limitation which Hazlitt shares with all the finer critics of his day.

After all these shortcomings have been acknowledged, the permanence of
Hazlitt's achievement appears only the more remarkable. It is clear that
the gods made him critical. The two essential qualities of judgment and
taste he seems to have possessed from the very beginning. It is impossible
to trace in him any development of taste; his growth is but the succession
of his literary experiences. One looks in vain for any of those errors of
youth such as are met even in a Coleridge enamored of Bowles. What
extravagance of tone Hazlitt displayed in his early criticism he carried
with him to his last day. If any change is to be noted, it is in the
growing keenness of his appreciation. The early maturity of his judicial
powers is attested by the political and metaphysical tendency of his
youthful studies. His birth as a full-fledged critic awaited only the
stirring of the springs of his eloquence, as is evident from the
excellence of what is practically his first literary essay, the "Character
of Burke."

No critic has approached books with so intense a passion as Hazlitt. That
sentimental fondness for the volumes themselves, especially when enriched
by the fragrance of antiquity, which gives so delicious a savor to the
bookishness of Lamb, was in him conspicuously absent. For him books were
only a more vivid aspect of life itself. "Tom Jones," he tells us, was the
novel that first broke the spell of his daily tasks and made of the world
"a dance through life, a perpetual gala-day."[69] Keats could not have
romped through the "Faerie Queene" with more spirit than did Hazlitt
through the length and breadth of eighteenth century romance, and the
young poet's awe before the majesty of Homer was hardly greater than that
of the future critic when a Milton or a Wordsworth swam into his ken. This
hot and eager interest, deprived of its outlet in the form of direct
emulation, sought a vent in communicating itself to others and in making
converts to its faith. So intimately did Hazlitt feel the spell of a work
of genius, that its life-blood was transfused into his own almost against
his will. "I wish," he exclaims, "I had never read the Emilius ... I had
better have formed myself on the model of Sir Fopling Flutter."[70] He
entered into the poet's creation with a sympathy amounting almost to
poetic vision, and the ever-present sense of the reality of the artist's
w