lined
phalanx of Toryism, brilliantly and bitterly enough to delight Gifford;
and yet he is writing a preface to a volume of radical Essays. He is
consoling himself for being in a minority of one by proving that two
virtuous men must always disagree. Hazlitt is no genuine democrat. He
hates 'both mobs,' or, in other words, the great mass of the human race.
He would sympathise with Coriolanus more easily than with the Tribunes.
He laughs at the perfectibility of the species, and holds that 'all
things move, not in progress but in a ceaseless round.' The glorious
dream is fled:

The radiance which was once so bright
Is now for ever taken from our sight;

and his only consolation is to live over in memory the sanguine times of
his youth, before Napoleon had fallen and the Holy Alliance restored the
divine right of kings; to cherish eternal regret for the hopes that have
departed, and hatred and scorn equally enduring for those who blasted
them. 'Give me back,' he exclaims, 'one single evening at Boxhill, after
a stroll in the deep empurpled woods, before Bonaparte was yet beaten,
with "wine of Attic taste," when wit, beauty, friendship presided at
the board.' The personal blends with the political regret.

Hazlitt, the politician, was soured. He fed his morbid egotism by
indignantly chewing the cud of disappointment, and scornfully rejecting
comfort. He quarrelled with his wife and with most of his friends, even
with the gentle Lamb, till Lamb regained his affections by the brief
quarrel with Southey. Certainly, he might call himself, with some
plausibility, 'the king of good haters.' But, after all, Hazlitt's
cynicism is the souring of a generous nature; and when we turn from the
politician to the critic and the essayist, our admiration for his powers
is less frequently jarred by annoyance at their wayward misuse. His
egotism--for he is still an egotist--here takes a different shape. His
criticism is not of the kind which is now most popular. He lived before
the days of philosophers who talk about the organism and its
environment, and of the connoisseurs who boast of an eclectic taste for
all the delicate essences of art. He never thought of showing that a
great writer was only the product of his time, race, and climate; and he
had not learnt to use such terms of art as 'supreme,' 'gracious,'
'tender,' 'bitter,' and 'subtle,' in which a good deal of criticism now
consists. Lamb, says Hazlitt, tried old authors