[514]. “We have more faith in a well-written romance than in common history.”
[515]. In 1845, reviewing Horne’s very rashly entitled New Spirit of the Age. The review will be found in the 13th vol. (1886) of the ordinary ed. of Thackeray’s Works.
[516]. P. 173.
[517]. “Its strength is in its wings” is, in idea, of course, as old as Plato. But the nearest expression of it, the “la lyre est un instrument ailé” of Joubert, though by a man more than thirty years Hazlitt’s senior, was never, I think, published till ten years after Hazlitt’s death.
[518]. Below Hazlitt (who as well as Lamb praised him, though the former more suo fell foul of him as well) may be best placed, in the note which is as much as he deserves, that much-written-of “curiosity of literature,” the poisoner, connoisseur, and coxcomb, Wainewright. “Janus,” however, was too much occupied with pictures, plays, bric-à-brac, Montepulciano, veal-pies in red earthenware dishes, the prize-ring, and other fancies or fopperies, to busy himself directly with literature, save, perhaps, in the curious paper “Janus Weatherbound,” which seems to have been his “farewell to essay-writing.” It is, however, fair to say that, odious as he was in ways not merely moral, he had something of “a taste” here also. His quotations, which are numerous, are singularly well selected; he admired not merely Fouqué but Shelley long before it was the fashion to do so; and you may pick out of the works, rather probably than certainly his (Essays and Criticisms, by T. G. Wainewright, ed. W. C. Hazlitt: London, 1880), stray literary notes not without value.
[519]. I use for Blake Gilchrist’s Life and Works (2nd ed., 2 vol., London, 1880), Mr Swinburne’s William Blake (London, 1868), Mr Rossetti’s Aldine Poetical Works (London, 1874), and Messrs Ellis and Yeats’s great Blakian Thesaurus (3 vols., London, 1893).
[520]. V. sup., ii. [391 note].
[521]. Letter to the Monthly Magazine of July 1, 1806. “O Englishmen! know that every man ought to be a judge of pictures, and every man is so who has not been connoisseured out of his senses.” The whole letter is given by Mr Swinburne, pp. 62, 63, op. cit.
[522]. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Compare with this Vico’s famous doctrine that “the criterion on truth is to have made it.”
[523]. Facsimiled in Ellis and Yeats, vol. iii. Printed as Sibylline Leaves in Gilchrist, ii. 178, 180.