The _Lectures on the Age of Elizabeth_ (which succeeded the _Comic Writers_, as these had succeeded the _Poets_) maintain, if they do not even raise, the standard. Perhaps there is nothing so fine as the Coleridge passage in individual and concentrated expression; nor any piece of connected criticism so masterly as the chapter on the Novel. But the level is higher: and nowhere do we find better expression of that _gusto_—that amorous quest of literary beauty and rapturous enjoyment of it—which, has been noted as Hazlitt’s great merit. His faults are here, as always, with him and with us. Even the faithful Lamb was driven to expostulate[488] with the wanton and, as it happens, most uncritical belittlement of Sidney,[489] and (though he himself was probably less influenced by political partisanship or political feeling of any kind than almost any great writer of whom we know) to assign this to its true cause. It is odd[490] that a critic, and a great critic, should contrive to be inadequate both on Browne and on Dryden: and again one cannot but suspect the combination to be due to the fact that both were Royalists. But the King’s Head does not always come in: and it is only fair to Hazlitt to say that he is less biassed than Coleridge by the royalism itself of Beaumont and Fletcher, and the supposed republicanism of Massinger. And in by far the greater part of the book— nearly the whole of that part of it which deals with the dramatists— there is no disturbance of this kind. The opening, if somewhat discursive, is masterly, and with very few exceptions the lecturer or essayist carries out the admirable motto—in fact and in deed the motto of all real critics—“I have endeavoured to feel what was good, and to give a reason for the faith that was in me when necessary and when in my power.”[491] Two of his sentences, in dealing with Beaumont and Fletcher, not merely set the key-note of all good criticism but should open the stop thereof in all fit readers. “It is something worth living for to write or even read such poetry as this, or to know that it has been written.” Again, “And so it is something, as our poets themselves wrote, ‘far above singing.’”[492] [Sidenote: Characters of Shakespeare.]