The last and gravest of his drawbacks has to be mentioned, and though it may be slurred over by political partisanship, those who admire and exalt him in spite of and not because of his politics, are well entitled to call attention to it. To the unpleasantness of Hazlitt’s personal temper we have the unchallengeable testimony of his friends Lamb, who was the most charitable, and Hunt, who with all his faults was one of the most good-natured, of mortals. But what we may call his political temper, especially when it was further exasperated by his personal, is something of the equal of which no time leaves record. Whenever this east wind blows, the true but reasonable Hazlittian had better, speaking figuratively, “go to bed till it is over,” as John Hall Stevenson is said to have done literally in the case of the literal Eurus. Not only does Hazlitt then cease to be a critic,—he ceases to be a rational being. Sidney and Scott are the main instances of its effect, because Sidney could not have annoyed, and Scott we know did not in any way annoy, Hazlitt personally. Gifford is not in this case, and he was himself so fond of playing at the roughest of bowls that nobody need pity him for the rubbers he met. But Hazlitt’s famous _Letter_ to him, which some admire, always, I confess, makes me think of the Doll’s-dressmaker’s father’s last fit of the horrors in _Our Mutual Friend_, and of the way in which the luckless “man talent” fought with the police and “laid about him hopelessly, fiercely, staringly, convulsively, foamingly.” Fortunately the effect was not so fatal, and I know no other instance in which Hazlitt actually required the strait waistcoat.[481] But he certainly did here: and in a considerable number of instances his prejudices have made him, if not exactly _non compos mentis_, yet certainly _non compos judicii_. [Sidenote: _His radical and usual excellence._]