«Собрание сочинений Уильяма Хэзлитта, том 4»

Make soft thy trenchant sword.’

Timon of Athens, Act IV. Scene 3.

‘All is conscience and tender heart.’ Chaucer, Prologue, 150.

Note. See John Leland’s A View of the Deistical Writers, etc., Letter vii.

205. ‘So ran the tenour of the bond.’ Cf. The Merchant of Venice, Act IV. Scene 1.

‘It was well said,’ etc. See ante, note to p. 161.

‘Fallen first,’ etc. Hamlet, Act II. Scene 2.

‘Lost the immortal part,’ etc. Othello, Act II. Scene 3.

‘The guide,’ etc.

‘The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being.’

Wordsworth, Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey.

206. Sir Walter Scott. ‘Scott’s baronetcy,’ says Lockhart, ‘was conferred on him, not in consequence of any Ministerial suggestion, but by the King personally, and of his own unsolicited motion; and when the Poet kissed his hand he said to him: “I shall always reflect with pleasure on Sir Walter Scott’s having been the first creation of my reign.”’ The baronetcy was Gazetted on March 30, 1820.

‘When in Auvergne,’ etc. Quoted inaccurately from Quentin Durward, Chap. i.

‘Reason is the queen,’ etc. Hazlitt quotes a passage of his own. See Political Essays, Vol. III., pp. 90–1.

207. ‘The unreasonableness of the reason,’ etc. See Don Quixote, Book I., Chap. i.

‘Flying an eagle flight,’ etc. Timon of Athens, Act I. Scene 1.

‘Thus far,’ etc. Job, xxxviii. 11.

Captain Parry. Captain, afterwards Sir William Edward Parry (1790–1855) had recently returned from the second of his voyages for the discovery of a north-west passage.

208. ‘Championing it to the Outrance.’ ‘And champion me to the utterance!’ Macbeth, Act III. Scene 1.

208. Caleb Williams. Published in 1794. St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century, appeared in 1799.

Note. Mr. Fuseli. Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), the painter, for whom, according to his biographer, Mary Wollstonecraft (afterwards Godwin’s wife) formed her first attachment.

209. ‘Bastards of his art.’ Cf.

‘Thought characters and words merely but art

And bastards of his foul adulterate heart.’

Shakespeare, A Lover’s Complaint, ll. 174–5.

Allen-a-Dale. This ‘northern minstrel’ figures in Scott’s own Ivanhoe.

Fleetwood. Fleetwood; or, the New Man of Feeling, was published in 1805, Mandeville: a Tale of the Seventeenth Century, in 1817.

210. His Life of Chaucer. Published in 1803. His Remarks on Judge Eyre’s Charge to the Jury. Cursory Strictures on the Charge of Chief-Justice Eyre appeared in the Morning Chronicle on October 20, 1794. Godwin’s own note and the notes of his daughter, Mrs. Shelley, on the political trials of that year, will be found in C. Kegan Paul’s William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries (I. 117–137). Cf. Hazlitt’s Life of Thomas Holcroft, Vol. II., pp. 139 et seq.

Skulked behind a British throne. See Vol. I., p. 378, note.

A Volume of Sermons. Sketches of History, in Six Sermons (1784).

A life of Chatham. Published anonymously in 1783.

Note. Antonio, a tragedy in verse, was produced on December 13, 1800, and ‘damned finally and hopelessly.’ See Kegan Paul (II. 36–55), where Lamb’s account of the tragedy and its representation (not reprinted in the Essays of Elia) is quoted from a paper in the London Magazine (April 1, 1822). Faulkener (not Ferdinand), a tragedy in prose, was produced with more success on December 16, 1807. Lamb wrote prologues to both plays. This play, which was sent to Holcroft to be touched up for the stage, led to a quarrel between the friends. See Kegan Paul, II. 122 et seq.

Mr. Fawcett. For Hazlitt’s account of Joseph Fawcett see Table Talk (On Criticism).

A Speech on General Warrants. Hazlitt refers to a speech of Chatham’s, not on General Warrants, but on the Cyder Tax in the Budget of 1763. The Parliamentary History gives only a few lines, but the passage quoted by Hazlitt will be found in Lord Brougham’s Historical Studies of Statesmen during George III.’s reign.

212. Mr. Coleridge, who, etc. Hazlitt seems to refer to Coleridge’s Lectures on Poetry, delivered at the Royal Institution in 1808.

A History of the Commonwealth of England. Published in 4 volumes, 1824–8.

A very admirable likeness. Reproduced as frontispiece to Vol. I. of Kegan Paul’s William Godwin, etc.

Mrs. Wollstonecraft. Godwin married Mary Wollstonecraft on March 29, 1797. Mrs. Inchbald, according to Mrs. Shelley (Kegan Paul, I. 239) shed tears when the announcement was made to her.

213. And thank the bounteous Pan. ‘In wanton dance they praise the bounteous Pan.’ Comus, 176.

‘A mind reflecting ages past.’ These words occur in the first line of a laudatory poem on Shakespeare printed in the second folio (1632). The poem is signed ‘J. M. S.’ and was attributed by Coleridge to ‘John Milton, Student.’ See his Lectures on Shakspere (ed. T. Ashe), pp. 129–30.

213. ‘Dark rearward and abyss.’ Cf. ‘In the dark backward and abysm of time.’ The Tempest, Act I., Scene 2.

‘That which was now a horse,’ etc. Antony and Cleopatra, Act IV. Scene 14.

‘Quick, forgetive, apprehensive.’ ‘Makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive.’ Henry IV., Part II., Act IV. Scene 3.

214. ‘What in him is weak,’ etc. Cf.

‘——what in me is dark,

Illumine, what is low raise and support.’

Paradise Lost, I. 22–3.

‘And by the force,’ etc.

‘As by the strength of their illusion

Shall draw him on to his confusion.’

Macbeth, Act III. Scene 5.

‘Blear illusion’ is a phrase of Milton’s (Comus, 155).

‘Rich strond.’ See The Faerie Queene, Book III., Canto iv., Stanzas 18., 29., and 34.

‘Goes sounding on his way.’ Hazlitt seems to have had a hazy recollection of two passages in Chaucer’s Prologue. In his essay on ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets,’ he says, ‘the scholar in Chaucer is described as going “sounding on his way,”’ and in his Lectures on the English Poets (see Vol. V., p. 13) he says ‘the merchant, as described in Chaucer, went on his way “sounding always the increase of his winning.’” The scholar is not described as ‘sounding on his way,’ but Chaucer says of him, ‘Souninge in moral vertu was his speche,’ while the merchant, though ‘souninge alway th’ encrees of his winning,’ is not described as going on his way. Wordsworth has a line (Excursion, Book III.), ‘Went sounding on a dim and perilous way,’ but it seems clear that Hazlitt thought he was quoting Chaucer.

‘His own nothings monstered.’ Coriolanus, Act II. Scene 2.

215. ‘Letting contemplation,’ etc. Cf. ‘Till Contemplation had her fill.’ Dyer, Grongar Hill, l. 26.

‘Sailing with supreme dominion,’ etc. Gray, The Progress of Poesy, 115–6.

‘He lisped in numbers,’ etc. Pope, Prologue to the Satires, 128.

Ode on Chatterton. Monody on the Death of Chatterton, written in 1790 when Coleridge was eighteen.

Gained several prizes. At Cambridge Coleridge won the Browne Gold Medal for a Greek Ode in 1792.

216. ‘Struggling in vain,’ etc. Wordsworth, The Excursion, Book VI.

‘Etherial braid,’ etc. Hazlitt perhaps recalled two passages from Collins, ‘with brede etherial wove’ (Ode to Evening), and ‘the shadowy tribes of mind, in braided dance their murmurs joined’ (Ode on the Poetical Character).

Next he was engaged, etc. Some foundation for this account of Coleridge will be found in his published writings, especially in The Friend and Biographia Literaria, but Hazlitt seems to have drawn largely upon his recollections of Coleridge’s conversation. See his essay, ‘My First Acquaintance with the Poets.’

Like Ariel. The Tempest, Act I. Scene 2.

Note. ‘And so by many winding nooks,’ etc. Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act II. Scene 7.

Malebranche. The De la Recherche de la Vérité of Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715) was published in 1674.

Cudworth’s Intellectual System. Ralph Cudworth’s (1617–1688) True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678).

216. Lord Brook’s hieroglyphic theories. For Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke (1554–1628), the friend of Sir Philip Sidney, see Hazlitt’s essay ‘On persons one would wish to have seen’ (Literary Remains), where Lamb speaks of Greville’s ‘apocalyptical, cabalistical’ style.

The Duchess of Newcastle’s fantastic folios. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1624–1674), published between 1653 and 1668 a number of folio volumes of poems, plays, and philosophical treatises. Lamb speaks of her (Essays of Elia, ‘Mackery End in Hertfordshire’) as ‘the thrice noble, chaste, and virtuous, but again somewhat fantastical, and original-brained, generous Margaret Newcastle,’ and in another essay (The Two Races of Men) charges Kenney with having carried off” with him ‘the letters of that princely woman, the thrice noble Margaret Newcastle.’

The hortus siccus of Dissent. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Select Works, ed. Payne, II. 14).

217. John Huss, etc. Cf. a passage in the Political Essays, vol, III. p. 265, and notes thereon.

His Religious Musings. First published in Poems on various subjects (1796).

The John Bull. The first number of ‘John Bull,’ Theodore Hook’s rascally paper founded to oppose the agitation in favour of Queen Caroline, appeared on Dec. 17, 1820. Arbuthnot’s History of John Bull appeared in 1712.

‘Laughed with Rabelais,’ etc.

‘Or laugh and shake in Rab’lais easy chair.’

Pope, The Dunciad, I. 22.

‘Spoke with rapture of Raphael,’ etc. Coleridge visited Rome in 1806 on his way from Malta to England.

218. Sang for joy, etc. Coleridge’s Stanzas entitled Destruction of the Bastile (of which the second and third are lost) were first published in 1834. They were written about 1789, and Hazlitt may have seen them.

‘In Philarmonia’s undivided dale.’ Coleridge in his lines To the Rev. W. J. Hort, plainly refers to the Pantisocracy scheme. Stanza 3, begins

‘In Freedom’s UNDIVIDED dell,

Where Toil and Health with mellowed Love shall dwell,

Far from folly, far from men,’ etc.

‘Frailty,’ etc. ‘Frailty, thy name is woman!’ Hamlet, Act I. Scene 2.

Paragraphs in the Courier. Many of Coleridge’s contributions to The Courier, chiefly from 1809 to 1811, are published in Essays on his own Times (1850).

A poet-laureate or stamp-distributor. The reference is of course to Southey and Wordsworth.

‘Bourne from whence,’ etc. Hamlet, Act III. Scene 1.

219. One splendid passage. ‘Alas! they had been friends in youth,’ etc., lines 408–426. Cf. Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Poets (on the Living Poets).

The Friend. See note to vol. III. p. 139.

220. ‘He cannot be constrained by mastery.’ Wordsworth, The Excursion, Book VI. See note to vol. III. p. 166.

221. ‘Taught with the little nautilus to sail.’ Pope, Essay on Man, III. 177.

‘Youth at its prow,’ etc. Gray, The Bard, II. 2.

It was a misfortune, etc. This concluding paragraph was added in the second edition.

Instead of gathering, etc. Cf. Hazlitt’s essay ‘On Poetical Versatility’ in The Round Table (vol. III. p. 151).

‘From the pelting of the pitiless storm.’ King Lear, Act III. Scene 4.

‘As with triple steel.’ Paradise Lost, II. 569.

‘His words were hollow’ etc. Cf. ‘But all was false and hollow ... yet he pleased the ear.’ Paradise Lost, II. 112–7.

222. ‘And curs’d the hour,’ etc.

‘Sad was the hour, and luckless was the day,

When first from Schiraz’ walls I bent my way!’

Collins, Oriental Eclogues, II.

Mr. Irving. This essay is from the New Monthly Magazine (1824, vol. X. p. 187). Edward Irving (1792–1834), after having been for a time Dr. Chalmers’s assistant at Glasgow, came to London in July 1822, as minister of the Caledonian Asylum Chapel in Cross Street, Hatton Garden. In 1829 he removed into the new church, built for him in Regent Square, where the ‘unknown tongues’ began to be heard. Hazlitt wrote a paper for The Liberal (1823) entitled ‘Pulpit Oratory, Dr. Chalmers and Mr. Irving,’ reprinted in the present edition.

A burning and a shining light. St. John, V. 35.

‘Nothing extenuate,’ etc. Othello, Act V. Scene 2.

223. After the last fight. Between the Gas-man and Bill Neate described by Hazlitt himself in the Essay entitled ‘The Fight,’ republished in Literary Remains.

Shaw the Life-guardsman. Apostrophised by Moore in his Epistle from Tom Crib to Big Ben. In a note Moore describes him as ‘a Life Guardsman, one of the Fancy, who distinguished himself, and was killed in the memorable set-to at Waterloo.’

Crib or Molyneux. Tom Cribb (1781–1848) the champion pugilist defeated Tom Molineaux, an American black, in two fights (1810 and 1811). At the time of Hazlitt’s essay, Cribb had retired, and was proprietor of a public house, the King’s Arms, at the corner of Duke Street and King Street, St. James’s.

Miss Macauley’s readings. Elizabeth Wright Macauley (1785–1837), poetess, actress, public reader, pamphleteer and preacher, appeared at Covent Garden in 1819 in the rôles of Mary Stuart and Jane Shore, but did not satisfy the managers, and was dismissed. After that she gave public readings and became a woman with a grievance. See her pamphlets, Theatric Revolution (1819) and Facts against Falsehood (1824). In 1833 she published a fragment of Autobiographical Memoirs.

Exeter-Change. The upper rooms of Exeter ‘Change in the Strand were let for various purposes, among others for the purposes of a menagerie. Byron writes in his Journal (Nov. 1813, ed. Prothero, II. 319): ‘Two nights ago I saw the tigers sup at Exeter ‘Change.’

224. ‘Lies floating many a rood.’ Paradise Lost, I. 196.

‘Bestrode the world,’ etc. Julius Caesar, Act I. Scene 2.

‘The player’s province,’ etc. Robert Lloyd, The Actor (1760), ll. 67–8.

‘Damnation round the land.’ Pope, The Universal Prayer, St. 7.

‘Hath a smooth aspect,’ etc.

‘He hath a person and a smooth dispose

To be suspected; framed to make women false.’

Othello, Act I. Scene 3.

‘Faultless monster.’ From the Essay on Poetry of John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham.

225. ‘Consummation,’ etc. Hamlet, Act III. Scene 1.

‘A lusty man’, etc.

‘A manly man, to been an abbot able.’

Chaucer, Prologue, 167.

225. Glanced an eye at Mr. Canning. The immediate cause of Irving’s popularity is said to have been a flattering reference to him by Canning in the House of Commons.

‘Like an eagle,’ etc. Coriolanus, Act V. Scene 6.

Peter Aretine. Pietro Aretino (1492–1557) ‘the scourge of princes.’

226. ‘God made the country,’ etc. Cowper, The Task, i. 749.

227. The ‘Saints,’ etc. Wilberforce was a prominent member of the ‘Clapham Sect,’ and represented Yorkshire from 1784 to 1812.

‘Hilting the house,’ etc. This expression is used by Burke in his speech on American taxation (Ap. 19, 1774). See Select Works (ed. Payne), i. 147 and note.

A Mr. Fox. William Johnson Fox (1786–1864), the anti-corn law orator, was at this time Unitarian preacher at the Chapel in South Place, Finsbury, which was built for him, and opened in 1824.

228. The Duke of Sussex. The sixth son of George III., created Duke of Sussex in 1801.

Miraturque, etc.

‘Miraturque novas frondes et non sua poma.’

Virgil, Georgics, II. 82.

Dr. Chalmers. Chalmers’s Astronomical Discourses (week-day sermons delivered at the Tron Church, Glasgow) were published in 1817, and in the same year he visited London where his sermons, at the Surrey Chapel, and at the Scotch Churches in London Wall and Swallow Street, created extraordinary enthusiasm. Hazlitt had heard him in Glasgow. See Memoirs of W. Hazlitt, II. 42.

‘Four Orations,’ etc. Irving’s For the Oracles of God, four Orations; for Judgment to Come, an Argument in nine Parts was published in 1823. Lowndes mentions a third edition in 1824.

229. Orator Henley. John Henley (1692–1756), who preached at Newport Market, and, later, in what Pope calls ‘Henley’s gilt tub,’ at Clare Market, is one of the heroes of the Dunciad—

‘Embrowned with native bronze, lo! Henley stands,

Tuning his voice, and balancing his hands.’

Act III. 199, et seq.

Pope gives a long note upon him.

‘A monkey preacher.’ Hazlitt probably refers to the passage from the Dunciad referred to in the last note—

‘Oh worthy thou of Aegypt’s wise abodes,

A decent priest, where monkeys were the gods!’

III. 207–8.

‘By the coinage,’ etc. A composite quotation. Cf. ‘This is the very coinage of your brain’ (Hamlet, Act III. Scene 4), and ‘A false creation, proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain’ (Macbeth, Act II. Scene 1).

230. ‘There’s magic in the web.’ Othello, Act III. Scene 4.

‘By his so potent art,’ etc. The Tempest, Act V. Scene 1.

‘Now of the planetary,’ etc. Cf.

‘And tell us whence the stars; why some are fix’d,

And planetary some.’

Cowper, The Task, Book III. 158.

‘In the very storm,’ etc. Hamlet, Act III. Scene 2.

230. ‘To be admired,’ etc. Cf.

‘Religion, if in heavenly truths attired,

Needs only to be seen to be admired.’

Cowper, Expostulation, 492–3.

231. The late Mr. Horne Tooke. Published originally in the New Monthly Magazine (1824, Vol. X. p. 246). Cf. ante, pp. 378 note and 389–390, and an essay ‘On the Diversions of Purley’ (Literary Remains).

‘So is the London Tavern!’ According to the usual version Horne Tooke said: ‘So is the London Tavern—to those who can pay!’

Sir Allan Gardiner. Alan Gardner (1742–1809) the admiral, created a baronet in 1794, represented Westminster from 1796 till 1806, when he was raised to the peerage as Lord Gardner of Uttoxeter. Hazlitt refers to the general election of 1796 when Horne Tooke unsuccessfully stood for Westminster against Fox and Gardner.

232. ‘The King’s Old Courtier’ etc.

‘Like an old courtier of the queen’s,

And the queen’s old courtier,’

is the burden of ‘The Old and Young Courtier.’ (See Percy’s Reliques, ed. Wheatley, II. 315.)

‘Lord of himself,’ etc. ‘Lord of yourself, uncumbered with a wife.’ Dryden, Epistle to John Driden, 18.

233. He used to plague Fuseli, etc. ‘He made strange havoc of Fuseli’s fantastic hieroglyphics, violent humours, and oddity of dialect.’ Hazlitt, ‘On the Conversation of Authors.’

At G——‘s. Godwin’s presumably.

Young Betty’s acting. William Henry West Betty (1791–1874), the young Roscius, made his first appearance in 1803 at the age of eleven, and finally retired from the stage in 1824. Many critics declared that his acting was finer than Kemble’s, and Home said that he had not seen his own creation of Douglas adequately realised until he had seen Betty in the part. Cf. Hazlitt’s essay on ‘On Patronage and Puffing’ in Table-Talk.

A professed orator. This was Coleridge. See Hazlitt’s Essay ‘On the Conversation of Authors’ in The Plain Speaker, where Horne Tooke’s conversational powers are described again.

235. ‘Sacred vehemence.’ Comus, 795.

Lord Camelford. Thomas Pitt (1775–1804), second Lord Camelford, duellist and naval commander.

The only palpable hit, etc. Hazlitt included in his Eloquence of the British Senate Horne Tooke’s speech (on the eligibility of clergymen to sit in Parliament), in which this hit was made. The reference in the note is to Letter LXVIII., to Lord Chief-Justice Mansfield.

236. ‘Native and endued,’ etc. Hamlet, Act IV. Scene 7.

His trial before Lord Kenyon. In 1790 Horne Tooke unsuccessfully contested Westminster against Fox and presented a petition to the House of Commons complaining of the riotous conduct of the electors. The House voted the petition ‘frivolous and vexatious,’ and Fox brought an action against Horne Tooke to recover the costs. An account of this action, which was tried by Lord Kenyon, was published in 1792.

His examination before the Commissioners of the Income-Tax. See Stephens’s Life of John Horne Tooke (II. 157).

The State Trials in 1794. See ante, p. 211 note, and Hazlitt’s Memoirs of Thomas Holcroft (Vol. II. pp. 139 et seq.). Home Tooke was acquitted on Nov. 22, 1794.

236. An intercepted letter. See Stephens’s Life of John Horne Tooke (II. 119). The letter related, not to a social invitation, but to the preparation of a list of sinecures held by the Grenvilles. The letter closed with these words: ‘Query, is it possible to get ready by Thursday?’

237. The celebrated philosopher of Malmesbury. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), born at Malmesbury.

Fabellas aniles. Horace, Satires, II. 6, 77–8.

A hasty charge. Junius accused Horne Tooke of having deserted Wilkes in connection with the election of Sheriffs for the city in 1771. See the Letters of Junius (1805, Vol. II. pp. 104 et seq.).

‘Under him,’ etc. Macbeth, Act. III. Scene 1.

He comes off more shabbily, etc. Sir Leslie Stephen takes a different view and speaks of Horne Tooke as ‘the most successful antagonist of his formidable enemy.’

238. Sir William Draper (1721–1787), who had commanded the expedition against Manilla, involved himself in a controversy with Junius by his defence of Lord Granby who was one of the persons attacked in Junius’s first letter (21st Jan. 1769).

His work on Grammar. Part I. of Horne Tooke’s ‘Diversions of Purley,’ appeared in 1786, another edition containing Part II. in 1798–1805.

The essence of it, etc. The Letter to Dunning was written and published in 1778 when Horne Tooke was undergoing a term of imprisonment in consequence of a resolution of the Constitutional Society in favour of ‘our beloved American fellow-subjects.’ The letter contained his reasoning on the word That. Coleridge (Table-Talk, May 7, 1830) said: ‘All that is worth anything (and that is but little) in the Diversions of Purley is contained in a short pamphlet-letter which he addressed to Mr. Dunning.’

Mr. Harris’s Hermes. The Hermes, or a Philosophical Inquiry concerning Universal Grammar of James Harris (1709–1780), father of the first Earl of Malmesbury, was published in 1751. Johnson said, ‘Harris, however, is a prig, and a bad prig. I looked into his book, and thought he did not understand his own system.’ (Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, III. 245.)

239. ‘Bear a charmed life,’ etc. Macbeth, Act V. Scene 8.

‘Palpable to feeling as to sight.’ Cf. ‘If ’tis not gross in sense ... ’tis probable and palpable to thinking.’ Othello, Act I. Scene 2.

‘Familiar as his garter.’

‘The Gordian knot of it he will unloose,

Familiar as his garter.’

Henry V., Act I. Scene 1.

Mr. Windham. Horne Tooke in the 4to edition of his Diversions, speaking of Bruckner’s Criticisms on the Diversions of Purley (1790) says that the substance of that work ‘was, with singular industry and a characteristical affectation, gossiped by the present precious Secretary at War, in Payne the bookseller’s shop; the cannibal commencing with this modest observation, that—“I had found a mare’s nest.”’ See the Diversions (ed. R. Taylor, 1860 ed.), p. 122.

Bull-baiting. Windham spoke twice in defence of bull-baiting, on April 18, 1800, and May 24, 1802. See his Speeches, i. 331–356.

240. ‘A complex idea,’ etc. See Horne Tooke’s Diversions (ed. R. Taylor, 1860), p. 19.

240. Mr. Lindley Murray’s Grammar. Published in 1795 at York, where Lindley Murray (1745–1826) settled on coming to England from America in 1784. De Quincey refers to Murray as ‘an imbecile stranger’ (Works, ed. Masson, x. 127), and speaks (ib. XI. 352) of Hazlitt’s New and Improved Grammar of the English Tongue, etc. (see ante, p. 389) as an ‘examination’ of Lindley Murray’s English Grammar.

241. Mr. C*** ... Mr. M***. Probably Croker and Malthus.

Sir Walter Scott. Published originally in the New Monthly Magazine (1824, Vol. X. p. 297). Cf. Hazlitt’s Essay on Scott, Racine, and Shakespeare in The Plain Speaker.

‘The present ignorant time.’ Macbeth, Act I. Scene 5.

‘Laudator temporis acti.’ Horace, Ars Poetica, 173.

242. ‘Poetry of no mark,’ etc. ‘A fellow of no mark nor likelihood.’ Henry IV., Part I., Act III. Scene 2.

In the New Monthly Magazine there is the following editorial note on this passage: ‘The writer of this paper, and not the Editor, must be considered as here presuming to be the critical arbiter of Sir Walter’s poetry. A journal such as this cannot be supported without the aid of writers of a certain degree of talent, and it is not possible to modify all their opinions so as to suit everybody’s taste.’

243. Note. Agnes. Agnes, or the Triumph of Principle, 1822.

The late Mr. John Scott. John Scott (1783–1821), editor of the London Magazine, died in Feb. 1821, from a wound received in a duel with Lockhart’s friend Christie, arising out of a quarrel between Blackwood’s Magazine and the London Magazine. The ‘elaborate panegyric’ of the Scotch Novels had appeared in the latter magazine early in 1820.

‘Skinned and filmed over.’ ‘It will but skin and film the ulcerous place.’ Hamlet, Act III. Scene 4.

244. Mr. Westall’s drawings. Richard Westall illustrated Marmion (1809) and The Lord of the Isles (1813).

A story goes, etc. A very unlikely story. Long before the publication of The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Scott had written not only the translations from the German, but a good deal of original work in The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–3).

‘A metre ballad-monger.’ Henry IV., Part I., Act III. Scene 1.

‘Fancies and good-nights.’ Henry IV., Part II., Act III. Scene 2.

‘Glances from heaven to earth’ etc. Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V. Scene 1.

245. Like Dorothea. Don Quixote, Part I., Book IV., Chap. xxviii.

As Lord Peter, etc. It was Martin who ‘at one twitch brought off a large handful of points; and, with a second pull, stripped away ten dozen yards of fringe,’ and Jack, who, ‘stripping down a parcel of gold lace a little too hastily,’ ‘rent the main body of his coat from top to bottom.’ A Tale of a Tub, Sect. VI.

‘Over-laboured lassitude.’ Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Select Works, ed. Payne, II. 120).

Mr. Constable. Archibald Constable (1774–1827) was publisher of the Edinburgh Review, of Marmion, and of Waverley, and the greater number of the novels.

246. ‘The embryo fry,’ etc. Cf. ‘An eyrie of children, little eyases, that cry out on the top of question,’ etc. Hamlet, Act II. Scene 2.

‘Comes like a satyr,’ etc.

‘A satyr that comes staring from the woods,

Must not at first speak like an orator.’

Earl of Roscommon, Translation of Horace’s Ars Poetica, ll. 281–2. Cf. Ars Poetica, ll. 244 et seq.

246. ‘A holy water sprinkle,’ etc. The Faerie Queene, Book III., Canto xii. Stanza 13.

‘More lively,’ etc. ‘It’s spritely, waking, audible, and full of vent.’ Coriolanus, Act IV. Scene 5.

‘Their habits as they lived.’ Hamlet, Act III. Scene 4.

‘Give her hand to another,’ etc. Old Mortality, Chap. xxxviii.

248. ‘Her head to the east.’ ‘Na, na! Not that way, the feet to the east.’ Guy Mannering, Chap. XV.

‘Thick-coming.’ ‘Thick-coming fancies.’ Macbeth, Act V. Scene 3.

Note. Perhaps the finest scene. Guy Mannering, Chap. li.

249. ‘Consummation,’ etc. Hamlet, Act III. Scene 1.

Note. Ivanhoe, Chap. xxiii.

250. Flints and dungs. Hazlitt refers to a passage at the beginning of Chap. xliii. of Ivanhoe.

‘Calls backing his friends.’ ‘Call you that backing of your friends?’ Henry IV., Part I., Act II. Scene 4.

Mr. Mac-Adam. John Loudon McAdam (1756–1836), whose services in the improvement of highways had been recognised and rewarded by Parliament in 1823.

‘Sixty years since.’ ‘’Tis sixty years since,’ the second title of Waverley.

Mr. Peel’s Police-Bill. Peel succeeded in establishing the Metropolitan Police in 1829.

251. Every living author ... but himself. Many of the mottoes were of course written by Scott himself, though that does not affect Hazlitt’s argument.

‘If there were a writer,’ etc. This concluding paragraph did not appear in the New Monthly Magazine.

‘Born for the universe,’ etc. Goldsmith, Retaliation, 31–2.

‘Winked and shut his apprehension up.’

Prologue to Antonio’s Revenge (History of Antonio and Mellida, Part II.). By John Marston.

252. A gang of desperadoes. Hazlitt seems to refer to the founders of The Quarterly Review.

The lowest panders of a venal press. The writers in Blackwood’s Magazine, presumably.

‘Who would not grieve,’ etc.

‘Who but must laugh, if such a man there be?

Who would not weep, if Atticus were he?’

Pope, Prologue to the Satires, 213–4.

253. ‘As if a man,’ etc. Coriolanus, Act V. Scene 3.

‘Cloud-capt.’ The Tempest. Act IV. Scene 1.

‘Golden mean.’ The English form of Horace’s ‘auream mediocritatem.’ Odes, II. 10–5.

‘Prouder than,’ etc.

‘and make him fall

His crest that prouder than blue Iris bends.’

Troilus and Cressida, Act I. Scene 3.

Note. Byron died at Mesolonghi on April 19, 1824.

254. ‘Silly sooth,’ etc. Twelfth Night, Act II. Scene 4.

255. ‘Denotes a foregone conclusion.’ Othello, Act III. Scene 3.

255. ‘In cell monastic.’ ‘To live in a nook merely monastic.’ As You Like It, Act III. Scene 2.

256. ‘Thoughts that breathe,’ etc. Gray, The Progress of Poesy, l. 110.

257. ‘Poor men’s cottages,’ etc. The Merchant of Venice, Act I. Scene 2.

‘Reasons high,’ etc. Paradise Lost, II. 558–9.

‘Till contemplation,’ etc. Dyer, Grongar Hill, l. 26.

‘This bank and shoal of time.’ Macbeth, Act I. Scene 7.

258. Published in the Liberal. Byron’s fragment Heaven and Earth: A Mystery, was published in the second number of The Liberal: Verse and Prose from the South, the ill-fated quarterly review established by Shelley, Byron, and Leigh Hunt in Italy. Byron and Hunt found themselves unable to work together, especially after Shelley’s death in July, 1822, and the review only lived through four numbers (1822–3).

‘It is his aversion.’

‘A drowsy frowzy poem, call’d the “Excursion,”

Writ in a manner which is my aversion.’

Don Juan, Canto III. Stanza 94.

‘Born in a garret,’ etc.

‘The Tolbooth felt defrauded of his charms,

If Jeffrey died, except within her arms:

Nay last not least, on that portentous morn,

The sixteenth story, where himself was born,

His patrimonial garret, fell to ground.’

English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.

‘Letter to the Editor,’ etc. Byron’s letter to William Roberts, Editor of the British Review, was published in No. 1 of The Liberal. See Byron’s Letters and Journals (ed. Prothero), Vol. IV., Appendix vii.

259. Long’s. ‘I saw Byron for the last time in 1815, after I returned from France. He dined, or lunched, with me at Long’s, in Bond Street.’ Lockhart’s Life of Scott, III. 336.

The controversy about Pope. See Byron’s Letters and Journals (ed. Prothero), Vol. V. Appendix iii. Byron wrote two letters to John Murray ‘on the Rev. W. L. Bowles’s Strictures on the Life and Writings of Pope,’ the first of which was published in 1821, the second not till 1835. Hazlitt himself wrote a paper in the New Scots Magazine (Feb. 1818) ‘on the question whether Pope was a poet.’

From the sublime, etc. ‘Du sublime au ridicule il n’y a qu’un pas,’ was a saying of Napoleon’s. Paine, in The Age of Reason, (Part II.) had already expressed the same thought less concisely.

Scrub in the Farce. Scrub, in Farquhar’s Beaux’ Stratagem, is quoted for the variety of his occupations in the household of Squire Sullen. See Act III. Scene 3.

‘Very tolerable,’ etc. Much Ado About Nothing, Act III. Scene 3.

260. ‘A chartered libertine.’ Henry V., Act I. Scene 1.

‘Like proud seas under him.’ Two Noble Kinsmen, Act II. Scene 1.

It is a ludicrous circumstance, etc. Scott acknowledged the obligation in a letter to John Murray (Dec. 17, 1821), in which he says: ‘I accept with feelings of great obligation, the flattering proposal of Lord Byron to prefix my name to the very grand and tremendous drama of “Cain.” I may be partial to it, and you will allow I have cause; but I do not think that his Muse has ever taken so lofty a flight amid her former soarings,’ etc., Lockhart, v. 150. In a letter to Rose (Dec. 18, 1821), after comparing Byron’s devil with Milton’s he says: ‘I think, however, the work will not escape censure, for it is scarce possible to make the devil speak as the devil without giving offence,’ and adds, ‘I question whether our noble friend has brought up his friend sufficiently cleanly.’ Familiar Letters of Sir Walter Scott, II. 127.

261. ‘Furthest from them is best.’ Paradise Lost, I. 247.

The first Vision of Judgment. Southey’s, published in 1821, and dedicated to the King.

‘None but itself,’ etc. From The Double Falsehood, produced in 1727, and written or adapted by Lewis Theobald. The line is quoted by Burke (Regicide Peace, ed. Payne, p. 40).

‘The tenth transmitter,’ etc. Richard Savage’s The Bastard, l. 8.

Lord Byron’s preposterous liberalism. Hazlitt probably refers specially to Byron’s relations with Leigh Hunt and The Liberal. See ante, note to p. 258.

262. ‘Nothing can cover,’ etc. Beaumont and Fletcher, or Fletcher and Massinger, The False One, Act II. Scene 1.

Mr. Southey. Cf. Political Essays, Vol. III. pp. 48–51, 192–232.

263. ‘Where he must live,’ etc.. Othello, Act IV. Scene 2.

‘Whatever is, is right.’ Pope, Essay on Man, IV. 394.

Old Sarum. The allusion is to Southey’s early radical inscription for Old Sarum.

‘His generous ardour,’ etc. ‘A generous friendship no cold medium knows.’

Pope, Homer’s Iliad, IX. 725.

264. ‘The words of truth and soberness.’ Acts, xxvi. 25.

‘We relish Mr. Southey,’ etc. ‘You may relish him more in the soldier than in the scholar.’ Othello, Act II. Scene 1.

‘He is nothing,’ etc. Cf. ‘For I am nothing, if not critical.’ Ibid.

265. Teres et rotundus. ‘Fortis, et in se ipso totus, teres atque rotundus.’

Horace, Sat. II. 7, 86.

‘Does he not dedicate,’ etc. See ante, note to p. 261.

His own Glendoveer. Curse of Kehama, vi. 2.

266. ‘Or if a composer,’ etc. Perhaps Hazlitt refers to William Sotheby (1757–1833), author of Orestes (1802) and Saul (1807), or to Henry Hart Milman (1791–1868), afterwards Dean of St. Paul’s, who had published Samor (1818), The Fall of Jerusalem (1820), and The Martyr of Antioch (1822), and was a constant contributor to The Quarterly Review. ‘A translator of an old Latin author’ is presumably Gifford.

‘Far from the sun,’ etc. Gray, The Progress of Poesy, l. 83.

267. ‘Because he is virtuous,’ etc. Twelfth Night, Act II. Scene 3.

The Book of the Church. Southey’s The Book of the Church, published in 2 vols. 1824.

‘A little leaven,’ etc. Galatians, V. 9.

‘There hangs,’ etc. Macbeth, Act III. Scene 5.

Once a philanthropist, etc. Cf. ‘Once a Jacobin, always a Jacobin.’ See vol. III. pp. 110, 159.

268. ‘Like the high leaves,’ etc. Southey’s The Holly Tree, Stanza 5.

‘Full of wise saws,’ etc. As You Like It, Act II. Scene 7.

269. Mandeville’s description of Addison. Cf. The Round Table, vol. I. p. 9.

‘And follows so,’ etc. Henry V., Act IV. Scene 1.

270. Mr. Wordsworth. Hazlitt had met Wordsworth at Alfoxden in 1798 (see the essay ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’), and in the Lake District in 1803, when he painted a portrait of the poet which proved unsatisfactory and was destroyed. In a letter to Hazlitt’s son (May 23, 1831), Wordsworth says that he does not recollect having met Hazlitt on more than one occasion after their meeting at the Lakes. Some of the opinions which Hazlitt attributes to Wordsworth appear to be recollections of the poet’s conversation. Hazlitt reviewed The Excursion in The Examiner (see The Round Table, vol. I. pp. 111–125), and spoke of him in his Lecture ‘On the Living Poets’ (see English Poets, vol. V. 161–4).

270. ‘Lowliness,’ etc. Julius Caesar, Act II. Scene 1.

‘No figures,’ etc.

‘Thou hast no figures nor no fantasies,

Which busy care draws in the brains of men.’—Ibid.

‘Skyey influences.’ Measure for Measure, Act III. Scene 1.

‘Nihil humani,’ etc. Terence, Heautontimorumenos, Act I. Scene 1.

271. The Lyrical Ballads. Lyrical Ballads, with a few other Poems, published in 1798.

‘The cloud-capt towers,’ etc. The Tempest, Act IV. Scene 1.

‘The judge’s robe,’ etc. Quoted inaccurately from Measure for Measure, Act II. Scene 2.

272. ‘A sense of joy,’ etc. Wordsworth, To my Sister.

‘Beneath the hills,’ etc. The Excursion, Book VI.

Vain pomp and glory, etc. Henry VIII., Act III. Scene 2.

273. ‘To him,’ etc. Ode on the Intimations of Immortality.

274. Cole-Orton. The seat of Wordsworth’s friend, Sir George Howland Beaumont, to whom he dedicated the 1815 edition of his Poems. ‘Some of the best pieces were composed under the shade of your own groves, upon the classic ground of Coleorton.’

‘Calm contemplation,’ etc.

‘Calm pleasures there abide—majestic pains.’

Laodamia, l. 72.

‘Fall blunted,’ etc.

‘Fall blunted from each indurated heart.’

Goldsmith, The Traveller.

275. Milton’s wish. Wordsworth, in that part of The Recluse which he published at the beginning of The Excursion, quotes Milton’s words (Paradise Lost, VII. 31)

‘——“fit audience let me find though few!”

So prayed, more gaining than he asked, the Bard—

In holiest mood.’

Toujours perdrix. Attributed to the confessor of Henry IV. of France, when the King illustrated the advantage of variety by ordering every course to consist of partridge. See Notes and Queries, 4th Ser. IV. 336–7.

‘A man of no mark,’ etc. ‘A fellow of no mark nor likelihood.’ Henry IV. Part I., Act III. Scene 2.

276. ‘Flushed with a purple grace,’ etc. Alexander’s Feast, III. 51–2. Byron, in his ‘Reply to Blackwood’s Magazine’ (Letters and Journals, ed. Prothero, IV., Appendix IX. p. 484) says of Southey and Wordsworth, ‘Are they not of those who called Dryden’s Ode “a drunken song”?’

Dares to compare himself, etc. Byron in the same essay refers to Wordsworth’s postscripts to Lyrical Ballads, ‘where the two great instances of the sublime are taken from himself and Milton.’

Wordsworth’s ‘Selections from Chaucer Modernised,’ written in 1801, were published, The Prioress’ Tale in 1820, The Cuckoo and the Nightingale, and Troilus and Cressida in 1841.

‘Action is momentary,’ etc. Quoted inaccurately from The Borderers (written 1795–6, published 1842), Act III. In a note to The White Doe of Rylstone, to which these lines were added as a kind of motto in 1837, Wordsworth writes: ‘This, and the five lines that follow, were either read or recited by me, more than thirty years since, to the late Mr. Hazlitt, who quoted some expressions in them (imperfectly remembered) in a work of his published several years ago.’

277. A great dislike to Gray. Coleridge was induced ‘by Mr. Wordsworth’s conversation ... to re-examine with impartial strictness Gray’s celebrated Elegy.’ (Biographia Literaria, Chap. II.)

‘Let observation,’ etc. De Quincey (Works ed. Masson, X. 128) attributes this criticism to the author of ‘a little biographic sketch of Dr. Johnson, published immediately after his death.’ Coleridge makes the same criticism. Lectures on Shakspere and Milton, 1811–12 (ed. Ashe, p. 72).

Drawcansir. In the Duke of Buckingham’s play, The Rehearsal (1671).

‘Let petty Kings the names of parties know:

Where’er I come, I slay both friend and foe.’

Act V. Scene 1.

Bewick’s woodcuts. Thomas Bewick (1753–1828), the famous wood-engraver.

Waterloo’s Sylvan etchings. Antoine Waterloo (1609?–1676?), a native of Lille, painter, engraver, and etcher.

‘He hates conchology,’ etc. Hazlitt quotes from himself. See his Lecture on the Living Poets (English Poets, Vol. V. pp. 163–4).

278. ‘Where one for sense,’ etc. Hudibras, II. l. 29–30.

‘Take the good,’ etc. Plautus, Rudens, Act IV. Scene 7.

279. Sir James Mackintosh. Sir James Mackintosh (1765–1832), born in Inverness-shire, and educated at Aberdeen and Edinburgh Universities, with a view to the medical profession, came to London in 1788, and soon turned to politics. His Vindiciæ Gallicæ, in reply to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, appeared in 1791. Called to the bar in 1795, he soon gained a considerable practice. In 1803 he was appointed to a Judgeship in India, where he remained till 1811. Soon after his return he was elected (in 1813) for Nairn. From 1819 till his death, he sat for Knaresborough. In 1818 he was appointed to the professorship of law and general politics at Haileybury, a post which he held till 1824. He was made a privy councillor in 1827, and a Commissioner of the Board of Control in 1830. His Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy, chiefly during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, contributed to the seventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, was republished in 1836 with a preface by Whewell. See Macaulay’s Essay on Mackintosh’s History of the Revolution.

281. His maiden speech. The speech referred to was delivered on Dec. 20, 1813. Colonel St. Paul said: ‘A more finical opposition to any measure he had never heard in that House.’ Parl. Hist., XXVII. pp. 301 et seq. Mackintosh had spoken before on Dec. 14.

282. Lectures on the Law of Nature and Nations. A course of thirty-nine lectures, delivered between February and June 1799. An ‘Introductory Discourse,’ published in 1798, contains a recantation of the revolutionary doctrines of the Vindiciæ Gallicæ, and an attack on Godwin. The lectures do not appear to have been published, but some ms. notes, taken by Sir John Stoddart at the time, are still preserved.

‘The whiff and wind,’ etc. ‘The whiff and wind of his fell sword.’ Hamlet, Act II. Scene 2.

282. ‘Laid waste the borders,’ etc. Cf. ‘Lay waste thy woods, destroy thy blissful bower.’ Dryden, The Hind and the Panther, Part 1. l. 158.

‘Carve them as a dish,’ etc. Julius Caesar, Act II. Scene 1.

283. Guicciardini. Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540), author of a History of Italy from 1494 to 1532.

Thuanus. Jacques Auguste de Thou (1553–1617), whose Historia sui Temporis Johnson ‘seriously entertained the thought of translating.’

Dr. Pangloss. In George Colman, the younger’s (1762–1836), The Heir-at-law, produced in 1797.

284. ‘Of lamentation,’ etc.

‘Cocytus, named of lamentation loud

Heard on the rueful stream.’

Paradise Lost, II. 579–80.

285. ‘Unbought grace of life.’ Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Select Works, ed. Payne, II. 89).

‘And gladly,’ etc. Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, the Prologue, l. 308.

286. An Essay on the Principles of Human Action. By Hazlitt, published in 1805.

287. A History of England. Mackintosh collected materials for a history of England from 1688 to the French Revolution, but left only a fragment posthumously published in 1834 under the title of ‘A History of the Revolution in England in 1688.’

Mr. Malthus. Cf. ante, pp. 1–184 and Vol. III. pp. 356–385.

289. ‘Like the toad,’ etc. As You Like It, Act. II. Scene 1.

290. ‘The mighty stream of tendency.’ Wordsworth, The Excursion, Book IX.

‘The Corinthian capitals of polished society.’ Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Select Works, ed. Payne, II. 164).

291. ‘Palmy state.’ ‘In the most high and palmy state of Rome.’ Hamlet, Act I. Scene 1.

An obscure and almost forgotten work. Cf. Hazlitt’s essay ‘On the Originality of Mr. Malthus’s Essay’ (Political Essays, Vol. III. pp. 361–7), where long passages are quoted from Wallace’s book.

295. ‘Gospel is preached to the poor.’ ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor.’ Luke, iv. 18.

‘The laws of nature,’ etc. Malthus, Essay on Population, 4to ed., 1803, Book IV., Chap. vii. p. 540.

The ‘tables are not full.’ Hazlitt refers to Malthus’s figure of ‘nature’s mighty feast.’ Ibid. Book IV., Chap. vi. pp. 531–2.

296. ‘To make it thick and slab.’ Macbeth, Act IV. Scene 1.

Mr. Godwin has lately attempted an answer. ‘Of Population. An Enquiry concerning the Power of Increase in the Numbers of Mankind, in Answer to Mr. Malthus on that Subject,’ 1820.

A curious passage of Judge Blackstone. Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book II. Chap. xiv.

298. Broke a lance with Mr. Ricardo. In 1814 and 1815 Malthus published two pamphlets on the corn laws, to which Ricardo replied in an Essay on the Influence of a low price of Corn on the Profits of Stock (1815). Hazlitt probably refers to Malthus’s Political Economy (1820), in which his differences with Ricardo are explained. See Sir Leslie Stephen’s The English Utilitarians, II. 189 et seq.

Mandeville. The second edition (1723) of Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices Public Benefits, contained An Essay on Charity and Charity Schools.

298. Plug Pulteney. See ante, note to p. 2, note.

Mr. Gifford. Cf. A Letter to William Gifford, Vol. I. pp. 365–411.

‘In the event of his death,’ etc. Gifford resigned the editorship of The Quarterly Review in 1824, and after a short interval, during which John Taylor Coleridge was editor, was succeeded by J. G. Lockhart.

299. In his critical pages. Gifford, though he used his editorial pen very freely, does not seem to have written so many articles in the Quarterly as his contemporaries imagined. ‘The only entire article ever contributed to the Review by Gifford himself was that which he wrote, in conjunction with Barron Field, on Ford’s “Dramatic works.”’ See Smiles, Memoirs of John Murray, I. 180, 200; II. 44, 49. Sometimes he appears to have inserted what Dr. Smiles calls ‘the pungent wit, the Attic salt’ into the articles of his contributors.

300. ‘Destroy his fib,’ etc. Pope, Prologue to the Satires, 91–2.

‘I am not Stephano,’ etc. The Tempest, Act V. Scene 1.

301. If a lady goes on crutches, etc. The allusion is to Gifford’s lines on Mrs. Robinson. See A Letter to William Gifford, Vol. I. note to p. 378.

302. The Feast of the Poets. By Leigh Hunt, published in 1814. See Vol. I. p. 377.

‘A man was confined in Newgate,’ etc. See Vol. I. p. 378 for an account of the Quarterly review of Leigh Hunt’s Rimini.

Verses to Anna. Ibid. p. 375.

‘A bud,’ etc. Romeo and Juliet, Act I. Scene 1.

Mr. Keats’s ostensible crime, etc. The famous Quarterly Review article on Endymion appeared in September 1818, and was written by Croker.

303. ‘Out went the taper,’ etc. Stanzas XXIII. to XXVII. of The Eve of St. Agnes, published in 1820.

304. Ecce iterum Crispinus. Juvenal, Sat. IV. 1.

305. ‘I wish I was,’ etc. See Vol. I. p. 375.

Note. ‘He! jam satis est.’ ‘Ohe jam satis est.’ Horace, Sat., l. 5, 12–3.

Note. ‘Why rack a grub,’ etc.

‘Satire or sense, alas! can Sporus feel,

Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?

Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings,

This painted child of dirt, that stinks and stings,’ etc.

Pope, Prologue to the Satires, 307 et seq.

306. Keats died when he was scarce twenty! Keats died in his 26th year.

307. Thus he informed the world, etc. See a review of Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespear’s Plays in the Quarterly Review (Vol. XVIII., p. 458).

‘It was amusing,’ etc. See a review of Political Essays in the Quarterly Review (Vol. XXII. p. 162), and A Letter to William Gifford, Vol. I. p. 410. In the Quarterly review of Table Talk Hazlitt is described as a ‘slang-whanger.’

308. The St. Helena articles. Two articles, in which Hudson Lowe’s treatment of Buonaparte is defended, appeared in the Quarterly Review shortly after Buonaparte’s death. See Vol. XXVIII. p. 219, and Vol. XXXIII. 177.

Lady Morgan. Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan (1783?–1859), authoress of The Wild Irish Girl (1806) was a favourite subject for the vulgar personal abuse of the Quarterly Review.

309. Peter Pindar. John Wolcot, ‘Peter Pindar,’ assaulted Gifford, mistaking him for his namesake John Gifford, editor of the Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine. The result was Gifford’s Epistle to Peter Pindar (1800).

This Drawcansir. See ante, note to p. 277.

309. His attacks on Mrs. Robinson, etc. See A Letter to William Gifford. (Vol. I., p. 378 note).

What he will make of Marlowe. Gifford did not publish an edition of Marlowe.

‘The fiery quality.’ King Lear, Act II. Scene 4.

Spiritus, etc. Petronius Arbiter (Satirae, 118, 3rd ed. Bücheler, p. 84), quoted by Coleridge in Biographia Literaria, Chap. xiv. ‘Praecipitandus est liber spiritus’ in the original.

In attempting to add the name, etc. See Gifford’s edition of Massinger (2nd ed. 1813, Vol. I., p. 14).

310. An article had appeared, etc. John Murray had conceived the scheme of establishing a Tory review, and had obtained many promises of support before the appearance of Jeffrey’s article in the Edinburgh (Oct. 1808, Vol. XIII., p. 215), on Cevallos and the affairs of Spain. (See Smiles, Memoirs of John Murray, I. 97). The first number of the Quarterly Review appeared in Feb. 1809.

311. ‘Those who are not for them,’ etc. St. Matthew, xii. 30.

‘Ugly all over with hypocrisy.’ See nowowte to Vol. I., p. 211.

Note. William Taylor (1765–1836), whose version of Bürger’s Lenore so fired the imagination of Scott, was a regular contributor to The Monthly Review from 1793 to 1800, and from 1809 to 1824.

312. Mr. Stuart Rose. William Stewart Rose (1775–1843), the friend of Scott, and translator of Ariosto (1823–1831).

313. The Lyrical Ballads. Hazlitt presumably refers to some introductory remarks on a new ‘sect of poets’ in a review by Jeffrey of Southey’s Thalaba. (Edinburgh Review, Oct. 1802, Vol. I., p. 63).

Unqualified encouragement, etc. For favourable references to Malthus see Edinburgh Review, Oct. 1807 (Vol. XI., p. 100), August 1810 (Vol. XVI., p. 464), and March 1817 (Vol. XXVIII., p. 1). Southey attacked Malthus in the Quarterly Review (Dec. 1812), but the Essay on Population was defended five years later (July 1817) by Sumner.

‘Reasons,’ etc. Henry IV., Part I., Act II., Scene 4.

Mr. Jeffrey is the Editor of the Edinburgh Review. Sydney Smith claimed to have been editor of the first number (Oct. 1802), Jeffrey was editor from that time till 1829, when he retired on being appointed Dean of the Faculty of Advocates.

314. Nearly a fourth part of the articles. Lord Cockburn in his Life of Lord Jeffrey (1874 ed., p. 404 et seq.) gives a total list of 200 contributions. A selection was published in four volumes in 1844.

‘Infinite agitation of wit.’ Bacon, Advancement of Learning, Book I., IV. 5.

316. ‘Spinning the thread,’ etc. Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act V. Scene 1.

317. But in private your follies, etc. Hazlitt very likely put Jeffrey to this test when he was in Edinburgh in 1823 on his divorce business. See Vol. II., p. 314 and note.

319. ‘Has no figures,’ etc. Julius Caesar, Act II. Scene 1.

‘Tread the primrose path,’ etc. Hamlet, Act I. Scene 3.

A Phillips. Charles Phillips (1787?–1859), a native of Sligo, who enjoyed a great reputation, both at the Irish bar, and at the English bar, to which he was called in 1821. Brougham himself described his speeches as ‘horticultural.’

A Plunket. William Conyngham Plunket (1764–1854), the advocate of Catholic Emancipation, famous for his eloquence both at the bar and in Parliament, created Baron Plunket in 1827, chief-justice of the Irish common pleas (1827–30), and Lord Chancellor of Ireland (1830–1841).

319. Note. Brougham was born in Edinburgh, where he was educated. His mother was Scotch (a niece of Robertson the historian), and his father belonged to an old Westmoreland family.

The late Lord Erskine. Erskine died in November, 1823.

320. ‘Domestic treason,’ etc.

‘Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,

Can touch him further.’

Macbeth, Act III. Scene 2.

321. ‘As much again to govern it.’ In Table Talk Hazlitt quotes this line as Butler’s.

‘Pour out all as plain,’ etc. Pope, Imitations of Horace, Sat. I. 51–2.

322. ‘Scared at the sound,’ etc. Cf.

‘And back recoiled, he knew not why,

Even at the sound himself had made.’

Collins, The Passions, ll. 19–20.

‘The total grist,’ etc. Cowper, The Task, Book VI., 108.

323. There are few intellectual accomplishments, etc. It was said of Brougham that if he had known a little law, he would have known a little of everything.

The celebrated Carnot. Lazare Nicolas Marguerite Carnot (1753–1823), the first organiser of the armies of the Revolution. He left Napoleon in 1800, but returned to him in 1814, and was Minister of the Interior during the Hundred Days. He wrote many works on mathematical subjects.

‘No day without a line.’ ‘Nulla dies sine linea,’ a phrase based on a saying of Apelles reported by Pliny. (Nat. Hist. XXXV., 36, 10).

325. Imbibed at Wimbledon Common. Where Horne Tooke lived.

‘Hunt half a day,’ etc. Wordsworth, Hart-Leap Well, Part II.

Lord Eldon and Mr. Wilberforce. The paper on Lord Eldon appeared in the New Monthly Magazine (1824, Vol. XI., p. 17).

‘All tranquillity and smiles.’ Cowper, The Task, Book IV., 49.

326. ‘All is conscience,’ etc. Chaucer, Prologue, 150.

‘If wretches hang,’ etc.

‘And wretches hang that jurymen may dine.’

Pope, Rape of the Lock, III. 22.

An instance, etc. For John Williams’s attack on the Court of Chancery, see Parl. Hist. (June 4, 1823, and Feb. 24, 1824), and Walpole’s History of England, III. 281. An inaccurate report of a speech of Abercromby’s on the second of John Williams’s motions led the Chancellor to make some angry observations from the bench. The incident created a considerable sensation and led to a debate in Parliament. (See Twiss’s Life of Lord Eldon, II. 490–502).

327. ‘Resistless passion,’ etc.

‘—— for affection,

Mistress of passion, sways it to the mood

Of what it likes or loathes.’

Merchant of Venice, Act IV. Scene 1.

328. ‘Lack lustre eye.’ As You Like It, Act II. 7.

‘As they were in Rabelais.’ See Pantagruel, Liv. II., Chap. xxxix et seq.

An injunction against Wat Tyler. See Vol. III., note to p. 192.

329. The Year 1794. The Year of unsuccessful prosecutions of Horne Tooke, Hardy, Thelwall, Holcroft, and others, and the year in which Wat Tyler was written.

‘One entire and perfect chrysolite.’ Othello, Act V. Scene 2.

‘Read his history,’ etc.

‘And read their history in a nation’s eyes.’

Gray, Elegy in a Country Churchyard, Stanza 16.

330. ‘So small a drop,’ etc. Cymbeline, Act IV. Scene 2.

331. Mr. Wilberforce. William Wilberforce (1759–1833), member for Hull 1780–4, for Yorkshire 1784–1812, and for Bramber 1812–1825, was early converted to the evangelical party known as the ‘Clapham Sect’ or the ‘Saints,’ and became the parliamentary leader of the anti-slavery cause. The slave trade was abolished by the coalition government in 1807, and emancipation was carried in 1833, the year of Wilberforce’s death. Apart from his efforts in this cause and on behalf of missionary work in India, he gave a general support to the Tory ministries of Pitt (his intimate friend), and of the Duke of Portland, Perceval, and Lord Liverpool. In particular he approved the coercive measures of 1795 and 1817. This partly accounts for the bitter attack not only of Hazlitt, but of Cobbett (Political Register, Aug. 1823).

‘What lacks he then.’ King John, Act IV. Scene 1.

‘Conscience will not budge.’ ‘Well, my conscience says, “Launcelot, budge not.” “Budge,” says the fiend. “Budge not,” says my conscience. “Conscience,” say I, “You counsel well.”’ Merchant of Venice, Act II. Scene 2.

‘Woe unto you,’ etc. St. Luke, vi. 26.

As old Fuller calls them. Holy and Profane State. The Good Sea Captain, Maxim 5.

332. ‘Out upon such half-faced fellowship.’ Henry IV., Part I., Act I. Scene 3.

333. ‘By every little breath,’ etc. The Faerie Queene, Book I., Canto vii. Stanza 32.

Clarkson. Thomas Clarkson (1760–1846). The most indefatigable of the extra-parliamentary agitators against slavery. Coleridge referred to him as ‘the moral steam engine, or Giant with one idea.’

334. Note. Byron in his Detached Notes (see Letters and Journals, ed. Prothero, II. 241 note) relates this well-known story as having been told to him by Sheridan himself.