ineffable and half-reluctant outburst—a very Balaam’s blessing—on Coleridge,[486] which stands not higher than this, not lower than that, but as an _A-per-se_, consummate and unique. [Sidenote: _The_ Comic Writers.] In a sense the _Comic Writers_ are even better. The general exordium on Wit and Humour belongs to the first class of Hazlitt’s critical performances as defined above, and is one of the cleverest of them; though it may perhaps have the faults of its class, and some of those of its author. That on Comedy—the general part of it—incurs this sentence in a heavier degree; for Aristotle or somebody else seems to have impressed Hazlitt too strongly with the necessary _shadiness_ of Comedy, and it is quite clear that of the Romantic variety (which to be sure hardly anybody but Shakespeare has ever hit off) he had an insufficient idea. He is again inadequate on Jonson; it is indeed in his criticism, because of its very excellence, that we see—more than anywhere else, though we see it everywhere—the truth of his master’s denunciation of the “criticism which denies.” But his lecture or essay on the capital examples of the comedy which he really liked—that of the Restoration—is again an apex: and, as it happens, it is grouped for English students with others—the morally excellent and intellectually vigorous but rather purblind onslaught of Collier, the again vigorous but somewhat Philistine following thereof by Macaulay, the practical confession of Lamb’s fantastic and delightful apology, Leigh Hunt’s rather feeble compromise—after a fashion which shows it off to a marvel. While as to the chapter on the Eighteenth-century Novel it has, with a worthier subject, an equal supremacy of treatment. You may differ with much of it, but always agree to differ: except in that estimate of Lovelace which unfortunately shows us Hazlitt’s inability to recognise a _cad_ in the dress and with the manners of a fine gentleman.[487] [Sidenote: The Age of Elizabeth.]