sinister motive."[21]
Hazlitt was not a republican, and he disapproved of the Utopian rhapsodies
of Shelley, woven as they seemed of mere moonshine, without applicability
to the evils that demanded immediate reform. But he did insist that there
was a power in the people to change its government and its governors, and
hence grew his idolatry of Napoleon, who, through all vicissitudes,
remained the "Child and Champion of the Revolution," the hero who had
shown Europe how its established despots could be overthrown.

The news of Waterloo plunged Hazlitt into deep distress, as if it had been
the shock of a personal calamity. According to Haydon, "he walked about
unwashed, unshaven, hardly sober by day, always intoxicated by night,
literally for weeks." But his disappointment only strengthened his
attachment to his principles. These remained enshrined with the brightest
dreams of his youth, and in proportion as the vision faded and men were
beginning to scoff at it as a shadow, Hazlitt bent his energies to fix its
outline and prove its reality. "I am attached to my conclusions," he says,
"in consequence of the pain, the anxiety, and the waste of time they have
cost me."[22] His doctrines contained nothing that was subversive of
social order, and their ultimate triumph lends the color of heroism to a
consistency which people have often interpreted as proof of a limited
horizon. It is at least certain that he did not put his conscience out to
market, and that his reward came in the form of the vilest calumny ever
visited upon a man of letters.

These were the most infamous years of the Quarterly Review and Blackwood's
Magazine, both of which had been founded as avowed champions of reaction.
Their purpose was to discredit all writers whose politics or the politics
of whose friends differed from the Government. Everybody knows of the fate
which Keats and Shelley suffered at their hands, chiefly because they
were friends of Leigh Hunt, who was the editor of a Liberal newspaper
which had displeased George IV. Even the unoffending Lamb did not escape
their brutality, perhaps because he was guilty of admitting Hazlitt to his
house. The weapons were misrepresentation and unconfined abuse, wielded
with an utter disregard of where the blows might fall, in the spirit of a
gang of young ruffians who knew that they were protected in their
wantonness by a higher authority. In the chastened sadness of his later
years Lockhart, who was one o