cting the genius
of his own time. He associated the absence of drama with the French
Revolution, its tendency to deal in abstractions and to regard everything
in relation to _man_ and not men--a tendency irreconcilable with dramatic
literature, which is essentially individual and concrete.[64] To be sure
the eighteenth century before the Revolution was as void of drama as
Hazlitt's generation, but what is true of the period which produced
Political Justice and the Edinburgh Review would hold equally of the time
which produced the "Essay on Man" and the deistic controversy. He
sometimes harshly exposes the weaker side of contemporary lyricism as a
"mere effusion of natural sensibility," and he regrets the absence of
"imaginary splendor and human passion" as of a glory departed.[65] But
with all this he had the true historical sense. It breaks out most
unmistakably when he says, "If literature in our day has taken this
decided turn into a critical channel, is it not a presumptive proof that
it ought to do so?"[66] Of the actual application of historical principles,
which were just beginning to be realized in the study of literature, we
find only a few faint traces in Hazlitt. Some remarks on the influence of
climate and of religious and political institutions occur in his
contributions to the Edinburgh, but occasionally their perfunctory manner
suggests the editorial pen of Jeffrey. Doubtless Hazlitt's discriminating
judgment would have enabled him to excel in this field, had he been
equipped with the necessary learning.

It may also be a serious limitation of Hazlitt's that he neglects
questions of structure and design. Doubtless he was reacting against the
jargon of the older criticism with its lifeless and monotonous repetitions
about invention and fable and unity, giving nothing but the "superficial
plan and elevation, as if a poem were a piece of formal architecture."[67]
In avoiding the study of the design of "Paradise Lost" or of the "Faerie
Queene" he may have brought his criticism nearer to the popular taste; but
he deliberately shut himself off from a vision of some of the higher
reaches of poetic art, perhaps betraying thereby that lack of
"imagination" with which he has sometimes been charged.[68] His
interpretation of an author is therefore occasionally in danger of
becoming an appreciation of isolated characters, or scenes, or passages,
as if he were actually reading him over with his audience. But this is a