In this phase of his genius, however, there is perhaps, for some tastes at any rate, a little too much of what has been called _bravura_—too much of the merely epideictic. It is not so in the other. Appreciate the appreciation of the _Winter’s Tale_ passage; still more take to heart (they will go to it without much taking where there is one) the “First Acquaintance with Poets,” or still better the marvellous critical swan-song of the “Farewell,” and there can be no more doubt about Hazlitt. _Quia multum amavit_ is at once his best description and his greatest glory. In all the range of criticism which I have read I can hardly think of any one except Longinus who displays the same faculty of not unreasonable or unreasoned passion for literature; and Longinus, alas! has, as an opportunity for showing this to us, scarcely more than the bulk of one of Hazlitt’s longest Essays, of which, long and short, Hazlitt himself has given us, I suppose, a hundred. Nor, as in some others (many, if not most of whom, if I named them, I should name for the sake of honour), is a genuine passion made the mere theme of elaborate and deliberate literary variations. As we have seen, Hazlitt will often leave it expressed in one sentence of ejaculatory and convincing fervour; it seldom appears at greater length than that of a passage, while a whole lecture or essay in the key of rapture is exceedingly rare. Hazlitt is desultory, irrelevant, splenetic, moody, self-contradictory; but he is never merely pleonastic,—there is no mere verbiage, no mere virtuosity, in him. And the consequence is that this enthusiastic appreciation of letters, which I have, however heretically, taken throughout this book to be really the highest function of criticism, _catches_: that the critical yeast (to plagiarise from ourselves) never fails to work. The order of history, as always, should probably be repeated, and the influence of Coleridge should be felt, as Hazlitt himself felt it, first: it is well to fortify also with Longinus himself, and with Aristotle, and with as many others of the great ones as the student can manage to master. But there is at least a danger, with some perhaps of not the worst minds, of all this remaining cold as the bonfire before the torch is applied. The _silex scintillans_ of Hazlitt’s rugged heart will seldom fail to give the vivifying spark from its own inward and immortal fire.[518] [Sidenote: _Blake._]