Letter to a Noble
Lord.' And then, in a passage worthy of Sir Thomas Browne, he describes
the change produced as our minds are stereotyped, as our most striking
thoughts become truisms, and we lose the faculty of admiration. In our
youth 'art woos us; science tempts us with her intricate labyrinths;
each step presents unlooked-for vistas, and closes upon us our backward
path. Our onward road is strange, obscure, and infinite. We are
bewildered in a shadow, lost in a dream. Our perceptions have the
brightness and indistinctness of a trance. Our continuity of
consciousness is broken, crumbles, and falls to pieces. We go on
learning and forgetting every hour. Our feelings are chaotic, confused,
strange to each other and ourselves.' But in time we learn by rote the
lessons which we had to spell out in our youth. 'A very short period
(from 15 to 25 or 30) includes the whole map and table of contents of
human life. From that time we may be said to live our lives over again,
repeat ourselves--the same thoughts return at stated intervals, like the
tunes of a barrel-organ; and the volume of the universe is no more than
a form of words, a book of reference.'

From such musings Hazlitt can turn to describe any fresh impression
which has interested him, in spite of his occasional weariness, with a
freshness and vivacity which proves that his eye had not grown dim, nor
his temperament incapable of enjoyment. He fell in love with Miss Sarah
Wilson at the tolerably ripe age of 43; and his desire to live in the
past is not to be taken more seriously than his contempt for his
literary reputation. It lasts only till some vivid sensation occurs in
the present. In congenial company he could take a lively share in
conversation, as is proved not only by external evidence, but by his
very amusing book of conversations with Northcote--an old cynic out of
whom it does not seem that anybody else could strike many sparks,--or
from the essay, partly historical, it is to be supposed, in which he
records his celebrated discussion with Lamb, on persons whom one would
wish to have seen. But perhaps some of his most characteristic
performances in this line are those in which he anticipates the modern
taste for muscularity. His wayward disposition to depreciate ostensibly
his own department of action, leads him to write upon the 'disadvantages
of intellectual superiority,' and to maintain the thesis that the glory
of the Indian jugglers is more desirabl