There is only one more in this gallery of portraits before which we shall pause, and that only for a moment, to present a last specimen of the critical manner of Mr Talfourd. We are sorry the last should not be the best; and yet, as this sketch is a reprint, in an abridged form, of an essay affixed to the _Literary Remains of Hazlitt_, it may be considered as having received a more than usual share of the author's attention. It is thus that he analyses the mental constitution of one whom he appears to have studied and greatly admired--William Hazlitt. "He had as unquenchable a desire for truth as others have for wealth, or power, or fame: he pursued it with sturdy singleness of purpose, and enunciated it without favour or fear. But besides that love of truth, that sincerity in pursuing it, and that boldness in telling it, he had also a fervent aspiration after the beautiful, a vivid sense of pleasure, and an _intense consciousness of his own individual being_, which sometimes produced obstacles to the current of speculation, by which it was broken into dazzling eddies, or urged into devious windings. Acute, fervid, vigorous as his mind was, it wanted _the one great central power of imagination, which brings all the other faculties into harmonious action, multiplies them into each other, makes truth visible in the forms of beauty, and substitutes intellectual vision for proof_. Thus in him truth and beauty held divided empire. In him the spirit was willing but the flesh was _strong_, and when these contend it is not difficult to anticipate the result; 'for the power of beauty shall sooner transform honesty from what it is into a bawd, than the person of honesty shall transform beauty into its likeness.' This 'sometime paradox' was vividly exemplified in Hazlitt's personal history, his conversation, and his writings."[3] [3] Vol. ii., p. 157.