conclusion. The glamour of Coleridge's
theosophy never seems to have fascinated Hazlitt's stubborn intellect.
At this time, indeed, Coleridge had not yet been inoculated with German
mysticism. In after years, the disciple, according to his custom,
renounced his master and assailed him with half-regretful anger. But the
intercourse and kindly encouragement of so eminent a man seem to have
roused Hazlitt's ambition. His poetical and his speculative intellect
were equally stirred. The youth was already longing to write a
philosophical treatise. The two elements of his nature thus roused to
action led him along a 'strange diagonal.' He would be at once a painter
and a metaphysician. Some eight years of artistic labour convinced him
that he could not be a Titian or a Raphael, and he declined to be a mere
Hazlitt junior. His metaphysical studies, on the contrary, convinced him
that he might be a Hume or a Berkeley; but unluckily they convinced
himself alone. The tiny volume which contained their results was
neglected by everybody but the author, who, to the end of his days,
loved it with the love of a mother for a deformed child. It is written,
to say the truth, in a painful and obscure style; it is the work of a
man who has brooded over his own thoughts in solitude till he cannot
appreciate the need of a clear exposition. The narrowness of his reading
had left him in ignorance of the new aspects under which the eternal
problems were presenting themselves to the new generation; and a
metaphysical discussion in antiquated phraseology is as useless as a
lady's dress in the last year's fashion. Hazlitt, in spite of this
double failure, does not seem to have been much disturbed by
impecuniosity; but the most determined Bohemian has to live. For some
years he strayed about the purlieus of literature, drudging,
translating, and doing other cobbler's work. Two of his performances,
however, were characteristic; he wrote an attack upon Malthus, and he
made an imprudent marriage. Even Malthusians must admit that imprudent
marriages may have some accidental good consequences. When a man has
fairly got his back to the wall, he is forced to fight; and Hazlitt, at
the age of thirty-four, with a wife and a son, at last discovered the
great secret of the literary profession, that a clever man can write
when he has to write or starve. To compose had been labour and grief to
him, so long as he could potter round a thought indefinitely; but with