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., Act IV. Scene 1.

66.

‘Hussey, hussey,’ etc. Beggar’s Opera, Act I.

 

Miss Hannah More’s laboured invectives. Such as Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great to General Society (1788) and An Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World (1790). See ante, p. 154, for another expression of Hazlitt’s belief in the disciplinary value of The Beggar’s Opera.

 

Note. For further reference to Baron Grimm’s Correspondance (1812–14) see ante, p. 131, the essay ‘On the Literary Character.’ Claude Pierre Patu (1729–1757) published Choix de pièces traduites de l’anglais (de Robert Dodsley et John Gay) in 1756. The collected works of Jean Joseph Vadé (1720–1757) were published in 1775.

ON PATRIOTISM—A FRAGMENT

This fragment is taken from one of the ‘Illustrations of Vetus’ which appeared originally in The Morning Chronicle and were republished in Political Essays.

PAGE

 

67.

‘The love of mankind‘, etc. Rousseau’s Emile, Liv. IV. p. 279 (edit. Garnier): a favourite quotation of Hazlitt’s.

ON BEAUTY

No. 29 of the Round Table series, and signed in The Examiner—‘An Amateur.’

PAGE

 

68.

Three Papers, etc. Reynolds’s papers in the Idler are Nos. 76, 79, and 82. It is to the last, On the true idea of Beauty, that Hazlitt particularly refers.

69.

Spenser’s description of Belphœbe. The Faerie Queene, Book II. Canto iii. st. 21 et seq.

70.

‘Her full dark eyes,’ etc. The reference seems to be to Leiden des jungen Werthers (December 6).

71.

Pope’s translation. Homer’s Odyssey, V. 56–67.

 

Note. A classical friend. Leigh Hunt.

 

Note. ‘That was Arion crown’d,’ etc. The Faerie Queene, Book IV. Canto xi. st. 23 and 24.

 

Note. A striking description. Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (Select Works, ed. Payne, ii. 89).

 

Note. The idea is in ‘Don Quixote.’ Part II. Chap, xlviii. In The Examiner this note was concluded as follows: ‘Much the same impression which the sight of the Queen of France made on Mr. Burke’s brain sixteen years before the French Revolution, did the reading of the New Eloise make on mine at the commencement of it. “Such is the stuff of which our dreams are made!”^[103] This man (Burke), who was a half poet and a half philosopher, has done more mischief than perhaps any other person in the world. His understanding was not competent to the discovery of any truth, but it was sufficient to palliate a lie; his reasons, of little weight in themselves, thrown into the scale of power, were dreadful. Without genius to adorn the beautiful, he had the art to throw a dazzling veil over the deformed and disgusting, and to strew the flowers of imagination over the rotten carcase of corruption, not to prevent, but to communicate the infection. His jealousy of Rousseau^[104] was one chief cause of his opposition to the French Revolution. The writings of the one had changed the institutions of a kingdom; while the speeches of the other, with the intrigues of his whole party, had changed nothing but the turnspit of the King’s kitchen.^[105] He would have blotted out the broad, pure light of Heaven, because it did not first shine in upon the narrow, crooked passages of St. Stephen’s Chapel. The genius of Rousseau had levelled the towers of the Bastile with the dust; our zealous reformist, who would rather be doing mischief than nothing, tried therefore to patch them up again, by calling that loathsome dungeon the King’s Castle, and by fulsome adulation of the virtues of a Court Strumpet. This man had the impudence to say^[106] that an Elector of Hanover was raised to the throne of these kingdoms, “in contempt of the will of the people,” while the hereditary successor was still alive. He was at once a liar, a coward, and a slave; a liar to his own heart, a coward to the success of his own cause, a slave to the power he despised. See his Letter about the Duke of Bedford, in which the man gets the better of the sycophant, and he belabours the Duke in good earnest. It is not a source of regret to reflect that he closed his eyes on the ruin of liberty, which he had been the principal means of effecting, and of his own projects, at the same time. He did not live to see that deliverance of mankind, bound hand and foot into the absolute, lasting, inexorable power of Kings and Priests, which the author of Joan of Arc^[107] has so triumphantly celebrated. He did not live to see the sending of the Liberales of Spain to the gallies, and the liberating the Afrancesadoes from prison, for which our romantic Laureate, who sees so much farther into futurity than the Edinburgh Reviewers,^[108] thanks God. He did not live to read that Sonnet^[109] to the King which Mr. Wordsworth has written, in imitation of Milton’s Sonnet to Cromwell. There is a species of literary prostitution which has sprung up and spread wide in these days, more nauseous and despicable than any recorded in Juvenal. It proves, however, one thing, that is, the force which knowledge and opinion have acquired, and which makes it worth while for power to court and pervert those faculties which were intended to enlighten and reform the world, in order to plunge it into a darkness that may be felt; and slavery, that can only cease by putting a stop to the propagation of the species.’ Hazlitt used a part of this passage as a note to his essay ‘On Good-Nature.’ See post, p. 105 note.

72.

Mr. Burke, etc. See his Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful, Part III. Sect. xv.

 

Which describe pleasant motions. ‘It has been conjectured that the pleasure derived from visible form, might be always resolved into the absence of every thing disagreeable to the touch or difficult in motion.’ Note by Hazlitt in The Examiner.

 

‘He hath set his bow,’ etc. Ecclesiasticus, xliii. 11, 12.

 

Titian’s ‘Bath of Diana.’ Diana and Actaeon, now the property of the Earl of Ellesmere, in Bridgewater House. Hazlitt described this picture at length in his Sketches of the Principal Picture Galleries in England (The Marquis of Stafford’s Gallery).

ON IMITATION

No. 30 of the Round Table series.

PAGE

 

73.

The new Spurzheim principles. See Hazlitt’s essays ‘On Dreams’ and ‘On Dr. Spurzheim’s Theory’ in The Plain Speaker.

74.

Note. Vanhuysum. Jan van Huysum (1682–1749).

75.

Pansy freak’d with jet. Lycidas, l. 144.

76.

‘A pleasure in art,’ etc.

‘There is a pleasure in poetic pains,

Which only poets know.’

Cowper’s Task, The Timepiece, ll. 285–286.

 

Cf. Table Talk (‘On the Pleasure of Painting’): ‘There is a pleasure in painting which none but painters know.’ The original of the expression seems to be Dryden’s ‘There is a pleasure, sure, in being mad, which none but madmen know’ (Spanish Friar, Act II. Scene 1).

 

Titian’s ‘Schoolmaster.’ For an account of this picture see Hazlitt’s Sketches of the Principal Picture Galleries in England (the Marquis of Stafford’s Gallery).

ON GUSTO

No. 40 of the Round Table series.

PAGE

 

77.

Albano’s. Francesco Albani (1578–1660), a pupil of Ludovico Caracci.

78.

To touch them. In The Examiner Hazlitt gives the following note to this passage: ‘This may seem obscure. We will therefore avail ourselves of our privilege to explain as Members of Parliament do, when they let fall any thing too paradoxical, novel, or abstruse, to be immediately apprehended by the other side of the House. When the Widow Wadman^[110] looked over my Uncle Toby’s map of the Siege of Namur with him, and as he pointed out the approaches of his battalion in a transverse line across the plain to the gate of St. Nicholas, kept her hand constantly pressed against his, if my Uncle Toby had then “been an artist and could paint,” (as Mr. Fox wished himself to be,^[111] that “he might draw Bonaparte’s conduct to the King of Prussia in the blackest colours”) my Uncle Toby would have drawn the hand of his fair enemy in the manner we have above described. We have heard a good story of this same Bonaparte playing off a very ludicrous parody of the Widow Wadman’s stratagem upon as great a commander by sea as my Uncle Toby was by land. Now, when Sir Isaac Newton, who was sitting smoking with his mistress’s hand in his, took her little finger and made use of it as a tobacco-pipe stopper, there was here a total absence of mind, or a great want of gusto.’

 

Mr. West. Benjamin West (1738–1820), historical painter, succeeded Sir J. Reynolds as President of the Royal Academy in 1792.

80.

‘Or where Chineses,’ etc. Paradise Lost, III. 438–439.

 

‘Wild above rule,’ etc. Ib. V. 297.

ON PEDANTRY

No. 32 of the Round Table series. See ante, p. 382, for a reference by Hazlitt to this essay.

PAGE

 

80.

The pedantry of Parson Adams. See Joseph Andrews, Book III. Chap. v.

 

Scotch Pedagogue. Roderick Random, Chap. xiv.

 

Seeing ourselves, etc. Burns, To a Louse, st. 8.

81.

Monsieur Jourdain. In Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme.

 

Note. ‘Not to admire anything.’

‘Nil admirari, prope res est una, Numici,

Solaque, quæ possit facere et servare beatum.’—Horace, Ep. I. vi. I.

82.

In the Library, etc. At his father’s house at Wem. See Memoirs of William Hazlitt, i. 33. The Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum, etc., was published in eight volumes folio, 1656.

 

‘From all this world’s,’ etc. ‘From worldly cares himselfe he did esloyne.’ The Faerie Queene, Book I. Canto iv. st. 20. In The Examiner Hazlitt published the following note: ‘Mr. Wordsworth has on a late occasion humorously applied this line of Spenser to persons holding sinecure places under government. He seems to intend adding to the list of such places that of Poet Laureate. This we think a decided improvement on the system.’ The reference is to Wordsworth’s sonnet, ‘Occasioned by the Battle of Waterloo,’ beginning ‘The bard whose soul is meek as dawning day.’

83.

‘Mitigated authors,’ etc. ‘It was this opinion which mitigated kings into companions, and raised private men to be fellows with kings. Without force, or opposition, it subdued the fierceness of pride and power; it obliged sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of social esteem,’ etc. Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (Select Works, ed. Payne, ii. 90).

 

The Spectator. See The Spectator, No. 131.

No. 33 the Round Table series.

PAGE

 

84.

A poetical enthusiast. Wordsworth presumably.

 

‘A clerk ther was,’ etc. Canterbury Tales, Prologue, ll. 285 et seq.

85.

‘Chemist, statesman,’ etc. Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, l. 550.

 

‘Tongues in the trees,’ etc. As You Like It, Act II. Scene 1.

86.

Vestris was so far right, etc. Vestris (1729–1808), ‘Le Dieu de la danse,’ said that Europe contained only three great men, himself, Voltaire, and Frederick of Prussia.

 

We do not see, etc. Johnson and Wordsworth were of the opposite opinion. See Boswell’s Life, ed. G. B. Hill, iv. 114, and Rogers’s Table-Talk, p. 234.

87.

In Froissart’s ‘Chronicles.’ Book IV. chapter 14 (Panthéon Litteraire). The man was not a monk at all.

88.

‘The sovereign’st thing on earth.’ 1 Henry IV., Act I. Scene 3.

 

Uneasy and insecure. In The Examiner the following note is appended: ‘It has been found necessary to cement them with blood. “Plus de belles paroles, messieurs, je veux du sang,” is the language of all absolute sovereigns to their subjects, when the film drops from their eyes which leads mankind to suppose themselves the property of tyrants. If men are to be treated like slaves, it is best that they should think themselves born to be so. Plus de belles paroles. The French Revolution was the necessary consequence of our English Revolution and of the Reformation. A crusade once more to re-establish the infallibility of the Pope all over the Continent would be a logical inference from the late crusade to restore divine right.’

ON THE CHARACTER OF ROUSSEAU

No. 36 of the Round Table series.

PAGE

 

89.

Note. In The Examiner this note was continued as follows: ‘He was the founder of Jacobinism, which disclaims the division of the species into two classes, the one the property of the others. It was of the disciples of his school, where principle is converted into passion, that Mr. Burke said and said truly,—“Once a Jacobin, and always a Jacobin!” The adept in this school does not so much consider the political injury as the personal insult. This is the way to put the case, to set the true revolutionary leaven, the self-love which is at the bottom of every heart, at work, and this was the way in which Rousseau put it. It then becomes a question between man and man, which there is but one way of deciding.’

90.

‘Va Zanetto,’ etc. Part II. liv. 7.

 

‘Louise Eleonore,’ etc. Part I. liv. 2.

91.

‘As fast,’ etc. Othello, Act V. Scene 2.

 

There are, indeed, impressions, etc. A quotation from Rousseau’s Confessions. See Hazlitt’s essay entitled ‘My first Acquaintance with Poets.’

92.

‘Ah, voila de la pervenche!’ Confessions, Part I. liv. 6.

 

Mr. Wordsworth’s discovery. The reference appears to be to Wordsworth’s poem, ‘The Sparrow’s Nest.’

No. 37 of the Round Table series.

PAGE

 

93.

Fitzosborne’s Letters, by William Melmoth the younger (1710–1799), were published in two vols. in 1742–1747. Hazlitt’s quotation seems to be merely a summary of a passage in Letter X. (p. 35, edit. 1748) which is itself quoted from Wollaston’s Religion of Nature Delineated.

 

Note. Burns. See his autobiographical letter to Dr. John Moore, 2nd August 1787. (Works, ed. Chambers and Wallace, i. 20).

94.

‘Bitter bad judges.’ Beggar’s Opera, Act I. Scene 1.

 

‘Makes ambition virtue.’ Othello, Act III. Scene 3.

 

Dr. Johnson. See his Life of Milton (Works, vii. 108).

 

‘Fame is the spur,’ etc. Lycidas, ll. 70–77.

 

Pluck its fruits, unripe and crude. Lycidas, l. 3.

95.

Hogarth’s ‘Distressed Poet.’ The map of the gold-mines of Peru was substituted in the impression of 1740 for a print of Pope thrashing Curll in the original impression of 1736.

 

A man of genius and eloquence. Coleridge presumably.

96.

Elphinstone. James Elphinston (1721–1809), who superintended an Edinburgh edition of The Rambler, in which he gave English translations of most of the mottoes. This, however, was far from being his only literary enterprise, and it is strange that Hazlitt should ‘know nothing more of him.’ He published many translations, one of which, A Specimen of the Translations of Epigrams of Martial (1778), achieved notoriety from its extreme badness. In his later life he devoted himself to the invention of a kind of phonetic spelling, which he explained in Propriety ascertained in her Picture, or English Speech and Spelling under Mutual Guides (1787), and other works.

 

Yorick and the Frenchman. Sterne’s Sentimental Journey. The Passport.

CHARACTER OF JOHN BULL

No. 39 of the Round Table series.

PAGE

 

97.

A respectable publication. Edinburgh Review, xxvi. p. 96 (Feb. 1816). The passage quoted is from a review by Hazlitt himself of Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Literature.

ON GOOD NATURE

No. 41 of the Round Table series.

PAGE

 

100.

Says Froissart. This well-known saying is wrongly attributed to Froissart. See Notes and Queries for 1863 and subsequent years.

102.

An Englishman, who would be thought a profound one. Wordsworth. See p. 116.

103.

Forge the seal of the realm, etc. The allusion seems to be to the events of the spring of 1804 when Lord Eldon, during the king’s illness, affixed the great seal to a commission giving the royal assent to certain bills.

104.

Good digestion wait on appetite. Macbeth, Act III. Scene 4.

 

Without control. In The Examiner Hazlitt appended as a note: ‘Henry VIII. was a good-natured monarch. He cut off his wives’ heads with as little ceremony as if they had been eels. This character ought, as Mr. Cobbett says, to be hooted off the stage, as a disgrace to human nature. Shakspeare represented kings as they were in his time.’

104.

Mr. Vansittart. Nicholas Vansittart (1766–1851), created Baron Bexley in 1823, was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1812 till 1822.

 

Everything by starts and nothing long. Absalom and Achitophel, Part I. l. 548.

105.

Note. This note is part of the note on Burke, which in The Examiner appeared at the foot of the essay ‘On Beauty.’ See ante, p. 71.

ON THE CHARACTER OF MILTON’S EVE

No. 42 of the Round Table series, with occasional passages from No. 43, on Shakspeare’s female characters, the substance of which was published in Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (Cymbeline, Othello, and Winter’s Tale).

PAGE

 

105.

‘As the vine curls her tendrils.’ Paradise Lost, IV. 307.

106.

‘Two of far nobler shape,’ etc. Paradise Lost, IV. 288–311.

107.

‘That day I oft remember,’ etc. Paradise Lost, IV. 449–465.

 

‘So spake our general mother,’ etc. Paradise Lost, IV. 492–501.

 

‘So much the more,’ etc. Paradise Lost, V. 8–20.

108.

‘When Adam thus to Eve,’ etc. Paradise Lost, IV. 610–611.

 

‘To whom thus Eve,’ etc. Paradise Lost, IV. 634.

 

‘To whom our general ancestor,’ etc. Paradise Lost, IV. 659–660.

 

‘Methought close at mine ear,’ etc. Paradise Lost, V. 35–47.

 

‘So talked the spirited sly snake.’ Paradise Lost, IX. 613.

 

‘So cheered he his fair spouse,’ etc. Paradise Lost, V. 129–135.

109.

‘Under his forming hands,’ etc. Paradise Lost, VIII. 470–477.

 

‘In shadier bower,’ etc. Paradise Lost, IV. 705–719.

 

‘Meanwhile at table Eve,’ etc. Paradise Lost, V. 443–450.

110.

‘Yet not more sweet,’ etc. Southey’s Carmen Nuptiale, Proem, stanza 18.

 

‘O unexpected stroke,’ etc. Paradise Lost, XI. 268–285.

111.

‘This most afflicts me,’ etc. Paradise Lost, XI. 315–333.

OBSERVATIONS ON MR. WORDSWORTH’S POEM ‘THE EXCURSION’

This essay is composed of two papers by Hazlitt which appeared in The Examiner on August 21 and August 28, 1814.

PAGE

 

112.

‘Without form and void.’ Genesis, i. 2.

113.

‘The bare trees and mountains bare.’ Wordsworth, ‘To my Sister.’

 

‘Exchange the shepherd’s flock.’ Excursion, Book VI.

114.

‘The sad historian of the pensive vale.’ Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village, l. 136.

 

‘Our system is not fashioned,’ etc. Excursion, Book VI.

 

‘Such as the meeting soul may pierce.’ L’Allegro, l. 138.

 

‘In that fair clime,’ etc. Excursion, Book IV.

115.

‘Now shall our great discoverers obtain,’ etc. Excursion, Book IV.

116.

‘Poor gentleman,’ etc. Wycherley’s Love in a Wood, Act III. Scene 1.

 

Dull. Wordsworth speaks of Candide as ‘this dull product of a scoffer’s pen’ (Excursion, Book II.) and refers to it again in Book IV.:—

‘Him I mean

Who penned, to ridicule confiding faith,

This sorry Legend.’

 

See ante, p. 102.

117.

Tout homme reflechi, etc. Cf. ‘J’ose presque assurer que l’état de réflexion est un état contre nature, et que l’homme qui médite est un animal dépravé.’ Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (édit. Firmin-Didot, p. 52).

 

‘From that abstraction I was roused,’ etc. Excursion, Book III.

118.

‘For that other loss,’ etc. Excursion, Book IV.

119.

‘What though the radiance,’ etc. Intimations of Immortality, stanza 10.

THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED

From The Examiner, October 2, 1814.

PAGE

 

120.

‘With glistering spires,’ etc. Paradise Lost, III. 550.

 

‘The great vision of the guarded mount.’ Lycidas, l. 161.

121.

‘A sudden illness,’ etc. Excursion, Book VI.

123.

Aristotle observed. In The Poetics.

 

Bells or Lancaster’s. Andrew Bell (1753–1832) founder of the Madras system of education, and Joseph Lancaster (1770–1838). For an account of these two rival reformers of education see Leslie Stephen’s The English Utilitarians, II. 17–19.

 

Guzman d’Alfarache. Hazlitt discussed this novel by Mateo Aleman, published in 1599, in his English Comic Writers (Lecture on the English Novelists).

 

A discipline of humanity. Bacon’s Essays, ‘Of Marriage and Single Life.’

124.

The Whig and Jacobite friends. Excursion, Book VI.

 

Sir Alfred Irthing. Excursion, Book VII.

 

‘Have proved a monument.’ From the sonnet in which Wordsworth dedicated The Excursion to Lord Lonsdale.

CHARACTER OF THE LATE MR. PITT

This ‘character’ originally appeared in Free Thoughts on Public Affairs, etc. (1806). It must have been a favourite with the author, for he afterwards reprinted it in The Eloquence of the British Senate, etc. (1807), in The Round Table (1817), and in Political Essays (1819). It also appeared in the posthumous Winterslow (1839). See note on p. 383, ante.

PAGE

 

127.

‘They had learned the trick,’ etc. Hobbes’s Behemoth (Works, ed. Molesworth, vi. 240).

128.

‘Not matchless,’ etc. Paradise Lost, VI. 341–2.

 

And in its liquid texture, etc. Paradise Lost, VI. 148–149.

From The Examiner, October 9, 1814, ‘Common-places,’ No. 1.

PAGE

 

129.

‘But ’tis not so above.’ Hamlet, Act III. Scene 3.

 

‘Compelled to give in evidence,’ etc. Ibid.

130.

‘Open and apparent shame.’ 1 Henry IV., Act II. Scene 4.

131.

Elymas the sorcerer. See Sketches of the Principal Picture Galleries in England (the Pictures at Hampton Court) where Hazlitt describes this cartoon.

ON THE LITERARY CHARACTER

Reprinted with some omissions from a letter which appeared in The Morning Chronicle for October 28, 1813, entitled ‘Baron Grimm and the Edinburgh Reviewers.’

PAGE

 

131.

A late number, etc. Edinburgh Review, vol. xxi. July 1813. The Correspondance of Friedrich Melchior, Baron Grimm (1723–1807) was published in 1812–14. The article in the Edinburgh is by Jeffrey. Hazlitt, in The Examiner, quotes from it at greater length, and proceeds: ‘These remarks, however shrewd and ingenious in themselves, are somewhat irrelevant to the literary and philosophical character of Mr. Grimm and his friends. There seems to have been an odd transposition of ideas in the writer’s mind; for the whole of his reasoning relates to the manners of fashionable life, or the tendency of mixed and agreeable society in general, to produce levity and insensibility, and does not at all apply to the peculiar defects of the literary character, or account for that hard-heartedness, which Mr. Burke attributes, by way of emphasis, to the thorough-bred metaphysician.^[112] The two characters are evidently distinct, and proceed from very different and even opposite causes, which ought not to have been confounded. It would have been a task worthy of the Edinburgh Reviewers to have pointed out the sources of each, and to have shewn how both appear to have united in the present instance with the natural levity of the French character, to produce that “faultless monster which the world ne’er saw” before.^[113] Much is undoubtedly to be given to accidental and local circumstances. Boswell’s Life of Johnson presents a very different picture of men and manners from Grimm’s Memoirs, though in the circle described by the former there were men who at least rivalled M. Grimm in literature, and in politeness and knowledge of mankind might vie with Baron d’Holbach. The profligacy of the French court, and the mummeries of the established religion might naturally produce an almost satiric license and impudence among the enlightened partisans of the new order of things, and lead them to regard all religion as a barefaced cheat, and every pretension to virtue as hypocrisy. The peculiar intelligible features of the philosophical and literary character are, however, stamped on every page of M. Grimm’s correspondence; and as they do not seem to have been very well distinguished by the Reviewer, I shall venture to throw out a few hints on the subject, in the hope that they may be taken up and embodied in an authentic form in some future supplementary volume.’

133.

Multiplicity of persons and things. Hazlitt quotes with characteristic inaccuracy the Edinburgh article on Grimm (see p. 131). A few lines further on he speaks of a ‘succession of persons and things.’

 

Rocks of Meillerie. La Nouvelle Héloïse, Part IV. 17.

135.

Mr. Shandy. Tristram Shandy, V. Chap, iii., where Sterne tells the story of Cicero and his daughter referred to in the text.

 

‘Hæret lateri,’ etc. Virgil, Aeneid, V. 73.

 

‘Clad in flesh and blood.’ From Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Select Works, ed. Payne, ii. 101).

 

The ghosts of Homer’s heroes. Odyssey, Book XI.

 

‘Play round the head, but never reach the heart.’

‘All fame is foreign, but of true desert;

Plays round the head, but comes not to the heart.’

Pope’s Essay on Man, IV. 254.

 

Hazlitt’s letter in The Morning Chronicle concluded as follows: ‘There is another very striking distinction between the indifference and insensibility to moral good and evil, to be met with in the philosopher or the man of the world, which the Reviewer has not pointed out. In the one, it is the effect of “frivolity, dissipation, and familiarity with vice”; in the other, it is oftener the effect of disappointed hope and early enthusiasm. The aversion of the philosopher to moral speculations has almost always the same source as the exclamation of Brutus, “Oh Virtue! I embraced thee as a substance, and I find thou art a shadow!” There is hardly any one of the persons who figure in these memoirs who did not set out with some panacea for the salvation of mankind, with as much sanguine extravagance as ever knight-errants indulged to conquer giants and rescue distressed damsels. The wounds received in the conflict might close, but the scar would remain. Indeed, the practical knowledge of vice and misery makes a stronger impression on the mind, when it has once imbibed a habit of abstract reasoning. Evil thus becomes embodied in a general principle, and shews its happy form in all things. It is a fatal, inevitable necessity hanging over us. It follows us wherever we go—if we fly into the uttermost parts of the earth, it is there; whether we turn to the right or the left, we cannot escape from it.

 

‘This, it is true, is the disease of philosophy; but it is one to which it is liable in minds of a certain cast, after the first ardour of expectation has been disabused by experience, and the finer feelings have received an irrecoverable shock from the jarring of the world.

 

‘There seems a peculiar tenaciousness in the French character in this respect, an unfortunate aptitude to cling to every vice and catch at every folly, or else a want of freshness of feeling, of that elastic force about the heart which repels the approach of moral or intellectual depravity.

 

‘What is said of the tone of the literary society of Paris, is equally misunderstood. The Reviewers hardly mean to represent the exclusion of tediousness and pertinacious wrangling, as the general character of assemblies of wits, and philosophers in all ages and nations. If so, their opinion differs from that of the Sage. The fact is, that the men of letters at this period, by mixing in the fashionable circles, took the tone of good company, as the people of fashion, by their familiarity with men of letters, received the tincture of philosophy. The two characters were blended together in real life, and are confounded in the Edinburgh Review.’

135.

Note. Plato’s Cave. Republic, Book VII.