imaginative force, the geniality and the wealth of picturesque incident
of the greatest of novelists, disarmed his antipathy. It is curious to
see how he struggles with himself. He blesses and curses in a breath. He
applies to Scott Pope's description of Bacon, 'the greatest, wisest,
meanest of mankind,' and asks--

Who would not laugh if such a man there be?
Who would not weep if "Waverley" were he?

He crowns a torrent of abuse by declaring that Scott has encouraged the
lowest panders of a venal press, 'deluging and nauseating the public
mind with the offal and garbage of Billingsgate abuse and vulgar slang;'
and presently he calls Scott--by way, it is true, of lowering
Byron--'one of the greatest teachers of morality that ever lived.' He
invents a theory, to which he returns more than once, to justify the
contrast. Scott, he says, is much such a writer as the Duke of
Wellington (the hated antithesis of Napoleon, whose 'foolish face' he
specially detests) is a general. The one gets 100,000 men together, and
'leaves it to them to fight out the battle, for if he meddled with it
he might spoil sport; the other gets an innumerable quantity of facts
together, and lets them tell their story as they may. The facts are
stubborn in the last instance as the men are in the first, and in
neither case is the broth spoiled by the cook.' Both heroes show modesty
and self-knowledge, but 'little boldness or inventiveness of genius.' On
the strength of this doctrine he even compares Scott disadvantageously
with Godwin and Mrs. Inchbald, who had, it seems, more invention though
fewer facts. Hazlitt was not bound to understand strategy, and devoutly
held that Wellington's armies succeeded because their general only
looked on. But he should have understood his own trade a little better.
Putting aside this grotesque theory, he feels Scott's greatness truly,
and admits it generously. He enjoys the broth, to use his own phrase,
though he is determined to believe that it somehow made itself.

Lamb said that Hazlitt was a greater authority when he praised than when
he abused, a doctrine which may be true of others than Hazlitt. The true
distinction is rather that Hazlitt, though always unsafe as a judge, is
admirable as an advocate in his own cause, and poor when merely speaking
from his brief. Of Mrs. Inchbald I must say what Hazlitt shocked his
audience by saying of Hannah More; that she has written a good deal
which I have not r