atrocious article and
saw the brand of the social outcast on his features.

In an atmosphere like this, it is scarcely to be wondered at if Hazlitt's
temper, never of the amiable sort, should have become embittered, nor is
it strange that he should sometimes, through ignorance, have committed the
fault of which his enemies had been guilty in wantonness. Not content with
retaliating the full measure of malice upon the heads of his immediate
assailants, he turned the stream of his abuse upon Sir Walter Scott, whom
he singled out deliberately as the towering head of a supposed literary
conspiracy. He is credited with remarking; "To pay these fellows in their
own coin, the way would be to begin with Walter Scott, and have at his
clump foot."[28] Very mean-spirited this sounds to us, who are acquainted
with the nobility of Scott's character and who know with what magnanimous
wisdom he kept himself above the petty altercations of the day. But for
Hazlitt, Sir Walter was the father-in-law and friendly patron of John
Lockhart, he was the person who had thrown the weight of his powerful
influence to make John Wilson Professor of Moral Philosophy at the
University of Edinburgh! He did not carry his prejudice against the Author
of Waverley.

In some instances Hazlitt was consciously the aggressor, but his attacks
were never wanton. He denounced Wordsworth and Coleridge and Southey
because they were renegades from the cause which lay nearest to his heart.
Their apostasy was an unforgivable offence in his eyes, and his wrath was
proportioned to the admiration which he otherwise entertained for them. It
is true that he treated their motives hastily and unjustly, but none of
his opponents set him the example of charity. In the earlier years of
their acquaintance Coleridge had spoken of Hazlitt as a "thinking,
observant, original man." one who "says things that are his own in a way
of his own,"[29] whereas after their estrangement he discovered that
Hazlitt was completely lacking in originality. Wordsworth, being offended
at Hazlitt's review of the "Excursion," peevishly raked up an old scandal
and wrote to Haydon that he was "not a proper person to be admitted into
respectable society."[30] Perhaps Hazlitt was not as "respectable" as his
poet-friends, but he had a better sense of fair play. At any rate, in a
complete balancing of the accounts, Hazlitt's frequent displays of
ill-temper are offset by the insidious, often unscrupulous ba