[111] J. G. Lockhart: Life of Sir Walter Scott, V. v, p. 268
Continuing the panorama, the issue for February 1818 contains three pages of notes “To Correspondents”, of which several deserve mention: “We have no objection to insert Z.’s Remarks on Mr. Hazlitt’s Lectures, after our present Correspondent’s Notices are completed. If Mr. Hazlitt uttered personalities against the Poets of the Lake School, he reviled those who taught him all he knows about poetry.” This same issue was then starting a series of articles entitled “Notices of a Course of Lectures on English Poetry, by W. Hazlitt”.[112] With no personal comment, they give the gist of Hazlitt’s lectures at the Surrey Institution in London. The first article covers the lectures on “Poetry in General”[113], “On Chaucer and Spenser”[114], and “On Shakespeare and Milton”[115]. These papers ran for several months, and the promised Remarks of Z. do not appear in any recognizable form unless the paper “Hazlitt Cross-Questioned”[116] in the August issue (1818) is the awaited article. It is presented in the form of eight questions, the first: “Did you, or did you not, in the course of your late Lectures on Poetry, infamously vituperate and sneer at the character of Mr. Wordsworth—I mean his personal character; his genius even you dare not deny?”[117] Again—“Do you know the difference between Milton’s Latin and Milton’s Greek?”[118] and—“Did you not insinuate in an essay on Shakespeare ... that Desdemona was a lewd woman, and after that dare to publish a book on Shakespeare?”[119] The eighth question closes the article: “Do you know the Latin for a goose?”[120]
[112] Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, V. ii, p. 556
[113] Same
[114] Ibid., V. ii, p. 558
[115] Ibid., V. ii, p. 560
[116] Ibid., V. iii, p. 550
[117] Same
[118] Ibid., V. iii, p. 551
[119] Same