His domestic experiences, indeed, had been nearly as extraordinary as Shelley’s. Sarah Walker, of No. 9 Southampton Buildings, is a sort of burlesque counterpart of that other “spouse, sister, angel,” Emilia Viviani. Nothing in literary history is much funnier than Mr. Hazlitt’s kind assistance to Mrs. Hazlitt in securing her divorce, going to visit her at Edinburgh, and supplying funds and advice over the teacups, while the process was pending, unless it be Shelley’s ingenuous invitation to his deserted young wife to come and dwell forever with himself and Mary! The silent dramatic withdrawal of the second Mrs. Hazlitt, the well-to-do relict of a colonel, who is henceforth swallowed up in complete oblivion, is a feature whose like is missing in Shelley’s romance. Events in Hazlitt’s path were not many, and his inner calamities seem somehow subordinated to exterior workings. It is not too much to say that to the French Revolution and the white heat of hope it diffused over Europe he owed the renewal of the very impetus within him: his moral probity, his mental vigor, and his physical cheer. His measure of men and things was fixed by its standard. Other enthusiasts wavered and went back to the flesh-pots of Egypt, but not he. _Et cuncta terrarum subacta præter atrocem animum Catonis._ Towards the grandest inconsistency this world has seen, he bore himself with a consistency nothing less than touching. Everywhere, always, as a friend who understood him well reminds a later generation, “Hazlitt was the only man of letters in England who dared openly to stand by the French Revolution, through good and evil report, and who had the magnanimity never to turn his back upon its child and champion.” The ruin of Napoleon, and the final news that “the hunter of greatness and of glory was himself a shade,” meant more to him than the relinquishment of his early and cherished art, or the fading of the long dream that his heart “should find a heart to speak to.” On his last autumn afternoon, he said what no one else would have dared to say for him: “I have had a happy life.” Such it was, if we are to compute happiness by souls, and not by the incidents which befall them. What were the things which atoned to this reformer for the curse of a mind too sentient, a heart never far from breaking? Over and above all amended and amending abuses, the memory of the Rembrandts on the walls of Burleigh House; the waving crest of the Tuderley woods; the sky, the turf, “a winding road, and a three-hours’ march to dinner”; the impersonator of Richard III. most to his mind, who lighted the stage, “and fought as if drunk with wounds”; and the figure (how pastoral and tender!) of the shepherd-boy bringing a nest for his young mistress’s sky-lark, “not doomed to dip his wings in the dappled dawn.” What heresy to the ancients would be this creed of poetic compensation! Montesquieu adhered to it; but hardly from baffled and impassioned Hazlitt, dying