adorn your person; maintain your health, your beauty,
and your animal spirits; for if you once lapse into poetry and
philosophy you will want an eye to show you, a hand to guide you, a
bosom to love--and will stagger into your grave old before your time,
unloved and unlovely.' 'A spider,' he adds, 'the meanest creature that
crawls or lives, has its mate or fellow, but a scholar has no mate or
fellow.' Mrs. Hazlitt, Miss Sarah Walker, and several other ladies,
thought Hazlitt surly and cared nothing for his treatise on human
nature. Therefore (it is true Hazlittian logic) no woman cares for
sentiment. The sex which despised him must be despicable. Equally
characteristic is his profound belief that his failure in another line
is owing to the malignity of the world at large. In one of his most
characteristic Essays he asks whether genius is conscious of its powers.
He writes what he declares to be a digression about his own experience,
and we may believe as much as we please of his assertion that he does
not quote himself as an example of genius. He has spoken, he declares,
with freedom and power, and will not cease because he is abused for not
being a Government tool. He wrote a charming character of Congreve's
Millamant, but it was unnoticed because he was not a Government tool.
Gifford would not relish his account of Dekkar's Orlando
Friscobaldo--because he was not a Government tool. He wrote admirable
table-talks--for once, as they are nearly finished, he will venture to
praise himself. He could swear (were they not his) that the thoughts in
them were 'founded as the rock, free as the air, the hue like an Italian
picture.' But, had the style been like polished steel, as firm and as
bright, it would have availed him nothing, for he was not a Government
tool. The world hated him, we see, for his merits. It is a bad world, he
says; but don't think that it is my vanity which has taken offence, for
I am remarkable for modesty, and therefore I know that my virtues are
faults of which I ought to be ashamed. Is this pride or vanity, or
humility, or cynicism, or self-reproach for wasted talents, or an
intimate blending of passions for which there is no precise name? Who
can unravel the masks within masks of a cunning egotism?

To one virtue, however, that of political constancy, Hazlitt lays claim
in the most emphatic terms. If he quarrels with all his friends--'most
of the friends I have seen have turned out the bitterest enemi