67. In the account of her death, a friend has pointed out an instance of the poet’s exact observation of nature:—
The inside of the leaves of the willow, next the water, is of a whitish colour, and the reflection would therefore be ‘hoary.’
68. See an article, called Theatralia, in the second volume of the Reflector, by Charles Lamb.
69. There is another instance of the same distinction in Hamlet and Ophelia. Hamlet’s pretended madness would make a very good real madness in any other author.
70. The river wanders at its own sweet will.—Wordsworth.
71. The lady, we here see, gives up the argument, but keeps her mind.
72. See the Examiner, Feb. 9.
73. ‘I hated my profession’ (the business of a shoemaker, to which he was bound prentice) ‘with a perfect hatred.’ See Mr. Gifford’s Life of Himself prefixed to his Juvenal. He seems to have liked few things else better from that day to this. He tells us in the same work (though this is hardly what I should call being ‘a good hater’) that he did not much like his father, and was not sorry when he died. This candid and amiable personage always overflowed with ‘the milk of human kindness.’
74. ‘Undoubtedly the translator of Juvenal.’
75. ‘It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.’ Mr. Gifford here seems to exclude his band of gentlemen-pensioners, whom he pays on earth, from bursting with obscure worth into the realms of day. It is thus that Jacobin sentiments sprout from the commonest sympathy, and are even unavoidable in a government critic, when the common claims of humanity touch his pity or his self-love.
76. A quotation of Mr. Gifford’s from Shakespeare. Yet he reproaches me with quoting from Shakespeare.
77. To Apollo.
78. Humanity stands as little in this author’s way as truth when his object is to please. It was in the same spirit of unmanly adulation that he struck at Mrs. Robinson’s lameness and ‘her crutches,’ with a hand, that ought to have been withered in the attempt by the lightning of public indignation and universal scorn. Mr. Sheridan once spoke of certain politicians in his day who ‘skulked behind the throne, and made use of the sceptre as a conductor to carry off the lightning of national indignation which threatened to consume them.’ There are certain small critics and poetasters who have always been trying to do the same thing.
79. This word is not very choice English: the character is not English.
80. See the Mæviad, l. 365, etc.:—
81. ‘To be honest as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.’—Shakspeare.
82. This character, (which has not been relished,) appeared originally in a small pamphlet in 1806, called Free Thoughts on Public Affairs, with a note acknowledging my obligations for the leading ideas to an article of Mr. Coleridge’s, in the Morning Post, Feb. 1800.
83. This extreme tenderness, it is to be observed, is felt by a person who in his Life of Ben Jonson, hopes that God will forgive Shakspeare for having written his plays!
84. It was a phrase, (I have understood,) common in this gentleman’s mouth, that Robespierre, by destroying the lives of thousands, saved the lives of millions. Or, as Mr. Wordsworth has lately expressed the same thought with a different application, ‘Carnage is the daughter of humanity.’
85. You have spelt it wrong (Marocchius), on purpose for what I know.
86. Quoted from the Edinburgh Review, No. 56.
87. Antony and Cleopatra, Act IV. Scene 14.
88. For Tramezzani and William Augustus Conway (1789–1828), who were not favourites of Hazlitt, see A View of the English Stage.
89. Paradise Lost, IV. 299.
90. Don Quixote, Book III. Chap. xxv.
91. The Canterbury Tales. The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, ll. 593–599.
92. Hamlet, Act II. Scene 2.
93. Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register for November 18, 1815 (vol. xxix). Cobbett’s outburst against Milton and Shakespeare is headed ‘On the subject of potatoes.’
94. See ante, p. 116.
95. Œuvres, xxxv. p. 159.
96. Probably the Letter from Paris, dated September 23, 1815, relating to the disposal of the works of art acquired by Napoleon.
97. See ante, pp. 140–151. The Catalogue appeared in The Morning Chronicle during the autumn of 1815 and the spring of 1816, beginning on September 22, 1815.
98. The reference seems to be to Samuel Parr (1747–1825) and Charles Burney (1757–1817). See Hazlitt’s essay ‘On the Ignorance of the Learned’ in Table Talk.
99. 2 Henry IV., Act II. Scene 4.
100. Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act I. Scene 2.
101. Political Register, July 30, 1802.
102. See The Faerie Queene, II. xii. st. 86 and 87.
103. A variation, quoted from Burke (A Letter to a Noble Lord), of Shakespeare’s well-known lines in The Tempest, Act IV. Scene 1.
104. For Burke on Rousseau see especially A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791).
105.
See Burke’s Speech (1780) on Economical Reform.
106. Reflections on the Revolution in France (Select Works, ed. Payne, ii. 17).
107. See Southey’s Carmen Triumphale.
108. See the Notes to Southey’s Carmen Triumphale.
109. See ante, note to p. 45.
110. Tristram Shandy, IX. 26.
111. In the Life of Napoleon Hazlitt refers to this saying, which he calls ‘quackery.’
112. ‘Nothing can be conceived more hard than the heart of a thorough-bred metaphysician.’ A Letter to a Noble Lord (Works, Bohn, V. 141).
113. From the Essay on Poetry of John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham.