PAGE [120]. ‘With glistering spires,’ etc. Paradise Lost, III. 550. ‘The great vision of the guarded mount.’ Lycidas, l. 161. [121]. ‘A sudden illness,’ etc. Excursion, Book VI. [123]. Aristotle observed. In The Poetics. Bells or Lancaster’s. Andrew Bell (1753–1832) founder of the Madras system of education, and Joseph Lancaster (1770–1838). For an account of these two rival reformers of education see Leslie Stephen’s The English Utilitarians, II. 17–19. Guzman d’Alfarache. Hazlitt discussed this novel by Mateo Aleman, published in 1599, in his English Comic Writers (Lecture on the English Novelists). A discipline of humanity. Bacon’s Essays, ‘Of Marriage and Single Life.’ [124]. The Whig and Jacobite friends. Excursion, Book VI. Sir Alfred Irthing. Excursion, Book VII. ‘Have proved a monument.’ From the sonnet in which Wordsworth dedicated The Excursion to Lord Lonsdale.

CHARACTER OF THE LATE MR. PITT

This ‘character’ originally appeared in Free Thoughts on Public Affairs, etc. (1806). It must have been a favourite with the author, for he afterwards reprinted it in The Eloquence of the British Senate, etc. (1807), in The Round Table (1817), and in Political Essays (1819). It also appeared in the posthumous Winterslow (1839). See note on p. 383, ante.

PAGE [127]. ‘They had learned the trick,’ etc. Hobbes’s Behemoth (Works, ed. Molesworth, vi. 240). [128]. ‘Not matchless,’ etc. Paradise Lost, VI. 341–2. And in its liquid texture, etc. Paradise Lost, VI. 148–149.

ON RELIGIOUS HYPOCRISY

From The Examiner, October 9, 1814, ‘Common-places,’ No. 1.

PAGE [129]. ‘But ’tis not so above.’ Hamlet, Act III. Scene 3. ‘Compelled to give in evidence,’ etc. Ibid. [130]. ‘Open and apparent shame.’ 1 Henry IV., Act II. Scene 4. [131]. Elymas the sorcerer. See Sketches of the Principal Picture Galleries in England (the Pictures at Hampton Court) where Hazlitt describes this cartoon.

ON THE LITERARY CHARACTER

Reprinted with some omissions from a letter which appeared in The Morning Chronicle for October 28, 1813, entitled ‘Baron Grimm and the Edinburgh Reviewers.’

PAGE [131]. A late number, etc. Edinburgh Review, vol. xxi. July 1813. The Correspondance of Friedrich Melchior, Baron Grimm (1723–1807) was published in 1812–14. The article in the Edinburgh is by Jeffrey. Hazlitt, in The Examiner, quotes from it at greater length, and proceeds: ‘These remarks, however shrewd and ingenious in themselves, are somewhat irrelevant to the literary and philosophical character of Mr. Grimm and his friends. There seems to have been an odd transposition of ideas in the writer’s mind; for the whole of his reasoning relates to the manners of fashionable life, or the tendency of mixed and agreeable society in general, to produce levity and insensibility, and does not at all apply to the peculiar defects of the literary character, or account for that hard-heartedness, which Mr. Burke attributes, by way of emphasis, to the thorough-bred metaphysician.[[112]] The two characters are evidently distinct, and proceed from very different and even opposite causes, which ought not to have been confounded. It would have been a task worthy of the Edinburgh Reviewers to have pointed out the sources of each, and to have shewn how both appear to have united in the present instance with the natural levity of the French character, to produce that “faultless monster which the world ne’er saw” before.[[113]] Much is undoubtedly to be given to accidental and local circumstances. Boswell’s Life of Johnson presents a very different picture of men and manners from Grimm’s Memoirs, though in the circle described by the former there were men who at least rivalled M. Grimm in literature, and in politeness and knowledge of mankind might vie with Baron d’Holbach. The profligacy of the French court, and the mummeries of the established religion might naturally produce an almost satiric license and impudence among the enlightened partisans of the new order of things, and lead them to regard all religion as a barefaced cheat, and every pretension to virtue as hypocrisy. The peculiar intelligible features of the philosophical and literary character are, however, stamped on every page of M. Grimm’s correspondence; and as they do not seem to have been very well distinguished by the Reviewer, I shall venture to throw out a few hints on the subject, in the hope that they may be taken up and embodied in an authentic form in some future supplementary volume.’