“Quidquid ex Agricolâ amavimus, quidquid mirati sumus, manet mansuromque est in animis hominum, in æternitate temporum, famâ rerum. Nam multos veterum, velut inglorios et ignobiles, oblivio obruet. Agricola, posteritati narratus et traditus, superstes erit.”—Tacitus, in Vitâ Agricolæ.
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“Through good and ill report, honour and blame,
Steadfast he kept his faith—firmly adhered
To his first creed, nor slight nor censure feared.
The cause hath triumphed—Hazlitt but a name!
What matters it, since Hazlitt’s name shall stand,—
Despite detraction’s venom, tyrants’ rage,—
The Patriot, Philosopher, and Sage,
High in the annals of his native land!
Oh! say not then that Hazlitt died too
soon,
Since he had fought and conquered—though the strife
Cost him his health—his happiness—his life—
Freely he yielded up the noble boon!
He saw the mists of error roll away,
And closed his eyes—but on the rising day.”
Mrs. Bryan, 1836.
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“I should belie my own conscience, if I said less, than that I think W. H. to be, in his natural and healthy state, one of the wisest and finest spirits breathing, so far from being ashamed of that intimacy which was betwixt us, it is my boast that I was able for so many years to have preserved it entire, and I think I shall go to my grave without finding, or expecting to find, such another companion.”
“Without the imagination and extreme facility of Coleridge, he had almost as much subtlety, and far more steadfastness of mind.”—Barry Cornwall, 1866.
| iv | LEAF OF MOTTOES, ETC. |
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“Dear Hazlitt, whose tact intellectual is
such
That it seems to feel truth, as one’s fingers do touch,—
Who in politics, arts, metaphysics, poetics,
To critics in these times, are health to cosmetics.
“And nevertheless—or, I rather should say,
For that very reason—can relish boys’ play,
And turning, on all sides through pleasures and cares,
Find nothing more precious than laughs and fresh airs.”
Leigh Hunt, 1818.
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“What the reader is and feels at the instant, that the author is and feels at all other times. It is stamped upon him at his birth; it only quits him when he dies. His existence is intellectual, ideal; it is hard to say he takes no interest in what he is. His passion is beauty; his pursuit is truth.” The Plain Speaker, 1826.
“Such was the power of beauty in Hazlitt’s mind; and the interfusing faculty was wanting. The spirit, indeed, was willing, but the flesh was strong; and when these contend it is not difficult to foretell which will obtain the mastery; for ‘the power of beauty shall sooner transform honesty from what it is into a bawd, than the power of honesty shall transform beauty into its likeness.’”—Talfourd, 1836.
“I suspect that half which the unobservant have taken literally, he meant, secretly, in sarcasm. As Johnson in conversation, so Hazlitt in books, pushed his own theories to the extreme, partly to show his power, partly, perhaps, from contempt of the logic of his readers. He wrote rather for himself than others; and often seems to vent all his least assured and most uncertain thoughts—as if they troubled him by the doubts they inspired, and his only anxiety was to get rid of them. He had a keen sense of the Beautiful and Subtle; and what is more, he was deeply imbued with sympathies for the Humane. He ranks high amongst the social writers—his intuitive feeling was in favour of the multitude;—yet had he nothing of the demagogue in literature; he did not pander to a single vulgar passion.”—Lord Lytton, 1836.
The three sketches prefixed to the ‘Literary Remains of William Hazlitt,’ 1836, from the pens of the late Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd, the present Lord Lytton, and my father, represent all that has been yet given to the world in the direction of my grandfather’s biography.
Thirty years have passed. My grandfather has still his admirers. I sometimes permit myself to indulge a belief that their number is on the increase. It might be something to have even to say that it was stationary, that while death kept thinning the ranks, new recruits did not cease to enrol themselves.
I have an opportunity presented to me here of offering to the reading public much that will be new to them, if not much that they will think important. I have introduced occasionally incidents and anecdotes which may appear trivial, but my object in inserting them has merely been in each instance to illustrate, if I could, some trait in a character, which some have wilfully, and more have unconsciously, misinterpreted.
I do not pretend to come forward as a vindicator of my grandfather. I must leave
that task to Time and its allied influences. All I have set myself to do is to hold a little
light towards one who was an early
| vi | PREFACE. |
The savage and paltry slanders which were propagated in his lifetime against him by persons of a particular stamp, whose names it is not worth while to rescue from oblivion, have long since, it is hoped, been estimated at something like their true worth. Mr. Hazlitt rowed against the stream. If he were living now, if he had lived to be old, he would have been rowing with it. The stream, not he, would have turned.
But as Lord Lytton, then Mr. Bulwer, observed in 1836, “he went down to dust without having won the crown for which he had so bravely struggled.”
I shall try to divest myself as much as possible of bitterness and indignation in what I have to write, but my feeling beforehand is, that I shall not succeed thoroughly. Strong words will perhaps come, and they will come, if they do, from my heart.
Very few of the men whom my grandfather knew are among us now, and of those the chief proportion were his later acquaintances; his younger admirers (so to speak), not the companions of his prime, nor the witnesses of his earlier trials and triumphs. They did not know him as the great Coleridge did, or as wise and witty Elia; they saw only the sunset.
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