“On Tuesday, the 14th of January, 1812, at this Institution, Mr. Hazlitt will commence a course of Lectures on the rise and progress of modern philosophy, containing an historical and critical account of the principal writers who have treated on moral and metaphysical subjects, from the time of Lord Racon to the present day. The Lectures will be on the following Subjects:—

* There is no record of any preceding sitting on the subject. † The date does not appear on the minutes.

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“Lecture I. On the writings of Hobbes, showing that he was the father of the modern system of philosophy.

“Lecture II. On Locke’s ‘Essay on the Human Understanding;’ or the formation of ideas in general.

“Lecture III. On Berkeley’s principles of human knowledge, and on the nature of abstraction.

“Lecture V. Same subject continued, with an account of the writings of Hartley and Helvetius.

“Lecture VI. On Bishop Butler’s theory of man, on the love of happiness, the love of action, and the human conduct.

“Lecture IX. On the Theory of Language; as treated by Horne Tooke, by the author of ‘Hermes,’ and Lord Monboddo.

A kind of indication that the lectures at the Russell

* My father included them in the ‘Literary Remains,’ 1836. He takes occasion, in a note, which I shall copy, to give an account of their history and fate:— “The following Essays form part of a series of Lectures delivered with very great effect by my father at the Russell Institution, in 1813 [1812] I found them with other papers in an old hamper which many years ago he stuffed confusedly full of MSS. and odd volumes of books, and left in the care of some lodging-house people, by whom it was thrown into a cellar, so damp that even the covers of some of the books were fast mouldering when I first looked over the collection. The injury to the MSS. may be imagined, Some of the Lectures, indeed, to my deep regret, are altogether missing, burnt probably, by the ignorant people of the house; and I have had the greatest difficulty in preparing those which remain for the press.”

IN THE GALLERY.

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Institution were not pecuniarily remunerative, is that Mr. Hazlitt was induced shortly afterwards to seek an engagement on the Morning Chronicle as a parliamentary reporter. This was an occupation which was calculated to suit neither his tastes nor his health; it involved late hours, and the gallery at that time was a hotbed of intemperance. My grandfather’s health had never been robust, and the sedentary life of a hard student had still further impaired it.

Like many other reporters, he was not a short-hand writer. He had no knowledge of stenography, or at best, no competent knowledge. He took notes of a very hurried description, restricting himself to general heads and salient points; and if he was not able, after his turn, to make out what he had written very satisfactorily, yet he had a memory which was retentive and accurate enough for that purpose; and I doubt whether anything worth preserving was lost through him. The complaint which I have heard made was, that he gave speakers credit for delivering better grammar and sense than was really the case; and this is a complaint which has attached so far to all reporters in all times. My friend, Mr. John Payne Collier, has a MS. copy of Coleridge’s ‘Christabel,’ in Miss Stoddart’s handwriting, which belonged to my grandfather, and with which were bound up, oddly enough, some blank leaves, serving him for his reporting notes. I also possess a volume of them; and very strange specimens of caligraphy they are, considering that Mr. Hazlitt, as a rule, wrote a beautifully clear hand.

196

OUT OF THE GALLERY.

He ran another danger, which was that of losing the thread of the debate, while he was listening to some favourite orator. He is said to have been so fascinated once by the eloquence of Plunket, that he omitted to take any notes at all of his speech. He himself tells a little anecdote of these days:—

“I have heard Sir Francis Burdett say things there [in the House of Commons] which I could not enough admire; and which he could not have ventured upon saying, if, besides his honesty, he had not been a man of fortune, of family, of character, ay, and a very good-looking man into the bargain!”

When he gave up the gallery, he did not leave the press, but transferred his services to the critical department of the Chronicle, occasionally contributing political articles. Among these latter were the celebrated ‘Illustrations of Vetus,’ which appeared in the Chronicle at the close of 1813, and attracted considerable attention.

He experienced great difficulty in the first instance, when he began to write for the newspapers; but he found that where the strong necessity for doing a thing

DRAMATIC CRITIC.

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was present to him, he managed to surmount all obstacles.

He succeeded Mr. Mudford as theatrical critic on the Chronicle, quite at the commencement of 1814. Mr. Mudford procured a place on the Courier, of whose columns he availed himself to make known to the public that “it was impossible for any one to understand a word Mr. Hazlitt wrote.”*

* Mr. W. Mudford was at one time editor of the Courier. He is the author of a work on the Battle of Waterloo, and others. There is an account of him in Jerdan’s ‘Autobiography.’

198

HIS FAVOURITES.

My grandfather’s dramatic reminiscences go no farther back than Bannister, who used to delight him excessively, he tells us, in Lenitive in the ‘Prize,’ when he was a boy. Northcote told him that Bannister was an imitator of Edwin, but at a considerable distance. Northcote spoke very well of Edwin. Liston appeared to Mr. Hazlitt to have more comic humour than any one in his time, though he was not properly an actor. Mr. Hazlitt has seen him walk along the streets with an air of melancholy—the player’s melancholy—a book in his hand, and a fixed expression, as if he had the lock-jaw.

Edmund Kean and Miss Stephens were Mr. Hazlitt’s great favourites, but there were others for whose performances he had an admiration and relish, as, for instance, Miss Kelly and Master Betty.

“I (not very long ago) had the pleasure,” he says, writing in 1821, “of spending an evening with Mr. Betty, when we had some ‘good talk’ about the good old times of acting. I wanted to insinuate that I had been a sneaking admirer, but could not bring it in. As, however, we were putting on our greatcoats downstairs, I ventured to break the ice by saying, ‘There is one actor of that period of whom we have not made honourable mention: I mean Master Betty.’ ‘Oh!’ he said, ‘I have forgot all that.’ I replied that he might, but that I could not forget the pleasure I had had in seeing him. On which he turned off, and shaking his sides heartily, and with no measured demand upon his lungs, called out, ‘Oh, memory, memory!’ in a way

PLAY-GOING RECOLLECTIONS.

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that showed the full force of the allusion. I found afterwards that the subject did not offend, and we were to have drunk some Burton ale together the following evening, but were prevented.”

A young Scotchman once tried to prove to him that Miss Stephens was inferior to Mrs. Dickons, because Mrs. Dickons surpassed her in sacred music!

“I went to see him [Mr. Kean] the first night of his appearing in Shylock.* I remember it well. The boxes were empty, and the pit not half full; ‘some quantity of barren spectators and idle renters were thinly scattered to make up a show.’ The whole presented a dreary, hopeless aspect. I was in considerable apprehension for the result. From the first scene in which Mr. Kean came on, my doubts were at an end.

“I had been told to give as favourable an account as I could. I gave a true one. I am not one of those who, when they see the sun breaking from behind a cloud, stop to ask others whether it is the moon. Mr. Kean’s appearance was the first gleam of genius breaking athwart the gloom of the stage, and the public have since gladly basked in its ray, in spite of actors, managers, and critics.

“I cannot say that my opinion has much changed since that time. Why should it? I had the same eyes

* January 26, 1814, at Drury Lane.

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ANECDOTES OF OLD ACTORS.

to see with that I have now* . . . . My opinions have been sometimes called singular: they are merely sincere. I say what I think: I think what I feel. I cannot help receiving certain impressions from things; and I have sufficient courage to declare (somewhat abruptly) what they are. This is the only singularity I am conscious of. . . . . . . I did not endeavour to persuade Mr. Perry† that Mr. Kean was an actor that would not last, merely because he had not lasted; nor that Miss Stephens knew nothing of singing, because she had a sweet voice.

“What I have said of any actor has never arisen from private pique of any sort. Indeed, the only person on the stage with whom I have ever had any personal intercourse, is Mr. Liston, and of him I have not spoken ‘with the malice of a friend.’

“I have heard that once, when Garrick was acting Lear, the spectators in the front row of the pit, not being able to see him well in the kneeling scene, where he utters the curse, rose up; when those behind them, not willing to interrupt the scene by remonstrating, immediately rose up too, and in this manner the whole pit rose up, without uttering a syllable, and so that you might hear a pin drop.

“At another time, the crown of straw which he wore in the same character fell off, or was discomposed, which would have produced a burst of laughter in any common actor to whom such an accident had happened;

* This was written in or about 1821. † James Perry, Esq., proprietor of the Morning Chronicle.

ANECDOTES OF OLD ACTORS.

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but such was the deep interest in the character, and such the power of riveting the attention possessed by this actor, that not the slightest notice was taken of the circumstance, but the whole audience remained bathed in silent tears.

“An incident in my own history, that delighted or tormented me very much at the time, I may have long since blotted from my memory, or have great difficulty in calling to mind after a certain period; but I can never forget the first time of my seeing Mrs. Siddons act—which is as if it happened yesterday; and the reason is because it has been something for me to think of ever since.

“One of the most affecting things we know is to see a favourite actor take leave of the stage. We were present not long ago, when Mr. Bannister quitted it. We do not wonder that his feelings were overpowered on the occasion: ours were nearly so, too. We remembered him in the first heyday of our youthful spirits, in the ‘Prize,’ in which he played so delightfully with that fine old croaker Suett and Madame Storace—in the farce of ‘My Grandmother,’ in the ‘Son-in-Law,’ in ‘Autolycus,’ and in ‘Scrub,’ in which our satisfaction was at its height.

“There was a dance in the pantomime at Covent Garden two years ago [1824] which I could have gone to see every night. I did go to see it every night that I could make an excuse for that purpose. It was nothing; it was childish. Yet I could not keep away from it. Some young people came out of a large twelfth-cake,

202

MRS. SIDDONS.

dressed in full court costume, and danced a quadrille, and then a minuet, to some divine air. Was it that it put me in mind of my schoolboy days, and of the large bunch of lilac that I used to send as a present to my partner? or of times still longer past, the court of Louis XIV., the Duke de Nemours, and the Princess of Cleves? or of the time when she who was all grace moved in measured steps before me, and wafted me into Elysium? I know not how it was, but it came over the senses with a power not to be resisted.

“Mrs. Siddons was in the meridian of her reputation, when I first became acquainted with the stage. She was an established veteran when I was an unfledged novice; and, perhaps, played those scenes without emotion which filled me and so many others with delight and awe. So far I had the advantage of her, and of myself, too I was stunned and torpid after seeing her in any of her great parts. I was uneasy, and hardly myself; but I felt (more than ever) that human life was something very far from being indifferent, and I seemed to have got a key to unlock the springs of joy and sorrow in the human heart. This was no mean possession, and I availed myself of it with no sparing hand The very sight of her name in the playbills, in ‘Tamerlane’ or ‘Alexander the Great,’ threw a light upon the day, and drew after it a long trail of eastern glory, a joy and felicity unutterable, that has since vanished in the mists of criticism and the glitter of idle distinctions.

“I fancied that I had a triumph some time ago over

MRS. BILLINGTON.

203

a critic and connoisseur in music, who thought little of the minuet in ‘Don Giovanni;’ but the same person redeemed his pretensions to musical taste, in my opinion, by saying of some passage in Mozart, “this is a soliloquy equal to any in ‘Hamlet.’”

“I remember a very genteel young couple in the boxes of Drury Lane being much scandalized, some years ago, at the phrase in ‘A New Way to Pay Old Debts’—‘an insolent piece of paper,’ applied to the contents of a letter: it wanted the modern lightness and indifference.”

“When I formerly had to do with these sort of critical verdicts, I was generally sent out of the way, when any débutant had a friend at court, and was to be tenderly handled. For the rest, or those of robust constitutions, I had carte blanche given me. Sometimes I ran out of the course, to be sure. Poor Perry! what bitter complaints he used to make, that by running-amuck at lords and Scotchmen, I should not leave him a place to dine out at! The expression of his face at these moments, as if he should shortly be without a friend in the world, was truly pitiable. What squabbles we used to have about Kean and Miss Stephens, the only theatrical favourites I ever had.

“Mrs. Billington had got some notion that Miss Stephens would never make a singer; and it was the torment of Perry’s life (as he told me in confidence) that he could not get any two people to be of the same opinion on any one point.

“I shall not easily forget bringing him my account

204

MISS STEPHENS.

of her first appearance in the ‘Beggar’s Opera.’ I have reason to remember that article; it was almost the last I ever wrote with any pleasure to myself. I had been down on a visit to my friends near Chertsey, and, on my return, had stopped at an inn at Kingston-upon-Thames, where I had got the ‘Beggar’s Opera,’ and had read it over night. The next day I walked cheerfully to town. It was a fine sunny morning in the end of autumn, and as I repeated the beautiful song, ‘Life knows no return of spring,’ I meditated my next day’s criticism, trying to do all the justice I could to so inviting a subject. I was not a little proud of it by anticipation. I had just then begun to stammer out my sentiments on paper, and was in a kind of honeymoon of authorship. . . . . I deposited my account of the play at the Morning Chronicle office in the afternoon, and went to see Miss Stephens as Polly. . . . . When I got back, after the play, Perry called out, with his cordial, grating voice, ‘Well, how did she do?’ and on my speaking in high terms, answered that ‘he had been to dine with his friend the Duke; that some conversation had passed on the subject; he was afraid it was not the thing; it was not the true sostenuto style; but as I had written the article (holding my peroration on the ‘Beggar’s Opera’ carelessly in his hand), it might pass.’

“I could perceive that the rogue licked his lips at it, and had already in imagination ‘bought golden opinions of all sorts of people’ by this very criticism; and I had the satisfaction the next day to meet Miss Stephens

HIS PLACE AT COVENT GARDEN.

205

coming out of the editor’s room, who had been to thank him for his very flattering account of her.”

In criticising Kemble’s King John, as it was performed at Covent Garden, December 7, 1816, Mr. Hazlitt observes: “We wish we had never seen Mr. Kean. He has destroyed the Kemble religion; and it is the religion in which we were brought up.”

Mr. Hazlitt said that he had seen some actors who had been favourites in his youth, and “cried up in the top of the compass,” treated, from having grown old and infirm, with the utmost indignity, and almost hooted from the stage. He had seen poor —— come forward under these circumstances to stammer out an apology, with the tears in his eyes (which almost brought them into Mr. Hazlitt’s), to a set of apprentice-boys and box-lobby loungers, who neither knew nor cared what a fine performer and a fine gentleman he was thought twenty years ago.

Latterly, my grandfather always had a place at Covent Garden kept for him—the seat in the second tier next to the private boxes, so that he could lean his back against the partition. But occasionally, when he went with friends, more particularly the Reynells, he would go where they did, which was into the looking-glass box, if it happened to be vacant, because my mother liked that best.

He was in a terrible way one evening, and terrified the box keeper—“Old Pantaloon,” as they called him—out of his wits, because this box (though pre-engaged)

206

HIS ILL-TREATMENT

was occupied, they arriving late. It ended by the interlopers having to clear out.

He wrote at successive periods for the Morning Chronicle, the Champion, edited by Mr. John Scott (who was afterwards editor of the London Magazine), the Examiner, and the Times.

He has thought fit, however, to take us a little behind the curtain in regard to the Morning Chronicle, with which the eventual severance of his connexion as a regular contributor, about 1814, appears to have been owing to unhandsome treatment on the part of the proprietary. He says:—

“A writer whom I knew very well [he is alluding to himself] cannot gain an admission to Drury Lane Theatre because he does not lounge into the lobbies or sup at the Shakespeare. Nay, the same person having written upwards of sixty columns of original matter, on politics, criticism, belles-lettres, and virtù in a respectable morning paper, in a single half-year, was, at the end of that period, on applying for a renewal of his engagement, told by the editor ‘he might give in a specimen of what he could do.’ One would think sixty columns of the Morning Chronicle were a sufficient specimen of what a man could do. But while this

BY THE ‘MORNING CHRONICLE.’

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person was thinking of his next answer to Vetus, or his account of Mr. Kean’s performance of Hamlet, he had neglected ‘to point the toe,’ to hold up his head higher than usual (having acquired a habit of poring over books when young), and to get a new velvet collar to an old-fashioned greatcoat. These are ‘the graceful ornaments to the columns of a newspaper—the Corinthian capitals of a polished style.’ This unprofitable servant of the press found no difference in himself before or after he became known to the readers of the Morning Chronicle, and it accordingly made no difference in his appearance or pretensions.”