tion as a critic and essayist: to a wider public than that of the Quarterly and Blackwood he was best known as a wild Republican. Even his idiosyncrasies tended to make him unpopular. Unhappy in his married life, he was unhappy also in his friendships, for he quarrelled unaccountably with all his associates-even with Lamb, though he was afterwards reconciled. Tactless, but of downright honesty, though brilliant in conversation yet devoid of social instinct, he seemed to his friends to live in dread of hearing some remark with which he could not agree. The stimulating acuteness and fine enthusiasm of his lectures did not conceal the fact that there was little sympathy between him and his audience. If his worth is better known now than it was in his own day, it is because his writings have lived down the personal prejudice which he too readily aroused.

With Coleridge and Lamb, Hazlitt marks the close of the short interregnum in criticism when the classical code of the eighteenth century had been replaced by the mere whim of the Edinburgh or Quarterly reviewer. Like Coleridge, he believed that the first requisite of a critic is intelligent sympathy, and that his duty is not so much to report on a work as to interpret it. Yet he can hardly be claimed as a member of the romantic school, for, though true to their principles, he had not their limitations; he laughed away their tenet that Pope was not a poet, and he would not be blinded to the merits of French literature by the new German cult and the crusade against the classical. In certain respects he preserves the eighteenth century attitude, as in his indifference to the Middle Ages and his appreciation of the elegant in literature, while he had not the enthusiasm of the new school for their own work. Personal and political considerations tended to warp his judgment on his contemporaries. Though eloquent in his praise of Scott, he discovers an objectionable political motive in the Scotch novels; his dislike of Byron is based on the 'noble author's' peerage; Coleridge, to whom he owed so much, he came to despise for changing his political views; even his whole-hearted appreciations of Wordsworth are dashed with unfriendly references to the poet's foibles. But these prejudices were vented merely on the living: no political bias, for instance, could dull his enthusiasm for Burke. He himself confesses that his criticism of the living is in a different category from his appreciations of the older authors. I have more confidence in the dead than the living,' he says; 'contemporary writers may generally be divided into two classes, one's friends and one's foes.' But it may be claimed for him that his prejudices, unlike those of the romanticists, were not literary. He was one of the first to recognise the impossibility of reconciling different tastes. The disagreement between French and English taste, he points out, is bound to remain till the French become English or the English French; and he

adds, with special reference to Shakespeare and Racine, that when we see nothing but grossness and barbarism or insipidity and verbiage in a writer that is the god of a nation's idolatry, it is we and not they who want true taste and feeling. Hazlitt's appreciations are more free from the distinguishing marks of a particular school than those of any of the great English critics before him.

Hazlitt characterised his own work when he said that 'a genuine criticism should reflect the colours, the light and shade, the soul and body of a work.' Whether he deals with painting or with literature, he pays little attention to matters of form or technique, and he always ignores the circumstances under which the works were produced. 'If,' he says, ‘a man leaves behind him any work which is a model of its kind, we have no right to ask whether he could do anything else, or how he did it, or how long he was about it.' Uninterested in the development and interaction of literatures, he is indifferent even to the growth of the art of an individual author. He may tell us that in the Tempest Shakespeare has shown all the variety of his powers, and that Love's Labour's Lost is the play with which he would most readily part; but he never hints that the one was written at the end of Shakespeare's career and the other at the beginning. His indifference to such matters explains his inaccuracy in points of fact. Few of his many quotations are given correctly; his references are vague; and he knew nothing of the worries of accurate chronology. What alone interests him is the complete work in itself. He had not, and expressly disclaimed, a wide knowledge of literature; and latterly he would rather read the same book for the twentieth time than read a new one. His favourite authors, and Shakespeare in particular, he knew so well that he could hardly write without alluding to them, or quoting from them, or employing their phraseology. And this intense knowledge makes him as guiltless of a second-hand as of an off-hand opinion, though he is occasionally under some det to the conversation of his friends. The writer from whom he borrows most is himself, for he indulges largely in the questionable habit of repeating, often in the same words, what he has said elsewhere. But this only points to that 'pertinacity of opinion' on which he prided himself, in literature as in politics. In no case would he revise his judgments; he would only repeat them and emphasise them.

He has spoken of his early difficulties in writing, but latterly he could say that he had merely to 'unfold the book and volume of the brain' and transcribe the characters he saw there as mechanically as any one might copy the letters in a sampler. It was fitting that a critic who was indifferent to technique should himself have no ambitions to be known by his style, and should expressly avoid formal method. What he desired above all was 'life, and spirit, and truth;' and whether he writes on Cavanagh the Fives-Player, or the fight of

Neate and the Gas-man, or Gifford, or Mrs Siddons, or Napoleon, or his favourite pictures and authors, his easy vigour and enduring freshness prove the wisdom of his aim.

Shakespeare.

The striking peculiarity of Shakespeare's mind was its generic quality, its power of communication with all other minds-so that it contained a universe of thought and feeling within itself, and had no one peculiar bias or exclusive excellence more than another. He was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men. He was the least of an egotist that it was possible to be. He was nothing in himself; but he was all that others were, or that they could become. He not only had in himself the germs of every faculty and feeling, but he could follow them by anticipation, intuitively, into all their conceivable ramifications, through every change of fortune, or conflict of passion, or turn of thought. He had 'a mind reflecting ages past,' and present :-all the people that ever lived are there. There was no respect of persons with him. His genius shone equally on the evil and on the good, on the wise and the foolish, the monarch and the beggar: 'All corners of the earth, kings, queens, and states, maids, matrons, nay, the secrets of the grave,' are hardly hid from his searching glance. He was like the genius of humanity, changing places with all of us at pleasure, and playing with our purposes as with his own. He turned the globe round for his amusement, and surveyed the generations of men, and the individuals as they passed, with their different concerns, passions, follies, vices, virtues, actions, and motives-as well those that they knew as those which they did not know or acknowledge to themselves. The dreams of childhood, the ravings of despair, were the toys of his fancy. Airy beings waited at his call and came at his bidding. Harmless fairies nodded to him, and did him curtesies;' and the night-hag bestrode the blast at the command of 'his so potent art.' The world of spirits lay open to him,

like the world of real men and women: and there is the same truth in his delineations of the one as of the other; for if the preternatural characters he describes could be supposed to exist, they would speak, and feel, and act as he makes them. He had only to think of any thing in order to become that thing, with all the circumstances belonging to it. When he conceived of a character, whether real or imaginary, he not only entered into all its thoughts and feelings, but seemed instantly, and as if by touching a secret spring, to be surrounded with all the same objects, subject to the same skyey influences,' the same local, outward, and unforeseen accidents, which would occur in reality. Thus the character of Caliban not only stands before us with a language and manners of his own, but the scenery and situation of the enchanted island he inhabits, the traditions of the place, its strange noises, its hidden recesses, 'his frequent haunts and ancient neighbourhood,' are given with a miraculous truth of nature, and with all the familiarity of an old recollection. The whole coheres semblably together' in time, place, and circumstance. In reading this author, you do not merely learn what his characters say,-you see their persons. By something expressed or understood, you are at no loss to decipher their peculiar physiognomy, the meaning of a look, the grouping, the byplay, as we might see it on the stage. A word, an epithet paints a whole scene, or throws us back whole

...

years in the history of the person represented. That which, perhaps, more than anything else distinguishes the dramatic productions of Shakespeare from all others is this wonderful truth and individuality of conception. Each of his characters is as much itself, and as absolutely independent of the rest, as well as of the author, as if they were living persons, not fictions of the mind. The poet may be said, for the time, to identify himself with the character he wishes to represent, and to pass from one to another, like the same soul successively animating different bodies. By an art like that of the ventriloquist, he throws his imagination out of himself, and makes every word appear to proceed from the mouth of the person in whose name it is given. His plays alone are properly expressions of the passions, not descriptions of them. His characters are real beings of flesh and blood; they speak like men, not like authors. One might suppose that he had stood by at the time, and overheard what passed. As in our dreams we hold conversations with ourselves, make remarks, or communicate intelligence, and have no idea of the answer which we shall receive, and which we ourselves make, till we hear it so the dialogues in Shakespeare are carried on without any consciousness of what is to follow, without any appearance of preparation or premeditation. The gusts of passion come and go like sounds of music borne on the wind. Nothing is made out by formal inference and analogy, by climax and antithesis: all comes, or seems to come, immediately from nature. Each object and circumstance exists in his mind, as it would have existed in reality; each several train of thought and feeling goes on of itself, without confusion or effort. In the world of his imagination, everything has a life, a place, and being of its own!

:

Chaucer's characters are sufficiently distinct from one another, but they are too little varied in themselves, too much like identical propositions. They are consistent, but uniform; we get no new idea of them from first to last; they are not placed in different lights, nor are their subordinate traits brought out in new situations; they are like portraits or physiognomical studies, with the distinguishing features marked with inconceivable truth and precision, but that preserve the same unaltered air and attitude. Shakespeare's are historical figures, equally true and correct, but put into action, where every nerve and muscle is displayed in the struggle with others, with all the effect of collision and contrast, with every variety of light and shade. Chaucer's characters are narrative, Shakespeare's dramatic, Milton's epic. That is, Chaucer told only as much of his story as he pleased, as was required for a particular purpose. He answered for his characters himself. In Shakespeare they are introduced upon the stage, are liable to be asked all sorts of questions, and are forced to answer for themselves. Chaucer we perceive a fixed essence of character. In Shakespeare there is a continual composition and decomposition of its elements, a fermentation of every particle in the whole mass, by its alternate affinity or antipathy to other principles which are brought in contact with it. Till the experiment is tried, we do not know the result, the turn which the character will take in its new circumstances. Milton took only a few simple principles of character, and raised them to the utmost conceivable grandeur, and refined them from every base alloy. His imagination, nigh sphered in Heaven,' claimed kindred only with what he saw from

In

that height, and could raise to the same elevation with itself. He sat retired and kept his state alone, 'playing with wisdom;' while Shakespeare mingled with the crowd, and played the host, to make society the sweeter welcome.' (From Lectures on the English Poets.)

Pope.

He

The question whether Pope was a poet has hardly yet been settled, and is hardly worth settling; for if he was not a great poet, he must have been a great prosewriter-that is, he was a great writer of some sort. was a man of exquisite faculties, and of the most refined taste; and as he chose verse (the most obvious distinction of poetry) as the vehicle to express his ideas, he has generally passed for a poet, and a good one. If, indeed, by a great poet we mean one who gives the utmost grandeur to our conceptions of nature, or the utmost force to the passions of the heart, Pope was not in this sense a great poet; for the bent, the characteristic power of his mind, lay the clean contrary way; namely, in representing things as they appear to the indifferent observer, stripped of prejudice and passion, as in his Critical Essays; or in representing them in the most contemptible and insignificant point of view, as in his Satires; or in clothing the little with mock-dignity, as in his poems of Fancy; or in adorning the trivial incidents and familiar relations of life with the utmost elegance of expression and all the flattering illusions of friendship or self-love, as in his Epistles. He was not, then, distinguished as a poet of lofty enthusiasm, of strong imagination, with a passionate sense of the beauties of nature, or a deep insight into the workings of the heart; but he was a wit and a critic, a man of sense, of observation, and the world, with a keen relish for the elegances of art, or of nature when embellished by art, a quick tact for propriety of thought and manners as established by the forms and customs of society, a refined sympathy with the sentiments and habitudes of human life, as he felt them within the little circle of his family and friends. He was, in a word, the poet, not of nature, but of art; and the distinction between the two, as well as I can make it out, is this-The poet of nature is one who, from the elements of beauty, of power, and of passion in his own breast, sympathises with whatever is beautiful and grand and impassioned in nature, in its simple majesty, in its immediate appeal to the senses, to the thoughts and hearts of all men; so that the poet of nature, by the truth and depth and harmony of his mind, may be said to hold communion with the very soul of nature; to be identified with and to foreknow and to record the feelings of all men at all times and places, as they are liable to the same impressions; and to exert the same power over the minds of his readers that nature does. He sees things in their eternal beauty, for he sees them as they are; he feels them in their universal interest, for he feels them as they affect the first principles of his and our common nature. Such was Homer, such was Shakespeare, whose works will last as long as nature, because they are a copy of the indestructible forms and everlasting impulses of nature, welling out from the bosom as from a perennial spring, or stamped upon the senses by the hand of their maker. The power of the imagination in them is the representative power of all nature. It has its centre in the human soul, and makes the circuit of the universe.

Pope was not assuredly a poet of this class, or in the

first rank of it. He saw nature only dressed by art; he judged of beauty by fashion; he sought for truth in the opinions of the world; he judged of the feelings of others by his own. The capacious soul of Shakespeare had an intuitive and mighty sympathy with whatever could enter into the heart of man in all possible circumstances: Pope had an exact knowledge of all that he himself loved or hated, wished or wanted. Milton has winged his daring flight from heaven to earth, through Chaos and old Night. Pope's Muse never wandered with safety but from his library to his grotto, or from his grotto into his library back again. His mind dwelt with greater pleasure on his own garden than on the garden of Eden; he could describe the faultless whole-length mirror that reflected his own person, better than the smooth surface of the lake that reflects the face of heaven-a piece of cut glass or a pair of paste buckles with more brilliance and effect than a thousand dew-drops glittering in the sun. He would be more delighted with a patent lamp than with the pale reflex of Cynthia's brow,' that fills the skies with its soft silent lustre, that trembles through the cottage window, and cheers the watchful mariner on the lonely wave. In short, he was the poet of personality and of polished life. That which was nearest to him was the greatest; the fashion of the day bore sway in his mind over the immutable laws of nature. ferred the artificial to the natural in external objects, because he had a stronger fellow-feeling with the selflove of the maker or proprietor of a gewgaw than admiration of that which was interesting to all mankind. He preferred the artificial to the natural in passion, because the involuntary and uncalculating impulses of the one hurried him away with a force and vehemence with which he could not grapple; while he could trifle with the conventional and superficial modifications of mere sentiment at will, laugh at or admire, put them on or off like a masquerade-dress, make much or little of them, indulge them for a longer or a shorter time, as he pleased; and because, while they amused his fancy and exercised his ingenuity, they never once disturbed his vanity, his levity, or indifference. His mind was the antithesis of strength and grandeur; its power was the power of indifference. He had none of the enthusiasm of poetry; he was in poetry what the sceptic is in religion. (From Lectures on the English Poets.)

Scott and Shakespeare.

He pre

No one admires or delights in the Scotch Novels more than I do; but at the same time when I hear it asserted that his mind is of the same class with Shakespeare's, or that he imitates nature in the same way, I confess I cannot assent to it. No two things appear to me more different. Sir Walter is an imitator of nature and nothing more; but I think Shakespeare is infinitely more than this. The creative principle is everywhere restless and redundant in Shakespeare, both as it relates to the inven tion of feeling and imagery; in the author of Waverley it lies for the most part dormant, sluggish, and unused. Sir Walter's mind is full of information, but the 'o'er-informing power' is not there. Shakespeare's spirit, like fire, shines through him: Sir Walter's, like a stream, reflects surrounding objects. It is true, he has shifted the scene from Scotland into England and France, and the manners and characters are strikingly English and French; but this does not prove that they are not local, and that they are not borrowed, as well as the scenery and costume,

from comparatively obvious and mechanical sources. Nobody from reading Shakespeare would know (except from the Dramatis Persona) that Lear was an English king. He is merely a king and a father. The ground is common but what a well of tears has he dug out of it! The tradition is nothing, or a foolish one. There are no data in history to go upon; no advantage is taken of costume, no acquaintance with geography or architecture or dialect is necessary: but there is an old tradition, human nature-an old temple, the human mind—and Shakespeare walks into it and looks about him with a lordly eye, and seizes on the sacred spoils as his own. The story is a thousand or two years old, and yet the tragedy has no smack of antiquarianism in it. I should like very well to see Sir Walter giving us a tragedy of this kind, a huge globose' of sorrow, swinging round in midair, independent of time, place, and circumstance, sustained by its own weight and motion, and not propped up by the levers of custom, or patched up with quaint, oldfashioned dresses, or set off by grotesque backgrounds or rusty armour, but in which the mere paraphernalia and accessories were left out of the question, and nothing but the soul of passion and the pith of imagination was to be found. A dukedom to a beggarly denier,' he would make nothing of it. Does this prove he has done nothing, or that he has not done the greatest things? No, but that he is not like Shakespeare. For instance, when Lear says, 'The little dogs and all, Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart, see they bark at me!' there is no old Chronicle of the line of Brute, no black-letter broadside, no tattered ballad, no vague rumour, in which this exclamation is registered; there is nothing romantic, quaint, mysterious in the objects introduced: the illustration is borrowed from the commonest and most casual images in nature, and yet it is this very circumstance that lends its extreme force to the expression of his grief by showing that even the lowest things in creation and the last you would think of had in his imagination turned against him. All nature was, as he supposed, in a conspiracy against him, and the most trivial and insignificant creatures concerned in it were the most striking proofs of its malignity and extent. It is the depth of passion, however, or of the poet's sympathy with it, that distinguishes this character of torturing familiarity in them, invests them with corresponding importance, and suggests them by the force of contrast. It is not that certain images are surcharged with a prescriptive influence over the imagination from known and existing prejudices, so that to approach or even mention them is sure to excite a pleasing awe and horror in the mind (the effect in this case is mostly mechanical)—the whole sublimity of the passage is from the weight of passion thrown into it, and this is the poet's own doing. This is not trick, but genius. Meg Merrilies on her death-bed says, 'Lay my head to the east!' Nothing can be finer or more thrilling than this in its way; but the author has little to do with it. It is an Oriental superstition; it is a proverbial expression; it is part of the gibberish (sublime though it be) of her gipsy clan!-'Nothing but his unkind daughters could have brought him to this pass.' This is not a cant phrase, nor the fragment of an old legend, nor a mysterious spell, nor the butt-end of a wizard's denunciation. It is the mere natural ebullition of passion, urged nearly to madness, and that will admit no other cause of dire misfortune but its own, which swallows up all other griefs. The force of despair hurries the imagination over

the boundary of fact and common-sense, and renders the transition sublime; but there is no precedent or authority for it, except in the general nature of the human mind. (From Essay on 'Scott, Racine, and Shakespear' in The Plain Speaker; elsewhere Hazlitt spells generally 'Shakspeare.')

Personal Characteristics.

What sometimes surprises me in looking back to the past is, with the exception already stated, to find myself so little changed in the time. The same images and trains of thought stick by me: I have the same tastes, likings, sentiments, and wishes that I had then. One great ground of confidence and support has, indeed, been struck from under my feet; but I have made it up to myself by proportionable pertinacity of opinion. The success of the great cause to which I had vowed myself was to me more than all the world: I had a strength in its strength, a resource which I knew not of, till it failed me for the second time.

'Fall'n was Glenartny's stately tree!

Oh! ne'er to see Lord Ronald more!'

It was not till I saw the axe laid to the root that I found the full extent of what I had to lose and suffer. But my conviction of the right was only established by the triumph of the wrong; and my earliest hopes will be my last regrets. One source of this unbendingness (which some may call obstinacy) is that, though living much alone, I have never worshipped the Echo. I see plainly enough that black is not white, that the grass is green, that kings are not their subjects; and, in such self-evident cases, do not think it necessary to collate my opinions with the received prejudices. In subtler questions, and matters that admit of doubt, as I do not impose my opinion on others without a reason, so I will not give up mine to them without a better reason; and a person calling me names, or giving himself airs of authority, does not convince me of his having taken more pains to find out the truth than have, but the contrary. . . . Both from disposition and habit, I can assume nothing in word, look, or manner. I cannot steal a march upon public opinion in any way. My standing upright, speaking loud, entering a room gracefully, proves nothing; therefore I neglect these ordinary means of recommending myself to the good graces and admiration of strangers (and, as it appears, even of philosophers and friends). Why? Because I have other resources, or, at least, am absorbed in other studies and pursuits. Suppose this absorption to be extreme, and even morbid—that I have brooded over an idea till it has become a kind of substance in my brain, that I have reasons for a thing which I have found out with much labour and pains, and to which I can scarcely do justice without the utmost violence of exertion (and that only to a few persons)is this a reason for my playing off my out-of-the-way notions in all companies, wearing a prim and self-complacent air, as if I were the admired of all observers'? or is it not rather an argument (together with a want of animal spirits) why I should retire into myself, and perhaps acquire a nervous and uneasy look, from a consciousness of the disproportion between the interest and conviction I feel on certain subjects, and my ability to communicate what weighs upon my own mind to others? If my ideas, which I do not avouch, but suppose, lie below the surface, why am I to be always

attempting to dazzle superficial people with them, or smiling, delighted, at my own want of success?

In matters of taste and feeling, one proof that my conclusions have not been quite shallow or hasty is the circumstance of their having been lasting. I have the same favourite books, pictures, passages, that I ever had : I may therefore presume that they will last me my lifenay, I may indulge a hope that my thoughts will survive me. This continuity of impression is the only thing on which I pride myself. Even Lamb, whose relish of certain things is as keen and earnest as possible, takes a surfeit of admiration, and I should be afraid to ask about his select authors or particular friends after a lapse of ten years. As to myself, any one knows where to have me. What I have once made up my mind to, I abide by to the end of the chapter. One cause of my independence of opinion is, I believe, the liberty I give to others, or the very diffidence and distrust of making converts. I should be an excellent man on a jury. I might say little, but should starve the other eleven cbstinate fellows' out.

(From A Farewell to Essay-Writing' in Winterslow.)

On Judging of Pictures.

I deny in toto and at once the exclusive right and power of painters to judge of pictures. What is a picture made for? To convey certain ideas to the mind of a painter-that is, of one man in ten thousand? No, but to make them apparent to the eye and mind of all. If a picture be admired by none but painters, I think it is a strong presumption that the picture is bad. A painter is no more a judge, I suppose, than another man of how people feel and look under certain passions and events. Everybody sees as well as he whether certain figures on the canvas are like such a man, or like a cow, a tree, a bridge, or a windmill. All that the painter can do more than the lay spectator is to tell why and how the merits and defects of a picture are produced. I see that such a figure is ungraceful, and out of nature-he shows me that the drawing is faulty, or the foreshortening incorrect. He then points out to me whence the blemish arises; but he is not a bit more aware of the existence of the blemish than I am. In Hogarth's Frontispiece' I see that the whole business is absurd, for a man on a hill two miles off could not light his pipe at a candle held out of a window close to me; he tells me that is from a want of perspective-that is, of certain rules by which certain effects are obtained. He shows me why the picture is bad, but I am just as well capable of saying 'the picture is bad' as he is. To take a coarse illustration, but one most exactly apposite: I can tell whether a made dish be good or bad-whether its taste be pleasant er disagreeable; it is dressed for the palate of uninitiated people, and not alone for the disciples of Dr Kitchener and Mr Ude. But it needs a cook to tell one why it is bad; that there is a grain too much of this, or a drop too much of t'other; that it has been boiled rather too much, or stewed rather too little. These things, the wherefores, as Squire Western would say, I require an artist to tell me; but the point in debate-the worth or the bad quality of the painting or pottage-I am as well able to decide upon as any who ever brandished a pallet or a pan, a brush or a skimming-ladle.

To go into the higher branches of the art-the poetry of painting—I deny still more peremptorily the exclusiveness of the initiated. It might as well be said that none

but those who could write a play have any right to sit on the third row in the pit, on the first night of a new tragedy; nay, there is more plausibility in the one than the other. No man can judge of poetry without possessing in some measure a poetical mind; it need not be of that degree necessary to create, but it must be equal to taste and to analyse. Now, in painting there is a directly mechanical power required to render those imaginations, to the judging of which the mind may be perfectly competent. I may know what is a just or a beautiful representation of love, anger, madness, despair, without being able to draw a straight line; and I do not see how that faculty adds to the capability of so judging. A very great proportion of painting is mechanical. The higher kinds of painting need first a poet's mind to conceive; very well, but then they need a draughtsman's hand to execute. Now, he who possesses the mind alone is fully able to judge of what is produced, even though he is by no means endowed with the mechanical power of producing it himself. I am far from saying that any one is capable of duly judging pictures of the higher class. It requires a mind capable of estimating the noble, or touching, or terrible, or sublime subjects which they present; but there is no sort of necessity that we should be able to put them upon the canvas ourselves.

(From Hunt's Literary Examiner, 1823, No. 5, reprinted in Essays on the Fine Arts, 1873.) Works, edited by A. R. Waller and A. Glover, with Introduction by W. E. Henley (12 vols. 1902, &c.); Literary Remains of the late William Hazlitt, with a Notice of his Life by his Son, and Thoughts on his Genius and Writings, by E. L. Bulwer and Talfourd (2 vols. 1836); Memoirs of William Haslitt, by W. Carew Hazlitt (1867); Four Generations of a Literary Family, by W. Carew Hazlitt (2 vols. 1897); William Hazlitt, Essayist and Critic, with a Memoir by Alexander Ireland (1889); Hazlitt, Essays on Poetry, edited, with Introduction, by D. Nichol Smith (1901); William Hazlitt, by Augustine Birrell, English Men of Letters' series (1902).

D. NICHOL SMITH.

Francis Jeffrey, son of George Jeffrey, a depute-clerk in the Court of Session, was born at Edinburgh on 23rd October 1773. There he lived almost continuously from his earliest school-days in the abyss of Bailie Fyfe's Close' to his latter years as a Lord of Session and Duke of Craigcrook.' At the age of fourteen he passed from the High School of Edinburgh to the University of Glasgow, where he remained till 1789. During the next two years, which he spent in his native city and at an uncle's place in Stirlingshire, he appears to have devoted himself to the composition of letters and essays on various critical and ethical subjects, as well as a Sketch of My Own Character. That he wrote no less than thirty-one papers between November 1789 and March 1790 is a fact of some interest in the biography of the later editor. Yet they are of indifferent promise, and history will prefer to signalise these aimless years by the occasion on which he assisted in carrying to bed the greatest of biographers in a state of the greatest intoxication. He proceeded to Oxford in September 1791, but he found the life there so uncongenial that he returned in July of the next year. The men at Queen's were 'pedants, coxcombs, and strangers:' so ill at ease was he that he could say, 'This place has no latent charms,' and