a heavenly origin and an immortal home; but moulded of low selfishness, and animated by demoniac fury. If earth has ever produced such beings as are here exposed on the scene, they are not specimens of any class of humanity, but its monsters. And on what minds is the exhibition to operate? On such as contain within themselves a conscious disposition to its atrocities, if any such there be, or on the rest of mankind, who sicken at the sight? The first are far beyond the reach of the actor's preaching; the last feel the lesson is not for them-if they indulge in gambling, they have no fear of murdering their sons, and "their withers are unwrung." In the mean time the "moral lesson," impotent for good, has a mischievous power to wear out the sources of sympathy, and to produce a dangerous familiarity with the forms of guilt, which according to the solemn warnings of Sir Thomas Browne, "have oft-times a sin even in their histories." "We desire," continues this quaint but noble writer, "no records of such enormities; sins should be accounted new, that so they may be esteemed monstrous; they omit of monstrosity as they fall from their rarity; for men count it venial to err with their forefathers, and foolishly conceive they divide a sin in its society. The pens of men may sufficiently expatiate without these singularities of villany; for, as they increase the hatred of vice in some, so do they enlarge the theory of wickedness in all. And this is one thing that may make latter ages worse than the former, for the vicious example of ages past poisons the curiosity of these present, affording a hint of sin unto seduceable spirits, and soliciting those unto the imitation of them, whose heads were never so perversely principled as to invent them. In things of this nature, silence commendeth history; it is the veniable part of things lost; wherein there must never rise a Pancovillus, nor remain any register but that of Hell." The murderous phantasm of Paris will never deter men from becoming gamblers, who have the fatal passion within them, but it may assist in making gamblers demons. In London this piece has, we are happy to find, succeeded only in the minor houses, where the audience are accustomed to look for coarse and violent stimulants. It was first produced at the Coburgh; and, assisted by splendid scenery and powerful melo-dramatic acting, was attractive for some time; but has given way to real operas, got up with great liberality, and the graceful performances of a young gentleman named Smith, who acts with more taste and feeling than the clever aspirants of his age usually exhibit. It was afterwards announced at both the winter theatres; but, fortunately for Covent-Garden, Drury Lane obtained the precedence, and the good sense of Mr. Kemble profited by the example set before him. Here the enormities were somewhat foreshortened, being compressed into two acts, but unredeemed by a single trait of kind or noble emotion. Cooper, as the more potent devil, and Wallack, as his disgusting tool, played with considerable energy; but no talent could alleviate the mingled sense of sickness and suffocation with which their slimy infamies oppressed the spectators. Although much curiosity had been excited, the piece did not draw, and was speedily laid aside; while at Covent-Garden, where its announcement was dignified by the names of Kemble, Ward, and Miss Kelly, it was most wisely suppressed in the shell. At the Adelphi, we have been told that it was rendered somewhat less revolting; but we could not muster courage to face it here, or even to endure it in the improved version of the Surrey, where, according to the play-bills, the Manager has, "after due correction, reformed his hero, and restored him to happiness and virtue." What a fine touch of maudlin morality! To hear Elliston deliver it from the stage with all the earnestness of his mock-heroic style, we would undergo the purgatory with which he threatens us. He is the reforming Quaker of dramatic legislation, and his stage, during the run of the piece, was a court of ease to Brixton, as Drury-Lane was to Newgate. Nothing can equal the benevolent discrimination of his theory, except that of a popular preacher whom we once heard deprecating the orthodox doctrine of the eternity of future punishment, and cheering his audience with the invigorating hope, that, after being tormented for three hundred and sixty-five thousand years, the wicked would be made good and happy. We are thankful, nevertheless, that Mr. Elliston's tread-mill for gamblers has rested with the axes and ropes of his more sanguinary rivals; and that the young gentlemen addicted to play have finished their lesson. How it may operate in Paris and the neighbourhood of St. James's, will be ascertained in the ensuing winter. ON THE INTELLECTUAL CHARACTER OF THE LATE [FROM THE EXAMINER" AND "THE REVIEW OF WILLIAM HAZLITT."] As an author, Mr. Hazlitt may be contem- | single, may be traced in the history of his mind, plated principally in three aspects,-as a moral at which it may be well to glance before adand political reasoner; as an observer of cha- verting to the examples. racter and manners; and as a critic in literature and painting. It is in the first character only, that he should be followed with caution. His metaphysical and political essays contain rich treasures, sought with years of patient toil, and poured forth with careless prodigality, -materials for thinking, a small part of which wisely employed, will enrich him who makes them his own, but the choice is not wholly unattended with perplexity and danger. He had, indeed, as passionate a desire for truth as others have for wealth, or power, or fame. The purpose of his research was always steady and pure; and no temptation from without could induce him to pervert or to conceal the faith that was in him. But, besides that love of truth, that sincerity in pursuing it, and that boldness in telling it, he had earnest aspirations after the beautiful, a strong sense of pleasure, an intense consciousness of his own individual being, which broke the current of abstract speculation into dazzling eddies, and sometimes turned it astray. The vivid sense of beauty may, indeed, have fit home in the breast of the searcher after truth,-but then he must also be endowed with the highest of all human faculties, the great mediatory and interfusing power of imagination, which presides supreme in the mind, brings all its powers and impulses into harmonious action, and becomes itself the single organ of all. At its touch, truth becomes visible in the shapes of beauty; the fairest of material things appear the living symbols of airy thought; and the mind apprehends the finest affinities of the worlds of sense and of spirit "in clear dream and solemn vision." By its aid the faculties are not only balanced, but multiplied into each other; are pervaded by one feeling, and directed to one issue. But, without it, the inquirer after truth will sometimes be confounded by too intense a yearning after the grand and the lovely,-not, indeed, by an elegant taste, the indulgence of which is a graceful and harmless recreation amidst severer studies, but by that passionate regard which quickens the pulse, and tingles in the veins, and "hangs upon the beatings of the heart." Such was the power of beauty in Hazlitt's mind; and the interfusing faculty was wanting. The spirit, indeed, was willing, but the flesh was strong; and when these contend, it is not difficult to foretell which will obtain the mastery; for "the power of beauty shall sooner transform honesty from what it is into a bawd, than the power of honesty shall transform beauty into its likeness." How this some-time paradox became exemplified in the writings of one whose purpose was always William Hazlitt was the son of a dissenting minister, who presided over a small Unitarian congregation at Wem, in Shropshire. His father was one of those blameless enthusiasts who, taking only one view of the question between right and power, embrace it with singleness of heart, and hold it fast with inflexible purpose. He cherished in his son that attachment to truth for its own sake, and those habits of fearless investigation which are the natural defences of a creed maintaining its ground against the indolent force of a wealthy establishment, and the fervid attacks of combining sectaries, without the fascinations of mystery or terror. In the solitude of the country, his pupil learned, at an early age, to think. But that solitude was something more to him than a noiseless study, in which he might fight over the battle between Filmer and Locke; or exult on the shattered dogmas of Calvin; or rivet the links of the immortal chain of necessity, and strike with the force of ponderous understanding, on all mental fetters. A temperament of unusual ardour glowed amidst those lonely fields, and imparted to the silent objects of nature a weight of interest akin to that with which Rousseau has oppressed the picture of his early years. He had not then, nor did he find till long afterwards, power to imbody his meditations and feelings in words; the consciousness of thoughts which he could not hope adequately to express, increased his natural reserve; and he turned for relief to the art of painting, in which he might silently realize his dreams of beauty, and repay the bounties of nature. A few old prints from the old masters awakened the spirit of emulation within him; the sense of beauty became identified in his mind with that of glory and duration; while the peaceful labour calmed the tumult in his veins, and gave steadiness to his pure and distant aim. He pursued the art with an earnestness and patience which he vividly describes in his essay "On the Pleasure of Painting;" and to which he frequently reverts in some of his most exquisite passages; and, although in this, his chosen pursuit, he failed, the passionate desire for success, and the long struggle to attain it, left deep traces in his mind, heightening his strong perception of external things, and mingling, with all the thoughts, shapes and hues which he had vainly striven to render immortal. A painter may acquire a fine insight into the nice distinctions of character, he may copy manners in words as he does in colours, but it may be apprehended that his course as a severe reasoner will be somewhat "troubled with thick coming fancies." And if the successful pursuit of art | whole "Quarterly Review," were dismissed may thus disturb the process of abstract contemplation, how much more may an unsatisfied passion ruffle it, bid the dark threads of thought glitter with radiant fancies unrealized, and clothe its diagrams with the fragments of picture which the hand refused to execute! What wonder, if, in the mind of an ardent youth, thus struggling in vain to give palpable existence to the shapes of loveliness which haunted him, "the homely beauty of the good old cause" should assume the fascinations not properly its own! At this time, also, while at once laborious and listless, he became the associate of a band of young poets of power and promise such as England had not produced for two centuries, whose genius had been awakened by the rising sun of liberty, and breathed forth most eloquent music. Their political creed resembled his own; yet, for the better and more influential part, they were poets, not metaphysicians; and his intercourse with them tended yet farther to spread the noble infection of beauty through all his thoughts. That they should have partially understood him at that time was much, both for them and for him; for the faculty of expression remained imperfect and doubtful until quickened at that chosen home of genius and kindness, the fire-side of the author of "John Woodvil." There his bashful struggles to express the fine conceptions with which his bosom laboured were met by entire sympathy; there he began to stammer out his just and original notions of Chaucer and Spenser, and old English writers, less talked of, though not less known, by their countrymen; there he was understood and cheered by one who thought after their antique mode, and wrote in their spirit, and by a lady, "sister every way" to his friend, whose fine discernment of his first efforts in conversation, he dwelt upon with gratitude even when most out of humour with the world. He wrote then slowly, and with great difficulty, being, as he himself states in his "Letter to Gifford," "eight years in writing as many pages;" in that austere labour the sense of the beautiful was rebuked, and his first work, the "Essay on the Principles of Human Action," is composed in a style as dry and hard as a mathematical demonstration. But when his pen was loosed from its long bondage, the accumulated stores of thought and observation pressed upon him; images of beauty hovered round him; deep-rooted attachments to books and works of art, which had been friends to him through silent years, glowed for expression, and a long arrear of personal resentments struggled to share in the masterdom of conscious power. The room of Imagination, which would have enabled him to command all his resources, and place his rare experiences to their true account, was supplied by a will-sufficiently sturdy by nature, and made irritable and capricious by the most inexcusable misrepresentation and abuse with which the virulence of party-spirit ever disgraced literary criticism. His works were shamelessly garbled; his person and habits slandered; and volumes, any one page of which contained thought sufficient to supply a with affected contempt, as the drivelling of an impudent pretender, whose judgment was to be estimated by an enthusiastic expression torn from its context, and of whose English style a decisive specimen was found in an error of the press. Thus was a temperament, always fervid, stung into irregular action; the strong regard to things was matched by as vivid a dislike of persons; and the sense of injury joined with the sense of beauty to disturb the solemn musings of the philosopher and the great hatreds of the patriots. One of the most remarkable effects of the strong sense of the personal on Hazlitt's abstract speculations, is a habit of confounding his own feelings and experiences in relation to a subject with proofs of some theory which had grown out of them, or had become associated with them. Thus, in his "Essay on the Past and the Future," he asserts the startling proposition, that the past is, at any given moment, of as much consequence to the individual as the future; that he has no more actual interest in what is to come than in what has gone by, except so far as he may think himself able to avert the future by action; that whether he was put to torture a year ago, or anticipates the rack a year hence, is of no importance, if his destiny is so fixed that no effort can alter it; and this paradox its author chiefly seeks to establish by beautiful instances of what the past, as matter of contemplation, is to thoughtful minds, and in fine glances at his individual history. The principal sophism consists in varying the aspect in which the past and future are viewed ;-in one paragraph, regarding them as apart from personal identity and consciousness, as if a being, who was "not a child of time," looked down upon them; and, in another, speaking in his own person as one who feels the past as well as future in the instant. When the quarrels with a supposed disputant who would rather not have been Claude, because then all would have been over with him, and asserts that it cannot signify when we live, because the value of existence is not altered in the course of centuries, he takes a stand apart from present consciousness and the immediate question-for the desire to have been Claude could only be gratified in the consciousness of having been Claude-which belongs to the present moment, and implies present existence in the party making the choice, though for such a moment he might be willing to die. He strays still wider from the subject when he observes a treatise on the Millennium is dull; but asks who was ever weary of reading the fables of the Golden Age? for both fables essentially belong neither to past nor future, and depend for their interest, not on the time to which they are referred, but the vividness with which they are drawn. But supposing the Golden Age and the Millennium to be happy conditions of being-which to our poor, frail, shivering virtue they are not-and the proposal to be made, whether we would remember the first, or enter upon the last, surely we should "hail the coming on of time," and prefer having our store of happiness yet to expend, to the know ledge that we had just spent it! When Mr. barren spectators, and that which is diffused Hazlitt instances the agitation of criminals through the hearts and affections of thousands, before their trial, and their composure after and fructifies and expands in generations yet their conviction, as proofs that if a future unborn, and connects its author with far disevent is certain, "it gives little more disturb- tant times, not by cold renown, but by the links ance or emotion than if it had already taken of living sympathy-to be exemplified in the place, or were something to happen in another very essay which would decry it, and to be state of being, or to another person," he gives nobly vindicated by its author at other times, an example which is perfectly fair, but which when he shows, and makes us feel, that every one sees is decisive against his theory. "words are the only things which last for If peace followed when hope was no longer ever."* So his attacks on the doctrine of busy; if the quiet of indifference was the same utility, which were provoked by the cold exthing as the stillness of despair; if the palsy travagancies of some of its supporters, consist of fear did not partially anticipate the stroke of noble and passionate eulogies on the graces, of death, and whiten the devoted head with pleasures, and ornaments, of life, which leave premature age; there might be some ground the theory itself, with which all these are confor this sacrifice of the future at the shrine of sistent, precisely where it was. So his "Essays the past; but the poor wretch who grasps the on Mr. Owen's View of Society" are full of hand of the chaplain or the under-sheriff's exquisite banter, well-directed against the inclerk, or a turnkey, or an alderman, in con- dividual: of unanswerable expositions of the vulsive agony, as his last hold on life, and falsehood of his pretensions to novelty and of declares that he is happy, would tell a different the quackery by which he attempted to render tale! It seems strange that so profound a them notorious; of happy satire against the thinker, and so fair a reasoner, as Mr. Hazlitt, aristocratic and religious patronage which he should adduce such a proof of such an hypo- sought and obtained for schemes which were thesis-but the mystery is solved when we tolerated by the great because they were regard the mass of personal feeling he has believed by them to be impracticable; but the brought to bear on the subject, and which has truth of the principal idea itself remains almost made his own view of it unsteady. All untouched. In these instances the personal this picturesque and affecting retrospection has prevailed over the abstract in the mind of amounts to nothing, or rather tells against the the thinker; his else clear intellectual vision argument; because the store of contemplation has been obscured by the intervention of his which is, will ever be while consciousness re- own recollections, loves, resentments, or fanmains; nay, must increase even while we cies; and the real outlines of the subject have reckon it, as the present glides into the past, been overgrown by the exuberant fertility of and turns another arch over the cave of me- the region which bordered upon them. mory. This very possession which he would set against the future is the only treasure which with certainty belongs to it, and of which no change of fortune can deprive him; and, therefore, it is clear that the essayist mistakes a sentiment for a demonstration, when he expatiates upon it as proof of such a doctrine. There is nothing affected in the assertion-no desire to startle-no playing with the subject or the reader; for of such intellectual trickeries he was incapable; but an honest mistake into which the strong power of personal recollection, and the desire to secure it within the lasting fret-work of a theory, drew him. So, when wearied with the injustice done to his writings by the profligate misrepresentations of the government critics, and the slothful acquiescence of the public, and contrasting with it the success of the sturdy players at his favourite game of fives, which no one could question, he wrote elaborate essays to prove the superiority of physical qualifications to those of intellect-full of happy illustrations and striking instances, and containing one inimitable bit of truth and pathos "On the Death of Cavanagh,"-but all beside the mark-proving nothing but that which required no proof-that corporeal strength and beauty are more speedily and more surely appreciated than the products of genius; and leaving the essential differences of the two, of the transitory and the lasting-of that which is confined to a few On the Indian Jugglers," and "On the DisadvanLages of Intellectual Superiority." The same causes diminished the immediate effect of Mr. Hazlitt's political writings. It was the fashion to denounce him as a sour Jacobin; but no description could be more unjust. Under the influence of some bitter feeling, he occasionally poured out a furious invective against those whom he regarded as the enemies of liberty, or the apostates from its cause; but, in general, his force was diverted (unconsciously to himself) by figures and fantasies, by fine and quaint allusions, by quotations from his favourite authors, introduced with singular felicity as respects the direct link of association, but tending by their very beauty to unnerve the mind of the reader, and substitute the sense of luxury for that of hatred or anger. In some of his essays, when the reasoning is most cogent, every other sentence contains some exquisite passage from Shakspeare, or Fletcher, or Wordsworth, trailing after it a line of golden associations-or some reference to a novel, over which we have a thousand times forgotten the wrongs of mankind; till in the recurring shock of pleasurable surprise, the main argument escapes us. When, for example, he compares the position of certain political waverers to that of Clarissa Harlowe when Lovelace would repeat his outrage, and describes them as having been, like her, trepanned into a house of illfame near Pall Mall, and defending their soiled virtue with their pen-knives,-who, at the suggestion of the stupendous scene which the "On Thought and Action." allusion directly revives, can think or care this strong attachment, at once personal and refined, would have enabled him to encounter the toil of collecting and arranging facts and dates for four volumes of narrative;—a drudgery too abhorrent to his habits of mind as a thinker, to be sustained by any stimulus which the prospect of wealth or reputation could supply. It is not so much in the ingenious excuses which he discovers for the worst acts of his hero, even for the midnight execution of the Duke d'Enghein, and the invasion of Spain, that the stamp of personal devotion is obvious, as in the graphic force with which he has delineated the short-lived splendours of the Imperial Court, and "the trivial fond about the renegade of yesterday? Here, again, is felt the want of that imagination which brings all things into one, tinges all our thoughts and sympathies with one joyous or solemn hue, and rejects every ornament which does not heighten or prolong the feeling which is proper to the design. Even when Mr. Hazlitt retaliates on Mr. Southey for attacking his old co-patriots, the poetical associations which bitter remembrance suggests almost neutralize the attack, else overpowering; he brings every "flower which sad embroidery wears to strew the laureate hearse," where patriotism is interred; and diverts our indignation and his own by affecting references to an early friend-records " he has gathered of every vestige of ship. So little does he regard the unity of his compositions, that in his "Letter to Gifford," after a series of the most just and bitter retorts on his maligner,-"the fine link which connected literature with the police"-he takes a fancy to teach that "Ultra-crepidarian Critic" his own theory of the natural disinterestedness of the human mind, and developes it-not now in the mathematical style in which it was first enunciated, but "o'er-informed" with the glow of sentiment, and terminating in an eloquent rhapsody. This latter part of the letter is one of the noblest of his effusions, but it entirely destroys the first in the mind of the reader; for who, when thus contemplating the living wheels on which human benevolence is borne onward in its triumphant career, and the spirit with which they are instinct, can think of the poor wasp settled upon them, and who was just before transfixed with minikin arrows? But the most signal result which "the shows of things" had over Mr. Hazlitt's mind, was his setting up the Emperor Napoleon as his idol. He strove to justify his predilection to himself by referring it to the revolutionary origin of his hero, and the contempt with which he trampled upon the claims of legitimacy, and humbled the pride of kings. But if his "only love" thus sprung "from his only hate," it was not wholly cherished by antipathies. If there had been nothing in his mind which tended to aggrandizement and glory, and which would fain reconcile the principles of liberty with the lavish accumulation of power, he might have desired the triumph of young tyranny over legitimate thrones; but he would scarcely have watched its progress "like a lover and a child." His feeling for Bonaparte was not a sentiment of respect for fallen greatness: not a desire to trace "the soul of goodness in things evil;" not a loathing of the treatment the emperor received from "his cousin kings" in the day of adversity; but entire affection mingling with the current of the blood, and pervading the moral and intellectual being. Nothing less than human feeling by which he could reconcile the Emperor to his mind. The first two volumes of the "Life of Napoleon," although redeemed by scattered thoughts of true originality and depth, are often confused and spiritless; the characters of the principal revolutionists are drawn too much in the style of caricatures; but when the hero throws all his rivals into the distance, erects himself the individual enemy of England, consecrates his power by religious ceremonies, and defines it by the circle of a crown, the author's strength becomes concentrated, his narrative assumes an epic dignity and fervour, and glows with "the long-resounding march and energy divine." How happy and proud is he to picture the meeting of Napoleon with the Pope, and the grandeurs of the coronation! How he grows wanton in celebrating the fêtes of the Tuileries, as "presenting all the elegance of enchanted pageants," and laments them as 'gone like a fairy revel!" How he "lives along the line" of Austerlitz, and rejoices in its thunder, and hails its setting sun, and exults in the minutest details of the subsequent meeting of the conquered sovereigns with the conqueror! How he expatiates on the fatal marriage with the "deadly Austrian," (as Mr. Cobbett justly called that most heartless of her sex,) as though it were a chapter in romance, and added the grace of beauty to the imperial picture! How he kindles with martial ardour as he describes the preparations for the expedition against Russia; musters the myriads of barbarians with a show of dramatic justice; and fondly lingers among the brief triumphs of Moskwa on the verge of the terrible catastrophe! The narrative of that disastrous expedition is, indeed, written with a master's hand; we see the "Grand Army" marching to its destruction through the immense perspective; the wild hordes flying before the terror of its "coming;" the barbaric magnificence of Moscow towering in the far distance; and when we gaze upon the sacrificial conflagration of the Kremlin, we feel that it is the funeral pile of the conqueror's glories. It is well for the readers of this splendid work, that there is more in it of the painter than of Proofs of the singular fascination which the idea of Bonaparte created on Mr. Hazlitt's mind abound in his writings. One example of which suffices to show how it mingled with his most passionate thoughts-his earli est aspirations, and his latest sympathies. Having re- first bloomed there. The years that are fled knock at ferred to some association which revived the memory the door and enter. I am in the Louvre once more. of his happiest days, he breathes out into this rhapsody: The Sun of Austerlitz has not set. It shines here, in my "As I look on the long-neglected copy of the Death heart; and he the Son of Glory is not dead, nor ever shall of Clorinda, golden dreams play upon the canvas as I am as when my life began."-See the Essay they used when I painted it. The flowers of Hope and on "Great and Little Things." Table Talk, vol. ii., p. Joy springing up in my mind, recall the time when they | 171. be to me. |