Contending with the wild winds as they roar ...
And the proud places of the insolent
And the oppressor fell ...
Such and so little is the mind of Man!
[28]. His summary of the fight between Hickman and Bill Neate is alone in literature, as also in the annals of the Ring. Jon Bee was an intelligent creature of his kind, and knew a very great deal more about pugilism than Hazlitt knew; but to contrast the two is to learn much. Badcock (which is Jon Bee) had seen (and worshipped) Jem Belcher, and had reported fights with an extreme contempt for Pierce Egan, the illiterate ass who gave us Boxiana. Hazlitt, however, looked on at the proceedings of Neate and the Gaslight Man exactly as he had looked on at divers creations of Edmund Kean. He saw the essentials in both expressions of human activity, and his treatment of both is fundamentally the same. In both he ignores the trivial: here the acting (in its lowest sense), there the hits that did not count. And thus, as he gives you only the vital touches, you know how and why Neate beat Hickman, and can tell the exact moment at which Hickman began to be a beaten man. ’Tis the same with his panegyric on Cavanagh, the fives-player. For a blend of gusto with understanding I know but one thing to equal with this: the note on Dr. Grace, which appeared in The National Observer; and the night that that was written, I sent the writer back to Hazlitt’s Cavanagh, and said to him ——! On the whole the Dr. Grace is the better of the two. But it has scarce the incorruptible fatness of the Cavanagh. Gusto, though, is Hazlitt’s special attribute: he glories in what he likes, what he reads, what he feels, what he writes. He triumphed in his Kean, his Shakespeare, his Bill Neate, his Rousseau, his coffee-and-cream and Love for Love in the inn-parlour at Alton. He relished things; and expressed them with a relish. That is his ‘note.’ Some others have relished only the consummate expression of nothing.
[29]. Listen, else, to Lamb himself: ‘Protesting against much that he has written, and some things which he chooses to do; judging him by his conversation which I enjoyed so long, and relished so deeply; or by his books, in those places where no clouding passion intervenes, I should belie my own conscience if I said less than that I think W. H. to be, in his natural and healthy state, one of the wisest and finest spirits breathing. So far from being ashamed of that intimacy which was betwixt us, it is my boast that I was able for so many years to have preserved it entire; and I think I shall go to my grave without finding or expecting to find such another companion.’ Thus does one Royalty celebrate the kingship and enrich the immortality of another.
[30]. It is Steele’s; and the whole paper (No. 95) is in his most delightful manner. The dream about the mistress, however, is given to Addison by the Editors, and the general style of that number is his; though, from the story being related personally of Bickerstaff, who is also represented as having been at that time in the army, we conclude it to have originally come from Steele, perhaps in the course of conversation. The particular incident is much more like a story of his than of Addison’s.—H. T.
[31]. We had in our hands the other day an original copy of the Tatler, and a list of the subscribers. It is curious to see some names there which we should hardly think of, (that of Sir Isaac Newton is among them), and also to observe the degree of interest excited by those of the different persons, which is not adjusted according to the rules of the Heralds’ College.
[32]. Pope also declares that he had a particular regard for an old post which stood in the court-yard before the house where he was brought up.
[33]. See also the passage in his prose works relating to the first design of Paradise Lost.