haps, the description of the man who "had you at an advantage
by never understanding you." I find, indeed, in looking through my
copies of his books, re-read for the purpose of this paper, an
innumerable and bewildering multitude of essays, of passages, and of
short phrases, marked for reference. In the seven volumes above referred
to (to which, as has been said, not a little has to be added) there must
be hundreds of separate articles and conversations; not counting as
separate the short maxims and thoughts of the _Characteristics_, and one
or two other similar collections, in which, indeed, several passages are
duplicated from the Essays. At least two out of every three are
characteristic of Hazlitt: not one in any twenty is not well worth
reading and, if occasion served, commenting on. They are, indeed, as far
from being consecutive as (according to the Yankee) was the conversation
of Edgar Poe; and the multitude and diversity of their subjects fit them
better for occasional than for continuous reading.[13] Perhaps, if any
single volume deserves to be recommended to a beginner in Hazlitt it had
better be _The Plain Speaker_, where there is the greatest range of
subject, and where the author is seen in an almost complete repertory of
his numerous parts. But there is not much to choose between it and _The
Round Table_ (where, however, the papers are shorter as a rule),
_Table-Talk_, and the volume called, though not by the author, _Sketches
and Essays_. I myself care considerably less for the _Conversations with
Northcote_, the personal element in which has often attracted readers;
and the attempts referred to above as _Characteristics_, avowedly in the
manner of La Rochefoucauld, are sometimes merely extracts from the
essays, and rarely have the self-containedness, the exact and chiselled
proportion, which distinguishes the true _pensee_ as La Rochefoucauld
and some other Frenchmen, and as Hobbes perhaps alone of Englishmen,
wrote it. But to criticise these numerous papers is like sifting a
cluster of motes, and the mere enumeration of their titles would fill
up more than half the room which I have to spare. They must be
criticised or characterised in two groups only, the strictly critical
and the miscellaneous, the latter excluding politics. As for art, I do
not pretend to be more than a connoisseur according to Blake's
definition, that is to say, one who refuses to let himself be
connoisseured out of his senses. I sha