The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 03 (of 12)Hazlitt, William
General
The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 03 (of 12)
Hazlitt, William
English essays -- 19th century
_Archbishop._ Aye, that my liege
Were politic. Go boldly forth to meet them,
Grant all they ask—however wild and ruinous;—
Meantime, the troops you have already summoned
Will gather round them. Then my Christian power
Absolves you of your promise.
_Walworth._ Were but their ringleaders cut off, the rabble
Would soon disperse.
The very burden of _The Courier_ all last week, and for many weeks last
past and to come.
5. Mr. Coleridge sums up his opinion of the ultimate design and secret
origin of ‘the _Wat Tyler_’ in these remarkable words:—‘We should have
seen that the vivid, yet indistinct images in which he had painted the
evils of war and the hardships of the poor, proved that neither the
forms nor the feelings were the result of real observation. The product
of the poet’s own fancy, they’—[_viz._ the evils of war and the
hardships of the poor]—‘were impregnated, therefore, with _that
pleasurable fervour which is experienced in all energetic exertion of
intellectual power_. But as to any serious wish, akin to reality,’ [that
is, to remove these evils] ‘as to any real persons or events designed or
expected, we should think it just as wise and just as charitable, to
believe that Quevedo or Dante would have been glad to realise the horrid
phantoms and torments of _imaginary_ oppressors, whom they beheld in the
infernal regions—_i.e._ on the slides of their own magic lanthorn.’
_Answer._ The slides of the guillotine, excited (as we have been told)
the same pleasurable fervour in Mr. Southey’s mind: and Mr. Coleridge
seems to insinuate, that the 5,800,000 lives which have been lost to
prove mankind the property of kings, by divine right, have been lost ‘on
the slides of a magic lanthorn’; the evils of war, like all other actual
evils, being ‘the products of a fervid imagination.’ So much for the
sincerity of poetry.
_Audrey._ Is not poetry a true thing?
_Touchstone._ No.
Would these gentlemen persuade us that there is nothing evil in the
universe but what exists in their imagination, but what is the product
of their fervid fancy? That the world is full of nothing but their
egotism, their vanity, and their hypocrisy? The world is _sick_ of them,
their egotism, their vanity, and their hypocrisy.
6th and lastly. ‘Mr. Southey’s darling poet from his childhood was
Edmund Spenser, from whom, next to the spotless purity of his own moral
habits, he learned that reverence for
—— ——“constant chastity,
Unspotted faith, and comely womanhood,
Regard of honour and mild modesty.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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