‘That these are the most striking positions of the moderns with respect to the human mind, is what every one, familiar with the writers since Locke, as Berkeley, Hartley, Hume, Priestley, Horne Tooke, Beddoes, among ourselves, and Helvetius, Condillac, Mirabaud, Condorcet &c., among the French, will readily allow: that most of them are to be found in the Essay on Human Understanding, mixed up in a state of inextricable confusion with common-place and common sense notions, now advanced, now retracted, the arguments on one side of the question now prevailing through an endless labyrinth of explanation, now those on the other, and now both opinions asserted and denied in the same sentence is what is equally well known to the readers of Locke and his commentators. That the same system came from the mind of Hobbes, not hesitating, stammering, puling, drivelling, ricketty, a sickly half birth, to be brought up by hand, to be nursed and dandled into common life and existence, but just the reverse of all this, full grown, completely proportioned and articulated, compact, stamped in all its lineaments, with the vigour and decision of the author’s mind, is what we have now to shew.’

The extracts follow, interspersed with brief comments by Hazlitt, and the essay concludes as follows:—

‘To what Mr. Hobbes has written on this subject [Liberty and Necessity] nothing has been added nor can be taken away. We agree to every word of it, and the more heartily, because it is the only one of all the points which have been stated on which we do. In speaking of the popular notions of liberty, in his controversy with a foolish Bishop of that day (Bramhall), he says, “In fine, that freedom which men commonly find in books, that which the poets chaunt in the theatres, and the shepherds on the mountains, that which the pastors teach in the churches, and the doctors in the universities, and that which the common people in the markets, and all mankind in the whole world do assent unto, is the same that I assent unto, namely, that a man hath freedom to do if he will; but whether he hath freedom to will, is a question which it seems neither the Bishop nor they ever thought on.” Hobbes was as superior to Locke as a writer, as he was as a reasoner. He had great powers both of wit and imagination. In short he was a great man, not because he was a great metaphysician, but he was a great metaphysician because he was a great man.

‘It has been thought, that the neglect into which Hobbes’s metaphysical speculations have fallen was originally owing to the obloquy excited by the irreligious and despotical tendency of his other writings. But in this he has also been unfairly dealt with. Locke borrowed his fundamental ideas of government from him; and there is not a word directly levelled at religion in any of his works. At least, his aristocratical notions and his want of religion must have, in some measure, balanced one another; and Charles II. had his picture hanging in his bed-room, though the Bishops wished to have him burnt. The true reason of the fate which this author’s writings met with was, that his views of things were too original and comprehensive to be immediately understood, without passing through the hands of several successive generations of commentators and interpreters. Ignorance of another’s meaning is a sufficient cause of fear, and fear produces hatred: hence arose the rancour and suspicion of his adversaries, who, to quote some fine lines of Spenser,

——‘Stood all astonished like a sort of steers

’Mongst whom some beast of strange and foreign race

Unawares is chanced far straying from his peers;

So did their ghastly gaze betray their hidden fears.’[[73]]

COLERIDGE’S ‘CHRISTABEL’

On June 2, 1816, The Examiner published a review of Coleridge’s Christabel, as to the authorship of which there has been some discussion. See Notes and Queries, 9th Ser. XI. pp. 171 and 271. Mr. Dykes Campbell (The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, p. 606) is disposed to attribute the review to Hazlitt. As in the case of the Edinburgh Review notice of Christabel (see vol. X. of the present edition, pp. 411–418), Hazlitt’s authorship cannot be regarded as absolutely certain. The review is as follows:—