publisher's speculations; if Coleridge had never
taken to opium--what great poems might not have opened the new era of
literature, where now we have but incomplete designs, and listen to
harmonies half destroyed by internal discord? The regret, however, is
less when a man has succeeded in uttering the thought that was in him,
though it may never have found a worthy expression. Wordsworth could
have told us little more, though the 'Excursion' had been as complete a
work as 'Paradise Lost;' and if Scott might have written more
'Waverleys' and 'Antiquaries' and 'Old Mortalities,' he could hardly
have written better ones. But the works of some other writers suggest
possibilities which never even approached fulfilment. If the opinion
formed by his contemporaries of Coleridge be anywhere near the truth, we
lost in him a potential philosopher of a very high order, as we more
clearly lost a poet of singular fascination. Coleridge naturally
suggests the name of De Quincey, whose works are as often tantalising as
satisfying. And to make, it is true, a considerable drop from the
greatest of these names, we often feel when we take up one of Hazlitt's
glowing Essays, that here, too, was a man who might have made a far more
enduring mark as a writer of English prose. At their best, his writings
are admirable; they have the true stamp; the thought is masculine and
the expression masterly; phrases engrave themselves on the memory; and
we catch glimpses of a genuine thinker and no mere manufacturer of
literary commonplace. On a more prolonged study, it is true, we become
conscious of many shortcomings, and the general effect is somehow rather
cloying, though hardly from an excess of sweetness. And yet he deserves
the study both of the critic and the student of character.

The story of Hazlitt's life has been told by his grandson; but there is
a rather curious defect of materials for so recent a biography. He kept,
it seems, no letters,--a weakness, if it be a weakness, for which one is
rather apt to applaud him in these days: but, on the other hand, nobody
ever indulged more persistently in the habit of washing his dirty linen
in public. Not even his idol Rousseau could be more demonstrative of his
feelings and recollections. His Essays are autobiographical, sometimes
even offensively; and after reading them we are even more familiar than
his contemporaries with many points of his character. He loved to pour
himself out in his Essays