n a review of Hazlitt's Literary Remains which had
been introduced by appreciative essays from the pens of Bulwer-Lytton and
Thomas Noon Talfourd, the former not a little patronizing, but Talfourd's
excellent in its discrimination of the strength and weakness of Hazlitt. A
few years later came the implied compliment of Horne's New Spirit of the
Age, which would hardly be worth mentioning were it not that Thackeray in
reviewing it took occasion to pay an exquisite tribute to Hazlitt.[119]
From this time forth he was not wanting in stout champions, though most
people still maintained a cautious reserve in their judgments of him. So
sound and penetrating a critic as Walter Bagehot became an earnest
convert, and in Bagehot's writings Mr. Birrell has pointed out more than
one resemblance to Hazlitt. James Russell Lowell has not been profuse in
his expressions of admiration, but he has probably followed Hazlitt's
track more closely than any other important critic. Many of his essays
seem to have been composed with a volume of Hazlitt on the desk before
him. There is the essay on Pope with its general correspondence of points
and occasional startling parallel of phrase. Hazlitt at the end of his
lecture on Pope and Dryden remarks that poetry had "declined by successive
gradations from the poetry of imagination in the age of Elizabeth to the
poetry of fancy in the time of Charles I," and Lowell repeats this with
some amplification. In the same connection he characterizes Shakespeare,
Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton in the sharp epigrammatic manner reminding
one of Hazlitt. In the concluding pages of the essay on Spenser we are
also kept in a reminiscent mood, till Lowell tells us that "to read him is
like dreaming awake," and at once there flashes upon us Hazlitt's
expression that "Spenser is the poet of our waking dreams." It is through
missionary work like this, not altogether conscious and therefore all the
more genuine, that his opinions have been diffused through the length and
breadth of English and been incorporated into the common stock. "Gracious
rills from the Hazlitt watershed have flowed in all directions,
fertilizing a dry and thirsty land"--is the happily turned phrase of Mr.
Birrell. If in our own day there are still persons who, looking upon
criticism as a severe science, occasionally sneer at him as a "facile
eulogist,"[120] those who regard it rather as a gift have seen in him "the
greatest critic that England has y