Much of _The Plain Speaker_ is injured as a treasury of criticism, though improved as a provision of amusement, by Hazlitt’s personal revelations, complaints, agonies; but the critical _ethos_ of the man was so irrepressible that it will not be refused. There is a curious little piece[498] of critical blasphemy, or at least “dis-_gusto_” (the word is wanted and is fairly choice Italian), in “On the Pleasure of Hating,” and, almost throughout the series, the sharp flux and reflux of literary admiration and political rage in respect of Scott is most noteworthy. “On the Qualifications necessary to Success in Life” contains yet another[499] of those passages on Coleridge which are like nothing so much as the half-fond, half-furious, retrospects of a discarded lover on his mistress—which are certainly like nothing else in literature. But “On Reading Old Books” does not belie the promise of its title, and is a complete and satisfactory palinode to the fit of critical headache noted just now. One must not venture to cite from it; it is to be read and re-read, and hardly any single piece, except the immortal “Farewell to Essay-Writing,” gives us so much insight into Hazlitt’s critical temperament as this. “On People of Sense” contains many critical glances, and, unfortunately, one[500] of those on Shelley which show Hazlitt at his worst. One might think that he who found others so “far above singing” could not miss the similar altitude of the author of _Prometheus Unbound_. But Shelley was a contemporary, something of an acquaintance, a man of some means, a gentleman—so Hazlitt must snarl[501] at him. Let us sigh and pass. “Antiquity,” though on one side only, is almost throughout ours, and therefore not ours: and there is not a little for us in “On Novelty and Familiarity,” while “Old English Writers and Speakers” speaks for itself, and is specially interesting for its glances on matters French and its characteristically Hazlittian fling—one I confess with which I have for once no quarrel—that “_’Tis pity She’s a Whore_ will no more act than Lord Byron and Goethe together could have written it.”[502] It puts one in charity for the absurd description,[503] contradicted by his own remarks, of _Redgauntlet_s “the last and almost worst” of Scott’s novels, and the prediction (alas! to be falsified) that “Old Sir Walter will last long enough”—in the flesh, not in fame.[504] “Scott, Racine, and Shakespeare” is not unworthy of its title, though it is really on the first and last only. Racine is brought in perfunctorily, and justice is done to him in neither sense.