was something atrocious.[66] The most humane of men, his suspicions and shyings cut him off completely from humanity. The base war waged upon him by the great Tory magazines could not have affected him so deeply that it changed his demeanor towards his fellows; for he had the mettle of a paladin, which no invective could break. But, alas! he had “the canker at the heart,” which is no fosterer of “the rose upon the cheek.” With all this fever and heaviness in Hazlitt’s blood, he had a hearty laugh, musical to hear. Haydon, in his exaggerated manner, reports an uncharitable conversation held with him once on the subject of Leigh Hunt in Italy, during which the two misconstruing critics, in their great glee, “made more noise than all the coaches, wagons, and carts outside in Piccadilly.” His smile was singularly grave and sweet. Mrs. Shelley wrote, on coming back to England, in her widowhood, and finding him much changed: “His smile brought tears to my eyes; it was like melancholy sunlight on a ruin.” A man who sincerely laughs and smiles is somewhat less than half a cynic. If there be any alive at this late hour who questions the genuineness of Hazlitt’s high spirits, he may be referred to the essay _On Going a Journey_, with the pæan about “the gentleman in the parlor,” in the finest emulation of Cowley; but chiefly and constantly to _The Fight_, with its lingering De-Foe-like details, sprinkled, not in the least ironically, with gold-dust of Chaucer and the later poets: the rich-ringing, unique _Fight_,[67] predecessor of Borrow’s famous burst about the “all tremendous bruisers” of _Lavengro_; and not to be matched in our peaceful literature save with the eulogy and epitaph of Jack Cavanagh, by the same hand. Divers hints have been circulated, within sixty-odd years, that Mr. Hazlitt was a timid person, also that he had no turn for jokes. These ingenious calumnies may be trusted to meet the fate of the Irish pagan fairies, small enough at the start, whose punishment it is to dwindle ever and ever away, and point a moral to succeeding generations. Hazlitt’s paradoxes are not of malice prepense, but are the ebullitions both of pure fun and of the truest philosophy. “The only way to be reconciled with old friends is to part with them for good.” “Goldsmith had the satisfaction of good-naturedly relieving the necessities of others, and of being harassed to death with his own.” “Captain Burney had you at an advantage by never understanding you.” Scattered mention of “people who live on their own estates and on other people’s ideas”; of Jeremy Bentham, who had been translated into French, “when it was the greatest pity in the world that he had not been translated into English”; of the Coleridge of prose, one of whose prefaces is “a masterpiece of its kind, having neither beginning, middle, nor end”; and even of the “singular animal,” John Bull himself, since “being the beast he is has made a man of him”:—these are no ill shots at the sarcastic.