of meanness, spite, cowardice, want of
feeling, and want of understanding, of indifference towards others and
ignorance of ourselves--seeing custom prevail over all excellence, itself
giving way to infamy--mistaken as I have been in my public and private
hopes, calculating others from myself, and calculating wrong; always
disappointed where I placed most reliance; the dupe of friendship, and the
fool of love; have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I
do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world
enough."[31]--This is not exactly downright cynicism; it is more like
disappointment, beating its head frantically against the wall of
circumstance. Yet through his bitterest utterances there is felt the warm
sentiment that, "let people rail at virtue, at genius and friendship as
long as they will--the very _names_ of these disputed qualities are better
than anything else that could be substituted for them, and embalm even the
most angry abuse of them."[32]

It is no wonder that Hazlitt has never been a popular favorite. With a
stronger attachment to principles than to persons, lavishing upon ideas or
the fanciful creations of art a passionate affection which he grudgingly
withheld from human beings, stubbornly tenacious of a set of political
dogmas to which he was ready to sacrifice his dearest friends, morbidly
sensitive to the faintest suggestion of a personal slight, and prompter
than the serpent to vent against the aggressor the bitterness of his
poison, he plays the role of Ishmael among the men of letters in his day.
The violence of his retorts when he felt himself injured and his capacity
for giving offence even when he was not directly provoked, begot a
resentment in his adversaries which blinded them to an appreciation of his
genuine worth. At best they might have assented, after his death, to the
sublime pity with which Carlyle, from his spiritual altitudes, moralized
upon his struggles. "How many a poor Hazlitt must wander on God's verdant
earth, like the Unblest on burning deserts; passionately dig wells, and
draw up only the dry quicksand; believe that he is seeking Truth, yet only
wrestle among endless Sophisms, doing desperate battle as with
spectre-hosts; and die and make no sign!"[33] We must appeal to the issue
to determine whether Hazlitt's battle was altogether against
spectre-hosts, and whether in his quest for truth and beauty he has drawn
up nothing but quicksand. But at leas