NOTES

399

A REPLY TO THE ESSAY ON POPULATION

Thomas Robert Malthus’s (1766–1834) Essay on the Principle of Population as it affects the Future Improvement of Society was published anonymously in 1798. The second edition ‘very much enlarged’ appeared with the author’s name in a large 4to volume in 1803. For a sketch of Malthus’s life and doctrine and of the Malthusian controversy, see Sir Leslie Stephen’s The English Utilitarians, II. 137–185 and 238–259. The references in the following notes are to the second (1803) edition of the Essay. Cf. Hazlitt’s essay on Malthus in The Spirit of the Age, ante, pp. 287–298, and the last five essays in Political Essays, vol. III. pp. 356–385. A paper by De Quincey, entitled ‘Malthus,’ in the London Magazine for Oct. 1823, led to a brief controversy between De Quincey and Hazlitt, the particulars of which will be found in De Quincey’s Works (ed. Masson), IX. pp. 3, 20–31. Hazlitt’s Reply to Malthus was reviewed in the Edinburgh Review for August 1810 (vol. xvi. p. 464), or rather, as Hazlitt complains, the title of his Reply was prefixed to an article in the Edinburgh ‘as a pretence for making a formal eulogy’ on Malthus’s work. Hazlitt thereupon wrote the following letter to Cobbett’s Political Register (Nov. 24, 1810, vol. xviii. p. 1014) under the heading ‘Mr. Malthus and the Edinburgh Reviewers’:—

‘Sir,—The title-page of a pamphlet which I published some time ago, and part of which appeared in the Political Register in answer to the Essay on Population, having been lately prefixed to an article in the Edinburgh Review as a pretence for making a formal eulogy on that work, I take the liberty to request your insertion of a few queries, which may perhaps bring the dispute between Mr. Malthus’s admirers and his opponents, to some sort of issue. It will, however, first of all be proper to say something of the article in the Review. The writer of the article accuses the ‘anonymous’ writer of the reply to the Essay, of misrepresenting and misunderstanding his author, and undertakes to give a statement of the real principles of Mr. Malthus’s work. He at the same time informs us for whom this statement is intended, namely, for those who are not likely even to read the work itself, and who take their opinions on all subjects moral, political, and religious, from the periodical reports of the Edinburgh Review. For my own part, what I have to say will be addressed to those who have read Mr. Malthus’s work, and who may be disposed to form some opinion of their own on the subject.—The most remarkable circumstance in the Review is, that it is a complete confession of the force of the arguments which have been brought against the Essay. The defence here set up of it may indeed be regarded as the euthanasia of that performance. For in what does this defence consist but in an adoption, point by point, of the principal objections and limitation, which have been offered to Mr. Malthus’s system; and which being thus ingeniously applied to gloss its defects, the Reviewer charges those who had pointed them out with misrepresenting and vilifying the author? In fact, the advocates of this celebrated work do not at present defend its doctrines, but deny them. The only resource left them is that of screening its 400fallacies from the notice of the public by raising a cry of misrepresentation against those who attempt to expose them, and by holding a mask of flimsy affectation over the real and distinguishing features of the work. Scarcely a glimpse remains of the striking peculiarities of Mr. Malthus’s reasoning, his bold paradoxes dwindle by refined gradations into mere harmless common-places, and what is still more extraordinary, an almost entire coincidence of sentiment is found to subsist between the author of the essay and his most zealous opponents, if the ignorance and prejudices of the latter would but allow them to see it. Indeed the Edinburgh Reviewer gives pretty broad hints that neither friends nor foes have ever understood much of the matter, and kindly presents his readers for the first time, with the true key to this much admired production. He accordingly proceeds with considerable self-complacency to translate the language of the essay into the dialect of the Scotch school of economy, to put quite on one side the author’s geometrical and arithmetical ratios, which had wrought such wonders, to state that Mr. Malthus never pretended to make any new discovery, and to quote a passage from Adam Smith, which suggested the plan of his work; to shew that this far-famed work which has been so idly magnified, and so unjustly decried as overturning all the commonly received axioms of political philosophy, proves absolutely nothing with respect to the prospects of mankind or the means of social improvement, that the sole hopes either of the present or of future generations do not centre (strange to tell!) in the continuance of vice and misery, but in the gradual removal of these, by diffusing rational views of things and motives of action, and particularly by ameliorating the condition, securing the independence, and raising the spirit, of the lower classes of society; and finally that both the extent of population, and the degree of happiness enjoyed by the people of any country depend very much upon, and, as far as there is any difference observable between one country or state of society and another, are wholly regulated by political institutions, a good or bad government, moral habits, the state of civilization, commerce, or agriculture, the improvements in art or science, and a variety of other causes quite distinct from the sole mechanical principle of population. And, this Sir, is what the Reviewer imposes on his unsuspecting readers as the sum and substance, the true scope and effect of Mr. Malthus’s reasoning. It is in truth an almost literal recapitulation of the chief topics insisted on in the Reply to the Essay, which the Reviewer seems silently to regard as a kind of necessary supplement to that work.—In this account it is evident, both that Mr. Malthus’s pretentions as an original discoverer are given up by the Reviewer, and that his obnoxious and extravagant conclusions are carefully suppressed. Now with regard to the general principle of the disproportion between the power of increase in population, and in the means of subsistence, and the necessity of providing some checks, moral or physical, to the former, in order to keep it on a level with the means of subsistence, I have never in any instance called in question either of “these important and radical facts,” which it is the business of Mr. M.’s work to illustrate. All that I undertook in the Reply to the Essay was to disprove Mr. Malthus’s claim to the discovery of these facts, and to shew that he had drawn some very false and sophistical conclusions from them, which do not appear in the article in the Review. As far therefore as relates to the Edinburgh Reviewers, and their readers, I might consider my aim as accomplished, and leave Mr. Malthus’s system and pretensions in the hands of these friendly critics, who will hardly set the seal of their authority—on either one or the other, till they have reduced both to something like their own ordinary standard. But against this I have several reasons. First, as I never looked upon Mr. Malthus as “a man of no mark or likelihood,”^[74] I should be sorry to see him dandled into insignificance, 401and made a mere puppet in the hands of the Reviewers. Secondly, I in some measure owe it to myself to prove that the objections I have brought against his system are not the phantoms of my own imagination. Thirdly, Mr. Malthus’s work cannot be considered as entirely superseded by the account of it in the Review, as there are, no doubt, many persons who will still take their opinion of Mr. Malthus’s doctrines from his own writings, and abide by what they find in the text as good authority and sound argument, though not sanctioned in the Commentary.—I will therefore proceed to put the questions I at first proposed as the best means I can devise for determining, both what the contents of Mr. Malthus’s work really are, and to what degree of credit they are entitled, or how far they are true or false, original or borrowed.’

The queries which follow were with a few alterations republished by Hazlitt in The Examiner (Oct. 29, 1815—The Round Table, No. 23) and in Political Essays (vol. III. pp. 381–5). The alterations are almost entirely confined to the omission of all reference to the Edinburgh Review, for which Hazlitt himself had begun to write in 1814. The letter concludes as follows: ‘The drift of these questions, is, I believe, sufficiently obvious and direct; but if they should not be thought clear enough in themselves, I am ready to add a suitable commentary to them, by collating a convenient number of passages from the Essay, the Reply, and the Review.’

PAGE

1.

Letter I. First published in Cobbett’s Political Register, March 14, 1807: xi. 398.

The proposed alteration. Hazlitt alludes to the poor-law bill of Samuel Whitbread (1758–1815), introduced on February 19, 1807. One of the main features of the scheme was the establishment of a system of free education. The bill was attacked not only by Cobbett (Political Register, August, September, and October, 1807), and Hazlitt, but also by Malthus. Portions of the scheme passed their second readings as separate bills, but were abandoned. See Martineau, History of the Peace, I. 116.

2.

‘Who have none to help them.’ Job, xxix. 12.

‘Pride and covetousness.’ St. Mark, vii. 22.

‘The compunctious visitings of nature.’ Macbeth, Act I. Scene 5.

‘Laying the flattering unction.’ Hamlet, Act III. Scene 4.

‘Grinding the faces of the poor.’ Isaiah, iii. 15.

Mandeville. He refers to Bernard Mandeville (1670?–1733), whose Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices Public Benefits, appeared in 1714.

‘Will but skin and film,’ etc. Hamlet, Act III. Scene 4.

Note. The late Sir W. Pulteney. Sir William Johnstone Pulteney, 5th bart. of Westerhall (1721–1805), M.P. for Shrewsbury in seven successive parliaments. His name was originally Johnstone, but he took the name of Pulteney on marrying the youngest daughter and heiress of Daniel Pulteney, Lord of the Admiralty in Sir R. Walpole’s Ministry. ‘In private life he was remarked principally for his frugal habits, which were perhaps the more striking, as he was supposed to be the richest Commoner in the kingdom.... In the latter part of his life he was remarkable for his abstemious manner of living, his food being composed of the most simple nourishment, principally bread and milk.’ Gentleman’s Magazine, June, 1805, Vol. LXXV., p. 587. In 1804 he married the widow of Andrew Stuart, who fought a duel with Thurlow in connection with the Douglas cause. Cf. ante, p. 298.

3.

In corpore vili. This well known saying was quoted by Burke in his great speech on conciliation with America. See Select Works, ed. Payne, I. 224. 402The editor in a note (p. 325) quotes from Menagiana (3rd ed., p. 129) an anecdote of Muretus which is said to be the origin of the saying.

4.

‘Baser matter.’ Hamlet, Act I. Scene 5.

5.

Leurre de dupe. An expression of Rousseau’s (Confessions, Liv. IV.).

Unsuccessful endeavours, etc. Hazlitt refers to Whitbread’s management of the impeachment of Lord Melville for malversation as Treasurer of the Navy. Melville was acquitted on June 12, 1806.

6.

The celebrated Howard. John Howard died of camp fever at Kerson on January 20, 1790, while investigating the condition of Russian military hospitals.

The ‘champion,’ etc. A reference to Pitt’s description of Buonaparte as ‘the child and champion of Jacobinism. See Vol. III., note to page 99.

7.

‘The latter end,’ etc. Tempest, Act II. Scene 1.

Letter II. Political Register, May 16, 1807: XI. 883.

The English have been called, etc. Diderot said this in his Lettre sur les aveugles, ed. Tourneux, I. 312, but the opinion was expressed more than once in France during the period of Anglomania which prevailed in the middle of the eighteenth century. Cf. Texte, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (trans. Matthews) pp. 96 et. seq.

8.

‘Worthless importunity in rags.’ ‘——Lib’ral of their aid To clam’rous Importunity in rags.’ Cowper, The Task, IV. 413–4.

9.

‘Its bane and antidote.’ Addison’s Cato, Act V. Scene 1.

Multum abludit imago. Horace, Satires, II. 3, 320.

Wallace is the chief. Robert Wallace (1697–1771), a minister of the Scottish Church, published his Various Prospects of Mankind, Nature, and Providence, in 1761. The British Museum copy of Hazlitt’s Reply contains the following MS. note: ‘The writer of this note put into the hands of Mr. Hazlitt in the year 1828 a small volume entitled “a philosophical survey of the animal creation, which is a translation (by the author) of the Théorie du Système Animal,” which the Rev. John Bruckner had published some time before: after a perusal of the English edition of this work, Mr. Hazlitt admitted that the principles of the Essay on Population had been anticipated to a greater extent by the Flemish Divine, who settled in England, than they had been by Mr. Wallace.’ The Rev. John Bruckner (1726–1804), Minister of the Dutch Church at Norwich, published his Théorie du Système Animal in 1767, and Criticisms on the Diversions of Purley in 1790.

14.

‘Present circumstances of the earth.’ In the Political Register Hazlitt has the following note: ‘A different spirit breathes through this chapter from that of the Essay; the spirit of a gentleman, a philosopher, and a philanthropist. Mr. Malthus, indeed, sometimes limps after his model, and cants liberality in the true whine of hypocrisy.’

15.

‘So will his anticipation,’ etc. ‘So shall my anticipation prevent your discovery.’ Hamlet, Act II. Scene 2.

Arithmetical series. In the Political Register the following note is appended: ‘As far as I understand the nature of an arithmetical and geometrical series, I do not apprehend that Mr. M. could make good their strict application to the subject. An arithmetical series is where any number or quantity is increased by the perpetual addition of the same given sum or quantity. But how does Mr. M. know that this is true of the cultivation of the land, or that much more rapid strides may not be made at one time than at another?’ 403

15.

Mr. Shandy was of opinion, etc. Tristram Shandy, Book I. chap. xix.

18.

Letter III. Political Register, May 23, 1807: xi. 935. Hazlitt published part of this letter in his Political Essays. See vol. III. pp. 367–374.

‘A swaggering paradox,’ etc. Cf. ‘The paradoxes of one age become the common-places of the next.’ Jowett, Plato, III. 155.

19.

The reply of the author of the Political Justice. In Thoughts on Dr. Parr’s Spital Sermon (1801) Godwin replied to Parr, Mackintosh, and Malthus. Many years later, in 1820, he wrote Of Population. An Enquiry concerning the Power of Increase in the Numbers of Mankind, in Answer to Mr. Malthus on that Subject.

21.

‘The exuberant strength of my argument.’ A phrase of Malthus’s. Essay on Population, p. 372.

22.

‘What conjuration,’ etc. Othello, Act I. Scene 3.

23.

And as Trim. Tristram Shandy, Book VI. chap. xxiii.

24.

‘These three bear record,’ etc. Cf. 1 John, v. 7.

25.

‘Tis as easy as lying,’ etc. Hamlet, Act III. Scene 2.

To sum up the whole of the argument. The conclusion of Letter III. from this point is not in the Political Register.

‘And less than smallest dwarfs,’ etc. Paradise Lost, I. 779–781.

28.

‘It cannot but be,’ etc. Malthus, Essay on Population, pp. 353–4.

29.

‘Who am no great clerk.’ Cf. Burke, A Letter to a Noble Lord (Works, Bohn, V. 150). ‘He [Lord Keppel] was no great clerk.’

35.

‘It may be safely affirmed,’ etc. Malthus, pp. 7–8.

36.

Sancho Panza. Don Quixote, Part II., Book III., chap. xlix.

38.

‘Fast by,’ etc. Paradise Lost, II. 1051–2.

‘To nature’s furthest verge,’ etc. ‘Shoots far into the bosom of dim night A glimmering dawn. Here Nature first begins Her farthest verge, and Chaos to retire,’ etc. Paradise Lost, II. 1036–8.

‘Come on, sir,’ etc. King Lear, Act IV. Scene 6.

41.

A new Iliad of woes. See note to vol. III. p. 10.

42.

‘It keeps on its way,’ etc. Cf. ‘——I do know but one That unassailable holds on his rank, Unshaked of motion.’ Julius Caesar, Act III. Scene 1.

44.

‘Squalid poverty.’ Malthus, p. 516.

Note. ‘I am not as this poor Hottentot.’ Cf. ‘God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, etc.’ St. Luke, xviii. II.

Note. ‘Chill and comfortless.’ Cf. ‘All dark and comfortless.’ King Lear, Act III. Scene 7.

45.

‘Palaces, her ladies and her pomp.’ ‘Our palaces, our ladies, and our pomp of equipage.’ Cowper, The Task, I. 643–4.

46.

‘Upland swells,’ etc. ‘The grassy uplands’ gentle swells Echo to the bleat of flocks.’ Coleridge, Ode on the Departing Year, ll. 125–6.

53.

When Don Quixote had to encounter, etc. See Don Quixote, Part II., Book I. Chap. xiv. 404

55.

‘Their greatest merit,’ etc. Othello, Act III. Scene 3.

No maid could live near such a man. See note to vol. I. p. 305.

56.

‘Were they as prime,’ etc. Othello, Act III. Scene 3.

Note. Even Miss Howe, etc. In Clarissa Harlowe.

62.

‘The sin that most easily besets him.’ Hebrews, xii. I.

‘The rich golden shaft,’ etc. Twelfth Night, Act I. Scene 1.

‘All for love, or the world well lost.’ Dryden’s version of Antony and Cleopatra (1678).

63.

‘But as the dust in the balance.’ Isaiah, xl. 15.

Aaron’s rod. Exodus, vii. 12.

‘Sits umpire,’ etc. Paradise Lost, II. 907–9.

‘Our greatest good,’ etc. ‘Its former strength was but plethoric ill.’ Goldsmith, The Traveller, 144.

66.

Described by Hogarth. In what Lamb calls the ‘sublime print,’ entitled ‘Gin Lane.’

70.

Hume’s assertion. Dialogues on Natural Religion, Part XI. p. 212. The assertion is denied by Malthus in his Essay, p. 587.

71.

Note. A late publication. Letters to Samuel Whitbread, M.P., on his proposed Bill for the Amendment of the Poor Laws (1807).

Note. Jactet, etc. ‘Illa se jactet in aula Aeolus.’ Virgil, Aeneid, I. 140–1.

81.

Algernon Sydney. Sidney’s Discourses concerning Government, written about 1680, in reply to Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, were first published in 1698.

82.

‘The face of the clearest warning,’ etc. Quoted inaccurately from Malthus. See ante, pp. 173–4.

83.

Note. ‘Monks, eremites,’ etc. ‘Embryos and idiots, eremites and friars, White, black, and grey, with all their trumpery.’ Paradise Lost, III. 474–5.

84.

Lord Kaims’s account, etc. See Lord Kaims’s Sketches of the History of Man, vol. II. pp. 240–1 (edit. 1788).

85.

A common-place book. Hazlitt refers to James Burgh’s (1714–1775) Political Disquisitions: or, an Enquiry into public Errors, Defects, and Abuses. Illustrated by, and established upon Facts and Remarks extracted from a Variety of Authors, ancient and modern. Calculated to draw the timely attention of Government and People to a due Consideration of the Necessity, and the Means, of reforming those Errors, Defects, and Abuses; of restoring the Constitution, and saving the State. (3 vols. 1774–5).

‘That honest Chronicler.’ ‘But such an honest chronicler as Griffith.’ Henry VIII., Act IV. Scene 2.

‘The excellent Montague.’ Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the Ancient Republics. Adapted to the Present State of Great Britain, by Edward Wortley Montagu (1713–1776), son of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, was published in 1759. See Burgh’s Political Disquisitions, III. 68 et seq.

90.

The descendants of the heroes, etc. This passage to the end of the quotation is from Bolingbroke’s Political Tracts, 270. See Burgh, III. 414.

91.

The account which Voltaire gives. Burgh (III. 410) quotes this passage from Essais sur l’Histoire, II. 60.

Since that time it has fallen, etc. It is difficult to understand what such a worshipper of Napoleon as Hazlitt means by this sentence. The Vienna Congress (1815) ultimately declared the perpetual neutrality of Switzerland. 405

92.

‘I see,’ he says, etc. Burgh, III. 416.

‘A consummation,’ etc. Hamlet, Act III. Scene 1.

93.

Lord Molesworth. Robert Molesworth, first Viscount Molesworth (1656–1725), was appointed envoy extraordinary at the Danish Court in 1692, but left abruptly in 1694, and in the same year published An Account of Denmark as it was in the year 1692. See Burgh, III. 412.

95.

‘It must indeed be an answer,’ etc. All’s Well that Ends Well, Act II. Scene 2.

‘A thing may serve,’ etc. Ibid.

Burnet’s Travels. Gilbert Burnet’s Some Letters containing an Account of what seemed most remarkable in Switzerland, Italy, etc. (1686). See Burgh, III. 398–9.

‘Italy shews,’ etc. Ibid. III. 399.

‘In England,’ etc. Ibid. III. 400.

96.

‘The title of freemen,’ etc. From Spelman’s Glossary, quoted in Burgh, III. 400.

‘It is constantly,’ etc. Quoted by Burgh (III. 400) from Hume’s History of the Tudors, II. 640.

‘Nations have often,’ etc. Burgh, III. 34.

‘A single genius,’ etc. Ibid. III. 220.

‘Commerce,’ etc. Ibid. III. 83–4.

‘The extreme poverty,’ etc. Ibid. III. 84.

97.

‘Government, according to Plato,’ etc. Cf. Burgh, III. 175–8.

‘The great difference we see,’ etc. Ibid. III. 220.

‘Among the Lacedemonians,’ etc. Ibid. III. 150.

98.

‘Aristotle lays down,’ etc. Ibid. III. 156.

‘Lycurgus did not allow,’ etc. Ibid.

‘At Sparta,’ etc. Ibid. III. 181.

‘A very wise man,’ etc. Ibid. III. 100.

99.

‘The grave Romans,’ etc. Cf. Ibid. III. 100. The saying alluded to is Cicero’s. ‘Nemo enim fere saltat sobrius, nisi forte insanit.’ Pro Murena. Cap. 6.

‘In the old English laws,’ etc. Quoted by Burgh (III. 139) from Spelman’s Concilia.

‘Who elbow us aside,’ etc. ‘Till prostitution elbow us aside In all our crowded streets.’ Cowper, The Task, III. 60–1.

100.

‘Insensés qui vous plaignez,’ etc. Hazlitt seems to be recalling imperfectly a passage in Rousseau’s Émile (Liv. I.):—‘Nous plaignons le sort de l’enfance, et c’est le nôtre qu’il faudroit plaindre. Nos plus grands maux nous viennent de nous.’ See also a letter to Voltaire, 18th August 1756. Correspondance (1822), I. 216 et seq.

101.

Zaleucus. See Burgh, III. 180.

The greedy eye, etc. Cf. The English Comic Writers. (‘Comic Writers of the last Century’), and The Round Table (‘On Modern Comedy’), vol. I., p. 13.

102.

Narcissus and the Graces. A ballet by Sir Henry Rowley Bishop (1786–1855), produced at the King’s Theatre, June, 1806.

Note. The Memoirs of Fanny Hill. Fanny Hill, or the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, by John Cleland (1709–1789), was published, Part I. in 1748, Part II. in 1749. In 1750 the work was republished in a milder form by Ralph Griffiths, who is said to have paid twenty guineas for the copyright, and made a profit of £10,000. Cleland was summoned before the Privy Council, and received a pension of £100 from Lord Granville that he might devote himself to worthier forms of literature. 406

104.

‘In which the wicked,’ etc. Job, iii. 17.

‘Happy are they,’ etc. Hazlitt repeated this paragraph in a paper in The Yellow Dwarf. See Political Essays, vol. III., note to p. 266.

‘Hurt by the archers.’ Cowper, The Task, III. 113.

105.

‘M. Condorcet’s “Esquisse,”’ etc. Malthus, p. 354. Condorcet’s work appeared in 1794.

106.

‘This posthumous publication,’ etc. Ibid.

107.

‘This would indeed,’ etc. Ibid. p. 368.

108.

White Conduit-House. A ‘popular place of entertainment and tea-gardens’ at Pentonville. See Wheatley and Cunningham’s London Past and Present, III. 496, and ibid., I. 86, for an account of Bagnigge-Wells, a ‘noted place of entertainment, much resorted to the lower sort of tradesman,’ in the neighbourhood of King’s Cross.

‘There exists,’ etc. Malthus, p. 355.

109.

‘Such establishments,’ etc. Ibid. p. 356.

110.

‘Killing frost.’ Henry VIII., Act III. Scene 2. See Malthus, p. 356.

111.

‘Variations’ etc. Malthus, p, 359.

112.

‘It will be said, perhaps.’ Ibid. p. 362.

113.

‘What can we reason,’ etc. Pope’s Essay on Man, I. 18.

116.

Note. Dr. Paley. See his Evidences of Christianity. Preparatory Considerations. Of the antecedent credibility of miracles.

117.

The old argument of the Heap. Hazlitt alludes to a favourite logical impasse of the Stoics: ‘What constitutes a heap? Is it two, three, or four atoms, and on taking them away, when does a heap cease to exist?’ Cf. Horace, Ep. II. 1–47; and Cicero, De Div. II. 4.

‘It does not, however,’ etc. Malthus, p. 363.

Quotes Bickerstaff. See The Tatler, No. 75.

‘Mr. Godwin,’ etc. Malthus, p. 367.

118.

‘It is not, therefore,’ etc. Ibid. p. 43.

120.

‘They neither marry,’ etc. St. Matthew, xxii. 30.

122.

‘It may be curious,’ etc. Malthus, p. 374.

128.

The charge which he brings against Paine. Ibid. p. 530.

130.

‘Those who were born,’ etc. Ibid. p. 377.

132.

‘‘A man’ he says,’ etc. Ibid. p. 531.

134.

‘In most countries,’ etc. Ibid. p. 537.

135.

‘There is one right,’ etc. Ibid. p. 531.

138.

‘Sharpens his understanding,’ etc. ‘Thy flinty heart,’ occurs in Henry VI., Part II., Act III. Scene 2.

139.

‘Metaphysical aid.’ Macbeth, Act I. Scene 5.

140.

‘The quantity of food,’ etc. Malthus, p. 375.

142.

‘As Mr. Godwin,’ etc. Ibid. p. 381.

143.

‘He is himself again.’ ‘Richard’s himself again.’ Colley Cibber’s version of Richard III., Act V. Scene 3.

145.

‘Which after,’ etc. Butler, Hudibras, Part II., Canto I, 377–8.

‘Suppose,’ etc. Malthus, p. 396.

‘The question is,’ etc. Ibid. p. 422.

146.

‘It may at fist,’ etc. Ibid. p. 398.

150.

‘They lay heavy burthens,’ etc. St. Matthew, xxiii. 4.

‘Fared sumptuously,’ etc. St. Luke, xvi. 19.

151.

‘If instead,’ etc. Malthus, p. 405.

153.

‘Whose solid virtue,’ etc. Othello, Act IV. Scene 1.

156.

‘Independently of any considerations,’ etc. Malthus, p. 409. 407

157.

‘Alas from what height fallen.’ Cf. ‘——into what pit thou seest From what highth fallen.’ Paradise Lost, I. 91–2.

And ‘Alas, from what high hope to what relapse Unlooked for are we fallen!’ Paradise Regained, II. 30–1.

158.

‘Comes to him,’ etc. Romeo and Juliet, Act I. Scene 4.

‘Shall no more impart,’ etc. Goldsmith, The Deserted Village, 239–40.

‘Their drunkenness and dissipation.’ Malthus, p. 411.

‘Their squalid appearance.’ See Ibid. p. 516.

159.

‘The symmetry of person,’ etc. This is a quotation of Malthus’s (p. 488) from Godwin (Political Justice, Vol. I., Book I., Chap. v).

‘Our Doctors Commons,’ etc. Malthus, p. 576.

‘Father Paul.’ In Sheridan’s Duenna, first performed in 1775 at Covent Garden.

‘That the poor,’ etc. Malthus, p. 411.

‘A man who,’ etc. Ibid.

160.

‘“If,” says he,’ etc. Ibid. p. 540.

161.

‘This is well said,’ etc. Henry VIII., Act III. Scene 2.

162.

‘I like not,’ etc. Merry Wives of Windsor, Act. IV. Scene 2.

165.

Omne tulit punctum. Horace, Ars Poetica, 343.

166.

Mr. Burke has said. ‘Nobody will be argued into slavery.’ Speech on American Taxation (April 19, 1774, Select Works, ed. Payne, I. 155).

166.

‘Among the prejudices,’ etc. Malthus, p. 477.

Note. Tucker. Abraham Tucker (1705–1774), whose chief work The Light of Nature Pursued (7 vols., 1768–1778) was abridged by Hazlitt (1807). See ante, pp. 371–385. Paley admitted his obligations to Tucker.

168.

‘Will come when it will come.’ Julius Caesar, Act II. Scene 2.

‘The object of those,’ etc. Malthus, p. 508.

169.

‘The pressure of distress,’ etc. Ibid. p. 525.

Blifil. In Tom Jones.

The euthanasia foretold by Hume. See his Essay ‘On the British Government.’ ‘They talk,’ said Burke, ‘of Mr. Hume’s Euthanasia of the British Constitution gently expiring without a groan in the paternal arms of a mere Monarchy. In a monarchy! Fine trifling indeed! There is no such Euthanasia for the British Constitution.’ Regicide Peace (ed. Payne), p. 352.

172.

Timeo Danaos, et dona ferentes. Virgil, Aeneid, II. 49.

As the husband secured the virtue of his wife, etc. That is, presumably, by cutting off her head, ‘the Sign of the Good Woman,’ representing a headless woman carrying her head in her hand.

173.

‘I should propose,’ etc. Malthus, p. 538. A great part of the rest of Hazlitt’s Reply was repeated in the Political Essays. See vol. III. pp. 374–381.

176.

‘These paper bullets of the brain.’ Much Ado about Nothing, Act II. Scene 3.

177.

‘Would submit to the sufferings‘, etc. Malthus, p. 539.

180.

‘The scanty relief,’ etc. Ibid. p. 415.

‘If, as in Ireland,’ etc. Ibid. p. 548.

181.

‘It is not enough,’ etc. Ibid. p. 549.

183.

‘In some conversations,’ etc. Ibid. p. 553.

Anthony’s repeated declaration. Julius Caesar, Act III. Scene 2.

184.

‘It very rarely,’ etc. Malthus’s Essay (1st edition, 1798), p. 34.

408

THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE

189.

Jeremy Bentham. This essay appeared originally in the New Monthly Magazine (1824, vol. X. p. 68), of which Thomas Campbell was editor from 1820 to 1830. For an account of Bentham’s life and work, see Sir Leslie Stephen’s The English Utilitarians, vol. I. pp. 169–326.

The old adage. ‘A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country, and in his own house.’ St. Matthew, xiii. 57.

In the plains of Chili, etc. Bentham had many disciples among the patriots of South America, and in 1808 thought seriously of going to Mexico.

Westminster, where he lives. In Queen Square Place, now Queen Anne’s Gate. Hazlitt himself was from 1812 to 1819 a tenant of Bentham’s in Milton’s old house in Petty France, the garden of which Bentham had added to his house in Queen Square. See frontispiece to vol. III., and ante, p. 190.

‘I know thee,’ etc. ‘I have seen thee in her, and I do adore thee: my mistress show’d me thee, and thy dog, and thy bush.’ The Tempest, Act II. Scene 2.

Mr. Hobhouse. John Cam Hobhouse (1786–1869) was defeated at Westminster in February 1819, but was returned in the following year.

Lord Rolle. John Rolle (1795–1842) was the hero of The Rolliad, and sat for the great maritime county of Devonshire. He was raised to the peerage in 1796. See Wraxall’s Historical and Posthumous Memoirs (ed. Wheatley, IV. 116–119).

‘That waft a thought,’ etc. ‘And waft a sigh from Indus to the Pole.’ Pope, Eloisa to Abelard, 58.

Sir Samuel Romilly. Romilly was returned for Westminster in July 1818. He had already taken an active part in Parliament as a law-reformer.

190.

‘Lone island,’ etc. ‘Some happier island in the watery waste.’ Pope, Essay on Man, I. 106.

Chrestomathic School. The object of this was to apply Lancasterian principles to the education of the middle classes. An association, of which Mackintosh, Brougham, James Mill, and others were trustees, was formed in 1814, and Bentham offered his garden as a site, but the scheme came to nothing. See Sir Leslie Stephen’s The English Utilitarians, vol. II. p. 22.

Franklin. Bentham seems to have had a strong personal resemblance to Benjamin Franklin.

191.

Foregone conclusion. Othello, Act III. Scene 3.

192.

Mr. Bentham is not the first writer, etc. The principle of utility had been expressed by (among others) Priestley (Essay on Government, 1768), Hutcheson (Enquiry concerning Moral Good and Evil, 1725), and Beccaria (On Crimes and Punishments, 1764). See The English Utilitarians, vol. I. p. 178.

‘He has not allowed for the wind.’ A familiar expression which Hazlitt may have seen in Ivanhoe, Chap. xiii.

‘Bound volatile Hermes.’ Paradise Lost, III. 602–3.

193.

‘All appliances,’ etc. Henry IV., Part II., Act III. Scene 1.

Posthæc, etc. ‘Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit.’ Virgil, Aeneid, I. 203.

195.

No more than Montaigne, etc. Essays, Booke II., Chap. xii. An Apologie of Raymond Sebond. Florio’s translation, Temple Classics, Vol. II., p. 209.

196.

‘All men act,’ etc. ‘Men calculate, some with less exactness, indeed, some 409with more: but all men calculate. I would not say, that even a madman does not calculate.’ Principles of Morals and Legislation, Chap. XIV. § xxviii.

196.

Too knowing by half. ‘That’s too civil by half.’ Sheridan, The Rivals, Act III. Scene 4.

197.

A Panopticon. ‘A mill for grinding rogues honest, and idle men industrious’ (Bentham, Works, X. 226). Bentham published an account of the scheme in 1791 under the title of ‘The Panopticon, or the Inspection House,’ and spent a great deal of money in connection with it. Ultimately a committee reported against the scheme and proceeded to found the Millbank Penitentiary, which was opened in 1816. See The English Utilitarians, I. 193–206.

197.

‘Dip it in the ocean,’ etc. ‘But I fear, friend, said I, this buckle won’t stand ... you may immerse it, replied he, into the ocean, and it will stand.’ A Sentimental Journey, The Wig, Paris.

198.

Mr. Owen. Cf. Political Essays (vol. III. pp. 121–7) and Table-Talk (‘On People with one Idea’).

His address to the higher and middle classes. The second of Coleridge’s Lay Sermons (1817) was ‘addressed to the higher and middle classes.’

Hunter’s captivity among the North American Indians. J. Dunn Hunter’s Memoirs of a Captivity amongst the Indians of North America, from Childhood to the Age of Nineteen, etc., 1824.

199.

In nook monastic. ‘To forswear the full stream of the world and to live in a nook merely monastic.’ As You Like It, Act III. Scene 2.

‘Men of Ind.’ The Tempest, Act II. Scene 2.

Mr. Speaker Abbott. Charles Abbot (1757–1829) was Speaker from 1802 to 1817, when he retired and became Lord Colchester. His mother was the second wife of Bentham’s father. His unique Diary and Correspondence, extending from 1795 to 1829, were published in 3 vols. in 1861.

He was educated at Eton. Bentham was a Westminster boy.

200.

At the University. Bentham went to Queen’s College, Oxford, in 1760, and took his M.A. degree in 1766.

Church-of-Englandism. Church of Englandism and its Catechism examined, published in 1818.

‘To be honest,’ etc. Hamlet, Act II. Scene 2.

‘Looked enough abroad,’ etc. ‘The corrupter sort of politicians, who are not by learning established in a love of duty, nor ever look abroad into universality.’ Advancement of Learning, Book I.

Mr. Godwin. For Godwin see C. Kegan Paul’s William Godwin: his Friends and Contemporaries, 2 vols. 1876.

201.

Political Justice. Godwin’s Enquiry concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness was published in 1793, Things as they are; or the Adventures of Caleb Williams in 1794.

As Goldsmith used to say. ‘Whenever I write any thing, the public make a point to know nothing about it.’ Boswell, Life of Johnson (ed. G. B. Hill), III. 252.

Sedet, in eternumque, etc. ‘Sedet, aeternumque sedebit, Infelix Theseus.’ Virgil, Aeneid, VI. 617–18.

The false Duessa. The Faerie Queene, Book II., Canto ii., and Canto viii. Stanzas 46–8. 410

201.

His House of Pride. ‘And all the hinder partes, that few could spie, Were ruinous and old, but painted cunningly.’ Ibid. Book I., Canto iv. Stanza 5.

‘The pillar’d firmament,’ etc. Comus, 598–9.

202.

‘What, then,’ etc. St. Matthew, xi. 7.

Mr. Southey’s Inscriptions. Southey’s early ‘Inscriptions’ (1796–9), some of which he reprinted in the collected edition of his poems (1837–8), are, like his Joan of Arc and Wat Tyler, strongly radical in sentiment. See Hazlitt’s Political Essays (vol. III. p. 205).

Mr. Coleridge’s Religious Musings. Published in Poems on Various Subjects, 1796.

‘Like Cato,’ etc. Pope, Prologue to the Satires, 208. The line is taken from Pope’s own Prologue to Addison’s Cato.

‘By that sin fell the angels.’ Henry VIII., Act III. Scene 2.

204.

‘There was the rub,’ etc. ‘There’s the respect That makes calamity of so long life.’ Hamlet, Act III. Scene 1.

204.

‘Trenchant blade.’ ‘Let not the virgin’s cheek 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. 411

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. 412

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). 413

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.

414‘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. 415

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. 416

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 417Thomas 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. 418

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.’

419Earl 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. 420

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 421escape 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 422says 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, 423to 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. 424

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. 425

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. 426

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 427Parliament, 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. 428

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.

Mr. Cobbett. This essay appeared in Table Talk (Vol. I., 1821) and was republished in a small volume in 1835, the year of Cobbett’s death. Cf. a passage on Cobbett in the Examiner printed in notes to the Round Table, Vol. I. p. 424.

Cribb. See ante, note to p. 223.

‘Fillips the ear,’ etc. Henry IV., Part II., Act I. Scene 2.

‘Lays waste’ a city orator, etc. The reference is probably to an attack on Robert Waithman in the Political Register. (See Political Works, IV. 319 and V. 298.) Waithman was member for the City of London from 1816 till 1820, and from 1826 till his death in 1833. See ante, p. 282, and post, note to p. 366.

335.

‘Damnable iteration.’ Henry IV., Part I., Act I. Scene 2.

336.

Nunquam sufflaminandus erat. ‘Itaque D. Augustus optime dixit, Aterius noster sufflaminandus est.’ M. Annaeus Seneca, Controversiae, 4, praef. § 7. The saying is quoted by Ben Jonson (Timber, LXIV.).

‘Weary, stale,’ etc. Hamlet, Act I. Scene 2. 429

337.

Barmecide. Arabian Nights, The Barber’s Story of his Sixth Brother.

‘Live in his description.’ A reminiscence, perhaps of the line in Pope’s Dunciad (I. 69), ‘But liv’d in Settle’s numbers one day more.’

Mr. ——. Probably Brougham. See Political Works, V. 145 et seq.

His Grammar. ‘A Grammar of the English Language, in a Series of Letters’ (1818).

Like Giant Despair. ‘So, when he arose, he getteth him a grievous crab-tree cudgel.... Then he falls upon them, and beats them fearfully, in such sort, that they were not able to help themselves, or to turn them upon the floor.’ Pilgrim’s Progress, Part I.

338.

The Yanguesian carriers. Don Quixote, Part I., Book III. Chap. xv.

‘He has the back-trick,’ etc. Twelfth Night, Act I. Scene 3.

‘Arrowy sleet.’ ‘——and flying behind them shot Sharp sleet of arrowy showers against the face Of their pursuers.’ Paradise Regained, III. 323–5.

An Ishmaelite indeed. Cf. ‘Behold an Israelite indeed,’ etc. St. John, i. 47. Hazlitt has in mind the description (Genesis, xvi. 12) of Ishmael: ‘And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren.’

340.

The two-penny trash. Set Political Register, August 1817 (Political Works, V. 236).

‘Till a Bill passed the House,’ etc. Cobbett’s Political Register had evaded the stamp duty until 1819, when it was rendered liable to duty by the fifth of the famous Six Acts passed in that year.

‘Ample scope,’ etc. ‘Give ample room, and verge enough.’ Gray, The Bard, II. 1.

341.

‘He pours out,’ etc. Pope, Imitations of Horace, Sat. I. 51–2.

Antipholis of Ephesus, etc. See The Comedy of Errors, Act V. Scene 1.

The relics of Mr. Thomas Paine, etc. When Cobbett returned to England from America in 1819 he brought Paine’s bones to Liverpool and left them there. After Cobbett’s death they were seized as part of the property of Paine’s son who became a bankrupt.

‘His canonized bones.’ Hamlet, Act I. Scene 4.

342.

The Edinburgh Review, etc. In an article by Jeffrey, July 1807, Vol. X. 386. The reply of Cobbett referred to by Hazlitt appeared in the Political Register, August 1807. Political Works, II. 294.

343.

The Pleasures of Memory. By Rogers, published in 1792.

The Pleasures of Hope. By Campbell, published in 1799.

344.

We should dread to point out, etc. Scott said to Washington Irving (Lockhart, IV. 93): ‘The fact is, Campbell is, in a manner, a bugbear to himself. The brightness of his early success is a detriment to all his further efforts. He is afraid of the shadow that his own fame casts before him.’

‘Snatches a grace,’ etc. Pope, Essay on Criticism, 155.

‘Yet sweeter,’ etc. Winter’s Tale, Act. IV. Scene 4.

345.

‘And by the vision,’ etc. Wordsworth’s Ode, Intimations of Immortality, 73–4.

Gertrude of Wyoming. Published in 1809.

‘A loved bequest,’ etc. Part I. Stanzas 11–13.

346.

‘Famous poet’s page.’ Cf. ‘A most famous Poet’s witt.’ Spenser, Verses addressed by the Author of the Faerie Queene (to the Earl of Essex).

‘Jealous leer malign.’ Paradise Lost, IV. 503. 430

346.

‘Scattered in stray-gifts,’ etc. Wordsworth, Stray Pleasures.

‘Like angel’s visits,’ etc. Pleasures of Hope, Part II. l. 378. Cf. Lectures on the English Poets (Vol. V. p. 150), where Hazlitt adds: ‘Mr. Campbell in altering the expression has spoiled it. “Few,” and “far between” are the same thing.’

‘We perceive a softness,’ etc. Cf. Vol. V. p. 184.

347.

‘Ruddy drops,’ etc. Julius Caesar, Act II. Scene 1.

Hohenlinden. Published anonymously with Lochiel in 1802, and included in the 4to (1803) edition of The Pleasures of Hope.

348.

Mr. Campbell’s prose-criticisms. Campbell’s ‘Lectures on Poetry Re-written’ appeared in the New Monthly Magazine of which he was editor from 1820 to 1830. Hazlitt does not refer to his Specimens of the British Poets, with biographical and critical notices, and an Essay on English Poetry (7 vols. 1819).

Mr. Crabbe. The Poems of George Crabbe (1754–1832), with a Life by his son George, were published in 8 vols. 1834, and in one volume 1847. The one volume edition has recently been re-issued, as a result of the praises bestowed on Crabbe by Edward Fitzgerald, who himself made a Selection from the Tales of the Hall.