undazzled eye. His "large discourse of reason looked not before, but after. He felt it his great duty, as a lover of genius and art, to defend the fame of the mighty dead. When the old painters were assailed in The Catalogue Raisonnée of the British Institution,' he was "touched with noble anger." All his own vain longings after the immortality of the works which were libelled,the very tranquillity and beauty they had shed into his soul,-all his comprehension of the sympathy and delight of thousands, which, accumulating through long time, had attested their worth-were fused together to dazzle and to blast the poor caviller who would disturb the judgment of ages. So, when a popular poet assailed the fame of Rousseau-seeking to reverse the decision of posterity on what that great writer had done, by fancying the opinion of people of condition in his neighbourhood on what he seemed to their apprehensions while living with Madame de Warrens, he vindicated the prerogatives of genius with the true logic of passion. Few things irritated him more than the claims set up for the present generation to be wiser and better than those which have gone before it. He had no power of imagination to embrace the golden clouds which hang over the Future, but he rested and expatiated in the Past. To his apprehension

human good did not appear a slender shoot of yesterday, like the bean-stalk in the fairy tale, aspiring to the skies, and ending in an enchanted castle, but a huge growth of intertwisted fibres, grasping the earth by numberless roots, and bearing vestiges of "a thousand storms, a thousand thunders."

It would be beside our purpose to discuss the relative merits of Mr Hazlitt's publications, to most of which we have alluded in passing; or to detail the scanty vicissitudes of a literary life. Still less do we feel bound to expose or to defend the personal frailties which fell to his portion. We have endeavoured to trace his intellectual character in the records he has left of himself in his works, as an excitement and a guide to their perusal by those who have yet to know them. The concern of mankind is with this alone. In the case of a profound thinker more than of any other, "that which men call evil”— the accident of his condition-is interred with him, while the good he has achieved lives unmingled and entire. The events of Mr Hazlitt's true life are not his engagement by the Morning Chronicle,' or his transfer of his services to the Times,' or his introduction to the Edinburgh Review,' or his contracts or quarrels with booksellers; but the progress and the develop

He

ment of his understanding as nurtured or swayed by his affections. "His warfare was within ;" and its spoils are ours! His "thoughts which wandered through eternity" live with us, though the hand which traced them for our benefit is cold. His death, though at the age of only fifty-two, can hardly be deemed untimely. lived to complete the laborious work in which he sought to embalm his idea of his chosen hero; to see the unhoped-for downfall of the legitimate throne which had been raised on the ruins of the empire; and to open, without exhausting, those stores which he had gathered in his youth. If the impress of his power is not left on the sympathies of a people, it has (all he wished) sunk into minds neither unreflecting nor ungrateful.

CHARACTER OF HAZLITT.

BY CHARLES LAMB.

FROM THE

"LETTER TO SOUTHEY."

THE friendship of Lamb and my father was once interrupted by some wilful fancy on the part of the latter. At this time, Southey happened to pay a compliment to Lamb at the expense of some of his companions, my father among them. The faithful and unswerving heart of the other forsaking not, although forsaken, refused a compliment at such a price, and sent it back to the giver. The tribute to my father, which he at the same time paid, may stand for ever as one of the proudest and truest evidences of the writer's heart and intellect. It brought back at once the repentant offender to the arms of his friend, and nothing again separated them till death came. It is as follows:From the other gen

tleman I neither expect nor desire (as he is well

assured) any such concessions as L- Hmade to C-. What hath soured him, and made him suspect his friends of infidelity towards him, when there was no such matter, I know not. I stood well with him for fifteen years (the proudest of my life), and have ever spoke my full mind of him to some to whom his panegyric must naturally be least tasteful. I never in thought swerved from him; I never betrayed him; I never slakened in my admiration of him; I was the same to him (neither better nor worse), though he could not see it, as in the days when he thought fit to trust me. At this instant he may be preparing for me some compliment, above my deserts, as he has sprinkled many such among his admirable books, for which I rest his debtor; or, for any thing I know or can guess to the contrary, he may be about to read a lecture on my weaknesses. He is welcome to them (as he was to my humble hearth), if they can divert a spleen, or ventilate a fit of sullenness. I wish he would not quarrel with the world at the rate he does; but the reconciliation must be effected by himself, and I despair of living to see that day. But-protesting against much that he has written, and some things which he chooses to do; judging him by his conver