It read its Campbell, its Rogers, its Moore, its Hook and Egan and Jon Bee; it accepted its convinced and pedantic sycophant in Southey, its gay, light-hearted protestant in Leigh Hunt; it nibbled at its Wordsworth, knew not what to make of its Coleridge, swallowed its Cobbett (that prince of pugilists) as its morning rasher and toast; it made much of Hone, yet was far from contemptuous of Westmacott; it laid itself open to its Scott and its Byron, Michael and Satan, the Angel of Acceptance and the Angel of Revolt. Withal it was essentially a Tory Public: a public long practised in fearing God and honouring the King; with half an ear for Major Cartwright and his like, and a whole mind for the story of Randal and Cribb; honestly and jovially proud of Nelson and ‘The Duke,’ but neither loving the Emperor nor seeking to understand him. Now, to Hazlitt the Revolution was humanity _in excelsis_, while the Emperor, being democracy incarnate, and so a complete expression of character and human genius, was as his god. Gifford, then, and Wilson, had small difficulty in blasting Hazlitt’s fame, and in so far ruining Hazlitt’s chance that ’tis but now, after some seventy years, that he takes his place in literary history as the hero of a Complete Edition. In the meanwhile he has had praise, and praise again. But it has come ever from the few, and he has yet to be considered of the general as a critic of many elements in human activity, a master of his mother-tongue, and one, and that one not the least, in an epoch illustrious in the achievement of Keats and Shelley and Wordsworth, the inimitable Cobbett, Byron and Sir Walter, Coleridge, the Arch-Potency (who, ‘prone on the flood’ of failure, ever ‘lies floating many a rood’), and the thrice-beloved Lamb. I