where he made notes (in long hand) for The Morning Chronicle, and learned to take more liquor than was good for him. In this same journal he printed some of his best political work, and broke ground as a critic of acting; and he left it only because he could not help quarrelling with its proprietors.

"Another stand-by of his was The Champion, to his work in which he owed a not unprofitable connexion with The Edinburgh; yet another, The Examiner, to which, with such dramatic criticism, he contributed, at Leigh Hunt's suggestion, the set of essays reprinted as The Round Table, and in which he may therefore be said to have discovered his avocation, and given the measure of his best quality. Then, in 1817, he published his 'Characters of Shakespeare,' which he dedicated to Charles Lamb; in 1818 he reprinted a series of lectures (at the Surrey Institute) on the English poets; in 1819-20 he delivered from the same platform two courses more-on the Comic Writers and the Age of Elizabeth. He wrote for The Liberal, The Yellow Dwarf, The London Magazine-(to which he may very well have introduced the unknown Elia)-Colburn's New Monthly; he returned to the Chronicle in 1824; in 1825 he published 'The Spirit of the Age,' in 1826 'The Plain Speaker,' the 'Boswell Redivivus,' in 1827; and in this last year he set to work, at Winterslow, on a life of Napoleon. That was the beginning of the end. He had no turn for history, nor none for research; his methods were personal, his results singular and brief; he was as it were an accidental writer, whose true material was in himself.

1 "Both the 'Characters' and the English Poets 'were reviewed by Gifford in the Quarterly. The style of these 'reviews' is abject; the inspiration venal; the matter the very dirt of the mind. Gifford hated Hazlitt for his politics, and set out to wither Hazlitt's repute as a man of letters. For the tremendous reprisal with which he was visited, the reader is referred to the Letter to William Gifford, Esq. If he find it over-savage: probably, being of to-day, he will; let him turn to his Quarterly, and consider, if he have the stomach, Gifford and the matter of offence."

His health broke, and worsened; his publishers went bankrupt; he lost the best part of the £500 which he had hoped to earn by his work; and though, consulting none but antiEnglish authorities, he lived to complete a book containing much strong thinking and not a few striking passages, it was a thing foredoomed to failure: a matter in which the nation, still hating its tremendous enemy, and still rejoicing in the man and the battle which had brought him to the ground, would not, and could not take an interest. Two volumes were published in 1828 (Sir Walter's 'Napoleon' appeared in 1827), and two more in 1830; but the work of writing them killed the writer. His digestion, always feeble, was ruined; and in the September of 1830 he died. was largely, I should say, a sacrifice to tea, which he drank in vast quantities of extraordinary strength. However this be, his ending was (as he'd have loved to put it) as a Chrissom child's.""1

He

1 "'Tis a pleasure to remember that Lamb was with him to the end-was in his death-chamber in the very article of mortality. We have all read Carlyle on Lamb. The everlasting pity is that we shall never read Hazlitt on Carlyle."

1906.

F. J. S.

THE following is a list of Hazlitt's published works :-"Essay on the Principles of Human Action... with Remarks on the System of Hartley and Helvetius," 1805. "Free Thoughts on Public Affairs," 1806. "Abridgment of Abraham Tucker's 'Light of Nature,'" 1807. "Eloquence of the British Senate" (Parliamentary Speeches and Notes), 1807. "Reply to Malthus," 1807. "A New and Improved Grammar of the "Memoir of Thomas Hol

English Tongue," &c., 1810. croft," written by himself, &c., continued by Hazlitt, 1816. "The Round Table," from The Examiner, 1817. "Characters of Shakespear's Plays," 1817, 1818. "A Review of the English Stage; or, a Series of Dramatic Criticisms,” 1818, 1821. "Lectures on the English Poets," 1818, 1819. "Lectures on the English Comic Writers," 1819. "Letter to William Gifford," 1819. “ "Political Essays, with Sketches of Public Characters," 1819, 1822. "Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth,” 1820. “Table Talk; or, Original Essays on Men and Manners,” 1821–2, 1824. "Liber Amoris; or, The New Pygmalion," 1823. "Sketches of the Principal Picture Galleries in England,” with a criticism on Mariage à la Mode" (in part from London Magazine), 1824. "Characteristics, in the manner of Rochefoucauld's Maxims," 1823, 1837. "The Spirit of the Age; or, Contemporary Portraits," 1825. "The Plain Speaker; or, Opinions on Books, Men, and Things," 1826. "Notes of a Journey through France and Italy" (from Morning Chronicle), 1826. "Boswell Redivivus," 1827. "The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte," vols. I. and II., 1828; III. and IV., 1830. "Conversations of James Northcote, Esq., R.A.," 1830.

66

Posthumous Publications: "Criticisms on Art," &c., 1843, 1844. "Literary Remains," &c., 1836. "Winterslow: Essays and Characters written there,” 1850. "Sketches and Essays," now first collected, 1839; republished as "Men and Manners," 1852.

Collected Works: Ed. Waller and Glover, 13 vols., 1902-6.

PREFACE

It is observed by Mr. Pope, that

"If ever any author deserved the name of an original, it was Shakespear. Homer himself drew not his art so immediately from the fountains of nature; it proceeded through Ægyptian strainers and channels, and came to him not without some tincture of the learning, or some cast of the models, of those before him. The poetry of Shakespear was inspiration indeed: he is not so much an imitator, as an instrument of nature; and it is not so just to say that he speaks from her, as that she speaks through him.

"His characters are so much nature herself, that it is a sort of injury to call them by so distant a name as copies of her. Those of other poets have a constant resemblance, which shows that they received them from one another, and were but multipliers of the same image: each picture, like a mock-rainbow, is but the reflection of a reflection. But every single character in Shakespear is as much an individual as those in life itself; it is as impossible to find any two alike; and such, as from their relation or affinity in any respect appear most to be twins, will, upon comparison, be found remarkably distinct. To this life and variety of character, we must add the wonderful preservation of it: which is such throughout his plays, that had all the speeches been printed without the very names of the persons, I believe one might have applied them with certainty to every speaker."

The object of the volume here offered to the public, is to illustrate these remarks in a more particular manner by a reference to each play. A gentleman of the name of Mason, the author of a Treatise on Ornamental Gardening (not Mason the poet), began a work of a similar kind about forty years ago, but he only lived to finish a parallel