a restless fever. He had the gift of interpreting every
contradiction to one of his favorite principles as a personal injury to
himself, and in the tense state of party feeling then prevailing, the
opportunities for taking offence were not limited. Hazlitt was one of the
chief marks singled out for abuse by the critics of Government. To
constant self-tormentings from within and persecution from without, there
was added the misfortune of an unhappy marriage and of a still more
unhappy love affair which lowered him in his own eyes as well as in the
eyes of the world. From the point of view of the practical man, Hazlitt's
life would be declared a failure.

The result of Hazlitt's hard experiences with the realities of life was to
confirm him in a devoted attachment to the past. All his high enthusiasms,
his sanguine dreams, his purest feelings continued to live for him in the
past, and it was only by recurring to their memory in the dim distance
that he could find assurance to sustain his faith. In the past all his
experiences were refined, subtilized, transfigured. A sunny afternoon on
Salisbury Plain, a walk with Charles and Mary Lamb under a Claude Lorraine
sky, a visit to the Montpelier Gardens where in his childhood he drank tea
with his father--occurrences as common as these were enveloped in a haze
of glory. And rarer events, such as a visit to the pictures at Burleigh
House, or to the galleries in the Louvre, tender visions of feminine grace
and sweetness, were touched in the recollection with a depth and pathos
which subdued even the most joyous impressions to a refined melancholy. In
no other English writer is this rich sentiment of the past so eloquent,
and no one was better qualified to describe its sources. "Time takes out
the sting of pain; our sorrows after a certain period have been so often
steeped in a medium of thought and passion, that they 'unmould their
essence'; and all that remains of our original impressions is what we
would wish them to have been.... Seen in the distance, in the long
perspective of waning years, the meanest incidents, enlarged and enriched
by countless recollections, become interesting; the most painful, broken
and softened by time, soothe."[18] The "Farewell to Essay Writing" is
perfumed with the odor of grateful memories from which the writer draws
his "best consolation for the future." He almost erects his feeling for
the past into a religion. "Happy are they," he exclaims, "who