Bacon and Jeremy Taylor to Burke and
Edward Irving, the drama in its two flourishing periods, the familiar
essay from Steele and Addison to Lamb and Leigh Hunt, the novel from Defoe
to Sir Walter Scott. This does not begin to suggest Hazlitt's versatility.
His own modest though somewhat over-alliterative words are that he has "at
least glanced over a number of subjects--painting, poetry, prose, plays,
politics, parliamentary speakers, metaphysical lore, books, men, and
things."[83]

The importance of Hazlitt's Shakespearian criticism is no longer open to
question. Though Coleridge alluded to them slightingly as out-and-out
imitations of Lamb,[84] Hazlitt's dicta on the greatest English genius are
equal in depth to Lamb's and far more numerous; and while in profoundness
and subtlety they fall short of the remarks of Coleridge himself, they
surpass them in intensity and carrying power. To both of these men Hazlitt
owed a great deal in his appreciation of Shakespeare, and perhaps even
more to August Wilhelm Schlegel, whose Lectures on Dramatic Literature he
reviewed in 1815.[85] His allusions to Schlegel border on enthusiasm and
he makes it a proud claim that he has done "more than any one except
Schlegel to vindicate the Characters of Shakespeare's Plays from the
stigma of French criticism."[86] But however great his obligation, there
was some point in the compliment of the German critic when he declared
that Hazlitt had gone beyond him (l'avoit depasse) in his Shakespearian
opinions.[87] A few years later Heine maintained that the only significant
commentator of Shakespeare produced by England was William Hazlitt.[88]
Coleridge's notes, it is to be remembered, were not at that time generally
accessible.

Hazlitt's attitude toward Shakespeare was wholesomely on this side of
idolatry. He did not make it an article of faith to admire everything that
Shakespeare had written, and refused his praise to the poems and most of
the sonnets. Even Schlegel and Coleridge could not persuade him to see
beauties in what appeared to be blemishes, but in a general estimate of
Shakespeare's all-embracing genius he conceived his faults to be "of just
as much consequence as his bad spelling."[89] He saw in him a genius who
comprehended all humanity, who represented it poetically in all its shades
and varieties. He examined all the fine distinctions of character, he
studied Shakespeare's manner of combining and contrasting them so as to
prod