PAGE 45. Note 1. It appears from a Ms. note in a copy of the 1817 edition that Hazlitt here refers to Lord Castlereagh. The greatest man, etc. Napoleon. Cf. Table Talk (on Great and Little Things) and Life of Napoleon, Chap. Ivii. Note 2. A sonnet to the King. This must be the sonnet beginning— "Now that all hearts are glad, all faces bright' to which Hazlitt referred again in Political Essays (Illustrations of The Times Newspaper "). Wordsworth's attack on a set of gipsies was in the poem entitled Gipsies' (1807). In a wise passiveness. Expostulation and Reply (1798). In the Excursion.' Book vIII. "They are a grotesque ornament, etc. Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order.' Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (Select Works, ed. Payne, ii. 164). This is enough. In The Examiner Hazlitt adds: We really have a very great contempt for any one who differs from us on this point." 46. The Story of the glass-man. The Barber's story of his Fifth Brother. That manner is everything. Sheer impudence answers almost the same purpose. "Those impenetrable whiskers have confronted flames." Many persons, by looking big and talking loud, make their way through the world without any one good quality. We have here said nothing of mere personal qualifications, which are another set-off against sterling merit. Fielding was of opinion that "the more solid pretensions of virtue and understanding vanish before perfect beauty." "A certain lady of a manor" (says Don Quixote in defence of his attachment to Dulcinea, which however was quite of the Platonic kind), "had cast the eyes of affection on a certain squat, brawny lay-brother of a neighbouring monastery, to whom she was lavish of her favours. The head of the order remonstrated with her on this preference shown to one whom he represented as a very low, ignorant fellow, and set forth the superior pretensions of himself, and his more learned brethren. The lady having heard him to an end made answer : All that you have said may be very true; but know, that in those points which I admire, Brother Chrysostom is as great a philosopher, nay greater than Aristotle himself!" So the Wife of Bath :2— "To church was mine husband borne on the morrow With neighbours that for him maden sorrow, And Jenkin our clerk was one of tho : As help me God, when that I saw him go Of legs and feet, so clean and fair, That all my heart I gave unto his hold." "All which, though we most potently believe, yet we hold it not honesty to have it thus set down."'3-Note by Hazlitt in The Examiner, September 3, 1815. Note. Sir Roger de Coverley. The Spectator, No. 130. 47. The successful experiment. See Peregrine Pickle, Chap. lxxxvii. 1 Don Quixote, Book 11. Chap. xxv. 2 The Canterbury Tales. The Wife of Bath's Prologue, II. 593-599 3 Hamlet, Act 11. Scene 2. ON THE TENDENCY OF SECTS No. 19 of the Round Table series. PAGE. 49. Note 1. The Freedom of the Will of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) was published in 1754. Edwards was, of course, an American, as Flower reminded Hazlitt in his letter referred to below (49, note 2). 'Hid from ages. Colossians, i. 26. Note 2. Benjamin Flower, in a reply which he wrote to this essay (The Examiner, October 8, 1815), pointed out the phenomenon' of a Quaker poet appeared about thirty years since, Mr. Scott of Amwell, whose volume of poetry obtained the marked approbation of our acknowledged best critics. Johnson said of John Scott of Amwell's (1730-1783) Elegies, 'they are very well; but such as twenty people might write' (Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, ii. 351). Another correspondent, signing himself B. B.,' wrote a letter to The Examiner (September 24, 1815), protesting against Hazlitt's sketch of Quakerism. This was no doubt Bernard Barton (1784-1849), another Quaker poet, and afterwards the friend of Lamb. 50. There is some soul of goodness, etc. Henry V., Act iv. Scene 1. "Evil communications, etc. 1 Corinthians, xv. 33. ON JOHN BUNCLE No. 20 of the Round Table series. The Life of John Buncle, Esq., by Thomas (not John) Amory (1691?-1788), was published in two volumes, 1756-1766. A new edition in three volumes was published in 1825, very likely on Hazlitt's recommendation. See Memoirs of William Hazlitt, ii. 198. A quotation from the present essay faces the title-page of the new edition (vol. i.). A volume containing the most readable parts of the book, and happily entitled 'The Spirit of Buncle,' was published in 1823. The book was a great favourite of Lamb's as well as of Hazlitt's. PAGE. 52. Botargos. Hard roes of mullet called botargos.' Urquhart's Rabelais, 1. xxi. 53. Man was made to mourn.' "Who breathes, must suffer; and who thinks, must mourn.' He danced the Hays. Prior, Solomon on the Vanity of the World, 111. 240. 'I will play on the tabor to the worthies, and let them dance the hay.' A mistress and a saint in every grove. Love's Labour's Lost, Act v. Scene 1. 'Most dolphin-like.' Antony and Cleopatra, Act v. Scene 2. "And there the antic sits, etc. Richard II., Act ш. Scene 2. 56. Philips's. The Pastorals of Pope and Ambrose Philips (1675?-1749) appeared in Tonson's Miscellany (1709). Sannazarius. An English translation of the Piscatory Eclogues of Jacopo Sannazario was published in 1726. What he beautifully calls, etc. See The Complete Angler, Part 1. Chap. i. 'We accompany them,' etc. The Complete Angler, Part 1. Chap. iv. The milkmaid sang 'Come live with me, and be my love.' That smooth song' (says Walton) which was made by Kit Marlowe, now at least fifty years ago. PAGE And the milkmaid's mother sung an answer to it, which was made by Sir 57. Tottenham Cross. The subject of one of the prints. Note. His friendship for Cotton. Charles Cotton (1630-1687), the translator of Montaigne (1685). Note. Dr. Johnson said. See Mrs. Piozzi's Anecdotes (Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. G. B. Hill, i. 332). ON THE CAUSES OF METHODISM No. 22 of the Round Table series. Leigh Hunt discussed this article in No. 24 of the series, republished in the 1817 edition of the Round Table, and entitled 'On the Poetical Character. On the subject of Methodism Hunt had already spoken his mind in a series of articles in The Examiner, which he republished in 1809 under the title of An Attempt to shew the fully and danger of Methodism. PAGE 58. To sinner it or saint it.' Pope's Moral Essays, Ep. 11. 1. 15. 'The whole need not a physician.' St. Matthew, ix. 12. "Conceit in weakest, etc. Hamlet, Act 111. Scene 4. 59. Marworm. In Isaac Bickerstaffe's Hypocrite, altered from Colley Cibber's Round fat oily men of God,' etc. Thomson's Castle of Indolence, stanza 69. Note. • And filled up all the mighty void of sense.' Pope's Essay on Criticism, 60. The vice, etc. Hebrews, xii. 1. "The Society for the Suppression of Vice. Founded in 1802. Sydney Smith criticised its methods in one of his Edinburgh Review articles (Jan. 1809). Hazlitt refers to it again. See ante, p. 139. "And sweet religion, etc. Hamlet, Act 111. Scene 4. "Numbers without number. Paradise Lost, 111. 346. 61. Dissolves them, etc. Il Penseroso, ll. 165-166. ON THE MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM No. 26 of the Round Table series. The essay was in substance republished in Characters of Shakespear's Plays. See ante, pp. 244-248, and the notes thereon. PAGE 64. Age cannot wither, etc. Antony and Cleopatra, Act 11. Scene 2. "Tis a good piece of work, etc. The Taming of the Shrew, Act 1. Scene 2. • Would, cousin Silence, etc. 2 Henry IV, Act . Scene 2. The dialogue on the death of old Double occurs earlier in the same scene. "The most fearful wild-fowl living. Midsummer Night's Dream, Act . Scene 1. At the end of this essay in The Examiner Hazlitt added the following 'Note Extraordinary': 'We had just concluded our ramble with Pack and Bottom, and were beginning to indulge in some less airy recreations, when in came the last week's Cobbett, and with one blow overset our 1 Cobbett's Weekly Political Register for November 18, 1815 (vol. xxix). Cobbett's outburst against Milton and Shakespeare is headed 'On the subject of potatoes.' 3 Round Table, and marred all our good things. If while Mr. C. and his lady are sitting in their garden at Botley, like Adam and Eve in Paradise, the delight of one another, the envy of their neighbours, and the admiration of the rest of the world, suddenly a large fat hog from the wilds of Hampshire should bolt right through the hedge, and with snorting menaces and foaming tusks, proceed to lay waste the flower-pots and root up the potatoes, such as the surprise and indignation of so economical a couple would be on this occasion, was the consternation at our Table when Mr. Cobbett himself made his appearance among us, vowing vengeance against Milton and Shakespear, Sir Hugh Evans and Justice Shallow, and all the delights of human life. We were not prepared for such an onset. More barbarous than Mr. Wordsworth's calling Voltaire dull, or than Voltaire's calling Cato the only English tragedy; 2 more barbarous than Mr. Locke's admiration of Sir Richard Blackmore; more barbarous than the declaration of a German Elector-afterwards made into an English king—that he hated poets and painters; more barbarous than the Duke of Wellington's letter to Lord Castlereagh, or than the Catalogue Raisonnée of the Flemish Masters published in the Morning Chronicle, or than the Latin style of the second Greek scholar of the age, or the English style of the first :-more barbarous than any or all of these is Mr. Cobbett's attack on our two great poets. As to Milton, except the fine egotism of the situation of Adam and Eve, which Mr. Cobbett has applied to himself, there is not much in him to touch our politician but we cannot understand his attack upon Shakespear, which is cutting his own throat. If Mr. Cobbett is for getting rid of his kings and queens, his fops and his courtiers, if he is for pelting Sir Hugh and Falstaff off the stage, yet what will he say to Jack Cade and First and Second Mob? If we are to scout the Roman rabble, where will the Register find English readers? Has the author never found himself out in Shakespear? He may depend upon it he is there, for all the people that ever lived are there! Has he never been struck with the valour of Ancient Pistol, who "would not swagger in any shew of resistance to a Barbary-hen"?6 Can he not, upon occasion, "aggravate his voice"7 like Bottom in the play? In absolute insensibility, he is a fool to Master Barnardine; and there is enough of gross animal instinct in Calyban to make a whole herd of Cobbetts. Mr. Cobbett admires Bonaparte; and yet there is nothing finer in any of his addresses to the French people than what Coriolanus says to the Romans when they banish him. He abuses the Allies in good set terms; yet one speech of Constance describes them and their magnanimity better than all the columns of the Political Register. Mr. Cobbett's address to the people of England on the alarm of an invasion, which was stuck on all the church-doors in Great Britain, was not more eloquent than Henry Vis address to his soldiers before the battle of Agincourt; nor do we think Mr. Cobbett was ever a better specimen of the common English character than the two soldiers in the same play. After all, there is something so : 1 See ante, p. 116. 2 (Euvres, xxxv. p. 159. Probably the Letter from Paris, dated September 23, 1815, relating to the disposal of the works of art acquired by Napoleon. 4 See ante, pp. 140-151. The Catalogue appeared in The Morning Chronicle during the autumn of 1815 and the spring of 1816, beginning on September 22, 1815. 5 The reference seems to be to Samuel Parr (1747-1825) and Charles Burney (1757-1817). See Hazlitt's essay 'On the Ignorance of the Learned' in Table Talk. 62 Henry IV., Act 11. Scene 4. 7 Midsummer Night's Dream, Act 1. Scene 2. 8 Political Register, July 30, 1802. droll in his falling foul of Shakespear for want of delicacy, with his desperate lounges and bear-garden dexterity, snorting, fuming, and grunting, that we cannot help laughing at the affair, now that our surprise is over; as we suppose Mr. Cobbett does, if he can only keep him out of his premises by hallooing and hooting or dry blows, to see his old friend, Grill,1 trudging along the high-road in search of his acorns and pignuts.' THE BEGGAR'S OPERA One of Hazlitt's Theatrical Examiners,' and published in The Examiner on June 18, 1815. PAGE 65. The Beggar's Opera was produced at Lincoln's Inn Fields on January 29, • Happy alchemy of mind, etc. Cf. Boswell (Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, iñi. 65): I have ever delighted in that intellectual chymistry, which can separate good qualities from evil in the same person.' • Oʻerstepping the modesty of nature. Hamlet, Act III. Scene 2. •W`oman is like, etc. Beggar's Opera, Act 1. Taton from Tiballas. Hazlitt probably means Catullus and refers to the lines (Carm. 62) Ut flos in saeptis secretus nascitur hortis,' etc. * I see kim szweeter, etc. Act 1. • Tiure is same soul of goodness in things evil? Henry V., Act iv. Scene 1. 66. * Hussey, hussey,' etc." "Beggar's Opera, Act 1. Miss Hannah Mere's laboured invectives. Such as Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great to General Society (1788) and An Estimate of the Roagium of the Fashionable World (1790). See ante, p. 154, for another expression of Hazlitt's belief in the disciplinary value of The Beggar's Opera. Note. For further reference to Baron Grimm's Correspondance (1812-14) see am, p. 131, the essay On the Literary Character. Claude Pierre Patu (1729-1757) published Choix de pièces traduites de l'anglais (de Robert Dodsley et John Gay) in 1756. The collected works of Jean Joseph Vade (1720-1757) were published in 1775. ON PATRIOTISM—A FRAGMENT This fragment is taken from one of the Illustrations of Vetus' which appeared originally in The Morning Chronicle and were republished in Political Essays. PAGE 67. The love of mankind, etc. Rousseau's Emile, Liv. iv. p. 279 (édit, Garnier): a favourite quotation of Hazlitt's. ON BEAUTY No. 29 of the Round Table series, and signed in The Examiner—'An Amateur." PAGE 68. Three Papers, etc. Reynolds's papers in the Idler are Nos. 76, 79, and 82. It is to the last, On the true idea of Beauty, that Hazlitt particularly refers. 1 See The Faerie Queene, 11. xii. st. 86 and 87. |