and, indeed, it may be said
in general that wherever he goes wrong, it is not because he judges
wrongly on known facts, but because he either does not know the facts,
or is prevented from seeing them by distractions of prejudice. To go
through his Characters of Shakespeare would be impossible, and besides,
it is a point of honour for one student of Shakespeare to differ with
all others. I can only say that I know no critic with whom on this point
I differ so seldom as with Hazlitt. Even better, perhaps, are the two
sets of lectures on the Poets and Comic Writers. The generalisations are
not always sound, for, as must be constantly repeated, Hazlitt was not
widely read in literatures other than his own, and his standpoint for
comparison is therefore rather insufficient. But take him where his
information is sufficient, and how good he is! Of the famous four
treatments of the dramatists of the Restoration--Lamb's, Hazlitt's,
Leigh Hunt's, and Macaulay's--his seems to me by far the best. In regard
to Butler, his critical sense has for once triumphed over his political
prejudice; unless some very unkind devil's advocate should suggest that
the supposed ingratitude of the King to Butler reconciled Hazlitt to
him. He is admirable on Burns; and nothing can be more unjust or sillier
than to pretend, as has been pretended, that Burns's loose morality
engaged Hazlitt on his side. De Quincey was often a very acute critic,
but anything more uncritical than his attack on Hazlitt's comparison of
Burns and Wordsworth in relation to passion, it would be difficult to
find. Hazlitt "could forgive Swift for being a Tory," he tells us--which
is at any rate more than some other people, who have a better reputation
for impartiality than his, seem to have been able to do. No one has
written better than he on Pope, who still seems to have the faculty of
distorting some critical judgments. His chapter on the English novelists
(that is to say, those of the last century) is perhaps the best thing
ever written on the subject; and is particularly valuable nowadays when
there is a certain tendency to undervalue Smollett in order to exalt
Fielding, who certainly needs no such illegitimate and uncritical
leverage. I do not think that he is, on the whole, unjust to Campbell;
though his Gallican, or rather Napoleonic mania made him commit the
literary crime of slighting "The Battle of the Baltic." But in all his
criticism of English literature (and he has