memory owes so much to his pen in other moods. He is the most ingenuous and agreeable egoist we have had since the seventeenth-century men. It must be remembered how little he was in touch outwardly with social and civic affairs; how he was content to be the always young looker-on. There was nothing for him to do but fall back, under given conditions, upon his own capacious entity. The automaton called William Hazlitt is to him a toy made to his hand, to be reached without effort; the digest of all his study and the applicable test of all his assumptions. He knew himself; he could, and did, with decorum, approve or chastise himself in open court. “His life was of humanity the sphere.” His “I” has a strong constituency in the other twenty-five initials. In this sense, and in our current cant, Hazlitt is nothing if not subjective, super-personal. His sort of sentimentalism is an anomaly in Northern literature, even in the age when nearly every literary Englishman of note was variously engaged in baring his breast. Whether he would carp or sigh, he will still hold you by the button, as he held host and guest, master and valet, to pour into their adjacent ears the mad extravagances of the _Liber Amoris_. He gets a little tired at his desk, after battling for hours with the slow and stupid in behalf of the beauty ever-living; he wants fresh air and a reverie; he must digress or die. And from abstractions bardic as Carlyle’s, he runs gladly to his own approved self. This very circumstance, which lends Hazlitt’s pages their curious blur and stain, is the same which stamps his individuality, and gives those who are drawn towards him at all an unspeakably hearty relish for his company. What shall we call it?—the habit, not maudlin in him, of speaking out, of draining his well of emotion for the benefit of the elect; nay, even of delicate lyric whimperings, beside which “Poore Petrarch’s long-deceasèd woes” take on a tinsel glamour. As the dancing-girl carries her jewels, every one in sight as she moves, so our “Faustus, that was wont to make the schools ring with _Sic probo_,” steps into the forum jingling and twinkling with personalia. He is quite aware of the figure he may cut: he does not stumble into an intimacy with you because he is absent-minded, or because he is liable to an attack of affectation. He is as conscious as Poussin’s giants, whom he once described as “seated on the tops of craggy mountains, playing idly on their Pan’s pipes, and knowing the beginning and the end of their own story.” Many sentences of his, from their structure, might be attributed to Coleridge, the single person from whom Hazlitt admits to have learned anything;[71] but there is no mistaking his _note émue_: that is as obvious as the syncopations in a Scotch tune, or the long eyes of Orcagna’s saints.