Wordsworth's, and he pricked the bubble
of Edward Irving's popularity while it was at its pitch of highest glory.
If he was often bitter toward men whom he at other times eulogized, it was
in the heat and hurry of journalistic publication in a period when blows
were freely dealt and freely taken. If he sometimes censured even
Wordsworth and Scott and grew impatient with Byron and Coleridge, it must
be remembered that these men of genius had imperfections, and that the
imperfections of men of genius are of far greater concern to their
contemporaries than to posterity. Time dispels the mists and allows the
gross matter to settle to the bottom. We now have Wordsworth in the
selections of Matthew Arnold, we read the Waverley Novels with Lockhart's
Life of Scott before us, and we render praise to Coleridge for what he has
accomplished since his death. With none of these advantages, Hazlitt's
performance seems remarkable enough. No contemporary with the exception of
Leigh Hunt displayed as wide a sympathy with the writers of that time, and
Hazlitt so far surpasses Hunt in discrimination and strength, that he
deserves to be called, strange as it may sound, the best contemporary
judge of the literature of his age.

It has already been suggested that much of Hazlitt's appeal as a critic
rests on the force of his popular eloquence, so that a brief consideration
of his prose is not in this connection out of place. "We may all be fine
fellows," said Stevenson, "but none of us can write like Hazlitt." To
write a style that is easy yet incisive, lively and at the same time
substantial, buoyant without being frothy, glittering but with no tinsel
frippery, a style combining the virtues of homeliness and picturesqueness,
has been given to few mortals. Writing in a generation in which the
standards of prose were conspicuously unsettled, when the most ambitious
writers were seeking an escape from the frozen patterns of the eighteenth
century in a restoration of the elaborate artifices of the seventeenth,
when quaintness and ornateness were the evidence of a distinguished style,
Hazlitt succeeded in preserving the note of familiarity without fading
into colorlessness or in any degree effacing his individuality. He cannot
be counted among the masters of finished prose, he is as a matter of fact
often very negligent,[100] but he developed the best model of an
undiluted, sturdy, popular style that is to be found in the English
language.

Per