Thus much, thus all-too little, of his course in print. For his life, despite his many ‘bursts of confidence,’ the admissions of his grandson, and the discoveries of such friends as Patmore, the half of it, I think, has to be told to us. This was not his fault, for he was in no sense secretive: he would no more lie about himself than he would lie about Southey or Gifford. His trick of drinking was, while it lasted, public; he proclaimed with all his lungs his frank and full approval of the fundamentals of the Revolution and his preference of Bonaparte before all the Kings in Europe; he despised Shelley the politician, and rejected Shelley the poet, and he cherished and made the most he could of his resentment against Coleridge and Wordsworth, though his disdain for concealment perilled his friendship with Lamb, and well nigh cost him the far more facile regard of Leigh Hunt; while, as for Byron, he so bitterly resented the ‘noble Lord’s’ pre-eminency that he made no difference, strongly as he contemned the Laureate, between the Laureate’s _Vision of Judgment_, a piece of English verse immortal by the sheer force of its absurdity, and that other _Vision of Judgment_, which is one of the great things in English poetry. ’Twas much the same in life. Poor Mrs. Hazlitt, though she was well-read, of no account as an housekeeper, ‘fond of incongruous finery,’ and capable of child-bearing withal, was, one may take for granted, not distinguished as a woman. Now, her husband, thinker as he approved himself, was very much of a male. Who runs may read of his early loves—Miss Railton and the rest; ’tis history—at any rate ’tis history according to Wordsworth[17]—that once, in Lakeland, he so dealt with the local beauty that he came very near to tasting of the local pond; when Patmore walked home with him to Westminster, after his first lecture in the Surrey Institute, the wayside nymphs flocked to his encounter, and—(so Patmore says)—he knew them all;[18] he has himself recorded the confession that in the matter of mob-caps and black stockings and red elbows—in fact, on the score of your maid-servant—he could flourish a list as long, or thereabouts, as Leporello’s. I know not whether he lied or spoke the truth;[19] but I can scarce believe that he lied. I should rather opine that on this point, as on others, Hazlitt, a gross and extravagant admirer (be it remembered) of J.-J. Rousseau, was, and is, entirely credible. We may take it that his veracity is beyond reproach. But ’tis another matter with his taste; and for that I can say no more than that I have listened to so many confidences: From some we loved, the loveliest and the best That from his Vintage rolling Time has pressed: that I hold it for merely unessential.