PAGE 69. Spenser's description of Belphabe. The Faerie Queene, Book 11. Canto iii. st. 21 et seq. 70. Her full dark eyes,' etc. The reference seems to be to Leiden des jungen Werthers (December 6). 71. Pope's translation. Homer's Odyssey, v. 56-67. st. 23 and 24. The Faerie Queene, Book Iv. Canto xi. Note. A striking description. Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (Select Works, ed. Payne, ii. 89). Note. The idea is in Don Quixote. Part 11. Chap. xlviii. In The Examiner this note was concluded as follows: Much the same impression which the sight of the Queen of France made on Mr. Burke's brain sixteen years before the French Revolution, did the reading of the New Eloise make on mine at the commencement of it. "Such is the stuff of which our dreams are made!" This man (Burke), who was a half poet and a half philosopher, has done more mischief than perhaps any other person in the world. His understanding was not competent to the discovery of any truth, but it was sufficient to palliate a lie; his reasons, of little weight in themselves, thrown into the scale of power, were dreadful. Without genius to adorn the beautiful, he had the art to throw a dazzling veil over the deformed and disgusting, and to strew the flowers of imagination over the rotten carcase of corruption, not to prevent, but to communicate the infection. His jealousy of Rousseau was one chief cause of his opposition to the French Revolution. The writings of the one had changed the institutions of a kingdom; while the speeches of the other, with the intrigues of his whole party, had changed nothing but the turnspit of the King's kitchen3 He would have blotted out the broad, pure light of Heaven, because it did not first shine in upon the narrow, crooked passages of St. Stephen's Chapel. The genius of Rousseau had levelled the towers of the Bastile with the dust; our zealous reformist, who would rather be doing mischief than nothing, tried therefore to patch them up again, by calling that loathsome dungeon the King's Castle, and by fulsome adulation of the virtues of a Court Strumpet. This man had the impudence to say that an Elector of Hanover was raised to the throne of these kingdoms, "in contempt of the will of the people," while the hereditary successor was still alive. He was at once a liar, a coward, and a slave; a liar to his own heart, a coward to the success of his own cause, a slave to the power he despised. See his Letter about the Duke of Bedford, in which the man gets the better of the sycophant, and he belabours the Duke in good earnest. It is not a source of regret to reflect that he closed his eyes on the ruin of liberty, which he had been the principal means of effecting, and of his own projects, at the same time. He did not live to see that deliverance of mankind, bound hand and foot into the absolute, lasting, inexorable power of Kings and 1 A variation, quoted from Burke (A Letter to a Noble Lord), of Shakespeare's wellknown lines in The Tempest, Act iv. Scene 1. 2 For Burke on Rousseau see especially A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791). 3 'I give you joy of the report, That he's to have a place at court.' 'Yes, and a place he will grow rich in ; A turnspit in the royal kitchen.' Swift, Miscell. Poems, Upon the Horrid Plot, etc. See Burke's Speech (1780) on Economical Reform. 4 Reflections on the Revolution in France (Select Works, ed. Payne, ii. 17). PAGE 78. To touch them. In The Examiner Hazlitt gives the following note to this passage: This may seem obscure. We will therefore avail ourselves of our privilege to explain as Members of Parliament do, when they let fall any thing too paradoxical, novel, or abstruse, to be immediately apprehended by the other side of the House. When the Widow Wadman1 looked over my Uncle Toby's map of the Siege of Namur with him, and as he pointed out the approaches of his battalion in a transverse line across the plain to the gate of St. Nicholas, kept her hand constantly pressed against his, if my Uncle Toby had then "been an artist and could paint," (as Mr. Fox wished himself to be, that "he might draw Bonaparte's conduct to the King of Prussia in the blackest colours") my Uncle Toby would have drawn the hand of his fair enemy in the manner we have above described. We have heard a good story of this same Bonaparte playing off a very ludicrous parody of the Widow Wadman's stratagem upon as great a commander by sea as my Uncle Toby was by land. Now, when Sir Isaac Newton, who was sitting smoking with his mistress's hand in his, took her little finger and made use of it as a tobacco-pipe stopper, there was here a total absence of mind, or a great want of gusto.' Mr. West. Benjamin West (1738-1820), historical painter, succeeded Sir J. Reynolds as President of the Royal Academy in 1792. 80. 'Or where Chineses, etc. Paradise Lost, 111. 438-439. 'Wild above rule, etc. Ib. v. 297. ON PEDANTRY No. 32 of the Round Table series. See ante, p. 382, for a reference by Hazlitt to this essay. PAGE 80. The pedantry of Parson Adams. See Joseph Andrews, Book in. Chap. v. Scotch Pedagogue. Roderick Random, Chap. xiv. Seeing ourselves, etc. Burns, To a Louse, st. 8. 81. Monsieur Jourdain. In Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Note. Not to admire anything." "Nil admirari, prope res est una, Numici, Solaque, quæ possit facere et servare beatum.'-Horace, Ep. 1. vi. 1. 82. In the Library, etc. At his father's house at Wem. See Memoirs of William Hazlitt, i. 33. The Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum, etc., was published in eight volumes folio, 1656. "From all this world's, etc. From worldly cares himselfe he did esloyne.' The Faerie Queene, Book 1. Canto iv. st. 20. In The Examiner Hazlitt published the following note: 'Mr. Wordsworth has on a late occasion humorously applied this line of Spenser to persons holding sinecure places under government. He seems to intend adding to the list of such places that of Poet Laureate. This we think a decided improvement on the system.' The reference is to Wordsworth's sonnet, 'Occasioned by the Battle of Waterloo,' beginning 'The bard whose soul is meek as dawning day.' 83. Mitigated authors, etc. 'It was this opinion which mitigated kings into companions, and raised private men to be fellows with kings. Without force, or opposition, it subdued the fierceness of pride and power; it obliged sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of social esteem,' etc. Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (Select Works, ed. Payne, ii. 90). The Spectator. See The Spectator, No. 131. 1 Tristram Shandy, 1x. 26. * In the Life of Napoleon Hazlitt refers to this saying, which he calls 'quackery.' THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED No. 33 of the Round Table series. PAGE 84. A poetical enthusiast. Wordsworth presumably. A clerk ther was, etc. Canterbury Tales, Prologue, 11. 285 et seq. 85. Chemist, statesman, etc. 'Tongues in the trees, etc. 86. Vestris was so far right, etc. · Vestris (1729-1808), Le Dieu de la danse,” said that Europe contained only three great men, himself, Voltaire, and Frederick of Prussia. We do not see, etc. Johnson and Wordsworth were of the opposite opinion. See Boswell's Life, ed. G. B. Hill, iv. 114, and Rogers's Table-Talk, p. 234. 87. In Froissart's Chronicles.' Book 1v. chapter 14 (Panthéon Litteraire). The man was not a monk at all. 88. The sovereign'st thing on earth. 1 Henry IV., Act 1. Scene 3. Uneasy and insecure. In The Examiner the following note is appended: “It has been found necessary to cement them with blood. "Plus de belles paroles, messieurs, je veux du sang," is the language of all absolute sovereigns to their subjects, when the film drops from their eyes which leads mankind to suppose themselves the property of tyrants. If men are to be treated like slaves, it is best that they should think themselves born to be so. Plus de belles paroles. The French Revolution was the necessary consequence of our English Revolution and of the Reformation. A crusade once more to re-establish the infallibility of the Pope all over the Continent would be a logical inference from the late crusade to restore divine right.' ON THE CHARACTER OF ROUSSEAU No. 36 of the Round Table series. PAGE 89. Note. In The Examiner this note was continued as follows: He was the founder of Jacobinism, which disclaims the division of the species into two classes, the one the property of the others. It was of the disciples of his school, where principle is converted into passion, that Mr. Burke said and said truly,-"Once a Jacobin, and always a Jacobin!" The adept in this school does not so much consider the political injury as the personal insult. This is the way to put the case, to set the true revolutionary leaven, the self-love which is at the bottom of every heart, at work, and this was the way in which Rousseau put it. It then becomes a question between man and man, which there is but one way of deciding.' Va Zanetto, etc. Part 1. liv. 7. 90. 91. 'Louise Eleonore,' etc. Part 1. liv. 2. As fast, etc. Othello, Act v. Scene 2. There are, indeed, impressions, etc. A quotation from Rousseau's Confessions. See Hazlitt's essay entitled 'My first Acquaintance with Poets.' 92. Ah, voila de la pervenche !' Confessions, Part 1. liv. 6. Mr. Wordsworth's discovery. The reference appears to be to Wordsworth's poem, "The Sparrow's Nest.' ON DIFFERENT SORTS OF FAME No. 37 of the Round Table series. PAGE 93. Fitzosborne's Letters, by William Melmoth the younger (1710-1799), were published in two vols. in 1742-1747. Hazlitt's quotation seems to be merely a summary of a passage in Letter x. (p. 35, edit. 1748) which is itself quoted from Wollaston's Religion of Nature Delineated. Note. Burns. See his autobiographical letter to Dr. John Moore, 2nd August 1787. (Works, ed. Chambers and Wallace, i. 20). 94. Bitter bad judges.' Beggar's Opera, Act 1. Scene 1. Makes ambition virtue. Othello, Act 111. Scene 3. Dr. Johnson. See his Life of Milton (Works, vii. 108). Pluck its fruits, unripe and crude. Lycidas, 1. 3. 95. Hogarth's Distressed Poet.' The map of the gold-mines of Peru was substituted in the impression of 1740 for a print of Pope thrashing Curll in the original impression of 1736. A man of genius and eloquence. Coleridge presumably. 96. Elphinstone. James Elphinston (1721-1809), who superintended an Edinburgh edition of The Rambler, in which he gave English translations of most of the mottoes. This, however, was far from being his only literary enterprise, and it is strange that Hazlitt should know nothing more of him.' He published many translations, one of which, A Specimen of the Translations of Epigrams of Martial (1778), achieved notoriety from its extreme badness. In his later life he devoted himself to the invention of a kind of phonetic spelling, which he explained in Propriety ascertained in her Picture, or English Speech and Spelling under Mutual Guides (1787), and other works. Yorick and the Frenchman. Sterne's Sentimental Journey. The Passport. CHARACTER OF JOHN BULL No. 39 of the Round Table series. PAGE 97. A respectable publication. Edinburgh Review, xxvi. p. 96 (Feb. 1816). The passage quoted is from a review by Hazlitt himself of Schlegel's Lectures on Dramatic Literature. ON GOOD NATURE No. 41 of the Round Table series. PAGE 100. Says Froissart. This well-known saying is wrongly attributed to Froissart. See Notes and Queries for 1863 and subsequent years. 102. An Englishman, who would be thought a profound one. P. 116. Wordsworth. See 103. Forge the seal of the realm, etc. The allusion seems to be to the events of the spring of 1804 when Lord Eldon, during the king's illness, affixed the great seal to a commission giving the royal assent to certain bills. Macbeth, Act III. Scene 4. 104. Good digestion wait on appetite. Without control. In The Examiner Hazlitt appended as a note: 'Henry viii. |