fly.
One thing he has always, and that is charm; as for the rest he is an
epitome of the lighter side of _belles lettres_, and not always of the
lighter side only.

No one who studies Lamb can fail to see the enormous advantage which was
given him by his possession of an official employment which brought him
a small but sufficient income without very hard labour. Such literary
work as his could never be done (at any rate for a length of time) as
"collar-work," and even if the best of it had by chance been so
performed, it must necessarily have been mixed, as that of Leigh Hunt
is, with a far larger quantity of mere work to order. No such advantage
was possessed by the third of the great trio of Cockney critics, or at
least critics of the so-called Cockney school; for William Hazlitt, as
much the greatest of English critics in a certain way as Lamb is in
another and Jeffrey in a third (though a lower than either), was a
Cockney neither by extraction nor by birth, nor by early sojourn, nor
even by continuous residence in later life. His family was Irish, his
father a Unitarian minister; he was born at Maidstone in 1778. When his
father was officiating at Wem in Shropshire, in Hazlitt's twentieth
year, Coleridge, who at times affected the same denomination, visited
the place, and Hazlitt was most powerfully impressed by him. He was,
however, divided between art and literature as professions, and his
first essays were in the former, which he practised for some time,
visiting the Louvre during the peace, or rather armistice, of Amiens, to
copy pictures for some English collectors, and to study them on his own
account. Returning to London, he met Lamb and others of the literary set
in the capital, and, after some newspaper work, married Miss Stoddart, a
friend of Mary Lamb's, and a lady of some property. He and his wife
lived for some years at her estate of Winterslow on Salisbury Plain
(long afterwards still a favourite resort of Hazlitt's), and then he
went in 1812 once more to London, where abundant work on periodicals of
all kinds, on the Liberal side, from daily newspapers to the _Edinburgh
Review_, soon fell into his hands. But after a time he gave up most
kinds of writing except literary, theatrical, and art criticism, the
delivery of lectures on literature, and the composition of essays of a
character less fanciful and less purely original than Lamb's, but almost
as miscellaneous.

He lived till September 1830, the