the wife's part.

Little has to be said about the rest of Hazlitt's life. Miss Sarah
Walker would have nothing to say to him; and it has been already
mentioned that the lady whom he afterwards married, a Mrs. Bridgewater,
had enough of him after a year's experience. He did not outlive this
last shock more than five years; and unfortunately his death was
preceded by a complete financial break-down, though he was more
industrious during these later years than at any other time, and though
he had abundance of well-paid work. The failure of the publishers, who
were to have paid him five hundred pounds for his _magnum opus_, the
partisan and almost valueless _Life of Napoleon_, had something to do
with this, and the dishonesty of an agent is said to have had more, but
details are not forthcoming. He died on the eighteenth of September
1830, saying, "Well, I have had a happy life"; and despite his son's
assertion that, like Goldsmith, he had something on his mind, I believe
this to have been not ironical but quite sincere. He was only fifty-two,
so that the infirmities of age had not begun to press on him. Although,
except during the brief duration of his second marriage, he had always
lived by his wits, it does not appear that he was ever in any want, or
that he had at any time to deny himself his favourite pleasures of
wandering about and being idle when he chose. If he had not been
completely happy in his life, he had lived it; if he had not seen the
triumph of his opinions, he had been able always to hold to them. He was
one of those men, such as an extreme devotion to literature now and then
breeds, who, by the intensity of their enjoyment of quite commonplace
delights--a face passed in the street, a sunset, a quiet hour of
reflection, even a well-cooked meal--make up for the suffering of not
wholly commonplace woes. I do not know whether even the joy of literary
battle did not overweigh the pain of the dishonest wounds which he
received from illiberal adversaries. I think that he had a happy life,
and I am glad that he had. For he was in literature a great man. I am
myself disposed to hold that, for all his accesses of hopelessly
uncritical prejudice, he was the greatest critic that England has yet
produced; and there are some who hold (though I do not agree with them)
that he was even greater as a miscellaneous essayist than as a critic.
It is certainly upon his essays, critical and other, that his fame must
rest; not