_Political Essays_ is readable after—how many years? His notes on Kean and the Siddons are as novel and convincing as when they were penned. In truth, he is ever a solace and a refreshment. As a critic of letters he lacks the intense, immortalising vision, even as he lacks, in places, the illuminating and inevitable style of Lamb. But if he be less savoury, he is also more solid, and he gives you phrases, conclusions, splendours of insight and expression, high-piled and golden essays in appreciation: as the _Wordsworth_ and the _Coleridge_ of the _Political Essays_, the character of Hamlet, the note on Shakespeare’s style, the _Horne Tooke_, the _Cervantes_, the _Rousseau_, the _Sir Thomas Browne_, the _Cobbet_: that must ever be rated high among the possessions of the English mind. As a writer, therefore, it is with Lamb that I would bracket him: they are dissimilars, but they go gallantly and naturally together—_par nobile fratrum_.[29] Give us these two, with some ripe Cobbett, a volume of Southey, some Wordsworth, certain pages of Shelley, a great deal of the Byron who wrote letters, and we get the right prose of the time. The best of it all, perhaps, is the best of Lamb. But Hazlitt’s, for different qualities, is so imminent and shining a second that I hesitate as to the pre-eminency. Probably the race is Lamb’s. But Hazlitt is ever Hazlitt; and at his highest moments Hazlitt is hard to beat, and has not these many years been beaten. W. E. H. ----- Footnote 1: Hazlitt has glanced at him in his notes on dissenters and dissent in the _Political Essays_, and has given a further taste of him in that very notable and gracious piece, ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets.’ Footnote 2: In 1805 he produced his essay on the Principles of Human Action. Being no metaphysician, I have never read this work; but Mr. Leslie Stephen, who is a very competent person in these matters, I am told, assures me (_D. N. B._) that it is ‘scrupulously dry,’ though ‘showing great acuteness.’ This, I take leave to say—this is Hazlitt all over. None has written of the workaday elements in life and time with a rarer taste, a finer relish, a stronger confidence in himself and them. Yet, in dealing with absolutes in life and time, he is ‘scrupulously dry.’ This, I take it, is to be a man of letters. Footnote 3: Or rather bedgown: unction-soiled and laudanum-stained. Footnote 4: John Hazlitt had been a pupil of Reynolds, and his miniatures were welcome at the Academy. Footnote 5: Dans l’art il faut donner sa peau. Footnote 6: He had a painter in him, whether imperfectly developed or not; for he would condescend upon none but Guido, Raphael, Titian. Footnote 7: