delights--a face passed in the street, a sunset, a quiet hour of reflection, even a well-cooked meal--make up for the suffering of not wholly commonplace woes. I do not know whether even the joy of literary battle did not overweigh the pain of the dishonest wounds which he received from illiberal adversaries. I think that he had a happy life, and I am glad that he had. For he was in literature a great man. I am myself disposed to hold that, for all his accesses of hopelessly uncritical prejudice, he was the greatest critic that England has yet produced; and there are some who hold (though I do not agree with them) that he was even greater as a miscellaneous essayist than as a critic. It is certainly upon his essays, critical and other, that his fame must rest; not on the frenzied outpourings of the _Liber Amoris_ (full as these are of flashes of genius), or upon the one-sided and ill-planned _Life of Napoleon_; still less on his clever-boy essay on the _Principles of Human Action_, or on his attempts in grammar, in literary compilation and abridgment, and the like. Seven volumes of Bonn's Standard Library, with another published elsewhere containing his writings on Art, contain nearly all the documents of Hazlitt's fame: a few do not seem to have been yet collected from his _Remains_ and from the publications in which they originally appeared. These books--the _Spirit of the Age_, _Table Talk_, _The Plain Speaker_, _The Round Table_ (including the _Conversations with Northcote_ and _Characteristics_), _Lectures on the English Poets and Comic Writers_, _Elizabethan Literature_ and _Characters of Shakespeare_, _Sketches and Essays_ (including _Winterslow_)--represent the work, roughly speaking, of the last twenty years of Hazlitt's life; for in the earlier and longer period he wrote very little, and, indeed, declares that for a long time he had a difficulty in writing at all. They are all singularly homogeneous in general character, the lectures written as lectures differing very little from the essays written as essays, and even the frantic diatribes of the "Letter to Gifford" bearing a strong family likeness to the good-humoured _reportage_ of "On going to a Fight," or the singularly picturesque and pathetic egotism of the "Farewell to Essay-writing." This family resemblance is the more curious because, independently of the diversity of subject, Hazlitt can hardly be said to possess a style or, at least, a manner--indeed, he somewhere or other distinctly disclaims the possession. Yet, irregular as he is in his fashion of writing, no less than in the merit of it, the germs of some of the most famous styles of this century may be discovered in his casual and haphazard work. Everybody knows Jeffrey's question to Macaulay, "Where the devil did you get that style?" If any one will read Hazlitt (who, be it remembered, was a contributor to the _Edinburgh_) carefully, he will see where Macaulay got that style, or at least the