ned, but became the enthusiasm of
regret instead of hope. As one by one the former zealots dropped off he
despised them as renegades, and clasped his old creed the more firmly to
his bosom. But the change did not draw him nearer to the few who
remained faithful. They perversely loved the wrong side of the right
cause, or loved it for the wrong reason. He liked the Whigs no better
than the Tories; the 'Edinburgh' and the 'Quarterly' were opposition
coaches, making a great dust and spattering each other with mud, but
travelling by the same road to the same end. A Whig, he said, was a
trimmer who dared neither to be a rogue nor an honest man, but was 'a
sort of whiffling, shuffling, cunning, silly, contemptible, unmeaning
negation of the two.' And the true genuine radical reformers? To them,
as represented by the school of Bentham, Hazlitt entertained an aversion
quite as hearty as his aversion for Whigs and Tories. If, he says, the
Whigs are too finical to join heartily with the popular advocates, the
Reformers are too cold. They hated literature, poetry, and romance;
nothing gives them pleasure that does not give others pain;
utilitarianism means prosaic, hard-hearted, narrow-minded dogmatism.
Indeed, his pet essay on the principles of human nature was simply an
assault on what he took to be their fundamental position. He fancied
that the school of Bentham regarded man as a purely selfish and
calculating animal; and his whole philosophy was an attempt to prove the
natural disinterestedness of man, and to indicate for the imagination
and the emotions their proper place beside the calculating faculty. Few
were those who did not come under one or other clause of this sweeping
denunciation. He assailed Shelley, who was neither Whig, Tory, nor
Utilitarian, so cuttingly as to provoke a dispute with Leigh Hunt, and
had some of his sharp criticisms for his friend Godwin. His general
moral, indeed, is the old congenial one. The reformer is as unfit for
this world as the scholar. He is the only wise man, but, as things go,
wisdom is the worst of follies. The reformer, he says, is necessarily a
marplot; he does not know what he would be at; if he did, he does not
much care for it; and, moreover, he is 'governed habitually by a spirit
of contradiction, and is always wise beyond what is practicable.' Upon
this text Hazlitt dilates with immense spirit, satirising the crotchety
and impracticable race, and contrasting them with the discip