Hazlitt brought to his every task a mind violently made up, and a vocation for special pleading which nothing could withstand. Sure as he is, he means to be nobody’s hired guide: a resolve for which the general reader cannot be too grateful. In wilful and mellow study of what chance threw in his way his strength grew, and his limitations with it. It is small wonder that he hated schoolmasters, and the public which expected of him schoolmaster platitudes. He had a pride of intellect not unlike Rousseau’s, and he seems to have had ever in mind Rousseau’s cardinal declaration that if he were no better than other men, he was at least different from them. Hazlitt defined his own functions with proper haughtiness, in the amusing apology of _Capacity and Genius_. “I was once applied to, in a delicate emergency, to write an article on a difficult subject for an encyclopædia; and was advised to take time, and give it a systematic and scientific form; to avail myself of all the knowledge that was to be obtained upon the subject, and arrange it with clearness and method. I made answer that, as to the first, I _had_ taken time to do all that I ever pretended to do, as I had thought incessantly on different matters for twenty years of my life; that I had no particular knowledge of the subject in question, and no head for arrangement; that the utmost I could do, in such a case, would be, when a systematic and scientific article was prepared, to write marginal notes upon it, to insert a remark or illustration of my own (not to be found in former encyclopædias!) or to suggest a better definition than had been offered in the text.”[58] Such independence nobly became him, and none the less because it kept him poor. But in the course of time, he had to work, and keep on working, under wretched disadvantages. He had spurts of revolt, after long experience of compulsory composition; his darling wish in 1822 (confided to his wife, of all persons) being that he “could marry some woman with a good fortune, that he might not be under the necessity of writing another line!”