Sarah Hazlitt married no more; but her husband did. In 1824 he took to wife a certain Mrs. Bridgewater. She was Scots by birth, had lived much abroad, had married and buried a Colonel Bridgewater, was of excellent repute, and had about £300 a year; and with her new husband and his son by Sarah Stoddart—(who had an idea that his mother had been wronged, and seems to have been a most uncomfortable travelling companion)—she toured it awhile in France and Italy. On the return journey the Hazlitts left her in Paris; and when the elder, writing from London, asked her when she purposed to come home to him, she replied that she did not purpose to come home to him: that, in fact, she had done with him, and he would see her no more. So far as I know, he never did; so that, as his grandson says, this second marriage was but ‘an episode.’ Apparently it was the last in his life; for neither Mrs. Hazlitt attended him in his mortal illness, nor was there any woman at his bed’s head when he passed. V It is told of him that he was dark-eyed and dark-haired, slim in figure, rather slovenly in his habit; that he valued himself on his effect in evening dress; that his manners were rather ceremonious than easy; that he had a wonderfully eloquent face, with a mouth as expressive as Kean’s, and a frown like the Giaour’s own[23]—that Giaour whom he did not love. He worshipped women, but was awkward and afraid with them; he played a good game of fives, and would walk his forty to fifty miles a day; he would lie a-bed till two in the afternoon, then rise, dally with his breakfast until eight without ever moving from his tea-pot and his chair, and go to a theatre, a bite at the Southampton, and talk till two in the morning.[24] That he excelled in talk is beyond all doubt. Witness after witness is here to his wit, his insight, his grip on essentials, his beautiful trick of paradox, his brilliancy in attack, his desperate defence, his varying, far-glancing, inextinguishable capacity for expression. And he was himself—Hazlitt: a man who borrowed nobody’s methods, set no limits to the field of discussion, nor made other men wonder if this were no talk but a lecture. He bore no likeness to that ‘great but useless genius,’ Coleridge: who, beginning well as few begin, lived ever after ‘on the sound of his own voice’; none to Wordsworth, whose most inspiring theme was his own poetry; none to Sheridan, who ‘never oped his mouth but out there flew’ a jest; none to Lamb, who——But no; I cannot imagine Lamb in talk. Hazlitt himself has plucked out only a tag or two of Lamb’s mystery; and I own that, even in the presence of the notes in which he sets down Lamb as Lamb was to his intimates, I am divided in appreciation between the pair. Lamb for the unexpected, the incongruous, the profound, the jest that bred seriousness, the pun that was that and a light upon dark places, a touch