the crutches of Mary Robinson." Eldon yawns out his slow syllables of decision. Chalmers "mouths an idea as a dog mouths a bone." Brougham utters his "high unmitigated voice, approaching to a scream." Jeffrey creams, and bubbles, and sparkles, like his own champaign. Campbell plies his file, and Sheridan Knowles his fishing-rod, on this true painter's pictured page. Many disquisitions, too, are interspersed on important topics, which met him in his way. For instance, in the course of a few pages, he exhausts the Malthusian controversy. The book, in fine, would not be Hazlitt's if it were not full of errors of judgment, exaggerations of statement, acerbities of temper, and splendida vitia of style.

Of The Liberal, Hazlitt was the home-editor. No one can have forgotten the history of this unfortunate periodical. It was meant for a bomb-shell, to be cast-and by such spirits! Byron, Shelley, Hazlitt, and Hunt-among the inflammable materials of England; but went off prematurely, and scorched and blistered only their own hands. Byron's proud stomach sickened of it. Poor Shelley was drowned. Hunt became dyspeptic and dull. And to Hazlitt, already a broad mark for the arrows of political and literary attack, was left the double and difficult task of bearing the brunt of its odium, and fulfilling the prestige of its fame. In fact, with the exception of the "Vision of Judgment," and the fragments by Shelley from Faust, his essays are the only readable things in it; and whether we admire their sentiment or not, we are forced to admit their bold earnestness, and feel their burning vigour.

As a critic on painting, his pretensions are high. Paintings were to him real existences, each figure in his favourite pieces he loved as well as though he had known it from infancy. With no single passage equal to one or two we could

produce from Fuseli,-destitute of that uniform manliness of taste and style which distinguished Allan Cunningham,without Lamb's subtlety, or Coleridge's grand general view of the design and morale of paintings, he has more enthusiasm, sympathies more unaffected and profound with the masters and master-pieces of the art, more discrimination and a finer tact in discerning latent beauties. Few have said such eloquent extravagances about the old masters, and yet none has more accurately analyzed and painted their solid merits. The heavy dark of Rembrandt weighing down his pictures under the pressure of chiaro scuro, Claude's vivid skies, Titian's lovely landscapes, are dearer to him than even the cartoons of Raffaelle, or the frescos of Angelo. The silent splendours of that beautiful art lift him ever above himself, and touch his lips with living fire! He is the prosepoet of painting. His "Life of Napoleon" was the last and the largest of his books. It had loomed before his view for years, and he meant it for a proud and monumental work. He loved Napoleon as he loved all the other members of his intellectual seraglio, with idolatrous admiration. He saw him, enlarged in the haze of the hatred with which he regarded the despotisms which he overthrew the Messiah of Democracy, the pale, yet bold pilot of that fire-ship which the French Revolution had launched amid its ocean of blood, to track through the nations its terrible path of dismay, ruin, and death! But the book, written in the decay of his mind, full of hasty and huddled narrative, breathing more the spirit of the partisan than that of the calm and dignified historian, is confessedly a failure, though redeemed by passages of paradoxical acuteness and passionate declamation, which yet display rather the convulsion of strong disease, than the sovereign energy of health; more the last throes and staggerings of a ruined mind, than the sublime composure of a

spirit about to be "made perfect." One description in it, of the Reign of Terror,-a subject suited to the dark and permanent exasperation of his mind-is more like a bit of Tacitus than any thing we remember in modern history. There is in it the same gloomy concentration and massive grandeur. He paints the scene as with the torch of the Furies: one or two fierce waftures, and the thing is done. And although the work be imperfect and morbid, yet we believe that the memory of it ministered some consolation to poor Hazlitt on his premature and unhappy death-bed. On whatever misconduct and mishaps he might look back, with whatever "dimness of anguish" he may have contemplated the gloomy vast of the Future, he had, in language however rude and ragged, expressed his full idea of the idol of his soul, and so far was content.

Poor fellow, he had many things to wound him:
Let's own, since it can do no good on earth;
It was a trying moment, that which found him
Standing alone, beside his desolate hearth,

While all his household gods lay shivered round him.

Well says Bulwer somewhere, that of all the mental wrecks which have occurred in our era, this was the most melancholy. Others may have been as unhappy in their domestic circumstances, and gone down steeper places of dissipation than he; but they had meanwhile the breath of popularity, if not of wealth and station, to give them a certain solace. It was so with Burns and Byron. But Hazlitt had absolutely nothing to support and cheer him. no fortune, no status in society, no certain writer, no domestic peace, little sympathy from kindred spirits, little support from his political party, no moral management, no definite belief; with great powers, and great pas

With no hope, popularity as a

sions within, and with a host of powerful enemies without, it was his to enact one of the saddest tragedies on which the sun ever shone.

Such is the faithful portraiture of an extraordinary man, whose restless intellect and stormy passions have now, for fifteen years, found that repose in the grave which was denied them above it. Let his enemies and friends divide between them twain this lesson, expressed in the language of another hapless son of genius, "that prudent, cautious selfcontrol, is wisdom's root." But both will readily concede now, that a subtle thinker, an eloquent writer, a lover of beauty, and poetry, and man, and truth, one of the best of critics, and not the worst of men, expired in William Hazlitt.

ROBERT HALL.

ROBERT HALL was the facile princeps of English descent. And though his merits have been enshrined and emblazoned in the criticism of Foster, Dugald Stewart, Southey, and John Scott, as well as of Mackintosh and Parr, we may yet, gleaning after them in a field so rich, find a few stray ears. Following in their wake, we may, perchance, pick up a few floating fragments from the wreck of such an argosie. As a preacher, he enjoys the traditional fame of having outstripped all his contemporaries. Some sturdy sons of the Scottish Establishment continued, indeed, long to stand up for the superiority of Chalmers; but their voice, if not drowned, was overwhelmed by the general verdict of public opinion. We believe, however, that, in the mere force of immediate impression, the Scottish preacher had the

advantage. The rapidity of Hall's delivery, the ease with which finished sentences succeeded each other like a shower of pearls; the elevation of the sentiment, the purity of the composition, the earnestness of the manner, the piercing coruscations of the eye,-all these taken together, produced the effect of thrilling every bosom, and enchaining every countenance. But there lacked the struggle and the agony, the prophetic fury, the insana vis, the wild and mystic glance, "seeing the invisible," and (when the highest point of his oratory was reached) the "torrent rapture" of our countryman, "taking the reason prisoner," and hurrying the whole being as before a whirlwind. In listening to Hall, you felt as under the influence of the "cup which cheers but not inebriates." Hearing Chalmers was like tasting of the "insane root." Hall's oratory might be compared to a low but thrilling air; Chalmers' to a loud and barbaric melody. Hall's excitement was fitful, varying with the state of his health and feelings; that of Chalmers was constant and screwed up to a prodigious pitch, as if by the force of frenzy. Hall's inspiration was elegant and Grecian: you said of Chalmers, "he hath a demon, if he be not full of the God."

We speak merely of instant impression. In every other point, Chalmers yields to Hall. When you rob the writings of the former of the wild witchery of their delivery; when you take them into the closet; when you read them with an eye undazzled by the blaze of his spoken and acted declamation, they lose much of their interest. You may, indeed, as some do, reproduce, by an effort, the tone and rapid rhythm with which they were uttered, and imagine that you hear him all the while you read. But still, who has not felt a sad sinking down in the perusal of the writer's page, from the rapture with which he had listened to the spoken style? It had the effect of disenchantment. Sometimes,