the lines in
_Bombastes Furioso_ (Sc. 1):
‘——Fusbos, give place,
You know you haven’t got a singing face.’
_Moll Flagon._ In _The Lord of the Manor_.
‘_Let those laugh_,’ _etc._ Cf.
‘Let those love now, who never lov’d before;
Let those who always lov’d, now love the more.’
Parnell, Catullus, _The Vigil of Venus_.
317. _Mrs. Salmon._ Eliza Salmon (1787–1849), a well-known concert and
oratorio singer. The references in this paragraph to Miss
Stephens and the quotations are conclusive evidence of
Hazlitt’s authorship of the notice.
_D’une pathétique_, _etc._ Rousseau, _Confessions_, Liv. I.
‘_Thoughts of which_,’ _etc._ Cf. ‘Yet loss of thee would never
from my heart,’ _Paradise Lost_, IX. 912.
‘_With other notes_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, III. 17.
_The voice of Liberty_, _etc._ The Revolution in Spain had broken
out early in 1820, and on March 10 King Ferdinand had
proclaimed the Liberal Constitution of 1812.
‘_Had three ears again._’ Cf. ‘Had I three ears, I’d hear thee.’
_Macbeth_, Act IV. Sc. 1.
‘_Know the return of spring._’ _The Beggar’s Opera_, Act II. Sc.
1.
GUY FAUX
See vol. IV. (_The Spirit of the Age_), p. 365 and note, and the essay
‘On Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen’ (republished in vol. XII. of
the present edition), from which it appears that the subject was
suggested to Hazlitt by Lamb. Lamb himself wrote an essay (not
republished by him) on the same subject in _The London Magazine_ for
November 1823. This essay, in which a chaffing reference is made to
Hazlitt’s three papers, was partly founded on an earlier essay ‘On the
Probable Effects of the Gunpowder Treason,’ published in _The
Reflector_, 1811. See _The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb_, ed. E. V.
Lucas, I. 236 and notes.
317. _Mr. Hogg’s Jacobite Relics._ Published in 2 vols. in 1819. In
the Introduction Hogg says, ‘And now, when the horrors of the
Catholic religion have ceased to oppress the minds of men,
there is but one way of thinking on the rights of the Stuarts
throughout the realm.’
_A Popish Priest._ Guy Fawkes (1570–1606) was not a priest.
318. _Which Mr. Hogg treats_, _etc._ Hazlitt seems to be referring to
the general sense of the Introduction to _The Jacobite Relics_.
‘_The best of cut-throats._’ _Macbeth_, Act III. Sc. 4.
319. _Regulus._ The stories of the self-sacrifice of Regulus and of
Codrus, the last King of Athens, are familiar.
320. ‘_The compunctious visitings of nature._’ _Macbeth_, Act I. Sc.
5.
‘_The spirit is willing_,’ _etc._ _S. Matthew_ xxvi. 41.
320. _The keys of the House of Commons_, _etc._ The allusion is to a
passage in John Cam Hobhouse’s pamphlet, _A Trifling Mistake_,
for which as a breach of privilege he was committed to Newgate
in 1819.
_Margaret Lambrun._ This story is told as a ‘popular historical
tradition’ by Miss Strickland in her _Lives of the Queens of
England_.
321. _Sandt._ Karl Ludwig Sand (1795–1820), who had assassinated
Kotzebue the dramatist (March 23, 1819).
‘_Well done_,’ _etc._ _S. Matthew_, xxv. 21.
‘_No dim doubts alloy._’ Lamb, Lines _On the Celebrated Picture
by Lionardo da Vinci, called the Virgin of the Rocks_.
‘_Quiring_,’ _etc._ _The Merchant of Venice_, Act V. Sc. 1.
322. ‘_This night_,’ _etc._ Cf. _S. Luke_ xxiii. 43.
‘_Dross compared_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Romans_ viii. 18.
‘_Disembowelled_,’ _etc._ Burke, _Reflections on the Revolution
in France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 101).
_The Constitutional Association._ See vol. VI. (_Table Talk_),
note to p. 190.
_The concealed Editor of Blackwood’s Magazine._ This question of
the editorship of _Blackwood_ had recently (Feb. 16, 1821) led
to the fatal duel between John Scott and Lockhart’s friend,
Christie.
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
323. ‘_The infinite agitation of wit._’ Bacon, _Advancement of
Learning_, Book I. iv. 5.
‘_The soul of goodness_,’ _Henry V._, Act IV. Sc. 1.
324. ‘_According to knowledge_,’ _Romans_ x. 2.
‘_A consummation_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 1.
‘_A king is but a king_ [man],’ _etc._ _Reflections on the
Revolution in France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 90).
‘_As the vine_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, IV. 307.
325. ‘_Through the airy region_,’ _etc._ _Romeo and Juliet_, Act II.
Sc. 2.
326. Note. ‘_As men should serve a cucumber_,’ _etc._ _The Beggar’s
Opera_, Act I. Sc. 1.
327. ‘_Bears a charmed life._’ _Macbeth_, Act V. Sc. 8.
‘_All mortal consequences._’ _Ibid._ Act V. Sc. 3.
‘_Set duty in one eye_,’ _etc._ _Julius Cæsar_, Act I. Sc. 2.
‘_Set but a Scotsman_,’ _etc._ Burns, _The Author’s Earnest Cry
and Prayer_, _etc._, Postscript.
‘_Happy warrior._’ See Wordsworth’s _Character of a Happy
Warrior_ (1807).
THE SAME SUBJECT CONCLUDED
328. _The Cid._ Southey’s translation of the _Chronicle of the Cid_
was published in 1808.
332. _Mr. Kean._ An American lion was presented to Kean by Sir Edward
Tucker. Barry Cornwall (_Life of Edmund Kean_, II. 135) says
that ‘it amused the tragedian (who was fond of simple
pleasures) to allure his acquaintance into the room, and set
them face to face with the beast.’
‘_Masterless passion_,’ _etc._ Cf. _The Merchant of Venice_, Act
IV. Sc. 1.
‘_The shot of accident_,’ _etc._ _Othello_, Act IV. Sc. 1.
333. _Like Hotspur._ _1 Henry IV._, Act II. Sc. 4.
_Regnault de St. Jean Angely._ Michel Louis Étienne, Comte
Regnaud de Saint Jean D’Angely (1762–1819), a well-known
politician of the Revolution and under Buonaparte. The
reference seems to be to his conduct in 1814 when in command of
the National Guard at Paris.
333. ‘_Be mine to read_,’ _etc._ Gray, Letter to West (_Letters_, ed.
Tovey, I. 97).
‘_From worldly care_,’ _etc._ _The Faerie Queene_, I. IV. 20.
CHARACTER OF MR. CANNING
This essay was included in the Paris edition (1825) and subsequent
editions of _The Spirit of the Age_. See vol. IV. p. 186.
334. ‘_The child_,’ _etc._ Wordsworth, ‘My heart leaps up,’ etc.
‘_Like as the sun-burnt Indians_,’ _etc._ _The Faerie Queene_,
III. XII. 8.
336. ‘_Like the morn_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, V. 310–311.
‘_Scylla heard_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Comus_, 257–259.
‘_The nation’s Great Divan._’ Cf. ‘August divan of the British
Senate.’ H. Walpole, Letters (1857), IV. 130.
337. _Reply to Sir John Coxe Hippesley._ On March 11, 1813.
_Speeches_, ed. Therry, III. 396.
338. ‘_The worse the better reason._’ _Paradise Lost_, II. 113–4.
‘_That makes these odds all even._’ _Measure for Measure_, Act
III. Sc. 1.
‘_He aggravates_,’ _etc._ _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_, Act I. Sc.
2.
‘_Quite chopfallen._’ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act V. Sc. 1.
339. ‘_The inimitable satire of Cervantes._’ See Canning’s Plymouth
speech, October 1823.
340. ‘_Pluck out the heart_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 2.
‘_The deliverance of mankind._’ Cf. Southey, _Carmen Triumphale_.
‘_Of his port_,’ _etc._ Chaucer, _The Canterbury Tales_,
Prologue, 69.
‘_Freezes his spirits up_,’ _etc._ Cf. _2 Henry IV._, Act I. Sc.
1.
341. _Described so well_, _etc._ In his speech on receiving the
freedom of Plymouth, October 1823.
‘_The golden round_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Richard II._, Act III. Sc. 2.
‘_And to call evil good_,’ etc. _Isaiah_ v. 20.
‘_Revered and ruptured Ogden._’ For this famous phrase, used
during the debates on the Indemnity Bill, 1818, see _Hansard_,
XXXVII. 1026, and Stapleton’s _Political Life of Canning_, I.
86.
_Rejected Addresses._ By James and Horace Smith, published in
1812.
‘_Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin._’ Republished (1801) from _The
Anti-Jacobin_.
342. ‘_To turn what is serious_,’ _etc._ Cf. ‘What should be great,
you turn to farce.’ Prior, _The Ladle_, 139.
Note. See _The Three Trials of William Hone_ (1818, First Trial,
pp. 38–9), where a verse of Jekyll’s parody is quoted from _The
Spirit of the Journals_.
Note. ‘_A wit’s a feather_,’ _etc._ Pope, _An Essay on Man_, IV.
247–8.
THE DANDY SCHOOL
This essay, now republished for the first time, is attributed to Hazlitt
by Mr. W. C. Hazlitt (_Memoirs_, _etc._, I. xxix) and by Ireland (_List
of the Writings of William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt_, p. 76). The MS., in
Hazlitt’s hand-writing, is still in existence.
343. _Vivian Grey._ Disraeli’s first novel, published 1826–7. The
dedication was as follows: ‘To the best and greatest of men I
dedicate these volumes. He, for whom it is intended, will
accept and appreciate the compliment: those, for whom it is not
intended, will—do the same.’
344. _Long’s._ A well-known hotel in Bond Street.
_Almack’s._ Assembly Rooms (now known as ‘Willis’s Rooms’), in
King Street, St. James’s.
_Mr. Martin’s bill_, _etc._ Richard Martin’s (1754–1834) efforts
on behalf of animals were bitterly opposed on all sides.
_Mr. Croker_, _etc._ ‘The Dulwich collection ... was quite as
distant as Russell Square, though he did not profess to know
exactly where Russell Square was.’ March 28, 1825. _Hansard_,
New Series, XII. 1266.
345. _Sir Sedley Clarendels_, _etc._ In _Camilla_.
_Meadowses._ In _The Wanderer_.
346. ‘_The Court_,’ _etc._ Cf. _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_, Act III.
Sc. 2.
_Sayings and Doings._ The first series appeared in 1824, the
second in 1825 and the third in 1828.
348. _Mr. Vivacity Dull._ A character in _Vivian Grey_, said to
represent Horace Twiss.
ACTORS AND THE PUBLIC
This and the eleven following papers from _The Examiner_ of 1828 have
been included in the text mainly on account of the strong internal
evidence they bear of Hazlitt’s authorship. One of the papers is signed
‘W. H.,’ the rest are unsigned. During the period covered by these
essays other _Theatrical Examiners_ appeared, signed ‘X’ or ‘Q.’ So far
as the editors are aware, it has not been hitherto known that Hazlitt
resumed regular theatrical criticism so late as 1828, but they feel that
no reasonable doubt can exist with regard to his authorship of these
twelve essays.
349. _Bate Dudley._ Sir Henry Bate Dudley (1745–1824), the notorious
clergyman and journalist discussed by Johnson and Boswell
(_Life_, ed. G. B. Hill, IV. 296). He was for a time editor of
_The Morning Post_.
‘_Fall into misfortune._’ Cf. _post_, note to p. 533.
‘_To tatters_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 2.
350. _Who has praised Sir Walter_, _etc._ The failure of Constable and
of Ballantyne and Co., involving Scott’s financial ruin, had
occurred in 1826.
_A vulgar crim. con._ In January 1825, a verdict of £800 was
given against Kean in an action, Cox v. Kean, for criminal
conversation. In consequence of this he was for a time ‘hooted
from the stage.’
‘_The spells_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Othello_, Act I. Sc. 3.
_If an actor is indeed six feet high_, _etc._ Hazlitt probably
refers to Conway. See vol. VIII. p. 200, and _post_, p. 361.
351. ‘_The fiery soul_,’ _etc._ Dryden _Absalom and Achitophel_,
156–8.
‘_The envy_,’ _etc._ _Richard II._, Act II. Sc. 1.
_Madame Catalani._ Angelica Catalani had retired from the stage
in 1827.
_It was some time since we had seen Mr. Kean’s Shylock_, _etc._
This paragraph makes Hazlitt’s authorship of this _Theatrical
Examiner_ quite certain. Cf. vol. VIII. p. 179.
FRENCH PLAYS
352. _Monsieur Perlet._ Adrien Perlet (1795–1850), a well-known French
comedian, who had made his first appearance in 1814.
‘_Upturned eyes_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Romeo and Juliet_, Act II. Sc. 2.
352. _Madame Pasta._ Cf. vol. VII. (_The Plain Speaker_), pp. 324 _et
seq._
‘_A friend of ours_,’ _etc._ See Patmore’s _My Friends and
Acquaintance_ (vol. III. pp. 32–5). According to Patmore, the
following passage was intended by Hazlitt to form part of the
_Conversations with Northcote_ in _The New Monthly Magazine_,
but was suppressed by the editor:—
‘He then asked me if I had seen anything of H——?[78] I said, yes;
and that he had vexed me; for I had shown him some fine heads
from the Cartoons, done about a hundred years ago (which
appeared to me to prove that since that period those noble
remains have fallen into a state of considerable decay), and
when I went out of the room for a moment, I found the prints
thrown carelessly on the table, and that he had got out a
volume of Tasso, which he was spouting, as I supposed, to let
me understand that I knew nothing of art, and that he knew a
great deal about poetry.
‘I said I never heard him speak with enthusiasm of any painter
or work of merit, nor show any love of art, except as a
puffing-machine for him to get up into to blow a trumpet in
his own praise. Instead of falling down and worshipping such
names as Raphael and Michael Angelo, he is only considering
how he may, by storm or stratagem, place himself beside them,
on the loftiest seats of Parnassus, as ignorant country
squires affect to sit with judges on the bench. He told me he
had had a letter from Wilkie, dated Rome, with three marks of
admiration, and that he had dated his answer “Babylon the
Great,” with four marks of admiration. Stuff! Why must he
always “out-Herod Herod?”[79] Why must the place where he is
always have one note of admiration more than any other? He
gave as his reasons, indeed, our river, our bridges, the
Cartoons, and the Elgin Marbles—the two last of which,
however, are not our own. H. should have been the boatswain
of a man-of-war: he has no other ideas of glory than those
which belong to a naval victory, or to vulgar noise and
insolence; not at all as something in which the whole world
may participate alike. I hate “this stamp exclusive and
professional.”[80] He added that Wilkie gave a poor account
of Rome, and seemed, on the whole, disappointed. He (Haydon)
should not be disappointed when he went, for his expectations
were but moderate. “Ay,” said Northcote, “that is like the
speech of a little, crooked, conceited painter of the name of
Edwards, who went to Italy with Romney and Humphreys, and
when they looked round the Vatican, he turned round to Romney
and said, ‘Egad, George, we’re bit.’”
‘I said that when I heard stories of this kind, of even clever
men who seemed to have no idea or to take no interest except in
what they themselves could do, it almost inclined me to be of
Peter Pindar’s opinion, who pretended to prefer taste to
genius: “Give me,” said he, “one man of taste, and I will find
you twenty men of genius.” N. replied, “It is a pity you should
be of that opinion, for all your acquaintances are great
geniuses; and yet, I fancy, they have no admiration for anybody
but themselves.’”
352. _Sir William Curtis’s._ Sir William Curtis (1752–1829), Lord
Mayor of London (1795) and for long M.P. for the City.
353. ‘_Our Cupid_,’ _etc._ Cf. The Earl of Dorset’s song, _Dorinda_.
354. _The age of Louis XIV._, _etc._ Cf. a passage in vol. IX. (_Notes
of a Journey_, _etc._), p. 150.
354. ‘_New manners_,’ _etc._ Thomas Warton, Sonnet ‘Written in a Blank
Leaf of Dugdale’s Monasticon.’
355. ‘_Unmixed with baser matter._’ _Hamlet_, Act I. Sc. 5.
_A certain happy-spirited writer._ Leigh Hunt, no doubt, whose
recently published _Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries_
had created some sensation.
FRENCH PLAYS (_continued_)
This article in _The Examiner_ begins with a long editorial passage
written in a chaffing spirit and praising the former notice of the
French Plays.
356. ‘_That soul of pleasure_,’ _etc._ Cf. Pope, _Moral Essays_, III.
306.
357. l. 15. _Ariste._ This should be Valère.
358. _There is a credulous and unqualified assent_, _etc._ Cf. a
passage in vol. VIII. (_English Comic Writers_), p. 29, where
almost the same words are used.
‘_To the woods_,’ _etc._ Quoted elsewhere by Hazlitt.
THE THEATRES AND PASSION WEEK
This paper is signed ‘W. H.’
358. ‘_Because thou art virtuous_,’ _etc._ _Twelfth Night_, Act II.
Sc. 3.
359. ‘_Seizing_ [tear] _their pleasures_,’ _etc._ Marvell, _To his Coy
Mistress_.
360. _Ranting Croly._ The Rev. George Croly (1780–1860), a contributor
to _Blackwood’s Magazine_, and to Jerdan’s _Literary Gazette_.
‘_Stretched upon the rack_,’ _etc._ Cf.
‘Than on the torture of the mind to lie
In restless ecstasy.’ _Macbeth_, Act III. Sc. 2.
‘_All the natural ills_ [shocks], _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc.
1.
‘_To jest_,’ _etc._ _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, Act V. Sc. 2.
361. ‘_What is set down for them._’ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 2.
CHARLES KEAN
362. _Young Mr. Kean._ Charles John Kean (1811?–1868), second son of
Edmund Kean. He had made his first appearance at the opening of
the Drury Lane season, October 1, 1827.
_Lovers’ Vows._ Mrs. Inchbald’s adaptation from Kotzebue (1798).
_The Marquis of Douro._ Arthur Richard (1807–1884), eldest son of
the Duke of Wellington, afterwards second Duke.
363. _We do not presume_, _etc._ This adaptation of a passage from
Burke’s _A Letter to a Noble Lord_ (_Works_, Bohn, V. 114) is
quoted elsewhere by Hazlitt.
_The Dumb Savoyard._ By Thompson, acted thirty-eight times.
364. _Mrs. W. West._ Mrs. W. West (1790–1876) who first appeared (as
Miss Cooke) in London in 1812. She married William West in
1815.
_Meggy Macgilpin._ Maggy Macgilpin in O’Keeffe’s _Highland Reel_
(1788).
_Keeley._ Robert Keeley (1793–1869). His height was five feet two
inches.
365. ‘_A man made after supper_,’ _etc._ _2 Henry IV._, Act III. Sc.
2.
‘_Vice to be hated_,’ _etc._ Cf. Pope, _Essay on Man_, II.
217–18.
366. _Ecole des Veillards._ By Casimir Delavigne (1823).
SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS
This notice is full of favourite quotations and of sentiments which
Hazlitt had expressed elsewhere. See specially the Dramatic Essays in
vol. VIII.
366. ‘_Warbles_,’ _etc._ _L’ Allegro_, 134.
‘_Fierce extremes._’ _Paradise Lost_, II. 599.
_The Invincibles._ A musical farce, acted 34 times.
‘_Our mind’s eye._’ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act I. Sc. 2.
‘_Our heart’s core._’ Cf. _Ibid._ Act III. Sc. 2.
367. ‘_Fancy’s midwife._’ Cf. ‘The fairies’ midwife.’ _Romeo and
Juliet_, Act I. Sc. 4.
‘_Gay creatures_,’ _etc._ Comus, 299–301.
‘_Tears_,’ _etc._ _Paradise Lost_, I. 620.
368. ‘_Mr. Kean’s Othello_,’ _etc._ From The _Times_. See _post_, p.
406, and vol. VIII. p. 414 and notes.
‘_With kindliest change._’ _Paradise Lost_, V. 336.
THE COMPANY AT THE OPERA
369. _Mr. Peake._ Richard Brinsley Peake (1792–1847). The farce here
noticed is called by Genest ‘Little Offerings.’
‘_Crabbed age_,’ _etc._ _The Passionate Pilgrim_, Stanza XII.
_Miss Goward._ Mary Ann Goward (1805?–1899), who afterwards
became so well known as Mrs. Keeley. She married Keeley in
1829.
370. _Madame Caradori._ Madame Caradori-Allan (1800–1865), who made
her début at the Italian Opera in London in 1822.
_Mademoiselle Sontag._ Henriette Sontag (1806–1854). She married
Count Rossi in 1828 and retired from the stage till near the
end of her life.
371. _Brocard._ Suzanne Brocard (1798–1855), whose first appearance at
the Comédie Française was in 1817 and who retired in 1839.
372. _Lord Byron and his Contemporaries._ Cf. _ante_, note to p. 355.
‘_The mob_,’ _etc._ Pope, _Imitations of Horace_, Book II. Ep. I.
108.
THE BEGGAR’S OPERA
373. ‘_Vanity, chaotic Vanity._’ Hazlitt may have had in mind the
lines in _Romeo and Juliet_ (Act I. Sc. 1), ‘O heavy lightness!
serious vanity! misshapen chaos!’
374. ‘_Waste her sweetness_,’ _etc._ Cf. Gray’s _Elegy_, 56.
_Splenetic_ ‘[splenitive] _and rash_.’ _Hamlet_, Act V. Sc. 1.
_Blanchard._ William Blanchard (1769–1835), for long a member of
the Covent Garden Company.
‘_And when the date_,’ _etc._ Butler, _Hudibras_, Part I. Canto
1. 285–6.
_De Vere._ By Robert Plumer Ward (1765–1846), published in 1827.
It was supposed by some, though denied by the author, that De
Vere was intended to represent Canning.
‘_We have heard_,’ _etc._ _2 Henry IV._, Act III. Sc. 2.
375. _Sir John Sylvester._ Sir John Silvester (1745–1822), Recorder of
London.
‘_The thief_,’ _etc._ _Leviathan_, Part I. Chap. 3.
_A Race for Dinner._ By G. H. B. Rodwell (1800–1852).
‘_And Birnam wood_,’ _etc._ _Macbeth_, Acts IV. and V.
_The Poor Gentleman._ By George Colman the Younger (1801).
375. ‘_To advantage dressed._’ Pope, _An Essay on Criticism_, 297.
376. _Miss Ellen Tree._ Ellen Tree (1805–1880), who married Charles
Kean in 1842. She was a younger sister of Mrs. Bradshaw, the
actress and singer.
377. _Miss Love._ Emma Love, afterwards Mrs. Calcroft, had made her
first appearance on the stage in 1817 at the English Opera
House.
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW AND L’AVARE
377. ‘_The lungs of others_,’ _etc._ Cf. _As You Like It_, Act II. Sc.
7.
378. _Mr. Wilkie failed_, _etc._ See _ante_, p. 252.
‘_Warble, warble._’ _As You Like It_, Act II. Sc. 5.
379. _Mademoiselle Mars._ For Mademoiselle Mars in ‘a sort of shadowy
_Catherine and Petruchio_,’ see vol. IX. p. 151.
380. _Ninette à la cour._ By Charles Simon Favart (1710–1792).
381. _Seraglio._ An opera by Dimond, produced in 1827.
_Charles the Second._ By Howard Payne, produced in 1824.
MRS. SIDDONS
381. _Pie Voleuse._ See _ante_, note to p. 304.
‘_Born to converse_,’ _etc._ Cf. Pope, _Prologue to the Satires_,
196.
_The Fall of Nineveh._ By John Martin (1789–1854). The painting
was being exhibited in Bond Street.
382. _Abridged Paradise Lost._ Mrs. Siddons published _The Story of
our First Parents selected from Milton’s Paradise Lost for the
use of young persons_, 1822.
_A triumphant peroration_, _etc._ Hazlitt no doubt refers to
Scott’s _Life of Napoleon_, published in 1827.
‘_The worst, the second fall of man._’ Cf. William Windham,
_Speeches_, II. 47 (Nov. 4, 1801).
384. ‘_Barren spectators._’ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 2.
_Mr. Stanfield’s landscape back-grounds._ William Clarkson
Stanfield (1793–1867).
_Veluti in speculum._ Cf. ‘Inspicere tamquam in speculum in vitas
omnium,’ etc. Terence, _Adelphi_, Act III. Sc. 3.
THE THREE QUARTERS, ETC.
384. _The new comedy._ _Ups and Downs, or the Ladder of Life_ was the
title of the piece here noticed by Hazlitt. It was acted eight
times.
_The secretary of the Admiralty_, _etc._ Croker. Cf. _ante_, p.
344.
385. _A nice distinction in Miss Burney._ See her _Cecilia_.
_Killing no Murder._ A farce by Theodore Hook, produced in 1809.
386. ‘_Like dew-drops_,’ _etc._ _Troilus and Cressida_, Act III. Sc.
3.
‘_Fine by degrees_,’ _etc._ Prior, _Henry and Emma_, 430.
‘_They best can paint them_,’ _etc._ Pope, _Eloisa to Abelard_,
366.
_Lord Porchester’s tragedy._ _Don Pedro, King of Castile_, by
Lord Porchester, afterwards 3rd Earl of Carnarvon (1800–1849)
was produced at Drury Lane on March 10, 1828.
_Lord Morpeth’s._ Lord Morpeth, afterwards 7th Earl of Carlisle
(1802–1864) published in 1828 _The Last of the Greeks; or the
Fall of Constantinople_, a tragedy in verse.
386. _The Sphynx_, _etc._ _The Sphynx_ (1827) and _The Athenæum_
(1828) were started, and _The Argus_ (1828) was projected by
James Silk Buckingham (1786–1855).
387. ‘_Oh! dearest Ophelia_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act II. Sc. 2.
388. ‘_He knows his cue_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Othello_, Act I. Sc. 2.
MR. KEAN
389. _We do not wonder_, _etc._ Kean had played Richard III. at the
Théâtre Français in May 1828.
_Voltaire has borrowed_, _etc._ Cf. _ante_, p. 282.
‘_The poet’s eye_,’ _etc._ _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_, Act V.
Sc. 1.
390. ‘_Should be as a book_,’ _etc._ _Macbeth_, Act I. Sc. 5.
_The Hetman Platoff._ The Russian general, Matvei Ivanovich
Platoff (1757–1818), Hetman of the Cossacks of the Don. See
vol. IX. p. 465.
391. ‘_Give us pause._’ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 1.
_Miss Smithson._ Harriet Constance Smithson (1800–1854), who
played frequently in France and married Hector Berlioz in 1833.
_A series of elegant bas-reliefs_, _etc._ Cf. vol. VIII. p. 456,
where the same comparison is made.
392. _Little Bartolozzi._ Miss Bartolozzi made her first appearance
(at the Haymarket) on June 17, 1828. She was a sister of Madame
Vestris.
MUNDEN’S SIR PETER TEAZLE
For Hazlitt’s connection with The _Times_ as dramatic critic see vol.
VIII. p. 512. The fifteen articles reprinted for the first time in the
present volume have been included upon internal evidence of Hazlitt’s
authorship. No reasonable doubt can be felt with regard to any of them.
392. _Past Ten O’clock._ ‘A moderate farce’ by Dibdin, produced March
11, 1815. See Genest. In another account of Munden (vol. VIII.
p. 270) Hazlitt had referred to his ‘broad shining face’ and
‘the alarming drop of his chin.’
YOUNG’S HAMLET
Cf. this paper with the account of _Hamlet_ in _Characters of
Shakespear’s Plays_, vol. I. p. 237.
394. _The Miller and his Men._ A successful melodrama by Pocock,
produced in 1813.
395. ‘_The paragon of animals._’ _Hamlet_, Act II. Sc. 2.
‘_Peaked or pined._’ _Macbeth_, Act I. Sc. 3.
‘_Oh that this too, too solid flesh_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act I.
Sc. 2.
‘_The pretty Ophelia._’ _Ibid._ Act IV. Sc. 5.
DOWTON IN THE HYPOCRITE
Cf. the notice of _The Hypocrite_ in _A View of the English Stage_, vol.
VIII. pp. 245–7.
395. ‘_Very craftily qualified._’ _Othello_, Act II. Sc. 3.
MISS BRUNTON’S ROSALIND
Cf. the notices of two other Rosalinds in _A View, etc._, vol. VIII. pp.
252 and 336.
397. _Miss Brunton._ Elizabeth Brunton (1799–1860), who in 1823
married Frederick Henry Yates, the actor.
‘_Good emphasis and discretion._’ Cf. ‘With good accent and good
discretion,’ _Hamlet_, Act II. Sc. 2.
‘_The gods_,’ _etc._ _As You Like It_, Act III. Sc. 3.
MAYWOOD’S ZANGA
Hazlitt had noticed Maywood’s Shylock. See _A View_, _etc._ vol. VIII.
p. 374. In 1821 Maywood wrote to Hazlitt from New York introducing a Mr.
Greenhow, who was entrusted to present to Hazlitt a morsel of George
Cooke’s liver. See Mr. W. C. Hazlitt’s _Memoirs_, _etc._, II. 1–2.
398. ‘_From the sound_,’ _etc._ Cf. Collins, Ode, _The Passions_,
19–20.
‘_Distilling them_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act I. Sc. 5.
‘_Too tame._’ _Ibid._, Act III. Sc. 2.
‘_’Twas I that did it._’ _The Revenge_, Act V. Sc. 2.
‘_Forced gait._’ _1 Henry IV._, Act III. Sc. 1.
KEAN’S RICHARD III.
Cf. the essay on Richard III. in _Characters of Shakespear’s Plays_
(vol. I. pp. 298–303), where Hazlitt speaks of the ‘miserable medley
acted for Richard III.’ and gives some of the omitted passages as being
‘peculiarly adapted for stage effect.’ Shakespeare’s _Richard III._ was
revived at Covent Garden on March 12, 1821, Macready playing Richard and
Mrs. Bunn Queen Margaret.
399. ‘_Now is the winter_,’ _etc._ _Richard III._, Act I. Sc. 1.
‘_Even so!_’ _etc. Ibid._
400. ‘_They do me wrong_,’ _etc. Ibid._ Act I. Sc. 3.
‘_His grace looks cheerfully_,’ _etc. Ibid._ Act III. Sc. 4.
THE WONDER
Cf. _A View_, _etc._, vol. VIII. p. 332.
402. ‘_Snatch a grace_,’ _etc._ Pope, _An Essay on Criticism_, 155.
‘_Catch ere she falls_,’ _etc._ Pope, _Moral Essays_, II. 20.
VENICE PRESERVED
Cf. the account of Kemble’s Pierre, vol. VIII. p. 378.
403. ‘_The most replenished_,’ _etc._ _Richard III._, Act IV. Sc. 3.
SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER
403. _Borrowed from Fielding’s Joseph Andrews._ Cf. vol. III. p. 115.
404. ‘_His singularity_,’ _etc._ Johnson frequently denounced
singularity. The instances are collected in Boswell’s _Life_,
ed. G. B. Hill, II. 74–5.
KEAN’S MACBETH
405. _Except in the murder scene._ Cf. vol. VIII. p. 207.
‘_Proud and lion-hearted_,’ _etc._ Cf. ‘Be lion-mettled, proud,
and take no care,’ etc. _Macbeth_, Act IV. Sc. 1.
KEAN’S OTHELLO
405. _This young debutante._ Her name was Mrs. Robinson.
406. _Mr. Kean’s Othello_, _etc._ This passage, to the end of the
notice, was quoted more than once by Hazlitt. Cf. _ante_, p.
368 and vol. VIII. p. 414 and notes.
KEAN AND MISS O’NEILL
Cf. this with Hazlitt’s appreciation of Miss O’Neill in _The London
Magazine_, vol. VIII. of the present edition, pp. 392 _et seq._
407. ‘_O’erstep the modesty_,’ _etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 2.
408. ‘_As one in suffering all_,’ _etc. Ibid._
‘_Abide the beating_,’ _etc._ _Twelfth Night_, Act II. Sc. 4.
THE HONEY MOON
409. ‘_What is set down for him._’ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 2.
‘_Plautus was too light_,’ _etc._ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act II. Sc. 2.
‘_And near him_,’ _etc._ Collins, _Ode on the Poetical
Character_, 43–4.
‘_Grew sharp as a pen._’ _Henry V._, Act II. Sc. 3.
410. ‘_Go thou_,’ _etc._ _S. Luke_ x. 37.
MR. KEAN
410. ‘_Not Fate itself could awe._’ _Richard III._ (Cibber’s version),
Act V. Sc. 3.
KING JOHN
411. ‘_To me_,’ _etc._ _King John_, Act III. Sc. 1.
THE PRESS, ETC.
Hazlitt was a very frequent contributor to John Hunt’s ‘Weekly
Miscellany,’ _The Yellow Dwarf_, which ran from Jan. 1 to May 23, 1818.
Most of his contributions were included in _Political Essays_. See vol.
III. pp. 254 _et seq._ Of those included in the present volume ‘The
Opera’ was reprinted with some omissions and variations in _Literary
Remains_, the rest are now republished for the first time, on the
strength of what the editors regard as the conclusive internal evidence
of Hazlitt’s authorship. All the essays are reprinted _verbatim_ from
the Magazine.
411. _M. Jollivet._ Jean Baptiste Moïse, Comte Jollivet (1753–1818), a
prominent French politician.
412. ‘_Had’st thou believed_,’ _etc._ _Zapolya_, Prelude, Sc. 1.
413. _Was one of the passages, etc._ See the last chapter of
Coleridge’s _Biographia Literaria_.
_‘Restored,’ etc._ _Carmen Triumphale_, St. XVIII.
‘_A full solemne man._’ _Canterbury Tales_, Prologue, 209.
414. _Odes on Hoffer, etc._ Hazlitt refers to some of Wordsworth’s
‘Poems dedicated to National Independence and Liberty.’
_‘A dateless bargain,’ etc._ Cf. _Romeo and Juliet_, Act V. Sc.
3.
_‘Stretching out,’ etc._ _Macbeth_, Act IV. Sc. 1.
_‘The same,’ etc._ Hazlitt is no doubt quoting from Southey’s
_Carmen Nuptiale_, St. 52.
_Mrs. Tofts._ See Hogarth’s ‘Credulity, Superstition, and
Fanaticism,’ where the well-known imposture of Mary Tofts
(1701?–1763) is ridiculed.
415. _‘Charm these deaf adders,’ etc._ Cf. _Psalms_, lviii. 4, 5.
_‘Drops which sacred pity,’ etc._ _As You Like It_, Act II. Sc.
7.
_‘Which knaves,’ etc._ Butler, _Hudibras_, I. i. 35–6.
416. _‘The Gods,’ etc._ Cf. _As You Like It_, Act III. Sc. 3.
‘_A mingled_ [medley] _air,’ etc._ Wordsworth, _Peter Bell_,
304–5.
MR. COLERIDGE’S LECTURES
This course of Lectures began on Jan. 27, and ended on March 13, 1818.
Hazlitt was lecturing on Poetry at the same time. For Coleridge’s
prospectus see _Lectures on Shakespeare_ (ed. Ashe), 170.
416. _‘Those fair parts,’ etc._ Cf. _Romeo and Juliet_, Act II. Sc. 1.
417. ‘_Unhouselled_,’ [unhoused] _etc._ _Othello_, Act I. Sc. 2.
_‘This island’s mine,’ etc._ _The Tempest_, Act I. Sc. 2.
_‘Independently of his conduct,’ etc._ Cf. vol. III. (_Political
Essays_), p. 285.
_‘He had peopled else,’ etc._ _The Tempest_, Act I. Sc. 2.
‘_Lunes and abstractions._’ Cf. _The Merry Wives of Windsor_, Act
IV. Sc. 2.
418. ‘_Conquering and to conquer._’ _Revelation_ vi. 2.
_Bertram._ Cf. vol. X. p. 158, and _ante_, pp. 412–3.
‘_Tedious and brief._’ _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_, Act V. Sc. 1.
_‘The man may indeed be a reviewer,’ etc._ This saying does not
seem to have been reported elsewhere. Coleridge and Wordsworth
were often accused of ridiculing Southey’s poetical genius.
419. _‘Fie, Sir!’ etc._ Milman, _Fazio_, Act II. Sc. 1.
_‘To leave this keen encounter,’ etc._ _Richard III._, Act I. Sc.
2.
‘_Reason_ [reasons] _as plenty,’ etc._ _1 Henry IV._, Act II. Sc.
4.
‘_The inconstant moon._’ _Romeo and Juliet_, Act II. Sc. 2.
420. _‘His large discourse of reason,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act IV. Sc. 4.
CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE
420. _‘I do perceive a fury,’ etc._ Cf.
‘I do understand a fury in your words,
But not the words.’ _Othello_, Act IV. Sc. 2.
421. _‘And as the soldiers’ bare dead bodies lay,’ etc._ _1 Henry
IV._, Act I. Sc. 3.
_‘The very age,’ etc._ ‘The very age and body of the time.’
_Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 2.
_‘An understanding,’ etc._ ‘Give it an understanding, but no
tongue.’ _Hamlet_, Act I. Sc. 2.
421. _‘They are begot,’ etc._ Hazlitt was perhaps thinking of ‘Begot
upon itself, born on itself.’ _Othello_, Act III. Sc. 4.
_‘He has tasted,’ etc._ Lamb’s version (as given by Coleridge) of
Thekla’s song in Act II. Sc. 6 of _The Piccolomini_. See
Coleridge’s _Poetical Works_ (ed. J. D. Campbell), p. 648. Lamb
himself printed the song differently. See _The Works of Charles
and Mary Lamb_, ed. E. V. Lucas, v. 27 and notes.
422. _‘The man whose eye,’ etc._ Wordsworth, _Lines left upon a Seat
in a Yew-tree, etc._, 55–59.
_Hogarth’s famous print._ Hazlitt perhaps refers to Hogarth’s
frontispiece to Kirby’s ‘Perspective.’
‘_As ’twere in spite of scorn._’ Cf. _Paradise Lost_, I. 619.
_‘The child and champion,’ etc._ See vol. III. p. 99 and note.
424. _‘The statue,’ etc._ Thomson, _The Seasons_, Summer, 1346.
‘_The starry Galileo._’ _Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage_, Canto IV.
54.
_‘Now in glimmer,’ etc._ Coleridge, _Christabel_, 169.
_‘Moving wild laughter,’ etc._ _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, Act V. Sc.
2.
_‘The double night’, etc._ _Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage_, Canto
IV. 81.
425. ‘_Seen of all eyes._’ Cf. _Revelation_, i. 7.
THE OPERA
426. _‘The glass of fashion,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 1.
‘_The fool of the senses._’ _Macbeth_, Act II. Sc. 1.
_‘How happy,’ etc._ _The Beggar’s Opera_, Act II. Sc. 2.
428. _‘With some sweet,’ etc._ _Macbeth_, Act V. Sc. 3.
_‘The cloister’d heart,’ etc._ Cf. _ante_, p. 268 and note.
429. _‘The flower of Britain’s warriors,’ etc._ Southey, _Carmen
Nuptiale_, 16.
430. _A contemporary critic._ Hazlitt perhaps refers to Schlegel. See
vol. VIII. (_A View, etc._) p. 324.
ON THE QUESTION WHETHER POPE WAS A POET
Hazlitt was for a time a fairly frequent contributor to _The Edinburgh
Magazine_ (New Series), otherwise known as _The New Scots Magazine_. Two
of his contributions, ‘Remarks on Mr. West’s Picture of Death on the
Pale Horse,’ and ‘On the Ignorance of the Learned,’ have been published
in vols. IX. and VI. respectively. The essays ‘On Fashion,’ ‘On
Nicknames’ and ‘Thoughts on Taste’ in the present volume were first
reprinted with omissions and variations in _Sketches and Essays_ (1839);
those ‘On the Question whether Pope was a Poet,’ (signed W. H.), and ‘On
Respectable People,’ are now reprinted for the first time.
431. ‘_The pale reflex._’ _Romeo and Juliet_, Act III. Sc. 5.
432. _‘In fortune’s ray,’ etc._ _Troilus and Cressida_, Act I. Sc. 3.
‘_Gnarled oak._’ Shakespeare uses this phrase (_Measure for
Measure_, Act II. Sc. 2), but Hazlitt probably meant a ‘knotted
oak’ which is the expression used in the passage he had just
written down.
_‘Calm contemplation,’ etc._ Thomson, _The Seasons_, Autumn,
1277.
ON RESPECTABLE PEOPLE
Signed ‘A. Z.’ in the Magazine.
434. ‘_Buys golden opinions._’ _Macbeth_, Act I. Sc. 7.
_‘The learned pate,’ etc._ _Timon of Athens_, Act IV. Sc. 3.
435. _Otway, etc._ Otway, according to the familiar but probably
untrue account first given by T. Cibber in _The Lives of
the Poets_, was choked by the first mouthful of a roll
which he bought with money given to him by a gentleman in a
coffee-house.
‘_For a song._’ The story of Lord Burghley’s ungenerous treatment
of Spenser was first recorded by Fuller.
‘_The time gives evidence of it._’ Cf. ‘This was sometime a
paradox, but now the time gives it proof.’ _Hamlet_, Act III.
Sc. 1.
436. _‘What can ennoble sots,’ etc._ Pope, _An Essay on Man_, IV.
215–6.
‘_All honourable men._’ _Julius Cæsar_, Act III. Sc. 2.
437. ‘_Lives and fortunes men._’ For the old formula of ‘lives and
fortunes’ see Burke’s _Reflections on the Revolution in France_
(_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 18 and note.)
ON FASHION
437. _‘Born of nothing,’ etc._ Cf. _ante_, note to p. 421.
_‘His garment,’ etc._ _The Faerie Queene_, III. xii. 8.
‘_The great vulgar and the small._’ Cowley, Horace’s _Odes_, III.
1.
439. _‘The sign of an inward,’ etc._ Misquoted from the Catechism.
440. _‘And are, when unadorned,’ etc._ Thomson, _The Seasons_, Autumn,
206.
‘_The city madam_’ [woman], _etc._ _As You Like It_, Act II. Sc.
7.
_‘The age is grown so picked,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act V. Sc. 1.
441. _The story in Peregrine Pickle._ Chap, lxxxvii.
_‘Lisping and ambling,’ etc._ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 1.
442. ‘_In a high or low degree._’ Cf. Pope, _Epilogue to the Satires_,
1. 137.
_‘And thin partitions,’ etc._ Dryden, _Absalom and Achitophel_,
1. 164.
‘_Kings are naturally,’ etc._ Burke, _Speech on Economical
Reform_ (_Works_, Bohn, II. 106).
ON NICKNAMES
442. _‘Hæ nugæ,’ etc._ Cf. Horace, _Ars Poetica_, 451–2.
443. _‘The priest,’ etc._ _The Beggar’s Opera_, Act I. Sc. 1.
_‘As infidels,’ etc._ Hazlitt alludes to a note in the ‘Beauties
of the Anti-Jacobin,’ denouncing Coleridge, Lamb, and Southey.
See vol. X. (_Contributions to the Edinburgh Review_), p. 139.
444. _‘Sound them,’ etc._ _Julius Cæsar_, Act I. Sc. 2.
_An eminent character._ Probably Stoddart, late editor of _The
Times_. See _post_, p. 448.
_‘Hath Britain all the sun,’ etc._ _Cymbeline_, Act III. Sc. 4.
445. ‘_Brevity is the soul of wit._’ _Hamlet_, Act II. Sc. 2.
_‘The unbought grace of life,’ etc._ Burke, _Reflections on the
Revolution in France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, II. 89).
446. _‘Leave the will puzzled,’ etc._ _Ibid._, II. 103.
_‘Bring but a Scotsman,’ etc._ Burns, _The Author’s Earnest Cry
and Prayer, etc._ Postscript, St. 4.
447. _‘As rage,’ etc._ _Troilus and Cressida_, Act I. Sc. 3.
_‘A nickname is the heaviest stone,’ etc._ Cf. ‘It is the
heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man, to tell
him he is at the end of his nature.’ Sir Thomas Browne,
_Hydriotaphia_, IV. 23. See also vol. III. (_Political
Essays_), p. 261.
_As Canning pelted a noble lord, etc._ Canning ridiculed Henry
Addington (afterwards Lord Sidmouth) under the title of the
‘Doctor.’ His father was well known as a ‘mad’ doctor.
448. _‘With so small a web,’ etc._ _Othello_, Act II. Sc. 1.
_‘A starling,’ etc._ _1 Henry IV._, Act I. Sc. 3.
449. _Stat nominis umbra._ Lucan, _Pharsalia_, I. 135.
THOUGHTS ON TASTE
450. _‘He had found a few pearls,’ etc._ _Œuvres_, L. 58. July 19,
1776.
_‘Rich as the oozy bottom,’ etc._ _Henry V._, Act I. Sc. 2.
_‘Or like a gate of steel,’ etc._ _Troilus and Cressida_, Act
III. Sc. 3.
451. ‘_Damns_ [condemns] _him,’ etc._ _Much Ado About Nothing_, Act
IV. Sc. 3.
_‘Lay their choppy fingers,’ etc._ _Macbeth_, Act I. Sc. 3.
452. _‘Have built high towers,’ etc._ _Paradise Lost_, I. 749.
_‘Majestic though in ruin.’_ _Paradise Lost_, II. 305.
_Innocence ‘likest heaven.’_ ‘O innocence deserving Paradise.’
_Ibid._, V. 445–6.
_‘In tones,’ etc._ _Paradise Regained_, IV. 255.
_The author of the ‘Friend,’ etc._ Coleridge may have said this
to Hazlitt himself. He described Pope’s writings as ‘a
conjunction disjunctive of epigrams’ (_Biographia Literaria_,
chap. I.). For his views on French Tragedy, see _ibid._,
Satyrane’s _Letters_, Letter II.
_The author of the ‘Excursion,’ etc._ See _The Excursion_, II.
484. Cf. vol. I. (_The Round Table_), p. 116 and note.
Note. _Non satis est, etc._ Horace, _Ars Poetica_, 99.
453. _‘Not to admire,’ etc._ ‘Not to admire is all the art I know,’
quoted by Pope from Creech’s translation of Horace. See
_Imitations of Horace_, Book I. Epistle vi. I.
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
454. ‘_Hope told a flattering tale._’ An anonymous song sung to
Paisiello’s famous air, ‘Nel cor più non mi sento,’ from _La
Molinara_.
455. ‘_Pierceable._’ ‘Not perceable with any power of any starr’ (_The
Faerie Queene_, I. I. 7) is quoted elsewhere by Hazlitt.
_‘The drops,’ etc._ _As You Like It_, Act. II. Sc. 7.
456. ‘_Swept and garnished._’ _S. Matthew_ xii. 44.
_‘Knowledge at each entrance,’ etc._ _Paradise Lost_, III. 50.
Note. _Mr. Allston._ See _ante_, note to p. 189.
Note. _‘A temple,’ etc._ Cf. _2 Corinthians_, v. 1.
457. ‘_Nor seem’d_’ [appeared], _‘etc._ _Paradise Lost_, I. 592–4.
_Better than nothing._ At this point in the Magazine there is a
footnote by the editor, protesting against the view that
Rogers’s _Human Life_ is ‘nothing,’ and the _Lyrical Ballads_
only ‘something.’ He adds ‘Who told this lively writer that Mr.
Southey ever preferred the _Excursion_ to _Paradise Lost_?’
_The preference given, etc._ A review of _Human Life_ by Jeffrey
in _The Edinburgh Review_ (XXXI. 325) contains a contemptuous
reference to ‘a Lakish ditty.’
457. _‘Carnation,’ etc._ _Henry V._, Act II. Sc. 3.
458. _I know an admirer of Don Quixote, etc._ This was Lamb. See vol.
VII. (_The Plain Speaker_), p. 36.
THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
This conclusion of ‘Thoughts on Taste’ does not appear to have been
published in the _Edinburgh Magazine_, or, so far as the editors have
been able to discover, in any Magazine. In the _Edinburgh Magazine_ the
_second_ essay is described as ‘a conclusion of some thoughts on the
same subject, in our Number for October 1818.’ This third essay is
reprinted from _Sketches and Essays_, where it was perhaps printed from
a MS. or proof.
460. _Mr. Pratt._ Samuel Jackson Pratt (1749–1814), whose ‘Sympathy, a
Poem,’ was published anonymously in 1788.
_‘That come’ etc._ _A Winter’s Tale_, Act IV. Sc. 4.
461. _‘And fit audience find,’ etc._ _Paradise Lost_, VII. 31.
[HISTORICAL ILLUSTRATIONS OF SHAKESPEARE]
(1) Two letters from Hazlitt under the heading ‘Historical Illustrations
of Shakespeare’ appeared in the number for January 1819 (vol. IV. p. 39)
and ran as follows: ‘Mr. Editor, I daresay you will agree with me in
thinking, that whatever throws light on the dramatic productions of
Shakespeare, deserves to be made public. I have already, in the volume
called _Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays_,[81] shewn, by a reference to
the passages in North’s translation of Plutarch, his obligations to the
historian in his Coriolanus, and the noble way in which he availed
himself of the lights of antiquity in composing that piece. I shall,
with your permission, pursue the subject in the present and some future
articles. The parallel is even more striking between the celebrated
trial-scene in Henry VIII., and the following narrative of that event,
as it actually took place, which is to be found in Cavendish’s
Negociations of Cardinal Wolsey,’ [a long quotation from that work
follows, and Hazlitt concludes]: ‘In another article I shall give some
remarks on this subject, and the passages in Holingshed on which Macbeth
is, in a great measure, founded. I am, Sir, your humble servant, W.
Hazlitt. London, Nov. 13, 1818.’ Another letter on the same subject
appeared in September 1819 (vol. V. p. 262): ‘Mr. Editor, The following
passage in North’s translation of Plutarch will be found to have been
closely copied in the scene between Brutus and his wife in Julius Cæsar’
[a long quotation from Plutarch—see Temple Classics edition, vol. IX.
pp. 256–258—follows, and Hazlitt continues]: Again, the following
curious account, extracted from Magellan’s Voyage to the South Seas, may
throw light on the origin of the Tempest, and the character of Caliban.
The mention of the god Setebos seems decisive of the identity of the
source from which he borrowed.’ The letter concludes with an extract
from Magellan’s Voyage.
ON THE PRESENT STATE OF PARLIAMENTARY ELOQUENCE
Many of Hazlitt’s numerous contributions to _The London Magazine_ have
been included in former volumes of the present edition. Of those printed
in this volume, the essay ‘On the Spirit of Partisanship’ was reprinted
in _Sketches and Essays_ (1839), that ‘On Consistency of Opinion’ in
_Winterslow_ (1850). The remaining five are now republished for the
first time.
Some interesting particulars about _The London Magazine_ will be found
in Mr. Bertram Dobell’s _Sidelights on Charles Lamb_ (1903).
The essay ‘On the Present State of Parliamentary Eloquence’ is signed
‘T.’ and is No. IV. of the series entitled ‘Table Talk.’ Cf. the
Bibliographical and Critical Notes to _The Eloquence of the British
Senate_, vol. III. p. 389, to which this essay may be regarded as
supplementary. Hazlitt had been a parliamentary reporter on _The Morning
Chronicle_ in 1813. The exact period does not seem to be ascertainable,
but the present essay shows that he heard Plunket’s great speech on
Catholic Emancipation (Feb. 25, 1813), and Sir James Mackintosh’s maiden
speech (Dec. 14, 1813). With regard to Plunket’s speech there is a
tradition that Hazlitt was so fascinated by it that he omitted to take
any notes of it. See _Memoirs, etc._ (1867), I. 196. Most of the
speakers here described are referred to more than once by Hazlitt
elsewhere.
464. _‘Such a one,’ etc._ The Letters of the younger Pliny, I. 20.
465. _‘Domestic treason,’ etc._ Cf. _Macbeth_, Act III. Sc. 2.
466. ‘_Make a wanton._’ _Hamlet_, Act V. Sc. 2.
468. _‘Plays round the head,’ etc._ Pope, _An Essay on Man_, IV. 254.
469. _‘Kindle them,’ etc._ _Comus_, 794–5.
470. _‘Ample scope,’ etc._ Cf. Gray, _The Bard_, 51.
471. ‘_Would lengthen_ [stretch] _out,’ etc._ _Macbeth_, Act IV. Sc.
1.
472. _‘Grove nods to grove,’ etc._ Pope, _Moral Essays_, IV. 117–8.
_Roubilliac._ Louis François Roubiliac (1695–1762), many of whose
monuments are in Westminster Abbey. His remark quoted by
Hazlitt was made to Reynolds. See Northcote’s _Life of Sir J.
Reynolds_, p. 44.
Note 1. _‘It is a custom,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act I. Sc. 4.
Note 2. _Mr. Phillips._ Hazlitt presumably refers to Charles
Phillips (1787?–1859), a florid Irish barrister, called to the
English bar in 1821.
Note 3. _‘Like Juno’s swans,’ etc._ _As You Like It_, Act I. Sc.
3.
473. _Mr. Banks._ Henry Bankes (1757–1834), M.P. for Corfe Castle
(1780–1826).
_Mr. Charles Yorke._ Charles Philip Yorke (1764–1834), who had
been conspicuous in the stormy privilege debates of 1810. He
was at this time M.P. for Liskeard.
_Mr. Secretary Peele._ Sir Robert Peel (1788–1850), then Chief
Secretary for Ireland and a strong opponent of Catholic
Emancipation.
‘_Without o’erflowing, full._’ Sir John Denham, _Cooper’s Hill_,
192.
_It was but indifferently reported, etc._ As to Hazlitt’s own
difficulty in reporting it, see _ante_, introductory note to
the essay.
474. _‘Come then, expressive silence,’ etc._ Thomson, _A Hymn_, 118.
Note 2. _‘That speech,’ etc._ This famous saying is usually
credited to Talleyrand, but Voltaire had said much the same
thing (_Dialogues_, XIV. _Le Chapon et la Poularde_).
Note 2. _Isabey._ Jean Baptiste Isabey’s (1767–1855) picture of
The Congress of Vienna is at Windsor Castle.
475. _‘In many a winding bout,’ etc._ _L’Allegro_, 139–140.
_‘But ’tis the fall,’ etc._ Pope, _Epilogue to the Satires_, I.
144–5.
476. ‘_Out upon such half-faced fellowship._’ _1 Henry IV._, Act I.
Sc. 3.
_Summum jus, etc._ Cicero, _De Officiis_, I. 10.
477. _‘The punto,’ etc._ Cf. _The Merry Wives of Windsor_, Act II. Sc.
3, and Act II. Sc. 1; and _Romeo and Juliet_, Act II. Sc. 4.
_‘No further seek,’ etc._ Misquoted from Gray’s _Elegy_, 125–6.
478. _‘Hear him’s that now rise,’ etc._ Cf. Burke, _Speech on American
Taxation_, 1774 (_Works_, Bohn, I. 429).
_‘Swinging slow,’ etc._ _Il Penseroso_, 76.
_‘Mother-wit,’ etc._ Cf. Dryden, _Alexander’s Feast_, 166.
_‘Sole sovereign sway,’ etc._ Cf. _Macbeth_, Act I. Sc. 5.
479. _‘What’s serious,’ etc._ Cf. _ante_, p. 342.
_‘A windy fan,’ etc._ Cf. _The Faerie Queene_, III. xii. 8.
480. _‘Trifles,’ etc._ _Othello_, Act III. Sc. 3.
_‘To make the worse,’ etc._ _Paradise Lost_, Book II. 113–4.
_‘Takes the rose,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 4.
‘_In the extremity of an oath._’ Probably an adaptation of a
common Shakesperian expression.
[MR. CRABBE]
To _The London Magazine_ for May 1821, Hazlitt contributed an essay on
Crabbe, under the heading ‘Living Authors, No. V.’ The greater part of
this essay was republished in _The Spirit of the Age_ (see vol. IV. pp.
348 _et seq._), but some passages were omitted which are here supplied.
In the Magazine the first paragraph (which differs to some extent from
the opening of the _Spirit of the Age_ essay) runs as follows:
‘The object of Mr. Crabbe’s writings seems to be, to show what
an unpoetical world we live in: or rather, perhaps, the very
reverse of this conclusion might be drawn from them; for it
might be said, that if this is poetry, there is nothing but
poetry in the world. Our author’s style might be cited as an
answer to Audrey’s inquiry, “Is poetry a true thing?” If the
most feigning poetry is the truest, Mr. Crabbe is of all poets
the least poetical. There are here no ornaments, no flights of
fancy, no illusions of sentiment, no tinsel of words. His song
is one sad reality, one unraised, unvaried note of unavailing
woe. Literal fidelity serves him in the place of invention; he
assumes importance by a number of petty details; he rivets
attention by being prolix. He not only deals in incessant
matters of fact, but in matters of fact of the most familiar,
the least animating, and most unpleasant kind; but he relies for
the effect of novelty on the microscopic minuteness with which
he dissects the most trivial objects—and, for the interest he
excites on the unshrinking determination with which he handles
the most painful. His poetry has an official and professional
air. He is called out to cases of difficult births, of fractured
limbs, or breaches of the peace; and makes out a parish register
of accidents and offences. He takes the most trite, the most
gross and obvious, and revolting part of nature, for the subject
of his elaborate descriptions; but it is nature still, and
Nature is a great and mighty goddess. “Great is Diana of the
Ephesians.”[82] It is well for the reverend author that it is
so. Individuality is, in his theory, the only definition of
poetry. Whatever is, he hitches into rhyme. Whoever makes an
exact image of any thing on the earth below, however deformed or
insignificant, according to him, must succeed and he has
succeeded. Mr. Crabbe is one of the most popular and admired of
our living writers. That he is so, can be accounted for on no
other principle than the strong ties that bind us to the world
about us and our involuntary yearnings after whatever in any
manner powerfully and directly reminds us of it. His Muse is not
one of the daughters of Memory, but the old toothless mumbling
dame herself, doling out the gossip and scandal of the
neighbourhood, recounting, _totidem verbis et literis_, what
happens in every place in the kingdom every hour in the year,
and fastening always on the worst as the most palatable morsels.
But she is a circumstantial old lady, communicative, scrupulous,
leaving nothing to the imagination, harping on the smallest
grievances, a village oracle and critic, most veritable, most
identical, bringing us acquainted with persons and things just
as they happened, and giving us a local interest in all she
knows and tells. The springs of Helicon are, in general,
supposed to be a living stream, bubbling and sparkling, and
making sweet music as it flows; but Mr. Crabbe’s fountain of the
Muses is a stagnant pool, dull, motionless, choked up with weeds
and corruption; it reflects no light from heaven, it emits no
cheerful sound:—his Pegasus has not floating wings, but feet,
cloven feet that scorn the low ground they tread upon;—no
flowers of love, of hope, or joy spring here, or they bloom only
to wither in a moment; our poet’s verse does not put a spirit of
youth in every thing, but a spirit of fear, despondency and
decay; it is not an electric spark to kindle and expand, but
acts like the torpedo touch to deaden and contract: it lends no
rainbow tints to fancy, it aids no soothing feelings in the
heart; it gladdens no prospect, it stirs no wish; in its view
the current of life runs slow, dull, cold, dispirited,
half-underground, muddy, and clogged with all creeping things.
The world is one vast infirmary; the hill of Parnassus is a
penitentiary; to read him is a penance; yet we read on! Mr.
Crabbe is a _fascinating_ writer. He contrives to “turn diseases
to commodities,” and makes a virtue of necessity. He puts us out
of conceit with this world, which perhaps a severe divine should
do; yet does not, as a charitable divine ought, point to
another. His morbid feelings droop and cling to the earth;
grovel, where they should soar; and throw a dead weight on every
aspiration of the soul after the good or beautiful. By degrees,
we submit and are reconciled to our fate, like patients to a
physician, or prisoners in the condemned cell. We can only
explain this by saying, as we said before, that Mr. Crabbe gives
us one part of nature, the mean, the little, the disgusting, the
distressing; that he does this thoroughly, with the hand of a
master; and we forgive all the rest!’—
The essay then proceeds as in _The Spirit of the Age_, with a few
trifling variations, down to the words ‘inscribed to the Rutland
family!’ (vol. IV. p. 351, last line), after which there is the
following long passage, omitted from that work [the quotations are
indicated in brackets]:
‘But enough of this; and to our task of quotation.’ The poem of
_The Village_ sets off nearly as follows:
‘“No; cast by Fortune on a frowning coast,” etc. [_The Village_,
i. 49–62].
‘This plea, we would remark by the way, is more plausible than
satisfactory. By associating pleasing ideas with the poor, we
incline the rich to extend their good offices to them. The
cottage twined round with real myrtles, or with the poet’s
wreath, will invite the hand of kindly assistance sooner than
Mr. Crabbe’s “ruin’d shed”; for though unusual, unexpected
distress excites compassion, that which is uniform and
remediless produces nothing but disgust and indifference.
Repulsive objects (or those which are painted so) do not
conciliate affection, or soften the heart.’
‘“Lo! where the heath with withering brake grown o’er,” etc.
[_The Village_, i. 63–84].[83]
‘This is a specimen of Mr. Crabbe’s taste in landscape-painting,
of the power, the accuracy, and the hardness of his pencil. If
this were merely a spot upon the canvas, which might act as a
foil to more luxuriant and happier scenes, it would be well. But
our valetudinarian “travels from Dan to Beersheba, and cries it
is all barren.” Or if he lights “in a favouring hour” on some
more favoured spot, where plenty smiles around, he then turns
his hand to his human figures, and the balance of the account is
still very much against Providence, and the blessings of the
English Constitution. Let us see.
‘“But these are scenes where Nature’s niggard hand,” etc. [_The
Village_, I. 131–153.][84]
‘Grant all this to be true; nay, let it be told, but not told in
“mincing poetry.”[85] Next comes the WORKHOUSE, and this, it
must be owned, is a master-piece of description, and the climax
of the author’s inverted system of rural optimism.
‘“Thus groan the Old, till by disease opprest,” etc. [_The
Village_, I. 226 to the end of Book I.][86]
‘To put our taste in poetry, and the fairness of our opinion of
Mr. Crabbe’s in particular, to the test at once, we will
confess, that we think the two lines we have marked in italics:
‘“Him now they follow to his grave, and stand
Silent and sad, and gazing, hand in hand”—
worth nearly all the rest of his verses put together, and an
unanswerable condemnation of their general tendency and spirit.
It is images, such as these, that the polished mirror of the
poet’s mind ought chiefly to convey; that cast their soothing,
startling reflection over the length of human life, and grace
with their amiable innocence its closing scenes; while its less
alluring and more sombre tints sink in, and are lost in an
absorbent ground of unrelieved prose. Poetry should be the
handmaid of the imagination, and the foster-nurse of pleasure
and beauty: Mr. Crabbe’s Muse is a determined enemy to the
imagination, and a spy on nature.
‘Before we proceed, we shall just mark a few of those
quaintnesses of expression, by which our descriptive poet has
endeavoured to vary his style from common prose, and so far has
succeeded. Speaking of Quarle he says:
‘“Of Hermit Quarle we read, in island rare,
Far from mankind and seeming far from care;
Safe from all want, and sound in every limb;
Yes! there was he, and there was care with him.”[87]
· · · · ·
‘“Here are no wheels for either wool or flax,
But packs of cards—made up of sundry packs.”[88]
· · · · ·
‘“Fresh were his features, his attire was new;
Clean was his linen, and his jacket blue:
Of finest _jean_, his trowsers, tight and trim,
Brush’d the large buckle at the silver rim.”[89]
‘To compare small things with great, this last touch of minute
description is not unlike that in Theseus’s description of his
hounds:
‘“With ears that sweep away the morning dew.”[90]
· · · · ·
‘“Alas! your reverence, wanton thoughts, I grant,
Where once my motive, now the thoughts of want.
Women like me, as ducks in a decoy,
Swim down a stream, and seem to swim in joy.”[91]
· · · · ·
‘“But from the day, that fatal day she spied
The pride of Daniel, Daniel was her pride.”[92]
‘As an instance of the _curiosa felicitas_ in descriptive
allusion (among many others) take the following. Our author,
referring to the names of the genteeler couples, written in the
parish register, thus “morals” on the circumstance:
‘“How fair these names, how much unlike they look,” etc. [_The
Parish Register_, II. 283–300.]
‘The _Library_ and the _Newspaper_, in the same volume, are
heavy and common-place. Mr. Crabbe merely sermonises in his
didactic poetry. He must pierce below the surface to get at his
genuine vein. He is properly himself only in the petty and the
painful. The _Birth of Flattery_ is a homely, incondite lay. The
author is no more like Spenser than he is like Pope. The ballad
of Sir Eustace Grey is a production of great power and genius.
The poet, in treating of the wanderings of a maniac, has given a
loose to his conception of imaginary and preternatural evils.
But they are of a sort that chill, rather than melt the mind;
they repel instead of haunting it. They might be said to be
square, portable horrors, physical, external, not shadowy, not
malleable; they do not arise out of any passion in the mind of
the sufferer, nor touch the reader with involuntary sympathy.
Beds of ice, seas of fire, shaking bogs, and fields of snow, are
disagreeable matters of fact; and though their contact has a
powerful effect on the senses, we soon shake them off in fancy.
Let any one compare this fictitious legend with the unadorned,
unvarnished tale of Peter Grimes, and he will see in what Mr.
Crabbe’s characteristic strength lies. He is a most potent
copyist of actual nature, though not otherwise a great poet. In
the case of Sir Eustace, he cannot conjure up any phantoms from
a disordered imagination; but he makes honest Peter, the
fisherman of the Borough, see visions in the mud where he had
drowned his ’prentice boys, that are as ghastly and bewitching
as any mermaid. We cannot resist giving the scene of this
striking story, which is in our author’s exclusive manner.
“Within that circle none durst walk but he.”[93]
‘“Thus by himself compell’d to live each day,” etc. [_The
Borough_, Letter XXII. 171–204.]’
The last paragraph, following this quotation, is the same as in _The
Spirit of the Age_ (vol. IV. pp. 352–3).
HAYDON’S CHRIST’S AGONY IN THE GARDEN
483. _Matthews._ Charles Mathews (1776–1835), the comedian, whose
famous ‘At Homes’ Hazlitt refers to.
‘_Sea, earth, and air._’ Cf. ‘And shot my being through earth,
sea, and air.’ Coleridge, _France, An Ode_, 103.
_He bestrides his art, etc._ Haydon was pleased with these words
which he quoted in a letter to a friend extracted in Mr. W. C.
Hazlitt’s _Four Generations of a Literary Family_ (I. 234).
Haydon wrongly refers to Hazlitt’s article as having appeared
in _The New Monthly Magazine._ See also Haydon’s _Life, etc._
(ed. T. Taylor, I. 418), where, speaking of this picture,
Haydon says ‘Except the Christ’s head and the St. John sleeping
it was the worst picture ever escaped my pencil.’
_‘Ample room,’ etc._ Gray, _The Bard_, 51.
484. _‘A hand,’ etc._ Donne, _The Storm_, 3–4.
485. _The celebrated Madonna, etc._ See vol. IX. p. 67.
POPE, LORD BYRON, AND MR. BOWLES
For Byron’s Letters to Murray ‘On the Rev. Wm. L. Bowles’s Strictures on
the Life and Writings of Pope’ and a full account of the controversy see
Byron’s _Letters and Journals_ (ed. Prothero), V. Appendix iii. Cf. a
passage in Hazlitt’s essay ‘On the Aristocracy of Letters,’ vol. VI.
(_Table Talk_), pp. 210, 223, and notes.
487. _Jem Belcher._ James Belcher (1781–1811), who defeated Andrew
Gamble in 1800.
_In the Preface to his Tragedy._ _Marino Faliero._
‘_A tale of bawdry._’ _Hamlet_, Act II. Sc. 2.
488. ‘_Our sweet voices._’ _Coriolanus_, Act II. Sc. 3.
489. ‘_Most small faults._’ Cf. _King Lear_, Act I. Sc. 4.
_‘Ends of verse,’ etc._ Butler, _Hudibras_, I. iii. 1011–2.
490. ‘_Sternhold and Hopkins had great qualms._’ The Earl of
Rochester, _On a Parish Clerk with a bad voice._
492. _‘Full of wise saws,’ etc._ _As You Like It_, Act II. Sc. 7.
494. _‘So perfumed,’ etc._ _Antony and Cleopatra_, Act II. Sc. 2.
495. ‘_Roaming the illimitable ocean wide._’ Cf. ‘Roaming the
illimitable waters round.’ Wordsworth, _The Female Vagrant_,
175.
‘_Ill at these numbers._’ _Hamlet_, Act II. Sc. 2.
‘_Damnable iteration in him._’ _1 Henry IV._, Act I. Sc. 2.
‘_Keeps distance due._’ _Paradise Lost_, III. 578.
496. _‘Luscious,’ etc._ _Othello_, Act I. Sc. 3.
_The grand-daughters of Mr. Coutts._ The two Misses Burdett,
presumably the daughters of Sir Francis Burdett and therefore
grand-daughters of Thomas Coutts the banker, were presented at
court on May 3, 1821, but Hazlitt’s meaning is a little
obscure.
_The Editor of the New Monthly Magazine._ Campbell, the poet.
_‘High arbiter,’ etc._ _Paradise Lost_, II. 908–9.
‘_All the art of art is flown._’ Cf. the note on ‘all the life of
life was flown’ in vol. VI. (_Table Talk_), p. 24.
497. _‘The stones and tower,’ etc._ Cf. _Peter Bell_, 856 _et seq._
497. ‘_Host of human life._’ Byron in his Letter speaks of having met
Bowles at the house ‘of our venerable host of _Human Life_,’
_i.e._ Rogers, the Poet.
498. _‘Of amber-headed snuff-box,’ etc._ Pope, _The Rape of the Lock_,
IV. 123–4.
499. ‘_Denote no foregone conclusion._’ _Othello_, Act III. Sc. 3.
_‘How far,’ etc._ _The Merchant of Venice_, Act V. Sc. 1.
500. _‘So was it,’ etc._ Cf. Wordsworth’s ‘My heart leaps up,’ etc.
501. _Almanach des gourmands._ See _The Edinburgh Review_, XXXV. 53.
502. ‘_Circumscription and confine_,’ _Othello_, Act I. Sc. 2.
‘_The poor man’s only music._’ Coleridge, _Frost at Midnight_,
29.
503. _‘The earth hath bubbles,’ etc._ _Macbeth_, Act I. Sc. 3.
‘_Loud-hissing urn._’ Cowper, _The Task_, The Winter Evening, 38.
_‘Enforc’d to seek,’ etc._ _The Faerie Queene_, I. i. 7 and 8.
504. ‘_A thing of life._’ ‘She walks the waters like a thing of life.’
Byron, _The Corsair_, I. iii.
_‘Behold the lilies,’ etc._ Cf. _S. Matthew_, vi. 28–9.
_‘Daffodils,’ etc._ _A Winter’s Tale_, Act IV. Sc. 4.
505. _‘Hail, adamantine steel,’ etc._ Erasmus Darwin, _The Botanic
Garden_, Part I, II. 201–6.
_‘Launched,’ etc._ _The Rape of the Lock_, II. 4.
_‘Strange that such difference,’ etc._ Byrom, ‘On the Feuds
between Handel and Bononcini.’
506. _‘Let me not,’ etc._ _The Canterbury Tales_, The Clerke’s Tale,
880.
_‘Pope was not assuredly,’ etc._ The rest of the essay is quoted
from a former paper ‘On the question whether Pope was a poet.’
See _ante_, pp. 431–2 and notes.
ON CONSISTENCY OF OPINION
Published with some omissions in _Winterslow_ (1850).
508. _‘Servetur ad imum,’ etc._ Horace, _Ars Poetica_, 126–7.
509. _‘It is the eye of childhood,’ etc._ _Macbeth_, Act II. Sc. 2.
_‘Where the treasure is,’ etc._ _S. Matthew_ vi. 21.
_‘To be wise,’ etc._ Cf. ‘Let it be virtuous to be obstinate.’
_Coriolanus_, V. 3.
_Mr._ ——. Northcote, no doubt, who told Haydon that he was so
delighted with the _Catalogue_ that he ‘ordered a long candle
and went to bed to read it in ecstasy.’ _Life of Haydon_ (ed.
T. Taylor), I. 376.
511. _‘Sots,’ etc._ Pope, _An Essay on Man_, IV. 215.
_‘I had rather hear,’ etc._ Cf. _1 Henry IV._, Act III. Sc. 1.
_‘Amaze the very faculties,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act II. Sc. 2.
512. _Mr. Wordsworth has hardly, etc._ This passage, down to
‘Constitutional Association-monger’ (p. 513) was omitted from
_Winterslow_.
_‘So small a drop,’ etc._ _Cymbeline_, Act IV. Sc. 2.
_Applied for an injunction, etc._ A hit at Southey. See vol. III.
(_Political Essays_), pp. 192 _et seq._ and notes.
_One stroke of his prose-pen, etc._ Hazlitt probably refers
to Wordsworth’s _Two Addresses to the Freeholders of
Westmoreland_, published in 1818.
_‘The wreck of matter,’ etc._ Addison, _Cato_, v. I.
514. _Contra audentior ito._ _Æneid_, VI. 95.
_‘Whose genius,’ etc._ Cowper, _The Task_, The Garden, 255–6.
_‘Like a worm,’ etc._ Cf. _ante_, note to p. 506.
‘_There’s sympathy._’ _The Merry Wives of Windsor_, Act II. Sc.
1.
515. ‘_Ancestral voices._’ Coleridge, _Kubla Khan_, 29.
515. _‘He looks up with awe,’ etc._ Cf. Burke, _Reflections on the
Revolution in France_ (_Select Works_, ed Payne, II. 101).
_‘I’ve heard of hearts unkind,’ etc._ Wordsworth, _Simon Lee_,
93–6.
_‘Every thing by turns,’ etc._ Cf. Dryden, _Absalom and
Achitophel_, I. 548.
_A young student, etc._ This passage, to the end of the
paragraph, was omitted in _Winterslow_. It would seem from the
last sentence that Sir John Stoddart is referred to.
_‘Perpetual volley,’ etc._ Cf. ‘Arrowy sleet, skin-piercing
volley.’ Cowper, _The Task_, The Winter Morning Walk, 140–1.
516. _—— always sets himself, etc._ The reference seems clearly to be
to Northcote.
_‘Though truth be truth,’ etc._ Cf. _Othello_, Act I. Sc. 1.
517. _‘Pride elevates,’ etc._ Cf. ‘Hope elevates, and joy brightens
his crest.’ _Paradise Lost_, IX. 633–4.
_‘From morn to noon,’ etc._ _Ibid._ I. 742–4.
518. _‘In all things,’ etc_. Cf. Burke’s Speech on Economical Reform
(Feb. 11, 1780), _Works_, Bohn, II. 105.
_‘To have done,’ etc._ _Troilus and Cressida_, Act III. Sc. 3.
_‘With one consent,’ etc._ _Ibid._
‘_Like a fashionable host_,’ _Ibid._
519. _‘Noise,’ etc._ Cf. _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 2.
_‘Tell me your company,’ etc._ Cf. the well-known proverb quoted
in _Don Quixote_, Part II. chap. xxiii.
520. ‘_Linked_ [bound] _each to each,’ etc._ Wordsworth, ‘My heart
leaps up,’ etc., 9.
ON THE SPIRIT OF PARTISANSHIP
Published in _Sketches and Essays_ (1839).
521. _‘Ever strong,’ etc._ _King John_, Act III. Sc. 1.
522. _‘In their generation,’ etc._ Cf. _S. Luke_ xvi. 8.
‘_The milk of human kindness._’ _Macbeth_, Act I. Sc. 5.
‘_Stuff o’ the conscience._’ _Othello_, Act I. Sc. 2.
_‘Turned to the stroke,’ etc._ Cowper, _The Task_, The
Time-Piece, 324–5.
523. _‘Though sun and moon,’ etc._ _Comus_, 374–5.
_‘To do a great right,’ etc._ _The Merchant of Venice_, Act IV.
Sc. 1.
524. _‘The very arm,’ etc._ Cf. _Antony and Cleopatra_, Act I. Sc. 5.
‘_Entire affection scorneth_ [hateth],’ _etc._ _The Faerie
Queene_, I. VIII. 40.
_‘Our bane,’ etc._ Addison, _Cato_, V. 1.
‘_Screwed to the sticking place._’ Cf. _Macbeth_, Act I. Sc. 7.
_‘Away to Heaven,’ etc._ _Romeo and Juliet_, Act III. Sc. 1.
525. ‘_To grinning scorn._’
‘To bitter Scorn a sacrifice,
And grinning infamy.’
Gray, _On a Distant Prospect of Eton College_, 73–4.
526. _‘In peace,’ etc._ _Henry V._, Act III. Sc. 1.
_‘Those who are not for us,’ etc._ Cf. _S. Matthew_, xii. 30.
527. _‘Letting our frail thoughts,’ etc._ Cf. _Lycidas_, 153.
_‘Nothing but vanity,’ etc._ Cf. _ante_, note to p. 373.
530. ‘_Our withers are unwrung._’ _Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 2.
_‘Green-eyed,’ etc._ Cf. Burke, _A Letter to a Noble Lord_
(_Works_, Bohn, V. 142).
THE PIRATE
Now republished for the first time on the strength of the internal
evidence of Hazlitt’s authorship.
531. ‘_So potent art._’ _The Tempest_, Act V. Sc. 1.
‘_A far war-cry to Lochiel._’ ‘It is a far cry to Lochow’ is the
old saying.
532. _That described by Mr. Coleridge._ See _Selections from Mr.
Coleridge’s Literary Correspondence_, No. I. Letter IV., ‘To a
Junior Soph. at Cambridge,’ (_Blackwood’s Magazine_, Oct. 1821,
X. 256), republished in _Miscellanies, etc._ (Bohn, ed. Ashe),
pp. 246 _et seq._
_‘Guns,’ etc._ Pope, _Imitations of Horace_, I. 26.
_‘Hell itself,’ etc._ Cf. _The Tempest_, Act I. Sc. 2.
‘_There be land pirates, etc._’ Cf. _The Merchant of Venice_, Act
I. Sc. 3.
_Multum abludit imago._ Horace, _Satires_, II. iii. 320.
533. ‘_A brave man in distress._’ Macheath is described by Lucy as ‘a
great man in distress.’ _The Beggar’s Opera_, Act III. Sc. 4.
PEVERIL OF THE PEAK
Now republished for the first time, as it appeared in the first copies
of _The London Magazine_ for February 1823. Before fifty copies had been
sold, the second and third paragraphs,—from ‘There were two things that
we used to admire,’ etc. to ‘Might not such a man have written the
Scotch Novels?’ (see post, p. 538)—were suppressed. Shortly afterwards a
writer in _Blackwood’s Magazine_, having obtained possession of one of
the original copies, published this passage together with indignant
comments. See _Blackwood’s Magazine_, August 1824, XVI. 180–1. The
editor of _The London Magazine_ replied to this attack in the number for
October 1824, and stated that the review was by ‘a celebrated critic,’
and that the passage had been withdrawn out of respect, not fear. See
Mr. Bertram Dobell’s _Sidelights on Charles Lamb_ (pp. 205 _et seq._).
The suppressed passage is here reprinted from _Blackwood’s Magazine_.
538. _‘Thinly scattered,’ etc._ _Romeo and Juliet_, Act V. Sc. 1.
_‘He knows all qualities,’ etc._ _Othello_, Act III. Sc. 3.
_‘The wisest,’ etc._ Cf. Pope, _An Essay on Man_, IV. 282.
COMMON PLACES
These were first republished by Mr. W. C. Hazlitt in Bohn’s Standard
Library (1871) in the volume containing _The Round Table_, etc. They
originally appeared in _The Literary Examiner_ on the following dates in
1823, viz.: Nos. I.–XVIII., September 6; Nos. XIX.–XLV., September 13;
Nos. XLVI.–LIII., October 11; Nos. LIV.–LIX., October 25; Nos. LX.–LXI.,
November 8; Nos. LXII.–LXXIII., November 15; Nos. LXXIV.–LXXV., November
22; Nos. LXXVI.–LXXXII., November 29; Nos. LXXXIII.–LXXXVII., December
13.
547. _‘According to our own deserts,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act II. Sc. 2.
_‘The true fuller’s earth,’ etc._ Cf. ‘For time, like fuller’s
earth, takes out each stain.’ Peter Pindar, _Lyric Odes_, VII.
14.
_The taste of the great in pictures, etc._ Cf. vol. VII. (_The
Plain Speaker_) pp. 292–4, where the whole paragraph is
repeated.
549. _‘Were I as tedious,’ etc._ _Much Ado About Nothing_, Act III.
Sc. 5.
550. _‘I am Misanthropos,’ etc._ _Timon of Athens_, Act IV. Sc. 3.
_‘The cruel sunshine,’ etc._ Cf. Armstrong, _The Art of
Preserving Health_, IV.
551. ‘_In its vacant interlunar cave._’ _Samson Agonistes_, 89.
_Slop._ Sir John Stoddart, no doubt. Cf. vol. III. p. 158 and
note.
552. _‘In spite of pride,’ etc._ Pope, _An Essay on Man_, I. 293.
553. _Mr. Martin’s picture._ By John Martin (1789–1854).
l. 9. _Bowers._ Query, a misprint for ‘flowers.’
_‘The earth spins round,’ etc._ Cf. _Paradise Lost_, VIII. 164–5.
555. _‘A gentle Husher,’ etc._ _The Faerie Queene_, I. IV. 13.
556. _Mr. Cobbett alone was not invited._ The editor of _The Literary
Examiner_ says, in a note, ‘This is _bien trouvé_, but not
quite correct.’
_‘What went they forth,’ etc._ Cf. _S. Matthew_ xi. 7.
_The author of the love-letters, etc._ Cf. vol. III. (_Political
Essays_) p. 218 and note.
‘_Oh, the wonderful works of nature._’ Farquhar, _The Recruiting
Officer_, Act II. Sc. 3.
557. _‘The primrose path,’ etc._ _Hamlet_, Act I. Sc. 3.
559. _‘Via Goodman Dull,’ etc._ _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, Act V. Sc. 1.
Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty at the Edinburgh
University Press
-----
Footnote 1:
Those essays which are now republished for the first time are
indicated by an asterisk.
Footnote 2:
These two essays were published together in _Winterslow_ as ‘Mind and
Motive.’
Footnote 3:
Published in _Winterslow_ as ‘Matter and Manner.’
Footnote 4:
This paper did not appear in _The Edinburgh (New Scots) Magazine_. See
_post_, note to p. 459.
Footnote 5:
The passage in Locke is as follows:
‘If in having our ideas in the memory ready at hand, consists
quickness of parts, in this of having them unconfused and being able
nicely to distinguish one thing from another, where there is but the
least difference, consists in a great measure the exactness of
judgment and clearness of reason, which is to be observed in one man
above another. And hence perhaps may be given some reason of that
common observation that men who have a great deal of wit and prompt
memories, have not always the clearest judgment, or deepest reason.
For wit lying most in the assemblage of ideas, and putting them
together with quickness and variety, wherein can be found any
resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant pictures and
agreeable visions in the fancy; judgment on the contrary lies quite on
the other side, in separating carefully one from another ideas wherein
can be found the least difference, thereby to avoid being misled by
similitude and by affinity to take one thing for another.’—_Locke’s
Essay_, vol. i. p. 143.
Footnote 6:
This relates to what Mr. Locke says of unity, whom all succeeding
writers have made a point of bringing forward on all occasions, merely
for the purpose of differing from him. They set him up as the
standard, or _ne plus ultra_ of profound wisdom, and yet they always
contrive to go beyond him. I will just add, by the bye, on this
argument about number, that the fair way of putting it is by asking
whether one combination of ideas is not different from another, or
whether one foot or one inch is the same with thirty-six feet, or
thirty-six inches, not whether one foot is the same as thirty-six
inches. Otherwise there will remain a real distinction of number, both
in idea and in fact.
Footnote 7:
The two men of the greatest ability in modern times as metaphysicians,
that is, with the greatest power of seeing things in the abstract, and
of pursuing a principle into all its consequences, are in my opinion
Hobbes and Berkeley: after them come Hume and Hartley. Compared with
these Locke was a mere common practical man: of the four, I think
Hobbes was at the head, as the others only worked out the materials
with which he furnished them.
Footnote 8:
This, if the translation is correct, is proving a great deal more than
Leibnitz’s restriction of Locke’s doctrine requires, and is, as it
appears to me, the great stumbling block in Kant’s Philosophy. It is
quite enough to shew, not that there are certain notions _à priori_ or
independent of sensation, but certain faculties independent of the
senses or sensible objects, which are the intellect itself, and
necessary, after the objects are given, to form _ideas_ of them. That
is to say, ideas are the result of the action of objects on such and
such faculties of the mind. Kant’s notions _à priori_, seem little
better than the innate ideas of the schools, or the Platonic ideas or
forms, which are to me the forms of _nothing_. The sole and simple
question is, whether there are not certain intellectual faculties
distinct from the senses, which exist before any ideas can be formed,
as it is not denied by any one, that there are certain sensitive
faculties which must exist before any sensations can be received. The
one supposition no more implies innate ideas, than the other implies
innate sensations.
Footnote 9:
Now Kant, by thus classing, as he apparently does, the representations
of space and time as forms of the sensitive faculty, throws up the
whole argument: for if these very complex (not to say distracted)
ideas, can be referred to mere sensation, I do not see why all the
rest may not. Time is obviously an idea of succession or memory, and
cannot be the result of an immediate sensible impression. The only
power of the sensitive faculty is to receive blind, unconscious,
unconnected impressions; the only category of the understanding is to
perceive the _relations between these impressions_, so as to connect
them consciously together, or to form ideas. To this category of
relation, all the other general categories of quantity, totality,
cause and effect, etc. as well as the ideas of space and time, are
necessarily consequent and subordinate.
Footnote 10:
See to the same purpose Hobbes’s Human Nature, p. 25, and Leviathan,
p. 14. Berkeley’s Principles of Human Knowledge, p. 15 and 24. Hume’s
Treatise, p. 46. Helvetius on the Mind, p. 10, and Condillac’s Logic,
p. 54.
Footnote 11:
‘Lastly, that there is some one principle or substance, absolutely
simple in its nature, and distinct from every composition of matter,
which is the seat of thought, the soul of man, and the bond of our
existence, will appear evident to any one who considers the nature of
judgment and comparison: where both terms of the one, and both
branches of the other must be apprehended together, in order to
determine between them. Let one man be ever so well acquainted with
St. Peter’s at Rome, and another with St. Paul’s in London, they can
never tell which is the larger, the handsomer, or make any other
comparison between the two buildings by virtue of this knowledge. But
you will say, the one may communicate his knowledge to the other: but
then that other has the idea of both before him in his imagination,
and it is from this that he forms his judgment. Nor is the case
different with respect to the parts of a percipient being: let the
idea of an elephant be impressed upon particle _a_, and that of a
mouse upon particle _b_, they can never know either jointly or
separately which is the larger creature: nor can a judgement be formed
till the ideas of both coincide in one and the same individual. This
is the common sense of mankind. For when we make use of the pronouns,
I, He, You, &c. and say, _I heard such a sound_; _I saw such a sight;
or felt such a sensation_; are not these different impressions all
referred by implication to the same simple individual? Or were I to
say, that in looking at a chess-board for instance, one part of me saw
the yellow king, another the black, another the queen, another the
bishop, and so on, should I not be laughed at by every body as not
knowing what I was talking about?’—Tucker’s Light of Nature pursued,
chapter on the Independent Existence of Mind. See also Rousseau’s
reasoning in Answer to Helvetius, Emile, tom. 3. And Bentley’s Sermons
at the Boyle Lecture.
Footnote 12:
So little has this principle of the unity of thought and consciousness
been understood, that even Professor Stewart, the great champion of
the intellectual philosophy, utterly rejects it, and supposes that the
idea which the mind forms of any visible figure is nothing but a rapid
succession of the ideas of the several parts. See his reasoning on
this subject most ably confuted in a work lately published, entitled
‘An Essay on Consciousness, by John Fearn.’—This Essay, in spite of
the disadvantage of the mechanical hypothesis with which it is
encumbered, and the technical obscurity of the style, contains, I
think, more close and original observation on the individual processes
of the human mind, than any work published in this country in the last
fifty years.
Footnote 13:
The faces of N. Poussin want expression, as his figures want grace;
but the landscape part of his historical compositions was never
surpassed. In his plague of Athens the buildings seem stiff with
horror. His Giants seated on the tops of their fabled mountains, and
playing on their Pan’s pipes are as natural and familiar as ‘silly
shepherds sitting in a row.’ The finest of his landscapes is his
picture of the Deluge. The sun is just seen wan and drooping in his
course, the sky is bowed down with a weight of waters, and heaven and
earth seem commingling.
Footnote 14:
The reader is referred to an elegant and beautiful description of
Claude, in Mr. Northcote’s Dream of a Painter.
Footnote 15:
The idea of the necessity of tampering with nature, or giving what is
called _a flattering likeness_, was universal in this country fifty
years ago. This would no doubt be always easy, if the whole of the art
consisted in leaving out, and not putting in, what is to be found in
nature. It may not be improper to add here, that, in our opinion,
Murillo is at the head of the class of painters, who have treated
subjects of common life. There is something in his pictures which is
not to be found at all in the productions of the Dutch school. After
making the colours on the canvass feel and think, the next best thing
is to make them breathe and live. But there is in Murillo’s pictures a
look of real life, a cordial flow of animal spirits, to be met with no
where else. We might here particularly refer to his picture of the
_Two Spanish Beggar-boys_ in Mr. Desenfans’ collection, which cannot
be forgotten by those who have ever seen it.
Footnote 16:
This theory will be found contained in Richardson’s Essay on Painting,
and in Coypel’s Discourses to the French Academy.
Footnote 17:
This painter’s book of studies from nature, commonly called _Liber
Veritatis_, disproves the truth of Sir Joshua’s assumption, that his
landscapes are mere general compositions, for the finished pictures
are nearly fac-similes of the original sketches, and what is added to
them in point of regularity (if this addition was any advantage) was
at least the result of his own genius.
Footnote 18:
Sir Joshua considers it as a great disadvantage to Raphael in studying
from the antique, that he had not the facilities afforded by modern
prints, but was forced to seek out, and copy them one by one with
great care. We should be disposed to reverse this conclusion.
Footnote 19:
The pictures of Rubens at Blenheim are another proof of this, and
certainly finer than the Luxembourg gallery.
Footnote 20:
Michael Angelo took his ideas of painting from sculpture, and Sir
Joshua from Michael Angelo.
Footnote 21:
Why fabulous or obscure?
Footnote 22:
The personification of the Deity is another instance of critical
contradiction and conceit. Objecting to the figures of Raphael and
Michael Angelo as mythological and sensible, he introduces a little
golden triangle behind a cloud (_triangulum in nube_) as a
philosophical emblem of the Trinity!
Footnote 23:
When the writer of this article was in France twelve years ago, a
young French artist began to copy in pencil a figure of the Virgin by
Leonardo da Vinci. He returned to it day after day, and week after
week. He was always there. He would first retouch an eyebrow or an
eyelash, then do something to one of the fingers, then mark in a bit
of the drapery, and then return to the face again. All this he did,
sometimes leaning over the railing before the picture, sometimes
sitting on a stool, mechanically screwed on to it, sometimes standing
on one leg. He also relieved the monotony of his undertaking, by
retiring to a small distance to compare his copy with the original, or
shewed it to some one near him, or went round to look over others who
were copying, or stood at the fire for an hour together, or loitered
into the sculpture room, or walked round the gallery, and generally
observed at his return that Poussin was excellent ‘pour la
composition,’ Raphael ‘pour l’expression,’ Titian ‘pour les beaux
coloris,’ but that David and his pupils united all these qualities to
the fine forms of the antique. At the end of eleven weeks, we left him
perfecting his copy. For anything we know, he may be at it still.
Footnote 24:
It is not correct to say that the French always colour from their
casts. They sometimes rouge them over with a beautiful rose-colour, or
cover their lay-figures with flesh-coloured Nankin, like that which
adorns the bodies of their opera dancers. We were at a loss to account
for the colouring of David, till we heard of this contrivance. It is
thus that these accomplished persons think to rival the hues of Titian
and Correggio!
Footnote 25:
A radical objection to it, in point of composition, is, that it is
addressing the spectator, and has its back turned to the audience.
Footnote 26:
The waiter drawing the cork in the Rent-day, is another exception, and
quite Hogarthian.
Footnote 27:
Mr. Wilkie’s pictures are in general much better painted than
Hogarth’s: but the Marriage a-la-mode is superior both in colour and
execution to any of Wilkie’s.
Footnote 28:
‘And see! how dark the backward stream
A little moment past how smiling!
And still perhaps, with faithless gleam,
Some other loiterer beguiling.’
_Wordsworth._
Footnote 29:
Mr. Southey is, it is hoped, politically reconciled to Mr. Dryden,
since his succession to the Laureatship. Which of these two writers is
the better poet, it would be presumptuous in us to determine. We could
sooner determine which was the honester man. Mr. Dryden, we believe,
never wrote Regicide Sonnets, Jacobin Odes, or Revolutionary Epic
Poems. How the Prince must laugh, if he can laugh at any thing. He
might as well have made his chaplain his historical painter!
Footnote 30:
As a contrast to the story at the beginning of this article, it will
be not amiss to mention that of Sir Isaac Newton, on a somewhat
similar occasion. He had prepared some papers for the press with great
care and study, but happening to leave a lighted candle on the table
with them, his dog Diamond overturned the candle, and the labour of
several years was destroyed. This great man, on seeing what was done,
only shook his head, and said with a smile, ‘Ah, Diamond, you don’t
know what mischief you have done!’
Footnote 31:
We have an instance in our own times of a man, equally devoid of
understanding and principle, but who manages the House of Commons by
his _manner_ alone.
Footnote 32:
Sheer impudence answers almost the same purpose. ‘Those impenetrable
whiskers have confronted flames.’ Many persons, by looking big and
talking loud, make their way through the world without any one good
quality. We have here said nothing of mere personal qualifications,
which are another set-off against sterling merit. Fielding was of
opinion that ‘the more solid pretensions of virtue and understanding
vanish before perfect beauty.’ ‘A certain lady of a manor’ (says _Don
Quixote_ in defence of his attachment to _Dulcinea_, which however was
quite of the Platonic kind), ‘had cast the eyes of affection on a
certain squat, brawny lay brother of a neighbouring monastery, to whom
she was lavish of her favours. The head of the order remonstrated with
her on this preference shown to one whom he represented as a very low,
ignorant fellow, and set forth the superior pretensions of himself,
and his more learned brethren. The lady having heard him to an end,
made answer: All that you have said may be very true; but know, that
in those points which I admire, Brother Chrysostom is as great a
philosopher, nay greater than Aristotle himself!’ So the _Wife of
Bath_:
‘To church was mine husband borne on the morrow
With neighbours that for him maden sorrow,
And Jenkin our clerk was one of tho:
As help me God, when that I saw him go
After the bier, methought he had a pair
Of legs and feet, so clean and fair,
That all my heart I gave unto his hold.’
‘All which, though we most potently believe, yet we hold it not
honesty to have it thus set down.’
Footnote 33:
At Salisbury, which is a cathedral and county town, you cannot get a
copy of Congreve or Wycherley at any of the shops.
Footnote 34:
The knack of off-hand, unprincipled, idle fabrication is not assisted,
but the contrary, by general knowledge or regular education. Women,
for this reason, have the better of their husbands in trumping up
sudden excuses and contrivances that have no foundation in fact or
reason; and their servant maids, who are more uneducated still, beat
them hollow at the same paltry game of cross-purposes.
Footnote 35:
It is observed and perhaps justly that the members of the Established
Church are the pleasantest sort of people to deal with. Dissenters are
more soured by the leaven of religion. The others do not trouble
themselves enough about it to come to a conclusion of their own, or to
quarrel with other people who do. They are religious merely out of
conformity to the practice of the age and country in which they live,
and follow that which has authority and numbers on its side.
Footnote 36:
There is a common inversion of this opinion, which is _desperation_;
or the becoming reckless of all consequences, poverty, disease, or
death, from disappointment in some one thing that the mind is set
upon, no matter what. A man who has been jilted of his first choice
marries out of spite the first woman he meets. A girl, whose
sweetheart goes to sea, because she will not have him, as soon as he
is gone, and she is baulked of her fancy, runs a-muck at ruin and
infamy—
‘As men should serve a cucumber,
She throws herself away!’
Losing gamesters act nearly on the same infatuated principle. Harrel,
in _Cecilia_, makes a fine hair-brained mock-heroic exit. I declare I
prefer it to the termination of Gray’s Bard. Gamesters and highwaymen
are so far heroes that it is neck or nothing with them: they set
consequences at defiance. Their actions are disinterested; but their
motives are not so. A fortune-hunting General stands much in the same
predicament. The abstracted, the _ideal_, is necessary to the true
heroic. But before a man can fight for an idea, he must have an idea
in his head to fight for. Now there are some Generals that are not
understood to possess this qualification of the heroic character.
Footnote 37:
It has been suggested whether this phrase ‘insulted’ is not too
modern.
Footnote 38:
Mr. Canning, when on a tour to the Lakes, did Mr. Wordsworth the
honour of paying him a visit. The favour was duly appreciated, but
quite unexpected. Really, we do not know any one so little capable of
appreciating the _Lyrical Ballads_.
Footnote 39:
We once heard it said, that ‘Mr. Canning had the most elegant mind
since Virgil.’ But we could not assent to this remark, as we just then
happened to think of Claude Lorraine.
Footnote 40:
We have said nothing here of the impiety of Mr. Canning’s parodies,
though a great deal has been said of the impiety of Mr. Hone’s, which
unfortunately happen to be on the other side of the question. It is
true that _one man may steal a horse sooner than another can look over
a hedge_. Mr. Hone is not a Cabinet Minister, and therefore is not
allowed to take liberties with the Liturgy. It is to no purpose to
urge that Mr. Hone is a very good-natured man, that he is mild and
inoffensive in his manners, that he is utterly void of guile, with a
great deal of sincere piety, and that his greatest vice is that he is
fond of a joke, and given to black-letter reading. The answer is—‘But
he has written parodies’—and it is to no purpose to reply—So has Mr.
Canning! He is a Cabinet Minister, and therefore incapable of any
thing vulgar or profane. One would think that the triumphant question
put by Mr. Hone to his Jury, ‘Whether Mr. Jekyll’s Parody on
Black-eyed Susan was meant to ridicule Sir William Curtis or the
Ballad of Black-eyed Susan?’ would have put an end for ever to the
cant on this subject, if reason could put an end to cant on any
subject. The fate of different men is curious. Mr. Canning, who has
all his life been defending the most odious and mischievous men and
measures, passes, on that very account, for a most amiable character
and an accomplished statesman. Mr. Hone, who defended himself against
a charge of blasphemy for a parody on the _Church Service_ of which
Mr. Canning had furnished him with a precedent, rose from the attack
by the force of good-nature, and by that noble spirit of freedom and
honesty in which to be unjustly accused is to be superior to all fear,
and to speak truth is to be eloquent—but that he did not suffer
himself to be crushed to atoms, and made a willing sacrifice to the
prejudice, talent, and authority arrayed against him, is a resistance
to the opinions of the world and the insolence of power, that can
never be overlooked or forgiven.
‘A wit’s a feather, and a chief’s a rod:
An honest man’s the noblest work of God!’
Footnote 41:
It is amusing to see an English woman in the streets of Paris looking
like a dowdy, and scarcely able to put one foot before another for
very awkwardness and shame, who but a week before she left home had
perhaps trampled on a dress brought home to her, in a fit of
uncontrollable rage, thrown a cap into the fire, and kicked her
milliner down stairs for bringing her such unfashionable trumpery. One
would scarcely believe that a mere change of place would make such an
alteration in behaviour. When we see our country-women so unpleasantly
situated, we are naturally both ashamed and sorry for them: but, as in
this case, we pity many of them more than they deserve.
Footnote 42:
Lady Byron, when a girl, was so affected at seeing Mrs. Siddons as
_Isabella_, in the _Fatal Marriage_, that she was carried out fainting
into the lobbies, and kept sobbing and exclaiming involuntarily ‘Oh,
Byron, Byron!’ Egad, she had enough of Byron afterwards. This
good-natured remark is not ours. Whose, reader, do you suppose it is?
We have heard the late Mr. Curran say, that when he was a young man
studying the law at the Temple, his supreme delight was to see Mrs.
Siddons in her great parts, and all he wanted was a couple of _pails_
on each side of him to fill them with his tears! Such things have
been.
Footnote 43:
‘Lodging-houses for the Universe,’ and ‘Stage-coaches of the
Universe.’
Footnote 44:
In this sort of representative Government the utility of the Press
seems by no means superseded.
Footnote 45:
Papers on Codification. What an odd title. Mr. Bentham writes a style
of his own, and in his titlepages he puts his best foot foremost.
Footnote 46:
Venice.
Footnote 47:
There is a false concord here.
Footnote 48:
This word is not English, nor its meaning clear.
Footnote 49:
Why is the word _portion_ here used, as if it were a portion of
Scripture?
‘Those strains that once did sweet in Zion glide,
He wales a _portion_ with judicious care.’
_Cottar’s Saturday Night._
Now, Mr. Wordsworth’s poems, though not profane, yet neither are they
sacred, to deserve this solemn style, though some of his admirers have
gone so far as to compare them for primitive, patriarchal simplicity,
to the historical parts of the Bible. Much has been said of the merits
and defects of this large poem, which is ‘portion of a
larger;’—perhaps Horace’s rule has been a double bar to its
success—_Non satis est pulchra poemata esse, dulcia sunto_. The
features of this author’s muse want sweetness of expression as well as
regularity of outline.
Footnote 50:
A French teacher, in reading Titus and Berenice with an English pupil,
used to exclaim, in raptures, at the best passages, ‘What have you in
Shakespeare equal to this?’ This showed that he had a taste for
Racine, and a power of appreciating his beauties, though he might want
an equal taste for Shakespeare.
Footnote 51:
It is a fashion among the scientific or pedantic part of the musical
world to decry Miss Stephens’s singing as feeble and insipid. This it
is to take things by their contraries. Her excellence does not lie in
force or contrast, but in sweetness and simplicity. To give only one
instance. Any person who does not feel the beauty of her singing the
lines in Artaxerxes, ‘What was my pride is now my shame,’ &c., in
which the notes seem to fall from her lips like languid drops from the
bending flower, and her voice flutters and dies away with the expiring
conflict of passion in her bosom, may console himself with the
possession of other faculties, but assuredly he has no ear for music.
Footnote 52:
There is a very striking and spirited picture of this subject by an
ingenious living artist (Mr. Alston), in the present exhibition of the
Royal Academy. The academic skill in it is admirable, and many of the
forms are truly elegant and beautiful; but I may be permitted to add,
that the scene (as he represents it) too much resembles the courtly
designs of Vitruvius or Palladio, rather than ‘a temple not made with
hands, eternal in the heavens’; and that the angels seem rather
preparing to dance a minuet or grand ballet on the marble pavement
which they tread, than descending the air in a dream of love, of hope,
and gratitude.
Footnote 53:
I apprehend that natural is of more importance than acquired
sensibility. Thus, any one, without having been at an opera, may judge
of opera dancing, only from having seen (with judicious eyes) a stag
bound across a lawn, or a tree wave its branches in the air. In all,
the general principles of motion are the same.
Footnote 54:
In answer to a criticism by Mr. Godwin on his poem called _Sympathy_.
Footnote 55:
‘Liberty is a custom of England,’ said a Member of Congress; who seems
also to be of opinion, that _it is a custom more honoured in the
breach than the observance_.
Footnote 56:
I by no means wish to preclude Mr. Phillips from trying annually to
naturalize his favourite mode of oratory at watering-places in this
country, or in Evangelical Societies held at the Egyptian-hall, where
it is not out of character. He may there assure his hearers, with
great impunity, that Dr. Franklin’s orthodoxy was never called in
question; and rank Moses and Mahomet together as true prophets, (by
virtue of the first letter of their names) in opposition to the
infidelity of Paine and Priestly, who go together for the same reason—
Like Juno’s Swans, link’d and inseparable.
Footnote 57:
The best speeches are the worst reported, the worst are made better
than they are. They both find a convenient newspaper level.
Footnote 58:
His Lordship is said to speak French with as little hesitation as he
does his native tongue; and once made a speech in that language to the
Congress for three hours without interruption. The sentiments, we may
be sure, were not English. Or was it on that occasion that Prince
Tallyrand made his observation, ‘that speech was given to man to
conceal his thoughts’? I cannot agree with Mr. Hobhouse in his
compliment to the expression which Isabey has given to Lord
Castlereagh’s face in the _insulated_ figure of him in the picture of
the Congress. An old classical friend of Mr. Hobhouse’s would have
supplied a better interpretation of it. But I do not think the French
artist has done his Lordship justice. His features are marked, but the
expression is dormant.
Footnote 59:
See his panegyric on the late King, his defence of the House of
Commons, and his eulogy on the practical liberty of the English
Constitution in his Liverpool Dinner Speech.
Footnote 60:
Letter to **** ****** on the Rev. W. L. Bowles’s Strictures on the
Life and Writings of Pope. By the Right Hon. Lord Byron. Third
Edition. Murray.
Footnote 61:
We have ‘purest architecture’ just before; and ‘the prior fabric which
preceded,’ is rather more than an inelegant pleonasm.
Footnote 62:
See Mr. Bowles’s Two Letters.
Footnote 63:
Coleridge.
Footnote 64:
Most people have felt the _ennui_ of being detained under a gateway in
a shower of rain. Happy is he who has an umbrella, and can escape when
the first fury of the storm has abated. Turn this gateway into a
broker’s shop, full of second-hand furniture—tables, chairs,
bedsteads, bolsters, and all the accommodations of man’s life,—the
case will not be mended. On the other hand, convert it into a wild
natural cave, and we may idle away whole hours in it, marking a streak
in the rock, or a flower that grows on the sides, without feeling time
hang heavy on us. The reason is, that where we are surrounded with the
works of man—the sympathy with the art and purposes of man, as it
were, irritates our own will, and makes us impatient of whatever
interferes with it: while, on the contrary, the presence of nature, of
objects existing without our intervention and controul, disarms the
will of its restless activity, and disposes us to submit to accidents
that we cannot help, and the course of outward events, without
repining. We are thrown into the hands of nature, and become converts
to her power. Thus the idea of the artificial, the conventional, the
voluntary, is fatal to the romantic and imaginary. To us it seems,
that the free spirit of nature rushes through the soul, like a stream
with a murmuring sound, the echo of which is poetry.
Footnote 65:
This, we are sorry to say, relates only to the three first volumes.
The fourth is in a very mixed style indeed. It looks as if the author
was tired, and got somebody to help him.
Footnote 66:
See Mackenzie’s Life of Home, the author of Douglas.
Footnote 67:
The Duke of Wellington, it is said, cannot enter into the merits of
Raphael, but he admires ‘the spirit and fire of Tintoret.’ I do not
wonder at this bias. A sentiment, probably, never dawned upon his
Grace’s mind; but he may be supposed to relish the dashing execution
and _hit or miss_ manner of the Venetian artist. Oh, Raphael! well is
it that it was one who did not understand thee that blundered upon the
destruction of humanity!
Footnote 68:
Hazlitt refers to what _The Examiner_ calls the ‘regal raree-show’ in
the Parks at the beginning of August 1814. A sham fight on the
Serpentine was one of the features.
Footnote 69:
_Paradise Lost_, III. 550.
Footnote 70:
Wordsworth himself says (_Hart-Leap Well_) ‘The moving accident is not
my trade.’
Footnote 71:
_Lycidas_, 161.
Footnote 72:
Wordsworth’s Ode, _Intimations of Immortality_, 206–7.
Footnote 73:
See _ante_, note to p. 48.
Footnote 74:
This opening paragraph is certainly very like Hazlitt. Cf. the review
by anticipation of Coleridge’s _Lay Sermon_ in _Political Essays_,
vol. III. pp. 138–142.
Footnote 75:
Query, a misprint for ‘delicacy.’
Footnote 76:
Ben Jonson’s _Underwoods_, XXX., ‘An Epistle to Sir Edward Sackville.
A favourite quotation of Hazlitt’s.
Footnote 77:
_The Faerie Queene_, III. VII. 7.
Footnote 78:
Haydon.
Footnote 79:
_Hamlet_, Act III. Sc. 2.
Footnote 80:
Leigh Hunt, _The Story of Rimini_, III. 32.
Footnote 81:
See vol. I. p. 218–221.
Footnote 82:
Acts xix. 28.
Footnote 83:
To the line ‘And to the ragged infant threaten war,’ Hazlitt appends
the footnote, ‘This is a pleasing line; because the unconsciousness to
the mischief in the child is a playful relief to the mind, and the
picturesqueness of the imagery gives it double point and _naiveté_.’
Footnote 84:
To the line ‘See them beneath the dog-stars raging heat,’ Hazlitt has
a footnote: ‘This seems almost a parody on the lines in Shakespeare.
“Not all these, laid in bed majestical,” etc. [_Henry V._, Act IV. Sc.
1, ll. 284–297.] Who shall decide where two such authorities
disagree!’
Footnote 85:
_1 Henry IV._, Act III. Sc. 1.
Footnote 86:
To the line ‘Or wipes the tear that stagnates in his eyes,’ Hazlitt
adds a footnote: ‘And the motion unsettles a tear.—Wordsworth.’ [_The
Convict_, (Lyrical Ballads) l. 42.]
Footnote 87:
_The Parish Register_, I. 107–10.
Footnote 88:
_Ibid._ I. 230–1.
Footnote 89:
_The Parish Register_, I. 301–4.
Footnote 90:
_A Midsummer Night’s Dream_, Act IV. Sc. 1.
Footnote 91:
_The Parish Register_, I. 454–7.
Footnote 92:
_Ibid._ II. 319–20.
Footnote 93:
Dryden, Prologue to _The Tempest_, 20.
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in
spelling.
2. Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed.
3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.