he does
not do justice to Mercutio or to Jaques; but he sympathises more
heartily with the tremendous passion of Lear and Othello, and finds
something congenial to his taste in Coriolanus and Timon of Athens. It
is characteristic, too, that he evidently understands Shakespeare better
on the stage than in the closet. When he can associate Iago and Shylock
with the visible presence of Kean, he can introduce that personal
element which is so necessary to his best writing.

The best, indeed, of Hazlitt's criticisms--if the word may be so far
extended--are his criticisms of living men. The criticism of
contemporary portraits called the 'Spirit of the Age' is one of the
first of those series which have now become popular, as it is certainly
one of the very best. The descriptions of Bentham, and Godwin, and
Coleridge, and Horne Tooke are masterpieces in their way. They are, of
course, unfair; but that is part of their charm. One would no more take
for granted Hazlitt's valuation of Wordsworth than Timon's judgment of
Alcibiades. Hazlitt sees through coloured glasses, but his vision is not
the less penetrating. The vulgar satirist is such a one as Hazlitt
somewhere mentioned who called Wordsworth a dunce. Hazlitt was quite
incapable of such a solecism. He knew, nobody better, that a telling
caricature must be a good likeness. If he darkens the shades, and here
and there exaggerates an ungainly feature, we still know that the shade
exists and that the feature is not symmetrical. De Quincey reports the
saying of some admiring friend of Hazlitt, who confessed to a shudder
whenever Hazlitt used his habitual gesture of placing his hand within
his waistcoat. The hand might emerge armed with a dagger. Whenever, said
the same friend (Heaven preserve us from our friends!), Hazlitt had been
distracted for a moment from the general conversation, he looked round
with a mingled air of suspicion and defiance, as though some
objectionable phrase might have evaded his censure in the interval. The
traits recur to us when we read Hazlitt's descriptions of the men he had
known. We seem to see the dark sardonic man, watching the faces and
gestures of his friends, ready to take sudden offence at any affront to
his cherished prejudices, and yet hampered by a kind of nervous timidity
which makes him unpleasantly conscious of his own awkwardness. He
remains silent, till somebody unwittingly contradicts his unspoken
thoughts--the most irritating kind o