his grandfather was 'physically incapable'--whatever that may mean--'of
fixing his affection upon a single object.' He 'comprehended,' indeed,
'the worth of constancy' and other virtues as well as most men, and
could have written about them better than most men; but somehow 'a
sinister influence or agency,' a periphrasis for a sensuous temperament,
was perpetually present, which confined his virtues to the sphere of
theory. An apology sometimes is worse than a satire. The case, however,
seems to be sufficiently plain. We need not suspect that Hazlitt was
consciously acting a part and nursing his 'frenzy' because he thought
that it would make a startling book. He was an egotist and a man of
impulse. His impressions were for the time overpowering; but they were
transient. His temper was often stronger than his passions. A gust of
anger would make him quarrel with his oldest friends. Every emotion
justified itself for the time, because it was his. He always did well,
whether it pleased him for the moment to be angry, to be in love, to be
cynical, or to be furiously indignant. The end, therefore, of his life
exhibits a series of short impetuous fits of passionate endeavour,
rather than devotion to a single overruling purpose; and all his
writings are brief outbursts of eloquent feeling, where neither the
separate fragments nor the works considered as a whole obey any law of
logical development. And yet, in some ways, Hazlitt boasted, and boasted
plausibly enough, of his constancy. He has the same ideas to the end of
his life that he had at fourteen. He would, he remarks, be an excellent
man on a jury; he would say little, but would starve the eleven other
obstinate fellows out. Amongst politicians he was a faithful Abdiel,
when all others had deserted the cause. He loved the books of his
boyhood, the fields where he had walked, the gardens where he had drunk
tea, and, to a rather provoking extent, the old quotations and old
stories which he had used from his first days of authorship. The
explanation of the apparent paradox gives the clue to Hazlitt's singular
character.

What I have called Hazlitt's egotism is more euphemistically and perhaps
more accurately described by Talfourd,[3] 'an intense consciousness of
his own individual being.' The word egotism in our rough estimates of
character is too easily confounded with selfishness. Hazlitt might have
been the person who, as one making a strange confession, assured a
frien