live in the
dream of their own existence, and see all things in the light of their own
minds; who walk by faith and hope; to whom the guiding star of their youth
still shines from afar, and into whom the spirit of the world has not
entered!... The world has no hold on them. They are in it, not of it; and
a dream and a glory is ever around them!"[19]

But this impassioned sentiment for the past was only a refuge such as
Byron might seek among the glories of by-gone ages or amid the solitary
Alpine peaks, where it was possible to regain the strength spent in
grappling with the forces of the actual world and return newly nerved to
the battle. For fighting was Hazlitt's more proper element. He could hate
with the same intensity that he loved, and his hatred was aroused most by
those whom he regarded as responsible for the overturning of his political
hopes. Politics had played the most important part in his early education.
In his father's house he had absorbed the spirit of protest, accustomed
himself to arguing for the repeal of the Test Act, and to declaiming
against religious and political persecution. At the age of twelve he had
written an indignant letter to the Shrewsbury Chronicle against the mob of
incendiaries which had destroyed the house of Priestley, and as a student
at Hackney he showed sufficient self-reliance to develop an original
"Essay on Laws." The defence of the popular cause was with him not an
academic exercise, but a religious principle. "Since a little child, I
knelt and lifted up my hands in prayer for it."[20] The emotional warmth
of his creed was heightened by the reading of Rousseau, and in Napoleon it
found a living hero on whom it could expend itself.

An uncompromising attachment to certain fundamental principles of
democracy and an unceasing devotion to Napoleon constitute the chief
elements of Hazlitt's political character. He sets forth his idea of
representative government exactly in the manner of Rousseau when he
proclaims that "in matters of feeling and common sense, of which each
individual is the best judge, the majority are in the right.... It is an
absurdity to suppose that there can be any better criterion of national
grievances, or the proper remedies for them, than the aggregate amount of
the actual, dear-bought experience, the honest feelings, and heart-felt
wishes of a whole people, informed and directed by the greatest power of
understanding in the community, unbiassed by any