f "Fontaine's Translation" of AEsop, and makes use of
the extraordinary phrase, "The whole Council of Trent with Father Paul
at their head," than which a more curious blunder is hardly
conceivable), his wayward inconsistencies, his freaks of bad taste,
would in all probability have been aggravated rather than alleviated by
the greater freedom and less responsibility of an independent or an
endowed student. The fact is that he was a born man of letters, and that
he could not help turning whatsoever he touched into literature, whether
it was criticism on books or on pictures, a fight or a supper, a game at
marbles, a political diatribe, or the report of a literary conversation.
He doubtless had favourite subjects; but I do not know that it can be
said that he treated one class of subjects better than another, with the
exception that I must hold him to have been first of all a literary
critic. He certainly could not write a work of great length; for the
faults of his _Life of Napoleon_ are grave even when its view of the
subject is taken as undisputed, and it holds among his productions about
the same place (that of longest and worst) which the book it was
designed to counterwork holds among Scott's. Nor was he, as it seems to
me, quite at home in very short papers--in papers of the length of the
average newspaper article. What he could do, as hardly any other man has
ever done it in England, was a _causerie_ of about the same length as
Sainte-Beuve's or a little shorter, less limited in range, but also less
artfully proportioned than the great Frenchman's literary and historical
studies, giving scope for considerable digression, but coming to an end
before the author was wearied of his subject, or had exhausted the fresh
thoughts and the happy borrowings and analogies which he had ready for
it. Of what is rather affectedly called "architectonic," Hazlitt has
nothing. No essay of his is ever an exhaustive or even a symmetrical
treatment of its nominal, or of any, theme. He somewhere speaks of
himself as finding it easy to go on stringing pearls when he has once
got the string; but, for my part, I should say that the string was much
more doubtful than the pearls. Except in a very few set pieces, his
whole charm consists in the succession of irregular, half-connected, but
unending and infinitely variegated thoughts, fancies, phrases,
quotations, which he pours forth not merely at a particular "Open
Sesame," but at "Open barley