Both the _Characters_ and the _English Poets_ were reviewed by Gifford in the _Quarterly_. The style of these ‘reviews’ is abject; the inspiration venal; the matter the very dirt of the mind. Gifford hated Hazlitt for his politics, and set out to wither Hazlitt’s repute as a man of letters. For the tremendous reprisal with which he was visited, the reader is referred to the _Letter to William Gifford, Esq._, in the first volume of the present Edition. If he find it over-savage: probably, being of to-day, he will: let him turn to his _Quarterly_, and consider, if he have the stomach, Gifford and the matter of offence. Footnote 15: He lived to rejoice in the Revolution of July; but of the great movement in the arts—of _Henri Trois et sa Cour_ and _Hernani_, of Delacroix and Barye, of Géricault and Bonington and de Vigny, and the rest of its heroes—he seems to have known nothing. That was his way. The new did not exist for him. A dissenter by birth and conviction, he yet cared only for the past, and the elder ‘glories of our blood and state’ were to him, not shadows but, the sole substantial things he could keep room for in the kingdom of his mind. Footnote 16: ’Tis a pleasure to remember that Lamb was with him to the end—was in his death-chamber in the very article of mortality. We have all read Carlyle on Lamb. The everlasting pity is that we shall never read Hazlitt on Carlyle. Footnote 17: Him Shelley calls ‘a solemn and unsexual man.’ Footnote 18: Much as years afterwards, according to a certain Nicolardot, the expertest of their kind were ‘on the list’ of old Ste.-Beuve. Footnote 19: His grandson describes him as ‘physically incapable’ of any but a transient fidelity to anybody. Footnote 20: He confessed that one day he told it half a dozen times or so to persons he had never seen before: once, twice over to the same listener. Footnote 21: It cost Hazlitt a crown, perhaps less; and he arranged—apparently with Mrs. Hazlitt—to be taken in the act! After this the knowledge that Mr. and Mrs. Hazlitt took tea together, _pendente lite_, and that then and after his second espousals Hazlitt supplied this very reasonable woman with money, astonishes no more, but comes as a kind of anticlimax. Footnote 22: That damsel presently married in her station. She seems to have been a decent woman according to her lights, and to have lived up honestly to her ideals, such as they were. Footnote 23: There was a laughing devil in his sneer That raised emotions both of rage and fear; And where his frown of hatred darkly fell, Hope, withering, fled—and Mercy sighed farewell. Footnote 24: These details are Patmore’s, and, even if they be true, are not the whole truth. Hazlitt loved solitude and the country, had to write for a living, wrote with difficulty, and left no inconsiderable body of work. Footnote 25: