his arguments are shrewd and
incontrovertible. [Then follows a quotation from Hazlitt setting forth the
Catholic standpoint.] It is impossible, upon Catholic principles, not to
admit the force of this reasoning; we can only not help smiling (with the
writer) at the simplicity of the gulled editor, swallowing the dregs of
Loyola for the very quintessence of sublimated reason in England at the
commencement of the nineteenth century. We will just, as a contrast, show
what we Protestants (who are a party concerned) thought upon the same
subject, at a period rather nearer to the heroic project in question."
This is the kind of resentment we would expect Lamb to show at the
appropriation of his ideas. That there were not wanting grounds for real
grievance against Hazlitt may be gathered from a letter to Wordsworth,
September 23, 1816 (Lamb's Works, ed. Lucas, VI, 491): "There was a cut at
me a few months back by the same hand.... It was a pretty compendium of
observation, which the author has collected in my disparagement, from some
hundred of social evenings which we had spent together,--however in spite
of all, there is something tough in my attachment to H---- which these
violent strainings cannot quite dislocate or sever asunder. I get no
conversation in London that is absolutely worth attending to but his." To
one of his quarrels with Lamb Hazlitt owes the finest compliment he ever
received, and happily it marks the termination of all differences between
them. It occurs in the well-known "Letter of Elia to Robert Southey" which
Lamb published in the London Magazine when Southey reproached him with his
friendship for Hazlitt (Works, I, 233): "I stood well with him for fifteen
years (the proudest of my life), and have ever spoke my full mind of him
to some, to whom his panegyric must naturally be least tasteful. I never
in thought swerved from him, I never betrayed him, I never slackened in my
admiration for him, I was the same to him (neither better nor worse)
though he could not see it, as in the days when he thought fit to trust
me. At this instant, he may be preparing for me some compliment, above my
deserts, as he has sprinkled many such among his admirable books, for
which I rest his debtor; or, for any thing I know, or can guess to the
contrary, he may be about to read a lecture on my weaknesses. He is
welcome to them (as he was to my humble hearth), if they can divert a
spleen, or ventilate a fit of sullenness. I wis