To take the “Poetic Versatility” first, it is an interesting paper, and with the aid of those “characters” of poets, &c., which have been indicated in the survey just completed, gives the best possible idea of one (and perhaps the most popular) of Hazlitt’s forms of critical achievement and influence. In it he eddies round his subject—completing his picture of it by strokes apparently promiscuous in selection, but always tending to body forth the image that presents itself to him, and that he wishes to present to his readers. “Poetry dwells in a perpetual Utopia of its own.” It “does not create difficulties where they do not exist, but contrives to get rid of them whether they exist or not.” “Its strength is in its wings; its element the air.” We “may leave it to time to take out the stains, seeing it is a thing immortal as itself.” Poets “either find things delightful or make them so,” &c. &c., some of the etceteras drawing away from the everlasting, and condescending rather lamentably to the particular. [Sidenote: _in set pieces,_] Now there is no need to tell the reader—even the reader of this book, I hope—that this, of these utterances, is a reproduction of Longinus (whom Hazlitt most probably had not read), or that of Coleridge, whom most certainly he had both read and heard.[517] “The man who plants cabbages imitates too”: and it is only the foolishest folk of rather foolish times who endeavour to be original, though the wisest of all times always succeed in being so. The point with Hazlitt is that in these circlings round his subject—these puttings of every possible way in which, with or without the help of others, it strikes him—he gives the greatest possible help to others in being struck. One of the blows will almost certainly hit the nail on the head and drive it home into any tolerably susceptible mind: many may, and the others after the first will help to fix it. Of method there may not be very much—there is rather more here than in most cases; but whether there is method or not, “everything,” in the old military phrase, “goes in”; the subject and the reader are carried by assault, mass, variety, repetition of argument, imagery, phrase. Hazlitt will not be refused; he takes towns at a hand-gallop, like Condé at Lerida—and he does not often lose them afterwards. [Sidenote: _and universally._]