Hazlitt would have set himself down, by choice, as a metaphysician. Up to the time when his _Life of Napoleon_ was well in hand, he used to affirm that the anonymous _Principles of Human Action_, which he completed at twenty, in the literary style of the azoic age, was his best work. He was rather proud, too, of the _Characteristics in the Manner of Rochefoucauld’s Maxims_, his one dreary book, which contains a couple of inductions worthy of Pascal, some sophistries and hollow cynicisms not native to Hazlitt’s brain, and a vast number of the very professorisms which he scouted. Maxims, indeed, are sown broadcast over his pages, which Alison the historian classified as better to quote than to read; but they gain by being incidental, and embedded in the body of his fancies. His vein of original thought comes nowhere so perfectly into play as in its application to affairs. His pen is anything but abstruse, “Housed in a dream, at distance from the kind.” He did not recognize that to display his highest power he needed deeds and men, and their tangible outcome to be criticised. His preferences were altogether wed to the past. In his essay on _Envy_ he excuses, with a wise reflection, his comparative indifference to living writers: “We try to stifle the sense we have of their merit, not because they are new or modern, but because we are not sure they will ever be old.” Or, as Professor Wilson said of him, with tardy but winning kindness: “In short, if you want Hazlitt’s praise, you must die for it . . . and it is almost worth dying for.”[69] Yet what an eye he has for the idiosyncrasy at his elbow, be it in the individual or in the race! Every contemporary of his, every painter, author, actor, and statesman of whom he cared to write at all, stands forth under his touch in delicate and aggressive outlines from which a wind seems to blow back the mortal draperies, like a figure in a triumphal procession of Mantegna’s. His manner is essentially pictorial. His sketches of Cobbett and of Northcote, in _The Spirit of Obligations_; of Johnson, in _The Periodical Essayists_; of Sir Thomas Browne and Bishop Taylor; and of Coleridge and Lamb, drawn more than once, with great power, from the life, will never be excelled. His philippic on _The Spirit of Monarchy_, or that on _The Regal Character_, is a pure vitriol flame, to scorch the necks of princes. His comments upon English and Continental types, if gathered from the necessarily promiscuous _Notes of a Journey_, would make a most diverting and illuminating duodecimo; the indictment of the French is especially masterly. _The Spirit of the Age_, _The Plain Speaker_, the Northcote book, _The English Comic Writers_, and the noble and little-read _Political Essays_ are packed with vital personalities. So is _The Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays_, full of beautiful metaphysical analysis, as well as of vivifying criticism. This lavish accumulation of material,