‘All fame is foreign, but of true desert;
Plays round the head, but comes not to the heart.’
Pope’s Essay on Man, IV. 254.
ON COMMON-PLACE CRITICS
No. 47 of the Round Table series.
PAGE [136]. Tout homme réfléchi, etc. See note to p. 117. ‘Nor can I think what thoughts they can conceive.’ Dryden, The Hind and the Panther, Part I. l. 315. We have already. In a paper (by Leigh Hunt) On Commonplace People (Examiner, March 19, 1815). [138]. The music which has been since introduced, etc. The famous ‘Macbeth music’ written for D’Avenant’s version produced, according to Genest, in 1672. This music, traditionally assigned to Matthew Locke, is now attributed to Purcell. [139]. Mr. Westall’s drawings. Richard Westall (1765–1836). Horne Tooke’s account, etc. See The Diversions of Purley and Hazlitt’s essay on Horne Tooke in The Spirit of the Age. ‘For true no-meaning puzzles more than wit.’ Pope’s Moral Essays, II. 114. The new Schools for all. For the famous educational schemes of Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancaster and for Bentham’s Panopticon, see Leslie Stephen’s English Utilitarians. The Penitentiary. Millbank Prison, formerly known as the Penitentiary, was the ultimate result of Bentham’s Panopticon scheme and was opened in 1816. The new Bedlam. The new Bedlam Hospital was opened in 1815. The new steamboats. The first steamboat had been launched on the Clyde in 1812. The gaslights. The Chartered Gas Company obtained its Act of Parliament in 1810. The Bible Society. The British and Foreign Bible Society was established in 1804. The Society for the Suppression of Vice. See ante, note to p. 60.
ON THE CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ OF THE BRITISH INSTITUTION
These two papers are taken (with considerable variations) from the two last of three ‘Literary Notices,’ dealing with the Catalogue, which Hazlitt contributed to The Examiner on Nov. 3, Nov. 10, and Nov. 17, 1816. The first of these ‘Literary Notices’ was never republished by Hazlitt. All three were republished in their Examiner form in the second volume of Criticisms on Art, etc. (2 vols., 1843–44), edited by the author’s son, who omitted from his edition of The Round Table the two essays in the present text. All three essays will be included in a later volume of the present edition.
PAGE [140]. Our former remarks. In The Examiner, Nov. 3, 1816. [141]. The Prince Regent’s new sewer. Presumably the Regent’s Canal, part of which was opened in 1814. [142]. ‘The scale by which,’ etc. Paradise Lost, VIII. 591. Mrs. Peachum’s coloured handkerchiefs. Beggar’s Opera, Act 1. [143]. ‘A name great above all names.’ Philippians, ii. 9.
‘A cutpurse of the empire and the rule,