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FOOTNOTES:
[1] In this Old Colony town, though none of his English biographers appear to know it, the boy Hazlitt lived in the Old North Parsonage, in which had lived some time before a girl named Abigail Smith, afterward better known as Abigail Adams, wife of the second President of the United States, and mother of the sixth. For which fact, more interesting to him than to his readers, it is to be feared, the present writer is indebted to the researches of his old Weymouth schoolmate, now President of the Weymouth Historical Society, Mr. John J. Loud.
[2] As it was to Solomon and, by this time, to William Hazlitt.
[3] “Mr. Johnson, indeed, as he was a very talking man himself, had an idea that nothing promoted happiness so much as conversation.”—Mrs. Piozzi.
[4] Author of Two Suffolk Friends.
[5] In a letter to his friend Pollock he says: “To-morrow I am going to one of my great treats, namely, the Assizes at Ipswich: where I shall see little Voltaire Jervis, and old Parke, who I trust will have the gout, he bears it so Christianly.”
[6] In connection with which it is good to remember that when Thackeray, not long before he died, was asked by his daughter which of his old friends he had loved most, he replied, “Why, dear old Fitz, to be sure.” After FitzGerald’s death Tennyson wrote of him: “I had no truer friend: he was one of the kindliest of men, and I have never known one of so fine and delicate a wit.”
[7] After he began writing, the question of an individual style took on, as was inevitable, a different complexion. In his early days he would not read Carlyle, and (more surprising) at forty or thereabout he discontinued the reading of Livy; dreading in both cases an injury to his own manner.
[8] How largely he profited by his study of Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and other poets, especially in the enrichment of his vocabulary, is shown by Mr. E. de Sélincourt in the notes and appendices to his recent admirable edition of Keats’s Poems. The subject is interesting, and is treated in the most painstaking manner.