iving writers
through the eyes of the somewhat jaded reviewer, who, though susceptible
to a romantic thrill from one or the other, is usually on his guard
against spurious blandishments and reluctant to admit the claims of new
pretenders. Even in poets of the first rank he slurred over a great deal;
but what he loved he dwelt on with a kind of rapt inspiration until it
became his second nature, its spirit and its language fused intimately
with his own. This revolutionist in politics was a jealous aristocrat in
the domains of art, and this admission does not impair our earlier
assertion of his openness to a greater variety of impressions than any of
his contemporaries in criticism.

Hazlitt's professed indifference to system is probably due as much to lack
of deep reading as to romantic impatience of restraint. When he declared
that it was beyond his powers "to condense and combine all the facts
relating to a subject"[62] or that "he had no head for arrangement,"[63]
it was only because he did not happen to be a master of the facts which
required combination or arrangement. For he did have an unusual gift for
penetrating to the core of a subject and tearing out the heart of its
mystery; in fact, his power of concrete literary generalization was in his
age unmatched. To reveal the distinctive virtue of a literary form, to
characterize the sources of weakness or of strength in a new or a by-gone
fashion of poetry, to analyze accurately the forces impelling a whole
mighty age--these things, requiring a deep and steady concentration of
mind, are among his most solid achievements. In a paragraph he distils for
us the essence of what is picturesque and worth dwelling on in the comedy
of the Restoration. In a page he triumphantly establishes the
boundary-line between the poetry of art and nature--Pope and
Shakespeare--which to the present day remains as a clear guide, while at
the same time Campbell and Byron and Bowles are filling the periodicals
with protracted and often irrelevant arguments on one side or the other
which only the critically curious now venture to look into. In the space
of a single lecture he takes a sweeping view of all the great movements
which gave vitality and grandeur to the Elizabethan spirit and found a
voice in its literature, so that in spite of his little learning he seems
to have left nothing for his followers but to fill in his outline. The
same keenness of discernment he applied casually in disse