prefer the unknown to the known. Cf. the first essay “On the Conversation of Authors”: “Coleridge withholds his tribute of applause from every person, in whom any mortal but himself can descry the least glimpse of understanding. He would be thought to look farther into a millstone than any body else. He would have others see with his eyes, and take their opinions from him on trust, in spite of their senses. The more obscure and defective the indications of merit, the greater his sagacity and candour in being the first to point them out. He looks upon what he nicknames a man of genius, but as the breath of his nostrils, and the clay in the potter’s hands. If any such inert, unconscious mass, under the fostering care of the modern Prometheus, is kindled into life,—begins to see, speak, and move, so as to attract the notice of other people,—our jealous patroniser of latent worth in that case throws aside, scorns, and hates his own handy-work; and deserts his intellectual offspring from the moment they can go alone and shift for themselves.”
a discovery on the same subject. Hazlitt’s first publication, “On the Principles of Human Action.”
[P. 288.] I sat down to the task, etc. Cf. “On Application to Study” (“Plain Speaker”): “If what I write at present is worth nothing, at least it costs me nothing. But it cost me a great deal twenty years ago. I have added little to my stock since then, and taken little from it. I ‘unfold the book and volume of the brain,’ and transcribe the characters I see there as mechanically as any one might copy the letters in a sampler. I do not say they came there mechanically—I transfer them to the paper mechanically.” See also p. [345].
[P. 289.] which ... he has somewhere told himself. “Biographia Literaria,” ch. 10.
that other Vision of Judgment. Byron’s.
Bridge-Street Junto. “The Constitutional Association or, as it was called by its opponents, ‘The Bridge Street Gang,’ founded in 1821 ‘to support the laws for suppressing seditious publications, and for defending the country from the fatal influence of disloyalty and sedition.’ The Association was an ill-conducted party organisation and created so much opposition by its imprudent prosecutions that it very soon disappeared. See an article in the Edinburgh Review for June, 1822.” Waller-Glover, VI, 487.
[P. 290.] at Tewkesbury. In the essay “On Going a Journey,” Hazlitt refers to this episode as occurring at Bridgewater: “I remember sitting up half the night to read Paul and Virginia, which I picked up at an inn in Bridgewater, after being drenched in the rain all day; and at the same place I got through two volumes of Madame D’Arblay’s Camilla.”
Paul and Virginia (1788), a sentimental novel by Bernardin St. Pierre (1737-1814).
[P. 291.] Camilla (1796), a novel by Fanny Burney (1752-1840).
a friend of the poet’s. “This is a mistake. Wordsworth paid £23 a year for Alfoxden. The agreement is given in Mrs. Henry Sandford’s ‘Thomas Poole and His Friends,’ I, 225.” Waller-Glover.