Under these several royal hands, the traditional helpfulness to men of letters had declared itself in pensions and civil appointments; Southey had come to his laureateship, and his additional pension; we found the venerable Wordsworth making a London pilgrimage for a “kissing of hands,” and the honor of a royal stipend; Walter Scott had received his baronetcy at the hands of George IV., and that dilettante sovereign would have taken Byron (whom we shall presently encounter) patronizingly by the hand, except the fiery poet--scenting slights everywhere--had flamed up in that spirit of proud defiance, which afterward declared itself with a fury of denunciation in the _Irish Avatar_ (1821). _Hazlitt and Hallam._ Another noticeable author of this period, whose cynicism kept him very much by himself, was William Hazlitt;[53] he was the son of a clergyman and very precocious--hearing Coleridge preach in his father’s pulpit at Wem in Shropshire, and feeling his ambition stirred by the notice of that poet, who was attracted by the shrewd speech and great forehead of the boy. Young Hazlitt drifts away from such early influences to Paris and to painting--he thinking to master that art. But in this he does nothing satisfying; he next appears in London, to carve a way to fame with his pen. He is an acute observer; he is proud; he is awkward; he is shy. Charles Lamb and sister greatly befriend him and take to him; and he, with his hate of conventionalisms, loves those Lamb chambers and the whist parties, where he can go, in whatever slouch costume he may choose; poor Mary Lamb, too, perceiving that he has a husband-ish hankering after a certain female friend of hers--blows hot and cold upon it, in her quaint little notelets, with a delighted and an undisguised sense of being a party to their little game. It ended in a marriage at last; not without its domestic infelicities; but these would be too long, and too dreary for the telling. Mr. Hazlitt wrote upon a vast variety of topics--upon art, and the drama, upon economic questions, upon politics--as wide in his range as Leigh Hunt; and though he was far more trenchant, more shrewd, more disputatious, more thoughtful, he did lack Hunt’s easy pliancy and grace of touch. Though a wide reader and acute observer, Hazlitt does not contend or criticise by conventional rules; his law of measurement is not by old syntactic, grammatic, or dialectic practices; there’s no imposing display of critical implements (by which some operators dazzle us), but he cuts--quick and sharp--to the point at issue. We never forget his strenuous, high-colored personality, and the seething of his prejudices--whether his talk is of Napoleon (in which he is not reverent of average British opinion), or of Sir Joshua Reynolds, or of Burke’s brilliant oratorical apostrophes. But with fullest recognition of his acuteness, and independence, there remains a disposition (bred by his