'on his palate as
epicures taste olives;' and the delicacy of discrimination which makes
the process enjoyable is perhaps the highest qualification of a good
critic. Hazlitt's point of view was rather different, nor can we ascribe
to him without qualification that exquisite appreciation of purely
literary charm which is so rare and so often affected. Nobody, indeed,
loved some authors more heartily or understood them better; his love is
so hearty that he cannot preserve the true critical attitude. Instead of
trying them on his palate, he swallows them greedily. His judgment of
an author seems to depend upon two circumstances. He is determined in
great measure by his private associations, and in part by his sympathy
for the character of the writer. His interest in this last sense is, one
may say, rather psychological than purely critical. He thinks of an
author not as the exponent of a particular vein of thought or emotion,
nor as an artistic performer on the instrument of language, but as a
human being to be loved or hated, or both, like Napoleon or Gifford or
Southey.

Hazlitt's favourite authors were, for the most part, the friends of his
youth. He had pored over their pages till he knew them by heart; their
phrases were as familiar to his lips as texts of Scripture to preachers
who know but one book; the places where he had read them became sacred
to him, and a glory of his early enthusiasm was still reflected from the
old pages. Rousseau was his beloved above all writers. They had a
natural affinity. What Hazlitt says of Rousseau may be partly applied to
himself. Of Hazlitt it might be said almost as truly as of Rousseau,
that 'he had the most intense consciousness of his own existence. No
object that had once made an impression upon him was ever after
effaced.' In Rousseau's 'Confessions' and 'Nouvelle Heloise,' Hazlitt
saw the reflections of his own passions. He spent, he declares, two
whole years in reading these two books; and they were the happiest years
of his life. He marks with a white stone the days on which he read
particular passages. It was on April 10, 1798--as he tells us some
twenty years later--that he sat down to a volume of the 'New Heloise,'
at the inn at Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a cold chicken. He
tells us which passage he read and what was the view before his bodily
eyes. His first reading of 'Paul and Virginia' is associated with an inn
at Bridgewater; and at another old-fashione