see many reasons to believe that he was very much more brilliant and convincing at the Southampton than he is in the most convincing and the most brilliant of his Essays. He was a full man; he had all the talker’s gifts; he exulted in all kinds of oral opportunities; what more is there to say? Sure ’tis the case of all that are born to talk as well as write. They live their best in talk, and what they write is but a sop for posterity: a last dying speech and confession (as it were) to show that not for nothing were they held rare fellows in their day. This is not to say that Hazlitt was not an admirable man of letters. His theories were many, for he was a reality among men, and so had many interests, and there was none on which he did not write forcibly, luminously, arrestingly. He had the true sense of his material, and used the English language as a painter his pigments, as a musician the varying and abounding tonalities that constitute a symphonic scheme. His were a beautiful and choice vocabulary, an excellent ear for cadence, a notable gift of expression. In fact, when Stevenson was pleased to declare that ‘we are mighty fine fellows, but we cannot write like William Hazlitt,’ he said no more than the truth. Whether or not we are mighty fine fellows is a Great Perhaps; but that none of us, from Stevenson down, can as writers come near to Hazlitt—this, to me, is merely indubitable. To note that he now and then writes blank verse is to note that he sometimes writes impassioned prose;[27] he misquoted habitually; he was a good hater, and could be monstrous unfair; he was given to thinking twice, and his second thoughts were not always better than his first; he repeated himself as seemed good to him. But in the criticism of politics, the criticism of letters, the criticism of acting, the criticism and expression of life,[28] there is none like him. His politics are not mine; I think he is ridiculously mistaken when he contrasts the Wordsworth of the best things in _The Excursion_ with the ‘classic Akenside’; his _Byron_ is the merest petulance; his _Burke_ (when he is in a bad temper with Burke), his _Fox_, his _Pitt_, his _Bonaparte_—these are impossible. Also, I never talk art or life with him but I disagree. But I go on reading him, all the same; and I find that technically and spiritually I am always the better for the bout. Where outside Boswell is there better talk than in Hazlitt’s _Boswell Redivivus_—his so-called _Conversations with Northcote_? And his _Age of Elizabeth_, and his _Comic Writers_, and his _Spirit of the Age_—where else to look for such a feeling for differences, such a sense of literature, such an instant, such a masterful, whole-hearted interest in the marking and distinguishing qualities of writers? And _The Plain Speaker_—is it not at least as good reading as (say) _Virginibus Puerisque_ and the discoursings of the late imperishable Mr. Pater! His