on the frenzied outpourings of the _Liber Amoris_ (full as
these are of flashes of genius), or upon the one-sided and ill-planned
_Life of Napoleon_; still less on his clever-boy essay on the
_Principles of Human Action_, or on his attempts in grammar, in literary
compilation and abridgment, and the like. Seven volumes of Bonn's
Standard Library, with another published elsewhere containing his
writings on Art, contain nearly all the documents of Hazlitt's fame: a
few do not seem to have been yet collected from his _Remains_ and from
the publications in which they originally appeared.

These books--the _Spirit of the Age_, _Table Talk_, _The Plain Speaker_,
_The Round Table_ (including the _Conversations with Northcote_ and
_Characteristics_), _Lectures on the English Poets and Comic Writers_,
_Elizabethan Literature_ and _Characters of Shakespeare_, _Sketches and
Essays_ (including _Winterslow_)--represent the work, roughly speaking,
of the last twenty years of Hazlitt's life; for in the earlier and
longer period he wrote very little, and, indeed, declares that for a
long time he had a difficulty in writing at all. They are all singularly
homogeneous in general character, the lectures written as lectures
differing very little from the essays written as essays, and even the
frantic diatribes of the "Letter to Gifford" bearing a strong family
likeness to the good-humoured _reportage_ of "On going to a Fight," or
the singularly picturesque and pathetic egotism of the "Farewell to
Essay-writing." This family resemblance is the more curious because,
independently of the diversity of subject, Hazlitt can hardly be said to
possess a style or, at least, a manner--indeed, he somewhere or other
distinctly disclaims the possession. Yet, irregular as he is in his
fashion of writing, no less than in the merit of it, the germs of some
of the most famous styles of this century may be discovered in his
casual and haphazard work. Everybody knows Jeffrey's question to
Macaulay, "Where the devil did you get that style?" If any one will read
Hazlitt (who, be it remembered, was a contributor to the _Edinburgh_)
carefully, he will see where Macaulay got that style, or at least the
beginning of it, much as he improved on it afterwards. Nor is there any
doubt that, in a very different way, Hazlitt served as a model to
Thackeray, to Dickens, and to many not merely of the most popular, but
of the greatest, writers of the middle of the century. I