as plain
As downright Shippen or as old Montaigne.

He has laid bare for the most careless reader the main elements of his
singular composition. Like some others of his revolutionary friends,
Godwin, for example, Leigh Hunt, and Tom Paine, he represents the old
dissenting spirit in a new incarnation. The grandfather a stern
Calvinist, the father a Unitarian, the son a freethinker; those were the
gradations through which more than one family passed during the closing
years of the last century and the opening of this. One generation still
clung to the old Puritan traditions and Jonathan Edwards; the next
followed Priestley; and the third joined the little band of radicals who
read Cobbett, scorned Southey as a deserter, and refused to be
frightened by the French Revolution. The outside crust of opinion may be
shed with little change to the inner man. Hazlitt was a dissenter to his
backbone. He was born to be in a minority; to be a living protest
against the dominant creed and constitution. He recognised and
denounced, but he never shook off, the faults characteristic of small
sects. A want of wide intellectual culture, and a certain sourness of
temper, cramped his powers and sometimes marred his writing. But from
his dissenting forefathers Hazlitt inherited something better. Beside
the huge tomes of controversial divinity on his father's shelves, the
'Patres Poloni,' Pripscovius, Crellius and Cracovius, Lardner and
Doddridge, and Baxter and Bates, and Howe, were the legends of the
Puritan hagiology. The old dissenters, he tells us, had Neale's 'History
of the Puritans' by heart, and made their children read Calamy's account
of the 2,000 ejected ministers along with the stories of Daniel in the
Lion's Den and Meshach, Shadrach, and Abednego. Sympathy for the
persecuted, unbending resistance to the oppressor, was the creed which
had passed into their blood. 'This covenant they kept as the stars keep
their courses; this principle they stuck by, for want of knowing better,
as it sticks by them to the last. It grew with their growth, it does not
wither in their decay.... It glimmers with the last feeble eyesight,
smiles in the faded cheek like infancy, and lights a path before them to
the grave. This'--for in Hazlitt lies a personal application in all his
moralising--'This is better than the whirligig life of a court
poet'--such, for example, as Robert Southey.

But Hazlitt's descent was not