very ideal of a literary Ishmael; and after the fullest admission of the
almost incredible virulence and unfairness of his foes, it has to be
admitted, likewise, that he was quite as ready to quarrel with his
friends. He succeeded, at least once, in forcing a quarrel even upon
Lamb. His relations with Leigh Hunt (who, whatever his faults were, was
not unamiable) were constantly strained, and at least once actually
broken by his infernal temper. Nor were his relations with women more
fortunate or more creditable than those with men. That the fault was
entirely on his side in the rupture with his first wife is, no doubt,
not the case; for Mrs. Hazlitt's, or Miss Stoddart's, own friends admit
that she was of a peculiar and rather trying disposition. It is indeed
evident that she was the sort of person (most teasing of all others to a
man of Hazlitt's temperament) who would put her head back as he was
kissing her, to ask if he would like another cup of tea, or interrupt a
declaration to suggest shutting the window. As for the famous and almost
legendary episode of Sarah Walker, the lodging-house keeper's daughter,
and the _Liber Amoris_, the obvious and irresistible attack of something
like erotic madness which it implies absolves Hazlitt partly--but only
partly, for there is a kind of shabbiness about the affair which shuts
it out from all reasonable claim to be regarded as a new act of the
endless drama of _All for Love, or The World Well Lost!_ Of his second
marriage, the only persons who might be expected to give us some
information either can or will say next to nothing. But when a man with
such antecedents marries a woman of whom no one has anything bad to
say, lives with her for a year, chiefly on her money, and is then
quitted by her with the information that she will have nothing more to
do with him, it is not, I think, uncharitable to conjecture that most of
the fault is his.

It is not, however, only of Hazlitt's rather imperfectly known life, or
of his pretty generally acknowledged character, that I wish to speak
here. His strange mixture of manly common-sense and childish prejudice,
the dislike of foreigners which accompanied his Liberalism and his
Bonapartism, and other traits, are very much more English than Irish.
But Irish, at least on the father's side, his family was, and had been
for generations. He was himself the son of a Unitarian minister, was
born at Maidstone in 1778, accompanied his parents as a