One really blushes for him. Could he possibly be unaware that when a person is about to look at anything, the natural gesture is to lower the head and thrust it a little forward, raising or depressing the eyelids at the same time? or be insensible to the exquisite profile image of Miranda with the long eyelashes projected against the air? And he was the author of _A Criticism of Female Beauty_! But if he sometimes misunderstands, he seldom misses good things such as (it is true Warton put him on this) the Medea passage of Gower.[476] Ben Jonson made him uncomfortable, which is again a pity; and on Beaumont and Fletcher he is at almost his very worst: but he is sounder than some greater ones on Ford and Massinger, and his great “catch” of De Flores deserves yet a third mention. He is at his very best and pleasantest, too, where most men fail—where they are even often very _un_pleasant—on his contemporaries, Coleridge, and Shelley, and Keats. When you have said such a thing as this[477] of Coleridge, “Of pure poetry, ... consisting of nothing but its essential self, ... he was the greatest master of his time,” you had better “stand down.” Your critical claim is made out: you may damage but can hardly increase it. Yet it is only in the severe court of critical history that one would wish to silence Hunt: for, in truth, nine-tenths of his criticism is admirable, and most admirably suited to instruct and encourage the average man. Impressionism and Rulelessness are almost as fairly justified of him, their child, as of any other that I can think of. They scarcely ever lead him wrong in liking; and he mentions what he dislikes so seldom that he has only occasional chances of being wrong there. [Sidenote: _Hazlitt._] But the greatest of the “Cockney critics” (_quelle Cocaigne!_) has yet to come. There is “a company of warm young men,” as Dryden has it, who would doubtless disdain the inquiry whether Coleridge or Hazlitt is the greatest of English critics; and it is quite certain that this inquiry might be conducted in a sufficiently futile sense and manner. There are others, less disdainful, who might perhaps be staggered by the acknowledgment _in limine_ that it is possible to answer the question either way—nay, for the same person to give both answers, and yet be “not unwelcome back again” as a reasonable disputant. I have myself in my time, I think, committed myself to both propositions; and I am not at all disposed to give up either—for reasons which it will be more proper to give at the end than at the beginning of an examination of Hazlitt himself. That he was a great critic there will probably now be little dispute, though Goethe is said not to have found much good in him; though persons of worship, including Mr Stevenson, have thought him greater as a miscellaneous essayist; and though you may read writings of considerable length upon him in which no attempt is made to bring out his critical character at all.