Page:Notes by the Way.djvu/385

 NOTES BY THE WAY. 309

untrammelled literary revolutionists who were silently bringing a new element into daily life and light reading when the nineteenth century was new-born. Whosoever thinks of Charles Lamb or the far inferior and self-conceited Cockney trifler Leigh Hunt, let alone the deeper-thoughted Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge, must inevitably, to my mind, prize the unbalanced, but thoroughly human and forgivable William Hazlitt. Honestly, I believe he was occasionally crazed and irresponsible as a man, in his actions, his quarrels, his conduct about his wife, and the idiocy of his ' Libre Amoris,' the abortive dallying with his lodging-housekeeper's daughter, of whose evident contempt for him he is the silly recorder. I have wondered whether Anthony Trollope was not thinking of this episode when reproducing the similarly debasing entanglement of Johnny Eames in 'The Small House at Allington.'. . . .1 tho- roughly agree as to Hazlitt having perpetrated the dastardly attack on his former friend S. T. Coleridge in the Edinburgh more shame to Jeffrey. And yet Coleridge was wrongheaded enough, as in his base and brutal perversion of Maturin's ' Bertram ' in ' Biogra- graphia Literaria,' to deserve merciless rebukes himself. And I deeply love the poet of ' The Ancient Mariner ' and ' Christabel,' but assuredly no less do I love the faulty, and for ever in unrest, Hazlitt even as my father did. Few things touch one so deeply as his Winterslow essays, ' My First Acquaintance with Poets ' and ' On Persons one would wish to have Seen.' The latter was first published in The New Monthly Magazine, 1826, when I was young, and my father read it aloud in my hearing not long after. That great evening when Lamb ' suggested the subject as well as the defence of Guy Faux ' must have been about the year 1805-6, for Hazlitt incidentally mentions it as ' a conversation that passed twenty years ago how time slips ! ' p. 37 of 1850 edition. I should be sorry to think that Hazlitt's best essays and sketches, including the Winterslow and ' The Characters of Shake- speare's Plays ' (almost the only book except Dr. Wm. Maginn's on the same worthy to accompany the unsurpassable dramatic extracts and summaries by Charles Lamb), could ever be forgotten or undervalued. And poor Hazlitt's few personal faults carried their own punishment with them. I suspect we love him, and such men as him, the better for them."

��'ASTARTE.'

" I did see and read, astonishingly, on Friday C. K. Shorter's 1906, Jan. 21.

page on that atrocious ' Astarte ' in The Sphere Can you ' Astarte.'

possibly get for me the sight of the Thursday Chronicle review of ' Astarte ' which you mention ?

�� �