rance, such as making puns, making
epigrams, making extempore verses, mimicking the company, mimicking a
style, etc.... Accomplishments are certain external graces, which are to
be learnt from others, and which are easily displayed to the admiration of
the beholder, _viz._ dancing, riding, fencing, music, and so on.... Talent
is the capacity of doing anything that depends on application and
industry, such as writing a criticism, making a speech, studying the
law."[9] These innocent looking definitions are probably not without an
ironic sting. It requires no great stretch of the imagination, for
example, to catch in Hazlitt's eye a sly wink at Lamb or a disdainful
glance toward Leigh Hunt as he gives the reader his idea of cleverness or
accomplishment.

Hazlitt's definitions often startle and give a vigorous buffet to our
preconceptions. He is likely to open an essay on "Good-Nature" by
declaring that a good-natured man is "one who does not like to be put out
of his way.... Good-nature is humanity that costs nothing;"[10] and he may
describe a respectable man as "a person whom there is no reason for
respecting, or none that we choose to name."[11] Against the imputation of
paradox, which such expressions expose him to, he has written his own
defence, applying his usual analytical acuteness to distinguish between
originality and singularity.[12] The contradiction of a common prejudice,
which always passes for paradox, is often such only in appearance. It is
true that an ingenious person may take advantage of the elusive nature of
language to play tricks with the ordinary understanding, but it is equally
true that words of themselves have a way of imposing on the uninquiring
mind and passing themselves off at an inflated value. No process is more
familiar than that by which words in the course of a long life lose all
their original power, and yet they will sometimes continue to exercise a
disproportionate authority. Then comes the original mind, which, looking
straight at the thing instead of accepting the specious title, discovers
the incongruity between the pretence and the reality, and in the first
shock of the disclosure annoyingly overturns our settled ideas. This is
the spirit in which Carlyle seeks to strip off the clothes in which
humanity has irrecognizably disguised itself, and it is the spirit in
which Robert Louis Stevenson tries to free his old-world conscience from
the old-world forms. To take a more recent pa