and hews at Southey through several furious Essays,
and ends with a groan. 'We met him unexpectedly the other day in St.
Giles's,' he says, 'were sorry we had passed him without speaking to an
old friend, turned and looked after him for some time as to a tale of
other days--sighing, as we walked on, Alas, poor Southey!' He fancies
himself to be in the mood of Brutus murdering Caesar. It is patriotism
struggling with old associations of friendship; if there is any personal
element in the hostility, no one is less conscious of it than the
possessor. To the whole Lake school his attitude is always the
same--justice done grudgingly in spite of anger, or satire tempered by
remorse. No one could say nastier things of that very different egotist,
Wordsworth; nor could anyone, outside the sacred clique, pay him
heartier compliments. Nobody, indeed, can dislike egotism like an
egotist. 'Wordsworth,' says Hazlitt, 'sees nothing but himself and the
universe; he hates all greatness and all pretensions to it but his own.
His egotism is in this respect a madness, for he scorns even the
admiration of himself, thinking it a presumption in anyone to suppose
that he has taste or sense enough to understand him. He hates all
science and all art: he hates chemistry, he hates conchology, he hates
Sir Isaac Newton, he hates logic, he hates metaphysics,' and so on
through a long list of hatreds, ending with the inimitable Napoleon,
whom Wordsworth hates, it seems, 'to get rid of the idea of anything
greater, or thought to be greater, than himself.' Hazlitt might have
made out a tolerable list of his own antipathies; though, to do him
justice, of antipathies balanced by ardent enthusiasm, especially for
the dead or the distant.

Hazlitt, indeed, was incapable of the superlative self-esteem here
attributed to Wordsworth. His egotism is a curious variety of that
Protean passion, compounded as skilfully as the melancholy of Jaques. It
is not the fascinating and humorous egotism of Lamb, who disarms us
beforehand by a smile at his own crotchets. Hazlitt is too serious to be
playful. Nor is it like the amusing egotism of Boswell, combined with a
vanity which evades our contempt, because it asks so frankly for
sympathy. Hazlitt is too proud and too bitter. Neither is it the
misanthropic egotism of Byron, which, through all its affectation,
implies a certain aristocratic contempt of the world and its laws.
Hazlitt has not the sweep and continuity of