ression unequalled in his day, arrested the attention of the ordinary
reader and made effective the principles which Coleridge with some
vagueness had projected. To analyze in cold blood such living criticism as
Hazlitt's may expose one to unflattering imputations, but the attempt may
serve to bring to light what is so often overlooked, that Hazlitt's
criticism is no random, irresponsible discharge of his sensibilities, but
has an implicit basis of sound theory.

In his History of Criticism, Mr. Saintsbury takes as his motto for the
section on the early nineteenth century a sentence from Sainte-Beuve to
the effect that nearly the whole art of the critic consists in knowing how
to read a book with judgment and without ceasing to relish it.[47] We are
almost ready to believe that the French critic, in the significant choice
of the words judgment and relish, is consciously summarizing the method of
Hazlitt, the more so as he elsewhere explicitly confesses a sympathy with
the English critic.[48] Hazlitt has indeed himself characterized his art
in some such terms. In one of his lectures he modestly describes his
undertaking "merely to read over a set of authors with the audience, as I
would do with a friend, to point out a favorite passage, to explain an
objection; or if a remark or a theory occurs, to state it in illustration
of the subject, but neither to tire him nor puzzle myself with pedantical
rules and pragmatical _formulas_ of criticism that can do no good to
anybody."[49] This sounds dangerously like dilettantism. It suggests the
method of what in our day is called impressionism, one of the most
delightful forms of literary entertainment when practiced by a master of
literature. The impressionist's aim is to record whatever impinges on his
brain, and though with a writer of fine discernment it is sure to be
productive of exquisite results, as criticism it is undermined by the
impressionist's assumption that every appreciation is made valid by the
very fact of its existence. But this was scarcely Hazlitt's idea of
criticism. Against universal suffrage in matters literary he would have
been among the first to protest. We might almost imagine we were listening
to some orthodox theorist of the eighteenth century when we hear him
declaring that the object of taste "must be that, not which _does_, but
which _would_ please universally, supposing all men to have paid an equal
attention to any subject and to have an equal reli