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
This last-mentioned player is at
present the keeper of the Fives-court, and we might recommend to him for
a motto over his door—“Who enters here, forgets himself, his country,
and his friends.” And the best of it is, that by the calculation of the
odds, none of the three are worth remembering!—Cavanagh died from the
bursting of a blood-vessel, which prevented him from playing for the
last two or three years. This, he was often heard to say, he thought
hard upon him. He was fast recovering, however, when he was suddenly
carried off, to the regret of all who knew him. As Mr. Peel made it a
qualification of the present Speaker, Mr. Manners Sutton, that he was an
excellent moral character, so Jack Cavanagh was a zealous Catholic, and
could not be persuaded to eat meat on a Friday, the day on which he
died. We have paid this willing tribute to his memory.
“Let no rude hand deface it,
And his forlorn ‘_Hic Jacet_.’”’
ESSAY X
ON LIVING TO ONE’S-SELF[27]
‘Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow,
Or by the lazy Scheldt or wandering Po.’
I never was in a better place or humour than I am at present for writing
on this subject. I have a partridge getting ready for my supper, my fire
is blazing on the hearth, the air is mild for the season of the year, I
have had but a slight fit of indigestion to-day (the only thing that
makes me abhor myself), I have three hours good before me, and therefore
I will attempt it. It is as well to do it at once as to have it to do
for a week to come.
If the writing on this subject is no easy task, the thing itself is a
harder one. It asks a troublesome effort to ensure the admiration of
others: it is a still greater one to be satisfied with one’s own
thoughts. As I look from the window at the wide bare heath before me,
and through the misty moonlight air see the woods that wave over the top
of Winterslow,
‘While Heav’n’s chancel-vault is blind with sleet,’
my mind takes its flight through too long a series of years, supported
only by the patience of thought and secret yearnings after truth and
good, for me to be at a loss to understand the feeling I intend to write
about; but I do not know that this will enable me to convey it more
agreeably to the reader.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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