pure. If we could trace back the line of
his ancestry we should expect to find that by some freak of fortune, one
of the rigid old Puritans had married a descendant of some great Flemish
or Italian painter. Love of graceful forms and bright colouring and
voluptuous sensations had been transmitted to their descendants, though
hitherto repressed by the stern discipline of British nonconformity. As
the discipline relaxed, the Hazlitts reverted to the ancestral type.
Hazlitt himself, his brother and his sister, were painters by instinct.
The brother became a painter of miniatures by profession; and Hazlitt to
the end of his days revered Titian almost as much as he revered his
great idol Napoleon. An odd pair of idols, one thinks, for a youth
brought up upon Pripscovius and his brethren! A keen delight in all
artistic and natural beauty was an awkward endowment for a youth
intended for the ministry. Keats was scarcely more out of place in a
surgery than Hazlitt would have been in a Unitarian pulpit of those
days, and yet from that pulpit, oddly enough, came the greatest impulse
to Hazlitt. It came from a man who, like Hazlitt himself, though in a
higher degree than Hazlitt, combined the artistic and the philosophic
temperament. Coleridge, as Hazlitt somewhere says, threw a great stone
into the standing pool of contemporary thought; and it was in January
1798--one of the many dates in his personal history to which he recurs
with unceasing fondness--that Hazlitt rose before daylight and walked
ten miles in the mud to hear Coleridge preach. He has told, in his
graphic manner, how the voice of the preacher 'rose like a stream of
rich distilled perfumes;' how he launched into his subject, after giving
out the text, 'like an eagle dallying with the wind;' and how his young
hearer seemed to be listening to the music of the spheres, to see the
union of poetry and philosophy; and behold truth and genius embracing
under the eye of religion. His description of the youthful Coleridge has
a fit pendant in the wonderful description of the full-blown philosopher
in Carlyle's 'Life of Sterling;' where, indeed, one or two touches are
taken from Hazlitt's Essays. It is Hazlitt who remarked, even at this
early meeting, that the dreamy poet philosopher could never decide on
which side of the footpath he should walk; and Hazlitt, who struck out
the epigram that Coleridge was an excellent talker if allowed to start
from no premisses and come to no