Hazlitt's professed indifference to system is probably due as much to lack of deep reading as to romantic impatience of restraint. When he declared that it was beyond his powers "to condense and combine all the facts relating to a subject"[62] or that "he had no head for arrangement,"[63] it was only because he did not happen to be a master of the facts which required combination or arrangement. For he did have an unusual gift for penetrating to the core of a subject and tearing out the heart of its mystery; in fact, his power of concrete literary generalization was in his age unmatched. To reveal the distinctive virtue of a literary form, to characterize the sources of weakness or of strength in a new or a by-gone fashion of poetry, to analyze accurately the forces impelling a whole mighty age--these things, requiring a deep and steady concentration of mind, are among his most solid achievements. In a paragraph he distils for us the essence of what is picturesque and worth dwelling on in the comedy of the Restoration. In a page he triumphantly establishes the boundary-line between the poetry of art and nature--Pope and Shakespeare--which to the present day remains as a clear guide, while at the same time Campbell and Byron and Bowles are filling the periodicals with protracted and often irrelevant arguments on one side or the other which only the critically curious now venture to look into. In the space of a single lecture he takes a sweeping view of all the great movements which gave vitality and grandeur to the Elizabethan spirit and found a voice in its literature, so that in spite of his little learning he seems to have left nothing for his followers but to fill in his outline. The same keenness of discernment he applied casually in dissecting the genius of his own time. He associated the absence of drama with the French Revolution, its tendency to deal in abstractions and to regard everything in relation to _man_ and not men--a tendency irreconcilable with dramatic literature, which is essentially individual and concrete.[64] To be sure the eighteenth century before the Revolution was as void of drama as Hazlitt's generation, but what is true of the period which produced Political Justice and the Edinburgh Review would hold equally of the time which produced the "Essay on Man" and the deistic controversy. He sometimes harshly exposes the weaker side of contemporary lyricism as a "mere effusion of natural sensibility," and he regrets the absence of "imaginary splendor and human passion" as of a glory departed.[65] But with all this he had the true historical sense. It breaks out most unmistakably when he says, "If literature in our day has taken this decided turn into a critical channel, is it not a presumptive proof that it ought to do so?"[66] Of the actual application of historical principles, which were just beginning to be realized in the study of literature, we find only a few faint traces in Hazlitt.