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On another occasion, I passed eight or ten days with Hazlitt, among scenes of peculiar interest, but not exactly of a nature to keep him in that good humour with himself which made his society so delightful, and in the absence of which, though his company was always in the highest degree interesting and instructive as a moral and intellectual study, it was not what one would have chosen purely for the sake of the companionship it afforded.
The place where I met him on this occasion was no other than Fonthill
Abbey, which had just been thrown open to the public curiosity, after having remained up to
that time a sealed book from the day of its mysterious creation. I was, by the favour of
its new proprietor, staying in the house (with a
view to a detailed description of its treasures of art, and of the beautiful domain
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We met the next day, and were much together during the time we stayed; and though he was anything but at ease and at home in those scenes of artificial luxury and overstrained refinement which surrounded us here, yet the locality happened to be one with which many of his early associations were connected; and we made several excursions in the neighbourhood, which afforded some of the most pleasant and profitable hours I ever spent with him.
Hazlitt particularly piqued himself on his skill in cicerone-ship; and when he was in good health and spirits, there was nothing pleased him better than to accompany a friend to some celebrated collection of pictures, with which he himself was familiar, but which the party accompanying him had not seen before; and the first place he proposed that we should go to see was Sir Richard Colt Hoare’s, which is situated a few miles from Fonthill.
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On these occasions it was very curious and characteristic to observe the manner in which the mere feelings and impressions of his youthful enthusiasm were blended with the critical knowledge and judgment of his after years,—each moulding and modifying the other into forms which neither could have assumed of themselves, and which, if they did not offer a very just estimate of the objects to which they were applied, offered that which was infinitely more characteristic and interesting, as illustrations of the mind and spirit in which they were generated.
Not that the actual criticisms which Hazlitt pronounced on these occasions—when he pronounced
such at all—were in any material degree impaired in value by the mere impressions which had preceded them in his mind. But it was these latter that he
loved chiefly to recur to, and which, to my thinking, were even more instructive and
valuable than his formal criticisms; because, with him, the first
impression was always the germ and the foundation of all that he might afterwards
have to say or to write on any topic of this kind. It was in the astonishing
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| 64 | WILLIAM HAZLITT. |
The truth is, that Hazlitt’s
extraordinary critical powers were available to him only by the light of the Past. His
impressions on contemporary art were as little to be depended on as those on contemporary
literature. The pictures that he had seen at the Louvre during the Peace of Amiens, and in
the private galleries of England about the same period, he could describe with a more
intimate sense of their merits and beauties than any other man; and he could convey to
others that sense more vividly than even actual observation would have presented
it—especially when he had the objects before him to renew his impression of those
individual details by which the general impression was first created in his mind. But to
all other objects of a similar kind, if he did not wilfully close his eyes, at least he
opened them only to look with that vague and vacant gaze in which the perceptive powers,
instead of projecting themselves outward in tangible communion, as it were, with the
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In going through the various apartments at Sir Richard Colt Hoare’s, and afterwards at Burleigh House, I shall never forget the almost childish delight which Hazlitt exhibited at the sight of two or three of the chief favourites of his early days, and the way in which he expressed that delight, not so much to me as to the attendant who showed us the pictures, and on whom he seemed to look with a sort of superstitious respect,—as if the daily looking upon objects which were nothing less than sacred in Hazlitt’s eyes, had transferred something of their sanctity to him.
On another day, while at Fonthill, we walked over to Salisbury (a distance
of twelve miles) in a broiling sunshine; and I remember, on this occasion in particular,
remarking the extraordinary physical as well as moral effect produced on Hazlitt by the sight and feel of “the
country.” In London the most inobservant person could scarcely pass him
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He spoke on this occasion of having repeatedly walked from forty to fifty
miles a day in that fashion formerly, and said that he could do so now with perfect ease
and pleasure. Yet in London (as I have hinted elsewhere) he would sit, as if nailed to his
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Another of our excursions was to that gem of English villages, Stourhead,
adjoining the seat of Sir Richard Colt Hoare. I have
never seen anything in its way so pretty as this village. Indeed it was too pretty, for it gave one the idea, not of a real country village, but of the
imitation of one in some prince’s or nobleman’s park; and, knowing it not to be
so, the effect was odd, and, in some degree, unpleasant. It reminded one of a village
beauty, too well dressed to admit the belief that she had been her own tire-woman; or, in
another way, it looked like one of those pretty Paris grisettes who sit for half an hour
under the hairdresser’s hands before they show themselves in their shops in the
morning. All the houses looked as if they had just been newly coloured and painted. The
windows glittered like crystal—the
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