f some later critics,[115] but
it is not to be imputed to him as a sin if, in the course of a century,
one of his virtues has become exaggerated into a fault. He has but
suffered human destiny.

Hazlitt's influence has been wide in guiding the taste of readers and in
creating or giving currency to a body of opinions on literature which has
found acceptance among critics. If the tributes of Schlegel and Heine to
Hazlitt's Shakespearian criticism were insufficient, we have the word of
his own countrymen for it that numberless readers were initiated into a
proper understanding of Shakespeare by means of his writings.[116] In our
own days Mr. Howells has told us that Hazlitt "helped him to clarify and
formulate his opinions of Shakespeare as no one else has yet done."[117]
Critics no less than readers owe him a large debt. Hazlitt had not been
writing many years before his fellow-laborers in literature began to
recognize and pay homage to his superior insight. His opinions were quoted
as having the weight of authority by those who were friendly to him, the
writers in the London Magazine or in the Edinburgh Review; they were
appropriated without acknowledgement by the hostile contributors to
Blackwood's. Many writers deferred to him as respectfully as he himself
deferred to Coleridge and Lamb, even though Byron's respectable friends
adjured the noble poet not to dignify Hazlitt in open controversy except
by mentioning him as "a certain lecturer." Leigh Hunt was frequently
indebted to him, but generally paid the tribute due. Macaulay sometimes
assimilated a passage of Hazlitt's to the needs of his own earlier essays.
In the essay on Milton his balancing of Charles's political vices against
his domestic virtues is strikingly reminiscent of a similar treatment of
Southey by the older critic. Personal dislike of Hazlitt, persisting after
his death, for a long time prevented a proper respect being paid to his
memory without much diminishing the weight of his influence. The attitude
toward him is summed up by a writer whose treatment in general does not
err on the side of enthusiasm. Hazlitt, he tells us, is "a writer with
whose reputation fashion has hitherto had very little to do--who is even
now more read than praised, more imitated than extolled, and whose various
productions still interest many who care and know very little about the
author."[118] But this very utterance was on the occasion of the turning
of the tide. It was i