The news of Waterloo plunged Hazlitt into deep distress, as if it had been the shock of a personal calamity. According to Haydon, "he walked about unwashed, unshaven, hardly sober by day, always intoxicated by night, literally for weeks." But his disappointment only strengthened his attachment to his principles. These remained enshrined with the brightest dreams of his youth, and in proportion as the vision faded and men were beginning to scoff at it as a shadow, Hazlitt bent his energies to fix its outline and prove its reality. "I am attached to my conclusions," he says, "in consequence of the pain, the anxiety, and the waste of time they have cost me."[22] His doctrines contained nothing that was subversive of social order, and their ultimate triumph lends the color of heroism to a consistency which people have often interpreted as proof of a limited horizon. It is at least certain that he did not put his conscience out to market, and that his reward came in the form of the vilest calumny ever visited upon a man of letters. These were the most infamous years of the Quarterly Review and Blackwood's Magazine, both of which had been founded as avowed champions of reaction. Their purpose was to discredit all writers whose politics or the politics of whose friends differed from the Government. Everybody knows of the fate which Keats and Shelley suffered at their hands, chiefly because they were friends of Leigh Hunt, who was the editor of a Liberal newspaper which had displeased George IV. Even the unoffending Lamb did not escape their brutality, perhaps because he was guilty of admitting Hazlitt to his house. The weapons were misrepresentation and unconfined abuse, wielded with an utter disregard of where the blows might fall, in the spirit of a gang of young ruffians who knew that they were protected in their wantonness by a higher authority. In the chastened sadness of his later years Lockhart, who was one of the offenders, confessed that he had no personal grudge against any of Blackwood's victims, in fact that he knew nothing about any of them, but that at the request of John Wilson, his fellow-editor, he had composed "some squibberies ... with as little malice as if the assigned subject had been the court of Pekin." The sincere regret he expressed for the pain which his "jokes" had inflicted ought perhaps to be counted in extenuation of his errors. It may be true, as his generous biographer suggests, that "his politics and his feud with many of these men was an affair of ignorance and accidental associations in Edinburgh," that under different circumstances "he might have been found inditing sonnets to Leigh Hunt, and supping with Lamb, Haydon, and Hazlitt."[23] But meanwhile irreparable mischief had been done to many reputations, and the life of one man had been sacrificed to his sportiveness.[24]