Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/107

 was a professor of rhetoric in the Belfast Institution twenty years ago, and had had Emerson Tenant, Thomas O'Hagan, and Joseph Napier, all now eminent men, for his pupils, and they profited by his teaching. He had trained them, he said, in effective elocution, an art without which good speaking and good reading were impossible, but which any man might learn at any age. His dearest friend in Belfast was John Lawless—Jack Lawless, the Catholic agitator. Lawless was the soul of honour, always interesting and exhilarating, and sometimes exhibiting unexpectedly sound judgment. But the Athens of Ireland was an exile for a man of literary tastes. In London his best friend was William Hazlitt. He owed more to him than he could express for early counsel and encouragement. But for him he would probably never have been a dramatist. But it would not have much mattered. Marston's 'Patrician's Daughter' contained more poetry than all his own dramas. Hazlitt's one weakness was that he could not bear contradiction. I said Hazlitt was one of my earliest masters in literature, a man of wide and strikingly original powers; but what a fate he had endured! Slandered by the Blackwood gang, patronised by his inferiors among his usual associates, and recognised for what he really was by scarcely any compeer except Charles Lamb. Yes (Knowles said) and Lamb was a Tory who did not share any of his opinions. I mentioned that Horne, the author of 'Orion,' told me that having a strong desire to see Hazlitt after his death, as he had not been fortunate enough to see him before, he visited the house where he died. The body was lying on a piano covered with a sheet pas trop propre, and there was not a human being in attendance on a man who had done more for popular liberty and the personal freedom which is the cream of liberty than any of the Broughams or Jeffreys who had been swathed in patrician robes or seated on some high fauteuil. Yes (Knowles said) one thing a man had better make up his mind to, the rewards in public life rarely fell to the generous workers, and never to the pioneers. He had latterly taken to preaching (under the influence of Madame, we may surmise) in a Baptist Chapel, and was to hold forth that night. Our host proposed that we should adjourn from the table to the