haps an adherence to the eighteenth century tradition of plainness is
the most prominent characteristic of Hazlitt's prose. But his plainness is
not precisely of the blunt type associated with Swift and Arbuthnot. It is
modified by the Gallic tone of easy familiarity, by the ideal deemed
appropriate for dignified converse among educated people of the world. His
periods are of the simplest construction and they are not methodically
combined in the artificial patterns beloved of the eighteenth century
followers of the plain style. Not that he altogether neglects the devices
of parallelism and antithesis when he wishes to give epigrammatic point to
his remarks, but he more generally develops his ideas in a series of
easily flowing sentences which are as near as writing can be to "the tone
of lively and sensible conversation." It is impossible to match in the
English essay such talk as Hazlitt reproduces in his accounts of the
evenings at Lamb's room or of his meeting with Coleridge, in which high
themes and spirited eloquence find spontaneous and unaffected expression
through the same medium as might be employed in a deliberate definition of
the nature of poetry. The various sets of lectures are pitched in the same
conversational key and are found adequate to conveying a notion of the
grandeur of Milton as well as of the familiarity of Lamb.

Those who have praised Hazlitt's simplicity have often given the
impression that his prose is a single-stringed instrument, and have failed
to suggest the range comprised between the simple hammer-strokes of the
essay on Cobbett and the magnificent diapason in which he unrolls the
panorama of Coleridge's mind. In both passages there is the same
sentence-norm. In the first, the periods, not bound by any connecting
words, strike distinctly, sharply, with staccato abruptness. The movement
is that of a clean-limbed wrestler struggling with confident energy to pin
down a difficult opponent:

"His principle is repulsion, his nature contradiction: he is made up of
mere antipathies; an Ishmaelite indeed, without a fellow. He is always
playing at _hunt-the-slipper_ in politics. He turns round upon whoever is
next to him. The way to wean him from any opinion, and make him conceive
an intolerable hatred against it, would be to place somebody near him who
was perpetually dinning it in his ears. When he is in England, he does
nothing but abuse the Boroughmongers, and laugh at the whole system: when