He crowns a torrent of abuse by declaring that Scott has encouraged the lowest panders of a venal press, 'deluging and nauseating the public mind with the offal and garbage of Billingsgate abuse and vulgar slang;' and presently he calls Scott--by way, it is true, of lowering Byron--'one of the greatest teachers of morality that ever lived.' He invents a theory, to which he returns more than once, to justify the contrast. Scott, he says, is much such a writer as the Duke of Wellington (the hated antithesis of Napoleon, whose 'foolish face' he specially detests) is a general. The one gets 100,000 men together, and 'leaves it to them to fight out the battle, for if he meddled with it he might spoil sport; the other gets an innumerable quantity of facts together, and lets them tell their story as they may. The facts are stubborn in the last instance as the men are in the first, and in neither case is the broth spoiled by the cook.' Both heroes show modesty and self-knowledge, but 'little boldness or inventiveness of genius.' On the strength of this doctrine he even compares Scott disadvantageously with Godwin and Mrs. Inchbald, who had, it seems, more invention though fewer facts. Hazlitt was not bound to understand strategy, and devoutly held that Wellington's armies succeeded because their general only looked on. But he should have understood his own trade a little better. Putting aside this grotesque theory, he feels Scott's greatness truly, and admits it generously. He enjoys the broth, to use his own phrase, though he is determined to believe that it somehow made itself.