first of those early thirties of the
nineteenth century which were to be as generally fatal to his
generation of great English men of letters as the seventies of the
eighteenth had been prolific of them; and his dying words, "Well, I have
had a happy life," are noteworthy. For certainly that life would hardly
have seemed happy to many. He quarrelled with his first wife, was
divorced from her in Scotland, discreditably enough; published to the
world with astounding lack of reticence the details of a frantic passion
for Sarah Walker, a lodginghouse-keeper's daughter, who jilted him; and
after marrying a second time, was left by his second wife. He had never
been rich, and during the last years of his life was in positive
difficulties, while for almost the whole period of his second sojourn in
London he was the object of the most virulent abuse from the Tory
organs, especially the _Quarterly_ and _Blackwood_--abuse which, it must
be confessed, he was both ready and able to repay in kind with handsome
interest. He appears to have played the part of firebrand and makebate
in the John Scott duel already referred to. Even with his friends he
could not keep upon good terms, and the sincere gentleness of Lamb broke
down at least once, as the easy good-nature of Leigh Hunt did many
times, under the strain of his perverse and savage wrong-headedness.

But whether the critical and the unamiable temper are, as some would
have it, essentially one, or whether their combination in the same
person be mere coincidence, Hazlitt was beyond all question a great, a
very great, critic--in not a few respects our very greatest. All his
work, or almost all that has much merit, is small in individual bulk,
though the total is very respectable. His longest book, his _Life of
Napoleon_, which was written late and as a counterblast to Scott's, from
the singular standpoint of a Republican who was an admirer of Bonaparte,
has next to no value; and his earliest, a philosophical work in
eighteenth century style on _The Principles of Human Action_, has not
much. But his essays and lectures, which, though probably not as yet by
any means exhaustively collected or capable of being identified, fill
nine or ten volumes, are of extraordinary goodness. They may be divided
roughly into three classes. The first, dealing with art and the drama,
must take the lowest room, for theatrical criticism is of necessity,
except in so far as it touches on literature rather