Fortunately, however, the wind does not always blow from this quarter with him, and when it does the symptoms are so unmistakable that nobody can be deceived unless he chooses to be, or is so stupid that it really does not matter whether he is deceived or not. Far more usually it is set in a bracing North or fertilising West, not seldom even in the “summer South” itself. And then you get such appreciations, in the best, the most thorough, the most delightful, the most _valuable_ sense, as had been seldom seen since Dryden, never before, and in him not frequently. I do not know in what language to look for a parallel wealth. Systematic Hazlitt’s criticism very seldom is, and, as hinted above, still seldomer at its best when it attempts system. But then system was not wanted; it had been overdone; the patient required a copious alterative. He received it from Hazlitt as he has—virtue and quantity combined—received it from no one else since: it is a “patent medicine” in everything but the presence of quackery. Roughly speaking, Hazlitt’s criticism is of two kinds. The first is very stimulating, very interesting, but, I venture to think, the less valuable of the two. In it Hazlitt at least endeavours to be general, and takes a lesson from Burke in “prodigious variation” on his subject. The most famous, the most laboured, and perhaps the best example is the exordium of the _Lectures on the English Poets_, with its astonishing “amplification” on what poetry in general is and what it is not. A good deal of this is directly Coleridgean. I forget whether this is the lecture which Coleridge himself, when he read it, thought that he remembered “talking at Lamb’s”; but we may be quite sure that he had talked things very like it. Much in the “Shakespeare and Milton” has the same quality, and may have been partly derived from the same source: the critical character of Pope[482] is another instance, and probably more original. For Hazlitt had not merely learnt the trick from his master but had himself a genius for it; and he adorned these disquisitions with more _phrase_ than Coleridge’s recalcitrant pen usually allowed him, though there seems to have been plenty in his speech.