The Pope passage is specially interesting, because it leads us to the second and, as it seems to me, the chief and principal class of Hazlitt’s critical deliverances—those in which, without _epideictic_ intention, without, or with but a moderate portion of, rhetoric and amplification and phrasemaking, he handles separate authors and works and pieces. I have said that I think him here unsurpassed, and perhaps unrivalled, in the quantity and number of his deliverances, and only surpassed, _if so_, in their quality, by the greatest things of the greatest persons. These deliverances are to be found everywhere in his extensive critical work, and it is of a survey of some of them, conditioned in the manner outlined above, that the main body of any useful historical account of his criticism must consist. The four main places are the Lectures on _The English Poets_ (1818), on _The English Comic Writers_ (1819), on _Elizabethan Literature_ (1820), and the book on _Characters of Shakespeare_ (1817). We may take them in the order mentioned, though it is not quite chronological, because the chronological dislocation, in the case of the second pair, is logically and methodically unavoidable. [Sidenote: The English Poets.] How thoroughly this examination of the greater particulars (as we may call it) was the work which he was born to do is illustrated by the sketches (at the end of the first Lecture on _The English Poets_[483]) of _The Pilgrim’s Progress_, _Robinson Crusoe_, the _Decameron_, Homer, the Bible, Dante, and (O Groves of Blarney!) _Ossian_. Hazlitt’s faults (except prejudice, which is here fortunately silent) are by no means hidden in them—irrelevance, defect of knowledge, “casualness,” and other not so good things. But the _gusto_,[484] the spirit, the inspiriting quality, are present in tenfold measure. Here is a man to whom literature is a real and live thing, and who can make it real and alive to his readers—a man who does not love it or its individual examples “by allowance,” but who loves it “with personal love.” Even his Richardsonian digression[485]—horrible to the stop-watch man—is alive and real and stimulating with the rest. The Dante passage is a little false perhaps in parts, inadequate, prejudiced, what you will in others. But it is criticism—an act of literary faith and hope and charity too—a substance; something added to, and new-born in, the literary cosmos. He is better (indeed he is here almost at his very best) on Spenser than on Chaucer, but why? Because he _knew_ more about Spenser, because he was plentifully read in sixteenth- and hardly read at all in fourteenth-century literature. And so always: the very plethora of one’s notes for comment warning the commentator that he is lost if he indulges rashly. Where Hazlitt is inadequate (as for instance on Dryden) he is more instructive than many men’s adequacy could be, and where he is not— on Collins, on the Ballads, and elsewhere—he prepares us for that