The _Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays_ is perhaps not as good as any of these three courses of Lectures; but it should be remembered that it came earlier in time, and that the critic had not “got his hand in.” The notes are as a rule nearly as desultory as Coleridge’s, with less suggestiveness; there is at least one outburst, in the case of _Henry V._, of the usual disturbing influence; there is very much more quotation than there need be from Schlegel; and there are other signs of the novitiate. Yet the book contains admirable things, as in the early comparison of Chaucer and Shakespeare, where, though Hazlitt’s defective knowledge of Chaucer again appears, there is much else good. Among the _apices_ of Shakespearian criticism is the statement that the poet “has no prejudice for or against his characters,”[493] that he makes “no attempt to force an interest: everything is left for time and circumstance to unfold.”[494] There is perhaps something inconsistent with this as well as with truth in the observation on _Lear_,[495] that “He is here fairly caught in the web of his own imagination”; but, like most of the greater critics, Hazlitt cares very little for superficial consistency. The characters of Falstaff and Shylock are masterpieces in his _bravura_ style, and one need perhaps nowhere seriously quarrel with any critical statement of his except the astonishing one, that _All’s Well that Ends Well_ is “one of the most _pleasing_” of the plays. In the remaining volumes the literary articles or passages are only occasional, and are often considerably adulterated with non-literary matter. In _The Plain Speaker_, for instance, the opening paper on “The Prose Style of Poets” holds out almost the highest promise, and gives almost the lowest performance. Hazlitt, as is not so very uncommon with him, seems to have deliberately set himself to take the other side from Coleridge’s. That it happens also to be the wrong side matters very little. But even his attack on Coleridge’s own prose style (open enough to objection) has nothing very happy in it except the comparison, “To read one of his disquisitions is like hearing the variations to a piece of music without the score.” So, too, “On the Conversation of Authors,” though intensely interesting, has no critical interest or very little— the chief exception being the passage on Burke’s style. Far more important is the glance at the theory of the single word in “On Application to Study,”[496] and in that in “On Envy”[497] on the taste of the Lake School. [Sidenote: The Plain Speaker.]