Congreve, with all his quicksilver wit, could not outgo Hazlitt on Thieves, _videlicet_: “Even a highwayman, in the way of trade, may blow out your brains; but if he uses foul language at the same time, I should say he was no gentleman!” Hazlitt’s sense of humor has quality, if not quantity. How was it this same sense of humor, this fine-grained reticence, which wrote, nay, printed, in 1823, the piteous and ludicrous canticle of the goddess Sarah? Hazlitt was a great pedestrian from his boyhood on, and, like Goldsmith, a fair hand at the game of fives, which he played by the day. Wherever he was, his pocket bulged with a book. It gave him keen pleasure to set down the hour, the place, the mood, and the weather of various ecstatic first readings. He became acquainted with _Love for Love_ in a low wainscoted tavern parlor between Farnham and Alton, looking out upon a garden of larkspur, with a portrait of Charles II. crowning the chimney-piece; in his father’s house he fell across _Tom Jones_, “a child’s Tom Jones, an innocent creature”; he bought Milton and Burke at Shrewsbury, on the march; he looked up from Mrs. Inchbald’s _Simple Story_, when its pathos grew too poignant, to find “a summer shower dropping manna” on his head, and “an old crazy hand-organ playing _Robin Adair_.” And on April 10, 1798, his twentieth birthday, he sat down to a volume of the _New Eloïse_, a book which kept its hold upon him, “at the inn of Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a cold chicken!” The frank epicurean catalogue, as of equal spiritual and corporeal delight, is worth notice. Do we not know that Mr. Hazlitt had wood-partridges for supper, in his middle age, at the Golden Cross, in Rastadt, near Mayence? Yet he failed to record what book lay by his plate, and distracted his attention from her who had been a widow, and who was already planning her respectable exit from his society. Evidence that he was an eater of taste is to be accumulated eagerly by his partisans, for eating is one of many engaging human characteristics which establish him as lovable—that is, posthumously lovable. Barry Cornwall was so jealously tender of his memory that he would have forbidden any one to write of Hazlitt who had not known him. As he did not warm miscellaneously to everybody, it followed that his friends were few. We do not forget which one of these, during their only difference, thought “to go to his grave without finding, or expecting to find, such another companion.”[68]