The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 06 (of 12)Hazlitt, William
General
The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 06 (of 12)
Hazlitt, William
English essays -- 19th century
his “New View” and “Addresses to the higher Classes;” that the
co-operation he had recommended was necessarily conducive to the most
extensive improvement of the ideas and faculties, and where this was the
case, there must be the greatest possible variety instead of a want of
it.’ And having said this, this expert and sweeping orator takes up his
hat and walks down stairs after reading his lecture of truisms like a
play-bill or an apothecary’s advertisement; and should you stop him at
the door to say by way of putting in a word in common, that Mr. Southey
seems somewhat favourable to his plan in his late Letter to Mr. William
Smith, he looks at you with a smile of pity at the futility of all
opposition and the idleness of all encouragement. People who thus swell
out some vapid scheme of their own into undue importance, seem to me to
labour under water in the head—to exhibit a huge hydrocephalus! They may
be very worthy people for all that, but they are bad companions and very
indifferent reasoners. Tom Moore says of some one somewhere, ‘That he
puts his hand in his breeches’ pocket like a crocodile.’ The phrase is
hieroglyphical: but Mr. Owen and others might be said to put their foot
in the question of social improvement and reform much in the same
unaccountable manner.
I hate to be surfeited with any thing, however sweet. I do not want to
be always tied to the same question, as if there were no other in the
world. I like a mind more Catholic.
‘I love to talk with mariners,
That come from a far countreé.’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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