FOOTNOTES:
[58] The article on The Fine Arts in the Encyclopædia Britannica is signed “W. H.”
[59] Mrs. Hazlitt the first, it would appear, undertook to verify her husband’s quotations for him. His favorite metaphor, “Like the tide which flows on to the Propontic, and knows no ebb,” must have passed many times under her eye. Any reference to Othello himself, in the great scene of Act III., would have shown four lines for William Hazlitt’s explicit one.
[60] Some of Hazlitt’s comments on women are full of unconscious humor. In Great and Little Things he admits being snubbed by the fair, and adds with grandiloquence: “I took a pride in my disgrace, and concluded that I had elsewhere my inheritance!”
[61] In the National Portrait Gallery, London.
[62] Blackwood’s, in the charming fashion of the time, repeatedly refers to Hazlitt’s “pimples”; and Byron credited and supplemented the allegation. Hazlitt himself says somewhere “that to lay a thing to a person’s charge from which he is perfectly free, shows spirit and invention!” The calumny is not worth mention, except as a fair specimen of the journalistic methods against which literary men had to contend some eighty years ago.
[63] Lamb had been his groomsman twenty-two years before, at the Church of St. Andrew, Holborn, “and like to have been turned out several times during the ceremony; anything awful makes me laugh!” as he confessed in a letter to Southey in 1815.
[64] Orrery had seen this same bitter indignation overwhelm Swift at times, “so that it is scarcely possible for human features to carry in them more terror and austerity.”
[65] At 19 York Street, Westminster. The house, with its tablet “To the Prince of Poets” set by Hazlitt himself, was destroyed in 1877.
[66] A snappy unpublished letter to Hunt, sold among the Hazlitt papers at Sotheby, Wilkinson and Hodge’s, in the late autumn of 1893, complains bitterly of kind Basil Montagu, who had once put off a proffered visit from Hazlitt, on the ground that a party of other guests was expected. The deterred one was naturally wroth. “Yet after this, I am not to look at him a little in abstracto! This is what has soured me and made me sick of friendship and acquaintanceship.” Hazlitt confounded cause and effect. He was unwelcome in general gatherings where his genius was unappreciated; and we may be sure Montagu was sorry for it when, in the interests of concord, he held up so deprecating and inhospitable a hand. But among those who nursed Hazlitt in his last illness, Basil Montagu was not the least loyal.