At the end of this essay in _The Examiner_ Hazlitt added the
following ‘Note Extraordinary’: ‘We had just concluded our
ramble with _Puck_ and _Bottom_, and were beginning to indulge
in some less airy recreations, when in came the last week’s
_Cobbett_,[93] and with one blow overset our Round Table, and
marred all our good things. If while Mr. C. and his lady are
sitting in their garden at Botley, like Adam and Eve in
Paradise, the delight of one another, the envy of their
neighbours, and the admiration of the rest of the world,
suddenly a large fat hog from the wilds of Hampshire should
bolt right through the hedge, and with snorting menaces and
foaming tusks, proceed to lay waste the flower-pots and root up
the potatoes, such as the surprise and indignation of so
economical a couple would be on this occasion, was the
consternation at our Table when Mr. Cobbett himself made his
appearance among us, vowing vengeance against Milton and
Shakespear, _Sir Hugh Evans_ and _Justice Shallow_, and all the
delights of human life. We were not prepared for such an onset.
More barbarous than Mr. Wordsworth’s calling Voltaire
dull,[94] or than Voltaire’s calling Cato the only English
tragedy;[95] more barbarous than Mr. Locke’s admiration of Sir
Richard Blackmore; more barbarous than the declaration of a
German Elector—afterwards made into an English king—that he
hated poets and painters; more barbarous than the Duke of
Wellington’s letter to Lord Castlereagh,[96] or than the
_Catalogue Raisonné_ of the Flemish Masters published in the
_Morning Chronicle_,[97] or than the Latin style of the second
Greek scholar[98] of the age, or the English style of the
first:—more barbarous than any or all of these is Mr. Cobbett’s
attack on our two great poets. As to Milton, except the fine
egotism of the situation of Adam and Eve, which Mr. Cobbett has
applied to himself, there is not much in him to touch
our politician: but we cannot understand his attack upon
Shakespear, which is cutting his own throat. If Mr. Cobbett is
for getting rid of his kings and queens, his fops and his
courtiers, if he is for pelting _Sir Hugh_ and _Falstaff_ off
the stage, yet what will he say to _Jack Cade_ and First and
Second Mob? If we are to scout the Roman rabble, where will the
_Register_ find English readers? Has the author never found
himself out in Shakespear? He may depend upon it he is there,
for all the people that ever lived are there! Has he never been
struck with the valour of _Ancient Pistol_, who “would not
swagger in any shew of resistance to a Barbary-hen”?[99] Can he
not, upon occasion, “aggravate his voice”[100] like _Bottom_ in
the play? In absolute insensibility, he is a fool to _Master
Barnardine_; and there is enough of gross animal instinct in
_Calyban_ to make a whole herd of Cobbetts. Mr. Cobbett admires
Bonaparte; and yet there is nothing finer in any of his
addresses to the French people than what _Coriolanus_ says to
the Romans when they banish him. He abuses the Allies in good
set terms; yet one speech of Constance describes them and their
magnanimity better than all the columns of the _Political
Register_. Mr. Cobbett’s address to the people of England[101]
on the alarm of an invasion, which was stuck on all the
church-doors in Great Britain, was not more eloquent than
_Henry V.’s_ address to his soldiers before the battle of
Agincourt; nor do we think Mr. Cobbett was ever a better
specimen of the common English character than the two soldiers
in the same play. After all, there is something so droll in his
falling foul of Shakespear for want of delicacy, with his
desperate lounges and bear-garden dexterity, snorting, fuming,
and grunting, that we cannot help laughing at the affair, now
that our surprise is over; as we suppose Mr. Cobbett does, if
he can only keep him out of his premises by hallooing and
hooting or dry blows, to see his old friend, Grill,[102]
trudging along the highroad in search of his acorns and
pig-nuts.’
THE BEGGAR’S OPERA
One of Hazlitt’s ‘Theatrical Examiners,’ and published in _The Examiner_
on June 18, 1815.
PAGE
65. _The Beggar’s Opera_ was produced at Lincoln’s Inn Fields on
January 29, 1728.
‘_Happy alchemy of mind_,’ _etc._ Cf. Boswell (_Life of Johnson_,
ed. G. B. Hill, iii. 65): ‘I have ever delighted in that
intellectual chymistry, which can separate good qualities from
evil in the same person.’
‘_O’erstepping the modesty of nature._’ _Hamlet_, Act III. Scene
2.
‘_Woman is like_,’ _etc._ _Beggar’s Opera_, Act I.
_Taken from Tibullus._ Hazlitt probably means Catullus and refers
to the lines (_Carm._ 62)
‘Ut flos in saeptis secretus nascitur hortis,’ etc.
‘_I see him sweeter_,’ _etc._ Act I.
‘_There is some soul of goodness in things evil._’ _Henry V._,