would stand upon its head. Beware, therefore, how you join these friends of sedition and blasphemy, these enemies of peace and piety, whereever they are found.

voice of the serpent.

Listen not to the subtle Read not their writings, nor mix in their society; but rather unite with the true friends of your country, in banishing all such, by a silent ostracism, from the dwellings of the pious, the prudent, and the peaceful.

"These assertions and insinuations, enforced by the speaking-trumpet of an ascendant faction, made it once a dangerous and a daring thing for any man to avow himself the partizan of liberty and reform. Now, my brethren, the case is widely altered. The hearts of nations have been touched-their minds have been enlightened their voices have been lifted and heard. But there was a time, when he, who dared to advocate those principles, was overwhelmed with a foaming deluge of obloquy and opprobrium. The step was, of itself, almost enough to blast his public hopes, and his private fame. Detraction followed him-Derision went with him--and Persecution lay in ambush before him. Let us therefore, my brethren, look back with honour upon the few, who once lifted the sacred standard of Liberty, amid the fiery darts of the wicked' and of the world. Praise

to their living names, and peace to their solemn graves! Whatever else they may have done, or left undone, for this, at least, they deserve the That gratitude, indeed,

gratitude of their kind.

must soon be lost in oblivion. Those names, now bright as the sunset cloud, will grow darker and darker as the evening draws on, and be lost at length in the majesty of night. Posterity cannot remember the names of its benefactors; but that which is the misfortune of after ages, would be the crime of the present. It is ours, my brethren, -our duty and our prerogative, to hang a fading wreath, or to breathe a passing requiem, over the memories of those, who, in evil times, advocated a perilous but glorious cause; who bore the colours in the infant ranks of Freedom; and who, wherever they rest, should rest in our imaginations, with those colours wrapped round them, under which they fell."

Ruwer

SOME THOUGHTS

ON THE GENIUS OF WILLIAM HAZLITT.

THE present century has produced many men of poetical genius, and some of analytical acumen; but I doubt whether it has produced any one who has given to the world such signal proofs of the union of the two as the late WILLIAM HAZLITT. If I were asked his peculiar and predominant distinction, I should say that, above all things, he was a CRITIC. He possessed the critical faculty in its noblest degree. He did not square and measure out his judgments by the pedantries of dry and lifeless propositions-his taste was not the creature of schools and canons, it was begotten of Enthusiasm by Thought. He felt intensely;-he imbued-he saturated himself with the genius he examined; it became a part of him, and he reproduced it in science. He took in pieces the work he surveyed, and reconstructed the fabric in order to show the process by which it had

been built. nently scientific; to use his own expression, his "art lifts the veil from nature." It was the wonderful subtlety with which he possessed himself of the intentions of the author, which enabled him not only to appreciate in his own person, but to make the world appreciate, the effects those intentions had produced. Thus especially in his Characters of Shakspeare's Plays,' he seizes at once upon the ruling principle of each, with an ease, a carelessness, a quiet and unstrained fidelity,' which proves how familiarly he had dwelt upon the secret he had mastered. He is, in these sketches, less eloquent and less refining than Schlegel, but it is because he has gazed away the first wonder that dazzles and inspires his rival. He has made himself household with Shakspeare, and his full and entire confidence that he understands the mysteries of the host in whose dwelling-place he has tarried, gives his elucidations, short and sketch-like as they are, the almost unconscious simplicity of a man explaining the true motives of the friend he has known. Thus, in the character of 'Hamlet' on which so many have been bewildered, and so many have been eloquent, he employs little or nothing of the lavish and exuberant

His criticisms are therefore emi

diction, or the elaborate spirit of conjecture that he can command at will. He utters his dogmas as unpretendingly as if they were common-places, and it is scarcely till he brings the character of Hamlet,' as conceived by him, into sudden contrast with the delineation of the two master actors of his time, that you perceive how new and irresistible are his conclusions:

"The character of Hamlet is itself a pure effusion of genius. It is not a character marked by strength of will or even passion, but by refinement of thought and sentiment. Hamlet is as little of the hero as a man can well be: but he is a young and princely novice, full of high enthusiasm and quick sensibility-the sport of circumstances, questioning with fortune and refining on his own feelings, and forced from the natural bias of his disposition by the strangeness of his situation. He seems incapable of deliberate action, and is only hurried into extremities on the spur of the occasion, when he has no time to reflect, as in the scene where he kills Polonius, and again where he alters the letters which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are taking with them to England, purporting his death. At other times, when he is most bound to act, he remains puzzled, undecided, and sceptical, dallies with his purposes, till the occasion