[9]. ‘The point in debate,’ he says, ‘the worth or the bad quality of the painting ... I am as well able to decide upon as any who ever brandished a pallette.’ I doubt not that he spoke the truth; yet the residuum of his criticisms of pictures, their after-taste, is mostly literary. And, as he was finally a man of letters, what else could one expect?
[10]. Leigh Hunt said that he was the best art critic that ever lived: that to read him was like seeing a picture through stained glass, and so forth. But Leigh Hunt knew not much more about pictures than Coleridge knew about the books he talked of, but had not read.
[11]. The house had been the abode of Milton; for certain months it had harboured the eminent James Mill; it belonged to the celebrated Jeremy Bentham: so that in the matter of associations Hazlitt, a thorough-paced dissenter, was as well off as he could hope to be.
[12]. Ten in number: on ‘The Rise and Progress of Modern Philosophy,’ as illustrated in the works of Hobbes, Locke and his followers, Hartley, Helvétius, and others. The lectures, Mr. Stephen says, were in part a reproduction of the Principles of Human Action.
[13]. Haydon says that Waterloo made him drunk for weeks. Then he pulled himself together, and for the rest of his life drank nothing but strong tea. He had, however, no sort of sympathy with those who held the ‘social glass’ to be Man’s safest introduction to the Pit. He only said that liquor did not agree with him, and looked on cheerfully while his friends—Lamb was as close as any—drank as they pleased.
[14]. Both the Characters and the English Poets were reviewed by Gifford in the Quarterly. The style of these ‘reviews’ is abject; the inspiration venal; the matter the very dirt of the mind. Gifford hated Hazlitt for his politics, and set out to wither Hazlitt’s repute as a man of letters. For the tremendous reprisal with which he was visited, the reader is referred to the Letter to William Gifford, Esq., in the first volume of the present Edition. If he find it over-savage: probably, being of to-day, he will: let him turn to his Quarterly, and consider, if he have the stomach, Gifford and the matter of offence.
[15]. He lived to rejoice in the Revolution of July; but of the great movement in the arts—of Henri Trois et sa Cour and Hernani, of Delacroix and Barye, of Géricault and Bonington and de Vigny, and the rest of its heroes—he seems to have known nothing. That was his way. The new did not exist for him. A dissenter by birth and conviction, he yet cared only for the past, and the elder ‘glories of our blood and state’ were to him, not shadows but, the sole substantial things he could keep room for in the kingdom of his mind.
[16]. ’Tis a pleasure to remember that Lamb was with him to the end—was in his death-chamber in the very article of mortality. We have all read Carlyle on Lamb. The everlasting pity is that we shall never read Hazlitt on Carlyle.
[17]. Him Shelley calls ‘a solemn and unsexual man.’
[18]. Much as years afterwards, according to a certain Nicolardot, the expertest of their kind were ‘on the list’ of old Ste.-Beuve.