the printer's devil on one side and the demands of a family on the
other, his ink began to flow freely, and during the last fifteen or
seventeen years of his life he became a voluminous though fragmentary
author. Several volumes of essays, lectures, and criticisms, besides his
more ambitious 'Life of Napoleon,' and a great deal of anonymous
writing, attest his industry. He died in 1830, at the age of fifty-two;
leaving enough to show that he could have done more and a good deal of a
rare, if not of the highest kind of excellence.

Hazlitt, as I have said, is everywhere autobiographical. Besides that
secret, that a man can write if he must, he had discovered the further
secret that the easiest of all topics is his own feelings. It is an
apparent paradox, though the explanation is not far to seek, that
Hazlitt, though shy with his friends, was the most unreserved of
writers. Indeed he takes the public into his confidence with a facility
which we cannot easily forgive. Biographers of late have been guilty of
flagrant violations of the unwritten code which should protect the
privacies of social life from the intrusions of public curiosity. But
the most unscrupulous of biographers would hardly have dared to tear
aside the veil so audaciously as Hazlitt, in one conspicuous instance at
least, chose to do for himself. His idol Rousseau had indeed gone
further; but when Rousseau told the story of his youth, it was at least
seen through a long perspective of years, and his own personality might
seem to be scarcely interested. Hazlitt chose, in the strange book
called the 'New Pygmalion,' or 'Liber Amoris,' to invite the British
public at large to look on at a strange tragi-comedy, of which the last
scene was scarcely finished. Hazlitt had long been unhappy in his family
life. His wife appears to have been a masculine woman, with no talent
for domesticity; completely indifferent to her husband's pursuits, and
inclined to despise him for so fruitless an employment of his energies.
They had already separated, it seems, when Hazlitt fell desperately in
love with Miss Sarah Walker, the daughter of his lodging-house keeper.
The husband and wife agreed to obtain a divorce under the Scotch law,
after which they might follow their own paths, and Sarah Walker become
the second Mrs. Hazlitt. Some months had to be spent by Mr. and Mrs.
Hazlitt in Edinburgh, with a view to this arrangement. The lady's
journal records her impressions; which, i