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doing injustice to persons. I prefer closing this section with the words of Mr. Gilfillan :

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'Well says Bulwer, 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.' What had Hazlitt of this nature? Mr. Gilfillan answers, Absolutely nothing to support and cheer him. With no hope, no fortune, no status in society; no certain popularity as a 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 passions within, and with a host of powerfuĺ enemies without, it was his to enact one of the saddest tragedies on which the sun ever shone. Such is a 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.' Mr. Gilfillan concludes with expressing his conviction, in which I desire to concur, that both enemies and friends will now join in admiration for the man; 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.' Requiescat in pace!

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NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.*

NOBODY in this generation reads The Spectator. There are, however, several people still surviving who have read No. 1; in which No. 1 a strange mistake is made. It is there asserted, as a general affection of human nature, that it is impossible to read a book with satisfaction, until one has ascertained whether the author of it be tall or short, corpulent or thin, and as to complexion, whether he be a 'black' man, (which, in the Spectator's time, was the absurd expression for a swarthy man,) or a fair man, or a sallow man, or perhaps a green man, which Southey affirmed to be the proper description of many stout artificers in Birmingham, too much given to work in metallic fumes; on which account the name of Southey is an abomination to this day in certain furnaces of Warwickshire. But can anything be more untrue than this Spectatorial doctrine? Did ever the youngest of female novel readers, on a sultry day, decline to eat a bunch of grapes until she knew whether the fruiterer were a good-looking man? Which of us ever heard a stranger inquiring for a Guide to the Trosachs,'

* The Works of Walter Savage Landor. 2 vols.

but saying, 'I scruple, however, to pay for this book, until I know whether the author is heather-legged.' On this principle, if any such principle prevailed, we authors should be liable to as strict a revision of our physics before having any right to be read, as we all are before having our lives insured from the medical advisers of insurance offices; fellows that examine one with stethescopes; that pinch one, that actually punch one in the ribs, until a man becomes savage, and — in case the insurance should miss fire in consequence of the medical report - speculates on the propriety of prosecuting the medical ruffian for an assault, for a most unprovoked assault and battery, and, if possible, including in the indictment the now odious insurance office as an accomplice before the fact. Meantime the odd thing is, not that Addison should have made a mistake, but that he and his readers should, in this mistake, have recognised a hidden truth, the sudden illumination of a propensity latent in all people, but now first exposed; for it happens that there really is a propensity in all of us, very like what Addison describes very different, and yet, after one correction, the very same. No reader cares about an author's person before reading his book: it is after reading it, and supposing the book to reveal something of the writer's moral nature, as modifying his intellect; it is for his fun, his fancy, his sadness, possibly his crazi ness, that any reader cares about seeing the author in person. Afflicted with the very satyriasis of curiosity, no man ever wished to see the author of a Ready Reckoner, or of a treatise on the Agistment Tithe, or on the Present deplorable Dry-rot in Potatoes.

'Bundle off, Sir, as fast as you can,' the most diligent reader would say to such an author, in case he insisted on submitting his charms to inspection. I have had quite enough distress of mind from reading your works, without needing the additional dry-rot of your bodily presence.' Neither does any man, on descending from a railway train, turn to look whether the carriage in which he has ridden happens to be a goodlooking carriage, or wish for an introduction to the coach-maker. Satisfied that the one has not broken his bones, and that the other has no writ against his person, he dismisses with the same frigid scowl both the carriage and the author of its existence.

But, with respect to Mr. Landor, as at all connected with this reformed doctrine of the Spectator, a diffi culty arises. He is a man of great genius, and, as such, he ought to interest the public. More than enough appears of his strong, eccentric nature, through every page of his now extensive writings, to win, amongst those who have read him, a corresponding interest in all that concerns him personally; in his social relations, in his biography, in his manners, in his appear. ance. Out of two conditions for attracting a personal interest, he has powerfully realized one. His moral nature, shining with colored light through the crystal shrine of his thoughts, will not allow of your forgetting it. A sunset of Claude, or a dying dolphin can be forgotten, and generally is forgotten; but not the fiery radiations of a human spirit, built by nature to animate a leader in storms, a martyr, a national reformer, an arch-rebel, as circumstances might dictate, but whom too much wealth,2 and the accidents of education, have

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▼xa 1 1. Eang na sa eyes sette war in vijd the serving year. Lerature, with is cowardly fuse boods, exnibus the inges field of conscious. Pary gian above the human it has ever cxposed to the de risice of the heavens. Demosthenes, for instance, or Plato, is not read to the extent of twenty pages anne ally by ten people in Europe. The sair of the works would not account for three readers; the other sux of seven are generally conceded as possibilities furnished by the great publie libraries. Bat, then, Walter Savage Landor, though writing a little in Latin, and a very little in Italian, does not write at all in Greek. So far he has some advantage over Plato; and, if he writes chiefly in dialogue, which few people love to read any more than novels in the shape of letters, that is a crime common to both. So that he has the d-—l's luck and his own, all Plato's chances, and one of his own beside - viz. his English. Still, it is no use counting chances; facts are the thing. And printing-presses, whether of Europe or of England, bear witness that neither Plato nor Landor is a marketable commodity,

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