eveal his powers of discrimination.
Lamb was often carried away by a pioneer's fervor and misled persons like
Lowell, who, returning to Ford late in life, found "that the greater part
of what [he] once took on trust as precious was really paste and
pinchbeck," and that as far as the celebrated closing scene in "The Broken
Heart" was concerned, Charles Lamb's comment on it was "worth more than
all Ford ever wrote."[92] Hazlitt's dispassionate sanity in this instance
forms an instructive contrast: "Except the last scene of the Broken Heart
(which I think extravagant--others may think it sublime, and be right)
they [Ford's plays] are merely exercises of style and effusion of
wire-drawn sentiment."[93] The same strength of judgment rendered Hazlitt
proof against the excessive sentimentality in Beaumont and Fletcher and
gave a distinct value to his opinions even when they seemed to be wrong,
which was not often. But in writing of Marlowe, of Dekker and of Webster,
he spreads out all his sail to make a joyous run among the beauties in his
course.

And it is so with the rest of his criticism--throughout the same
susceptibility to all that is true, or lofty, or refined, vigilantly
controlled by a firm common sense, the same stamp of originality
unmistakably impressed on all. "I like old opinions with new reasons," he
once said to Northcote, "not new opinions without any."[94] But he did not
hesitate to express a new opinion where the old one appeared to be unjust.
His heretical preference of Steele over Addison has found more than one
convert in later days. On Spenser or Pope, on Fielding or Richardson, he
is equally happy and unimprovable. In the opinion of Mr. Saintsbury,
Hazlitt's general lecture on Elizabethan literature, his treatment of the
dramatists of the Restoration, of Pope, of the English Novelists, and of
Cobbett have never been excelled; and who is better qualified than Mr.
Saintsbury by width of reading to express such an opinion?[95]

Of Hazlitt's treatment of his own contemporaries an additional word needs
to be said. No charge has been repeated more often than that of the
inconsistency, perversity, and utter unreliableness of his judgments on
the writers of his day. To distinguish between the claims of living poets,
particularly in an age of new ideas and changing forms, is a task which
might test the powers of the most discerning critics, and in which
perfection is hardly to be attained. Yet one may ask wheth