Chapter V: Part 5

Langton thoughtfully effaced the lines. “It was kind of you to take it off,” said the burly Doctor, with a sigh; and then (for how could he but recall the contrast of temperament in the two, as well as the affectionate context of Horace?), “not unkind in him to have put it on.” The collection of thirty thousand glorious books “_pernobilis Angli T. Beauclerk_” was sold at auction. The advertisement alone is royal reading. There is much amiable witness to the circumstance that Beauclerk was not only an admirer but a buyer of his friends’ works. From some kind busybody who attended the twenty-ninth day of the sale, and pencilled his observations upon the margins of the catalogue now in the British Museum, we learn that Goldsmith’s _History of the Earth and Animated Nature_ (nothing less!), which was issued, with cuts, in the year he died, was knocked down to the vulgar for two and threepence. The shelves, naturally, were stocked with Johnsons. Things dear to the bibliophile were there: innumerable first editions, black-letter, mediæval manuscript, Elzevirs, priceless English and Italian classics, gathered with real feeling and pride; but the most vivid personal interest belonged to the unpretending Lot 3444, otherwise known to fame as _The Rambler_, printed at Edinburgh in 1751; for that was the young Beauclerk’s own copy, carried with him to Oxford, and with a fragrance, as of a last century garden, of the first hearty friendship of boys. One cannot help wishing that a sentimental fate left it in Langton’s own hands.

Lady Beauclerk, Topham’s mother, had died in 1766; and he asked to be buried beside her, or at her feet, in the old chapel of Garston, near Liverpool: “an instance of tenderness,” said Johnson, “which I should hardly have expected.” There, in the place of his choice, he rests, without an epitaph.

After this the Doctor consoled himself more than ever with Bennet Langton, and with the atmosphere of love and reverence which surrounded him in Langton’s house. He had been of old the most desired of all guests at the family seat in Lincolnshire. “Langton, sir!” as he liked to announce, “had a grant of warren from Henry II.; and Cardinal Stephen Langton, of King John’s reign, was of this family.” Peregrine Langton, Bennet’s uncle, was a man of simple and benevolent habits, who brought economy to a science, without niggardliness, and whom Johnson declared to be one of those he clung to at once, both by instinct and reason; Bennet’s father, learned, good, and unaffected, the prototype of his learned, good, and unaffected son, was, however, a more diverting character. He had sincerest esteem for Johnson, but looked askance on him for his liberal views, and suspected him, indeed, of being a Papist in secret! He once offered the Doctor a living of some value in the neighborhood, with the suggestion that he should qualify himself for Orders: a chance gravely refused. Of this exemplary but rather archaic squire, Johnson, a dissector of everything he loved, said: “Sir! he is so exuberant a talker in public meetings that the gentlemen of his county are afraid of him. No business can be done for his declamation.” In his behalf, too, Johnson produced one of his most astounding words; for having understood that both Mr. and Mrs. Langton were averse to having their portraits taken, he observed aloud that “a superstitious reluctance to sit for one’s picture is among the anfractuosities of the human mind.”

Bennet Langton married, on the 24th of May, 1770, Mary Lloyd, daughter of the Countess of Haddington, and widow of John, the eighth Earl of Rothes, the stern soldier in laced waistcoat and breastplate beneath, painted by Sir Joshua. It was a common saying at the time that everybody was welcome to a Countess Dowager of Rothes; for it did so happen that three ladies bearing that title were all remarried within a few years. Lady Rothes, although a native of Suffolk, had acquired from long residence in Scotland the accent of that country, which Dr. Johnson bore with magnanimously, on the consideration that it was not indigenous. She had a handsome presence, full of easy dignity, and a naturalness marked enough in the heyday of Georgian affectation. With a vivacity very different from Lady Di Beauclerk’s, she kept herself the spring and centre of Langton’s tranquil domestic circle: a more womanly woman historiographers cannot find. His own charm of character, after his marriage, slipped more and more into the underground channels of home-life, and so coursed on beneficently in silence. Their children were no fewer than nine,[55] “not a plain face nor faulty person among them:” the goddess daughters six feet in height, and the three sons so like their Maypole father that they were able once to amuse the Parisians by raising their arms to let a crowd pass. Langton was wont to repeat with some glee certain jests about his height, and Dr. Johnson’s nickname of “Lanky” he took ever with excellent grace; and when Garrick had leaped upon a chair to shake hands with him, in old days, he had knelt, at parting, to shake hands with Garrick. But the King’s awkward digs at his “long legs” he found terribly distasteful, nor was he thereby disposed to agree with the Doctor’s enthusiastic proclamation, after the famous interview of 1767, that George III. was “as fine a gentleman as Charles II.”

It was his cherished plan to educate his boys and girls at home, and to give them a thorough acquaintance with the learned languages. No social engagements were to stand in the way of this prime exigency. He was in great haste to turn his young brood into Masters and Mistresses of Arts. Johnson complained to Miss Burney, as they were both taking tea at Mrs. Thrale’s, that nothing would serve Langton but to stand them up before company, and get them to repeat a fable or the Hebrew alphabet, supplying every other word himself, and blushing with pride at the vicarious learning of his infants. But another of the tedious royal jokes, “How does Education go on?” actually lessened his devotion to his self-set task, and worried him like the water-drop in the story, which fell forever on a criminal’s head until it had drilled his brain. Again, both he and his wife, even after they had moved into the retirement of Great George Street, Westminster, in pursuance of their design, were far too agreeable and too accessible to be spared the incursions of society. In a word, Minerva found her seat shaken, and her altar-fires not very well tended, and therefore withdrew. Langton impressed one axiom on his young scholars which they never forgot: “Next best to knowing is to be sensible that you do not know.” An entirely superfluous waif of a baby was once left at the doors of this same many-childrened house, to be fed, clothed, and petted by Mr. Bennet Langton and Lady Rothes, without protest. Dr. Johnson, who made friends with all children, was especially attached to their third girl, his god-daughter, whom he called “pretty Mrs. Jane,” and “my own little Jenny.” The very last year of his life her “most humble servant” sent her a loving letter, extant yet, and written purposely in a large round hand as clear as print.

“Langton’s children are very pretty,” Johnson wrote to Boswell in 1777, “and his lady loses her Scotch.” But again, during the same year, condescendingly: “I dined lately with poor dear Langton. I do not think he goes on well. His table is rather coarse, and he has his children too much about him.” Boswell takes occasion, in reproducing this censure, to reprehend the custom of introducing the children after dinner: a parental indulgence to which he, at least, was not addicted. The Doctor gave him a mild nudge on the subject in remarking later: “I left Langton in London. He has been down with the militia, and is again quiet at home, talking to his little people, as I suppose you do sometimes.” While Langton was in camp on Warley Common, in command of the Lincolnshire troops, Johnson spent with him five delightful days, admiring his tall captain’s blossoming energies, and poking about curiously among the tents. Langton had fallen, little by little, into a confirmed extravagance, so that the moral of Uncle Peregrine’s sagacious living bade fair to be lost upon him. Boswell had a quarrel with Johnson on the subject of Langton’s expenditure, during the course of which, according to his own report, the Laird of Auchinleck suffered a “horrible shock” by being told that the best way to drive Langton out of his costly house would be to put him (Boswell) into it. The Doctor was truly concerned, nevertheless, about his engaging spendthrift; up to the very end, he would implore him to keep account-books, even if he had to omit his Aristophanes. “He complains of the ill effects of habit,” grumbled the great moralizer, “and he rests content upon a confessed indolence. He told his father himself that he had ‘no turn for economy!’ but a thief might as well plead that he had no turn for honesty.” Such were the hard hits sacred to those Dr. Johnson most esteemed. It transpires from his will that, by way of discouragement, he had lent Langton £750.[56]

In the winter of 1785, Langton came from the country, and took lodgings in Fleet Street, in order to sit beside Johnson as he lay dying, and hold his hand. Nor was he alone in his pious offices: the Hooles, Mr. Sestre, and several others were there, to keep constant vigil. Miss Burney met Langton in the passage December 11th, two days before the end: “He could not,” she wrote in her journal, “look at me, nor I at him.” But through the foggy and restless nights when Johnson tried to cheer himself, like More and Master William Lilly, by translating into Latin some epigrams from the _Anthologia_, the true Grecian beside him must have been his chief comfort. One can picture the old eyes turning to him for sympathy, perhaps with that same murmured “Lanky!” on awaking, which Boswell laughed to hear from him one merry Hebridean morning, twelve years before. The last summons did not come in Langton’s presence. Hurrying over to Bolt Court at eight of the fatal evening, he was told that all was over three-quarters of an hour ago. That large soul had gone away, as Leigh Hunt so beautifully said of Coleridge, “to an infinitude hardly wider than his thoughts.” Then Langton, who was wont to shape his words with grace and ease, went up-stairs, and tried to pen a letter to Boswell, which is more touching than tears: “I am now sitting in the room where his venerable remains exhibit a spectacle, the interesting solemnity of which, difficult as it would be in any sort to find terms to express, so to you, my dear sir, whose sensations will paint it so strongly, it would be of all men the most superfluous to”—and there, hopelessly choked and confused, it broke off.

Langton bore Johnson’s pall; and he succeeded him as Professor of Ancient Literature in the Royal Academy, as Gibbon had replaced Goldsmith in the chair of Ancient History. He survived many years, the delight of his company to the last. He, like others, was given in his later years to detailing anecdotes of his great friend, with an approximation to that friend’s manner. One lady critic, at least, thought that these explosive imitations did not become “his own serious and respectable character.” On December 18, 1801, in Anspach Place, Southampton, a venerable nook “between the walls and the sea,” when Wordsworth, Scott, and Coleridge were yet in their unheralded prime, when Charles Lamb was twenty-six, Byron a dreaming boy on the Cotswold hills, and Keats and Shelley little fair-eyed children, gentle Bennet Langton, known to none of these, and somewhat forgotten as a loiterer from the march of a glorious yesterday, slipped out of life. “I am persuaded,” wrote one who knew him well, “that all his inactivity, all the repugnance he showed to putting on the harness of this world’s toil, arose from the spirituality of his frame of mind . . . I believe his mind was in Heaven, wheresoever he corporeally existed.” He was laid under the chancel of ancient St. Michael’s at Southampton, with Johnson’s fond benison, “Be my soul with Langton’s!” inscribed on the marble tablet above him.[57] The Rev. John Wooll of Midhurst, Joseph Warton’s editor, was one of the few present at the funeral ceremony, and he leaves us to infer that it had a rather neglectful privacy, not, indeed, out of keeping with the “godly, righteous, and sober life” it closed. Langton’s will, drawn up in the June of 1800, and preserved in Somerset House, devised to the sole executrix, his “dear wife,” who outlived him by nearly twenty years, his real and personal estate, his books, his wines, his prints, his horses, and, as a gift particularly pretty, his right of navigation in the river Wey. George Langton was separately provided for, but there were some £8000 for the eight younger children. The document is crowded with technical details, and very long; and the manifest inference, on the whole, is that the dear squire’s affairs were in a prodigious tangle. There is no wish expressed concerning his burial, and, what is more curious, there are no Christian formulas for the committal of the _animula vagula blandula_: a lack perhaps not to be wondered at in Beauclerk’s concise testament, but somewhat notable in the case of a person who certainly had a soul.

So went Beauclerk first of the three, Langton last, with the good ghost still between them, as he in his homespun, they in their flowered velvet, had walked many a year together on this earth. The old companionship had undergone some sorry changes ere it fell utterly to dust and ashes. Its happy prime had been in the Oxford “Longs,” when the Doctor humored his lads, and tented under their roofs, plucking flowers at one house, and romping with dogs at the other; or in 1764, at the starting of the immortal Club, when the two of its founders, who had no valid or pretended claim to celebrity, perched on the sills like useful genii, with a mission to overrule sluggish melancholy, and renew the sparkle in abstracted eyes. How supereminently they did what they chose to do, and what vagaries they roused out of Johnson’s profound hypochondria! Did not Topham Beauclerk’s mother once have to reprove that august author for a suggestion to seize some pleasure-grounds which they were passing in a carriage? “Putting such things into young people’s heads!” said she. Where could the innocent Beauclerk’s elbow have been at that moment, contrary to the canons of polite society, but in the innocent Langton’s ribs? The gray reprobate, so censured, explained to Boswell: “Lady Beauclerk has no notion of a joke, sir! She came late into life, and has a mighty unpliable understanding.” Who can forget the Doctor’s visit to Beauclerk at Windsor, when, falling into the clutches of that gamesome and ungodly youth, he was beguiled from church-going of a fine Sunday morning, and strolled about outside, talking and laughing during sermon-time, and finally spread himself at length on a mossy tomb, only to be told, with a giggle and a pleased rub of the hands, that he was as bad as Hogarth’s Idle Apprentice? Or the other visit in the north, when, after ceremoniously relieving his pockets of keys, knife, pencil, and purse, Samuel Johnson, LL.D., deliberately rolled down a hill, and landed, betumbled out of all recognition, at the bottom? Langton had tried to dissuade him, for the incline was very steep, and the candidate scarcely of the requisite suppleness. “Oh, but I haven’t had a roll for such a long time!” pleaded his unanswerable big guest.

Best of all, we have the history of that memorable morning when Beauclerk and Langton, having supped together at a city tavern, roused Johnson at three o’clock at his Inner Temple Lane Chambers, and brought him to the door, fearful but aggressive, in his shirt and his little dark wig, and his slippers down at the heels, armed with a poker. “What! and is it YOU? Faith, I’ll have a frisk with you, ye young dogs!” We have visions of the Covent Garden inn, and the great brimming bowl, with Lord Lansdowne’s drinking-song for grace; the hucksters and fruiterers staring at the strange central figure, always sure to gather a mob, even during the moment he would stand by a lady’s coach-door in Fleet Street; the merry boat going its way by oar to Billingsgate, its mad crew bantering the watermen on the river; and two of the roisterers (equally wild, despite a little chronological disparity of thirty years or so) scolding the other for hastening off, on an afternoon appointment, “to dine with wretched unidea’d girls!” What golden vagabondism! “I heard of your frolic t’other night; you’ll be in _The Chronicle_! . . . I shall have my old friend to bail out of the round-house!” said Garrick. “As for Garrick, sirs,” tittered the pious Johnson aside to his accomplices, “he dare not do such a thing. His wife would not let him!” All this mirth and whim sweetened the Doctor’s heavy life. He had other intimates, other disciples. But these were Gay Heart and Gentle Heart, who drove his own blue-devils away with their idolatrous devotion, and whose bearing towards him stands ever as the best possible corroboration of his great and warm nature. With him and for him, they so fill the air of the time that to whomsoever has but thought of them that hour, London must seem lonely without their idyllic figures.

—“Our day is gone:
Clouds, dews, and dangers come; our deeds are done.”

There are gods as good for the after-years; but Odin is down, and his pair of unreturning birds have flown west and east.

FOOTNOTES:

[45] A popular eighteenth-century beverage, composed of wine, orange, and sugar.

[46] Although Langton is recorded on his college books as having given the usual £10 for plate, and also as having paid his caution money in 1757, his name is not down upon the matriculation lists, possibly because he failed to appear at the moment the entries were being made. In what must have been his destined space upon one of the pages, Dr. Ingram made this note: “Q. Num Bennet Langton hic inserendus?”

[47] A boyish fashion of self-entertainment afterwards in great favor with Shelley.

[48] It is a pleasant thing to remember that it was Langton, always an appreciator of Goldsmith’s lovable genius, who suggested “Auburn” as the name for his _Deserted Village_. There is a hamlet called Auborne in Lincolnshire.

[49] Langton’s sisters are generally spoken of as three in number. But Burke’s _History of the Landed Gentry_ mentions but two, Diana and Juliet. There was a younger brother, Ferne, who died in boyhood, and the floral name, not unlike a girl’s, may have been responsible for the confusion.

[50] The fruiterer.

[51] The bookseller’s.

[52] Rochester, in his immortal epigram, had said the same of King Charles II.

[53] This neat descriptive stroke has been attributed also to Richard Paget.

[54] The register of St. George’s betrays a little eager blunder of Lady Di’s which is amusing. When the officiating curate asked her to sign, she wrote “Diana Beauclerk,” and was obliged to cross out the signature—one knows with what a smile and a flush!—and substitute the “Diana Spencer” which stands beside it.

[55] Miss Hawkins says “ten,” and may have had the extra adopted child in mind.

[56] It is a pity he did not live to read the jolly _American Ballad of Bon Gaultier_, which seems to have a sort of muddled clairvoyant knowledge of this transaction:

“Every day the huge Cawana Lifted up its monstrous jaws; And it swallowed Langton Bennet,(!) And digested Rufus Dawes.

“Riled, I ween, was Philip Slingsby Their untimely deaths to hear; For one author owed him money,(!) And the other loved him dear.”

[57] The church has since been “restored,” and the fine epitaph is now (1890) “skyed” on the south wall of the nave.

V

WILLIAM HAZLITT

1778-1830

THE titles of William Hazlitt’s first books bear witness to the ethic spirit in which he began life. From his beloved father, an Irish dissenting minister, he inherited his unworldliness, his obstinacy, his love of inexpedient truth, and his interest in the emancipation and well-being of his fellow-creatures. Bred in an air of seriousness and integrity, the child of twelve announced by post that he had spent “a very agreeable day” reading one hundred and sixty pages of Priestley, and hearing two good sermons. A year later he appeared, under a Greek signature, in _The Shrewsbury Chronicle_, protesting against sectarian injustice; an infant herald in the great modern movement towards fair play. The roll of the portentous periods must have made his father weep for pride and diversion. William’s young head was full of moral philosophy and jurisprudence, and he had what is the top of luxury for one of his temperament: perfect license of mental growth. Alone with his parents (one of whom was always a student and a recluse), and for the most part without the school-fellows who are likely to adjust the perilous effects of books, he became choked with theories, and thought more of the needful repeal of the Test Act than of his breakfast. He found his way at fourteen into the Unitarian College at Hackney, but eventually broke from his traces, saving his fatherland from the spectacle of a unique theologian. During the year 1795 he saw the pictures at Burleigh House, and began to live. Desultory but deep study, at home and near home, took up the time before his first leisurely choice of a profession. His lonely broodings, his early love for Miss Railton, his four enthusiastic months at the Louvre, his silent friendship with Wordsworth and with Coleridge; the country walks, the pages and prints, the glad tears of his youth,—these were the fantastic tutors which formed him; nor had he ever much respect for any other kind of training. The lesson he prized most was the lesson straight from life and nature. He comments, tartly enough, on the sophism that observation in idleness, or the growth of bodily skill and social address, or the search for the secret of honorable power over people, is not in any wise to be accounted as learning. Montaigne, who was in Hazlitt’s ancestral line, was of this mind: “_Ce qu’on sçait droictement, on en dispose sans regarder au patron, sans tourner les yeulx vers son livre._” Hazlitt insists, too, that learned men are but “the cisterns, not the fountain-heads, of knowledge.” He hated the schoolmaster, and has said as witty things of him as Mr. Oscar Wilde. Yet his little portrait-study of the mere book-worm, in _The Conversation of Authors_, has a never-to-be-forgotten sweetness. His mental nurture was serviceable; it was of his own choosing; it fitted him for the work he had to do. Like Marcus Aurelius, he congratulated himself that he did not squander his youth “chopping logic and scouring the heavens.” Hazlitt once entered upon an _Inquiry whether the Fine Arts are promoted by Academies_; the answer, from him, is readily anticipated.

“If arts and schools reply,”

he might have added,—and it is a wonder that he did not,

“Give arts and schools the lie!”

Mr. Matthew Arnold made a famous essay on the same topic, and some readers recollect distinctly that his verdict, for England, would be in the affirmative, whereas it was no such matter. Now, no man can conceive of Hazlitt presenting both sides of a case so impartially as to be misunderstood, especially upon so vital a subject. He pastured, he was not trained; and therefore he would have you and your children’s children scoff at universities. Indeed, though the boy’s lack of discipline told on him all through life, his reader regrets nothing else which a university could have given him, except, perhaps, milder manners. Hazlitt was perfectly aware that he had too little general knowledge; but general knowledge he did not consider so good a tool for his self-set task in life as a persistent, passionate study of one or two subjects. Again, he is pleased to conjecture, with bluntness, that if he had learned more he would have thought less. (Perhaps he was the friend cited by Elia, who gave up reading to improve his originality! He was certainly useful to Elia in delicate and curious ways: a whole vein of rich eccentricity ready for that sweet philosopher’s working.) Hear him pronouncing upon himself at the very end: “I have, then, given proof of some talent and more honesty; if there is haste and want of method, there is no common-place, nor a line that licks the dust. If I do not appear to more advantage, I at least appear such as I am.” Divorce that remark and the truth of it from Hazlitt, and there is no Hazlitt left. He stood for individualism. He wrote from what was, in the highest degree for his purpose, a full mind, and with that blameless conscious superiority which a full mind must needs feel in this empty world. His whole intellectual stand is taken on the positive and concrete side of things. He has a fine barbaric cocksureness; he dwells not with althoughs and neverthelesses, like Mr. Symonds and Mr. Saintsbury. “I am not one of those,” he says, concerning Edmund Kean’s first appearance in London, “who, when they see the sun breaking from behind a cloud, stop to inquire whether it is the moon.” And he takes enormous interest in his own promulgation, because it is inevitably not only what he thinks, but what he has long thought. He delivers an opinion with the air proper to a host who is master of a vineyard, and can furnish name and date to every flagon he unseals.

None of Hazlitt’s energies went to waste: he earned his soul early, and how proud he was of the possession! Retrospection became his forward horizon. He was all aglow at the thought of that beatific yesterday; in his every mood “the years that are fled knock at the door, and enter.” He struggled no more thereafter, having fixed his beliefs and found his voice. He saw no occasion to change. “As to myself,” he wrote at fifty, referring to Lamb’s well-known “surfeits of admiration” concerning some objects once adored, “as to myself, any one knows where to have me!” He adds: “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. . . . This continuity of impression is the only thing on which I pride myself.” A fine saying in the _Boswell Redivivus_, attributed to Opie, is as clearly expressed elsewhere by Hazlitt’s self: that a man in his lifetime can do but one thing; that there is but one effort and one victory, and all the rest is as machinery in motion. “What I write costs me nothing, but it cost me a great deal twenty years ago. I have added little to my stock since then, and taken little from it.” His sensations, latterly, were “July shoots,” graftings on the old sap. It is his boast in almost his final essay that his tenacious brain holds fast while the planets are turning. He can look at a child’s kite in heaven, to the last, with the eyes of a child: “It pulls at my heart.”

His conservative habit, however, seemed to teach him everything by inference. In 1821, familiar with none of the elder dramatists save Shakespeare, he borrowed their folios, and shut himself up for six weeks at Winterslow Hut on Salisbury Plain. He returned to town steeped in his theme, and with the beautiful and authoritative _Lectures_ written. Appreciation of the great Elizabethans is common enough now; seventy years ago, propagated by Lamb’s _Specimens_, 1808, it was the business only of adventurers and pioneers. Here is a critic indeed who, without a suspicion of audacity, can arise as a stranger to arraign the _Arcadia_, and “shake hands with Signor Orlando Friscobaldo as the oldest acquaintance” he has! The thing, exceptional as it was, proves that William Hazlitt knew his resources. His devoted friend Patmore attributes his “unpremeditated art,” terse, profound, original, and always moving at full speed, to two facts: “first, that he never, by choice, wrote on any topic or question in which he did not, for some reason or other, feel a deep personal interest; and, secondly, because on all questions on which he did so feel, he had thought, meditated, and pondered, in the silence and solitude of his own heart, for years and years before he ever contemplated doing more than thinking of them.” Unlike a distinguished historian, who, according to Horace Walpole, “never understood anything until he had written of it,” Hazlitt brought to his every task a mind violently made up, and a vocation for special pleading which nothing could withstand.

Sure as he is, he means to be nobody’s hired guide: a resolve for which the general reader cannot be too grateful. In wilful and mellow study of what chance threw in his way his strength grew, and his limitations with it. It is small wonder that he hated schoolmasters, and the public which expected of him schoolmaster platitudes. He had a pride of intellect not unlike Rousseau’s, and he seems to have had ever in mind Rousseau’s cardinal declaration that if he were no better than other men, he was at least different from them. Hazlitt defined his own functions with proper haughtiness, in the amusing apology of _Capacity and Genius_. “I was once applied to, in a delicate emergency, to write an article on a difficult subject for an encyclopædia; and was advised to take time, and give it a systematic and scientific form; to avail myself of all the knowledge that was to be obtained upon the subject, and arrange it with clearness and method. I made answer that, as to the first, I _had_ taken time to do all that I ever pretended to do, as I had thought incessantly on different matters for twenty years of my life; that I had no particular knowledge of the subject in question, and no head for arrangement; that the utmost I could do, in such a case, would be, when a systematic and scientific article was prepared, to write marginal notes upon it, to insert a remark or illustration of my own (not to be found in former encyclopædias!) or to suggest a better definition than had been offered in the text.”[58] Such independence nobly became him, and none the less because it kept him poor. But in the course of time, he had to work, and keep on working, under wretched disadvantages. He had spurts of revolt, after long experience of compulsory composition; his darling wish in 1822 (confided to his wife, of all persons) being that he “could marry some woman with a good fortune, that he might not be under the necessity of writing another line!”

There was in him absolutely nothing of the antiquary and the scholar, as the modern world understands those most serviceable gentlemen. He was a “surveyor,” as he said, erroneously, of Bacon. He was continuously drawn into the byway, and ever in search of the accidental, the occult; he lusted, like Sir Thomas Browne, to find the great meanings of minor things. The “pompous big-wigs” of his day, as Thackeray called them, hated his informality, his boldly novel methods, his vivacity and enthusiasm. He had, within proscribed bounds, an exquisite and affectionate curiosity, like that of the Renaissance. “The invention of a fable is to me the most enviable exertion of human genius: it is the discovery of a truth to which there is no clew, and which, when once found out, can never be forgotten.” “If the world were good for nothing else, it would be a fine subject for speculation.” It is his deliberate dictum that it were “worth a life” to sit down by an Italian wayside, and work out the reason why the Italian supremacy in art has always been along the line of color, not along the line of form.

He depended so entirely upon his memory that those who knew him best say that he never took notes, neither in gallery, library, nor theatre; yet his inaccuracies are few and slight,[59] and he must have secured by this habit a prodigious freedom and luxury in the act of writing. He would rather stumble than walk according to rule; and he was so pleasantly beguiled with some of his own images (that, for instance, of immortality the bride of the youthful spirit, and of the procession of camels seen across the distance of three thousand years) that he reiterates them upon every fit occasion. He cites, twice and thrice, the same passages from the Elizabethans. He is a masterly quoter, and lingers like a suitor upon the borders of old poesy. His infallibility, like the Pope’s, is of narrow scope and nicely defined. When he steps beyond his accustomed tracks, which is seldom, his vagaries are entertaining. You may account for his declaration that Thomas Warton’s sonnets rank as the very best in the language, by reflecting that he dealt not in sonnets and knew nothing of them; if he prefer _Hercules Raging_ to any other Greek tragedy, it is collateral proof that he was no wide-travelled Grecian, nor even Euripideian; when he gives his distinguished preference to Shakespeare’s Helena, there is small need of adding that Mr. Hazlitt, albeit with an affectionate friendship for Mary Lamb, with a mother, a sister, a dynasty of sweethearts, and two wives, was notoriously unlearned in women.[60]

The events of his life count for so little that they are hardly worth recording. He was born into a high-principled and intelligent family, at Mitre Lane, Maidstone, Kent, on the 10th of April, in the year 1778. His infancy was passed there and in Ireland, his boyhood in New England and in Shropshire. Prior to a long visit to Paris, where he made some noble copies of Titian, he came in 1802 to Bloomsbury, where his elder brother John, an advanced Liberal in politics and an excellent miniature-painter, had a studio; and here he worked at art for several joyous years, finally abandoning it for literature. The portraits he painted, utterly lacking in grace, are fraught with power and meaning; few of these are extant, thanks to the fading and cracking pigments of the modern schools. The old Manchester woman in shadow, done in 1803, and the head of his father, dating from a twelvemonth later (two things to which Hazlitt makes memorable reference in his essays), are no longer distinguishable, save to a very patient eye, upon the blackened canvases in his grandson’s possession. The picture of the child Hartley Coleridge, begun at the Lakes in 1802, has perished from the damp; that of Charles Lamb in the Venetian doublet survives since 1804, in its serious and primitive browns,[61] as the best-known example of an English artist not in the catalogues. Its historic value, however, is not superior to that of two portraits of Hazlitt himself: one a study in strong light and shade, with a wreath upon the head, now very much time-eaten; and another representing him at about the age of twenty-five, with a three-quarters front face looking over the right shoulder, which appeals to the spectator like spoken truth. It is all but void of the beauty characterizing the striking Bewick head (especially as retouched and reproduced in Mr. Alexander Ireland’s valuable book of 1889, which is a sort of Hazlitt anthology), and characterizing, no less, John Hazlitt’s charming miniatures of William at five and at thirteen; therefore it can deal in no self-flattery. Fortunately, we have from the hand which knew him best the lank, odd, reserved youth in whom great possibilities were brewing; thought and will predominate in this portrait, and it expresses the sincere soul. It would be idle to criticise the technique of a work disowned by its author. Hazlitt had, as we know from much testimony, a most interesting and perplexing face, with the magnificent brow almost belied by shifting eyes, and the petulance and distrust of the mouth and chin; but a face prepossessing on the whole from the clear marble of his complexion,[62] remarkable in a land of ruddy cheeks. His lonely and peculiar life lent him its own hue; the eager look of one indeed a sufferer, but with the light full upon him of visions and of dreams:

“_Chi pallido si fece sotto l’ombra
Sì di Parnaso, o bevve in sua cisterna?_”

In 1798 Hazlitt had his immortal meeting at Wem with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He described himself at this period as “dumb, inarticulate, helpless, like a worm by the wayside,” striving in vain to put on paper the thoughts which oppressed him, shedding tears of vexation at his inability, and feeling happy if in eight years he could write as many pages. The abiding influence of his First Poet he has acknowledged in an imperishable chapter. For a long while he still kept in “the o’erdarkened ways” of Malthus and Tucker, or in the shadow, dear to him, of Hobbes; but in 1817 the floodgates broke, the pure current gushed out; and in the _Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays_ we have the primal pledge of Hazlitt as we know him, “such as had never been before him, such as will never be again.” From a “dumbness” and diffidence extreme, he developed into the readiest of writers; his sudden pages, year after year, transcribed in his slant large hand, went to the printers rapidly and at first draft. The longer he used his dedicated pen, the freer, the brighter, the serener it grew. In the fourteen or fifteen of his books which deal with genius and the conduct of life, there is, throughout, an indescribable unaffected zest, a self-same and unwavering certitude of handling. Once he learned his trade, he gave himself a large field and an easy rein. He never warmed towards a subject chosen for him. His conversation was non-professional. He considered a discussion as to the likelihood of the weather’s holding up for to-morrow as “the end and privilege of a life of study.”

In London, as soon as he had abandoned painting, he became a parliamentary reporter, and began to lecture on the English philosophers and metaphysicians. He furnished his famous dramatic criticisms to _The Morning Chronicle_, _The Champion_, _The Examiner_, and _The Times_, and he acted later as home editor of _The Liberal_. He married, on May-day of 1808, Miss Sarah Stoddart, who owned the property near Salisbury where he afterwards spent melancholy years alone. He fulfilled one human duty perfectly, for he loved and reared his son. A most singular infatuation for the unlovely daughter of his landlady; a second inauspicious marriage in 1824 with a Mrs. Isabella Bridgwater; a prolonged journey on the Continent; the failure of the publishers of his _Life of Napoleon_, which thus in his needful days brought him no competence; a long illness heroically borne, and a burial in the parish churchyard of St. Anne’s, under a headstone raised, in a romantic remorse after an estrangement, by Charles Wells, the author of _Joseph and his Brethren_,—these round out the meagre details of Hazlitt’s life. He died in the arms of his son and of his old friend Charles Lamb,[63] on the 18th of September, 1830, at 6 Frith Street, Soho.

His domestic experiences, indeed, had been nearly as extraordinary as Shelley’s. Sarah Walker, of No. 9 Southampton Buildings, is a sort of burlesque counterpart of that other “spouse, sister, angel,” Emilia Viviani. Nothing in literary history is much funnier than Mr. Hazlitt’s kind assistance to Mrs. Hazlitt in securing her divorce, going to visit her at Edinburgh, and supplying funds and advice over the teacups, while the process was pending, unless it be Shelley’s ingenuous invitation to his deserted young wife to come and dwell forever with himself and Mary! The silent dramatic withdrawal of the second Mrs. Hazlitt, the well-to-do relict of a colonel, who is henceforth swallowed up in complete oblivion, is a feature whose like is missing in Shelley’s romance. Events in Hazlitt’s path were not many, and his inner calamities seem somehow subordinated to exterior workings. It is not too much to say that to the French Revolution and the white heat of hope it diffused over Europe he owed the renewal of the very impetus within him: his moral probity, his mental vigor, and his physical cheer. His measure of men and things was fixed by its standard. Other enthusiasts wavered and went back to the flesh-pots of Egypt, but not he. _Et cuncta terrarum subacta præter atrocem animum Catonis._ Towards the grandest inconsistency this world has seen, he bore himself with a consistency nothing less than touching. Everywhere, always, as a friend who understood him well reminds a later generation, “Hazlitt was the only man of letters in England who dared openly to stand by the French Revolution, through good and evil report, and who had the magnanimity never to turn his back upon its child and champion.” The ruin of Napoleon, and the final news that “the hunter of greatness and of glory was himself a shade,” meant more to him than the relinquishment of his early and cherished art, or the fading of the long dream that his heart “should find a heart to speak to.” On his last autumn afternoon, he said what no one else would have dared to say for him: “I have had a happy life.” Such it was, if we are to compute happiness by souls, and not by the incidents which befall them. What were the things which atoned to this reformer for the curse of a mind too sentient, a heart never far from breaking? Over and above all amended and amending abuses, the memory of the Rembrandts on the walls of Burleigh House; the waving crest of the Tuderley woods; the sky, the turf, “a winding road, and a three-hours’ march to dinner”; the impersonator of Richard III. most to his mind, who lighted the stage, “and fought as if drunk with wounds”; and the figure (how pastoral and tender!) of the shepherd-boy bringing a nest for his young mistress’s sky-lark, “not doomed to dip his wings in the dappled dawn.” What heresy to the ancients would be this creed of poetic compensation! Montesquieu adhered to it; but hardly from baffled and impassioned Hazlitt, dying in his prime, would the avowal have been expected. Yet he had written almost always, as Jeffrey saw, in “a happy intoxication.” Like the sundial, in one of the most charming among his miscellaneous essays, he kept count only of the hours of joy.

Hazlitt’s erratic levees among coffee-house wits and politicians, his slack dress, his rich and fitful talk, his beautiful fierce head, go to make up any accurate impression of the man. Mr. P. G. Patmore has drawn him for us; a strange portrait from a steady hand: in certain moods “an effigy of silence,” pale, anxious, emaciated, with an awful look ever and anon, like the thunder-cloud in a clear heaven, sweeping over his features with still fury.[64] He was so much at the mercy of an excitable and extra-sensitive organization that an accidental failure to return his salute upon the street, or, above all, the gaze of a servant as he entered a house, plunged him into an excess of wrath and misery. Full, at other times, of scrupulous good faith and generosity, he would, under the stress of a fancied hurt, say and write malicious things about those he most honored. He must have been a general thorn in the flesh, for he had no tact whatever. “I love Henry,” said one of Thoreau’s friends, “but I cannot like him.” Shy, splenetic, with Dryden’s “down look,” readier to give than to exchange, Hazlitt was a riddle to strangers’ eyes. His deep voice seemed at variance with his gliding step and his glance, bright but sullen; his hand felt as if it were the limp, cold fin of a fish, and was an unlooked-for accompaniment to the fiery soul warring everywhere with darkness, and drenched in altruism. His habit of excessive tea-drinking, like Dr. Johnson’s, was to keep down sad thoughts. For sixteen years before he died, from the day on which he formed his resolution, Hazlitt never touched spirits of any kind. Profuse of money when he had it, he lacked heart, says Mr. Patmore, to live well. Wherever he dwelt there was what Carlyle, in Hunt’s case, called “tinkerdom”; his marriage, and his residence under the august roof which had been Milton’s,[65] did not mend matters for him. He covered the walls and mantel-pieces of London landladies, after the fashion of the French bohemian painters, with samples of his noblest style; and the savor of yesterday’s potions of strong tea exhaled into their curtains. Never was there, despite his confessional attitude, so non-communicative a soul. He never corresponded with anybody; he never would walk arm in arm with anybody; he never, perhaps from horror of the “patron” bogie, dedicated a book to anybody. De Quincey knew a man warmly disposed towards Hazlitt who learned to shudder and dread daggers when poor Hazlitt, with a gesture habitual to him, thrust his right hand between the buttons of his waistcoat! And he once cheerfully requested of a cheerful colleague: “Write a character of me for the next number. I want to know why everybody has such a dislike to me.” As a social factor he was something atrocious.[66] The most humane of men, his suspicions and shyings cut him off completely from humanity. The base war waged upon him by the great Tory magazines could not have affected him so deeply that it changed his demeanor towards his fellows; for he had the mettle of a paladin, which no invective could break. But, alas! he had “the canker at the heart,” which is no fosterer of “the rose upon the cheek.”

With all this fever and heaviness in Hazlitt’s blood, he had a hearty laugh, musical to hear. Haydon, in his exaggerated manner, reports an uncharitable conversation held with him once on the subject of Leigh Hunt in Italy, during which the two misconstruing critics, in their great glee, “made more noise than all the coaches, wagons, and carts outside in Piccadilly.” His smile was singularly grave and sweet. Mrs. Shelley wrote, on coming back to England, in her widowhood, and finding him much changed: “His smile brought tears to my eyes; it was like melancholy sunlight on a ruin.” A man who sincerely laughs and smiles is somewhat less than half a cynic. If there be any alive at this late hour who questions the genuineness of Hazlitt’s high spirits, he may be referred to the essay _On Going a Journey_, with the pæan about “the gentleman in the parlor,” in the finest emulation of Cowley; but chiefly and constantly to _The Fight_, with its lingering De-Foe-like details, sprinkled, not in the least ironically, with gold-dust of Chaucer and the later poets: the rich-ringing, unique _Fight_,[67] predecessor of Borrow’s famous burst about the “all tremendous bruisers” of _Lavengro_; and not to be matched in our peaceful literature save with the eulogy and epitaph of Jack Cavanagh, by the same hand. Divers hints have been circulated, within sixty-odd years, that Mr. Hazlitt was a timid person, also that he had no turn for jokes. These ingenious calumnies may be trusted to meet the fate of the Irish pagan fairies, small enough at the start, whose punishment it is to dwindle ever and ever away, and point a moral to succeeding generations. Hazlitt’s paradoxes are not of malice prepense, but are the ebullitions both of pure fun and of the truest philosophy. “The only way to be reconciled with old friends is to part with them for good.” “Goldsmith had the satisfaction of good-naturedly relieving the necessities of others, and of being harassed to death with his own.” “Captain Burney had you at an advantage by never understanding you.” Scattered mention of “people who live on their own estates and on other people’s ideas”; of Jeremy Bentham, who had been translated into French, “when it was the greatest pity in the world that he had not been translated into English”; of the Coleridge of prose, one of whose prefaces is “a masterpiece of its kind, having neither beginning, middle, nor end”; and even of the “singular animal,” John Bull himself, since “being the beast he is has made a man of him”:—these are no ill shots at the sarcastic. Congreve, with all his quicksilver wit, could not outgo Hazlitt on Thieves, _videlicet_: “Even a highwayman, in the way of trade, may blow out your brains; but if he uses foul language at the same time, I should say he was no gentleman!” Hazlitt’s sense of humor has quality, if not quantity. How was it this same sense of humor, this fine-grained reticence, which wrote, nay, printed, in 1823, the piteous and ludicrous canticle of the goddess Sarah?

Hazlitt was a great pedestrian from his boyhood on, and, like Goldsmith, a fair hand at the game of fives, which he played by the day. Wherever he was, his pocket bulged with a book. It gave him keen pleasure to set down the hour, the place, the mood, and the weather of various ecstatic first readings. He became acquainted with _Love for Love_ in a low wainscoted tavern parlor between Farnham and Alton, looking out upon a garden of larkspur, with a portrait of Charles II. crowning the chimney-piece; in his father’s house he fell across _Tom Jones_, “a child’s Tom Jones, an innocent creature”; he bought Milton and Burke at Shrewsbury, on the march; he looked up from Mrs. Inchbald’s _Simple Story_, when its pathos grew too poignant, to find “a summer shower dropping manna” on his head, and “an old crazy hand-organ playing _Robin Adair_.” And on April 10, 1798, his twentieth birthday, he sat down to a volume of the _New Eloïse_, a book which kept its hold upon him, “at the inn of Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a cold chicken!” The frank epicurean catalogue, as of equal spiritual and corporeal delight, is worth notice. Do we not know that Mr. Hazlitt had wood-partridges for supper, in his middle age, at the Golden Cross, in Rastadt, near Mayence? Yet he failed to record what book lay by his plate, and distracted his attention from her who had been a widow, and who was already planning her respectable exit from his society. Evidence that he was an eater of taste is to be accumulated eagerly by his partisans, for eating is one of many engaging human characteristics which establish him as lovable—that is, posthumously lovable. Barry Cornwall was so jealously tender of his memory that he would have forbidden any one to write of Hazlitt who had not known him. As he did not warm miscellaneously to everybody, it followed that his friends were few. We do not forget which one of these, during their only difference, thought “to go to his grave without finding, or expecting to find, such another companion.”[68]

Hazlitt would have set himself down, by choice, as a metaphysician. Up to the time when his _Life of Napoleon_ was well in hand, he used to affirm that the anonymous _Principles of Human Action_, which he completed at twenty, in the literary style of the azoic age, was his best work. He was rather proud, too, of the _Characteristics in the Manner of Rochefoucauld’s Maxims_, his one dreary book, which contains a couple of inductions worthy of Pascal, some sophistries and hollow cynicisms not native to Hazlitt’s brain, and a vast number of the very professorisms which he scouted. Maxims, indeed, are sown broadcast over his pages, which Alison the historian classified as better to quote than to read; but they gain by being incidental, and embedded in the body of his fancies. His vein of original thought comes nowhere so perfectly into play as in its application to affairs. His pen is anything but abstruse,

“Housed in a dream, at distance from the kind.”