ich expresses a very
keen if narrow range of feeling, and implies a powerful grasp of one, if
only one side of the truth. Hazlitt harps a good deal upon one string;
but that string vibrates forcibly. His best passages are generally an
accumulation of short, pithy sentences, shaped in strong feeling, and
coloured by picturesque association; but repeating, rather than
corroborating, each other. The last blow goes home, but each falls on
the same place. He varies the phrase more than the thought; and
sometimes he becomes obscure, because he is so absorbed in his own
feelings that he forgets the very existence of strangers who require
explanation. Read through Hazlitt, and this monotony becomes a little
tiresome; but dip into him at intervals, and you will often be
astonished that so vigorous a writer has not left some more enduring
monument of his remarkable powers.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] In the excellent Essay prefixed to 'Hazlitt's Literary Remains.'

_DISRAELI'S NOVELS_[4]

It is a commonplace with men of literary eminence to extol the man of
deeds above the man of words. Scott was half ashamed of scribbling
novels whilst Wellington was winning battles; and, if Carlyle be a true
prophet, the most brilliant writer is scarcely worthy to unloose the
shoe's latchet of the silent heroes of action. Perhaps it is graceful in
masters of the art to depreciate their own peculiar function. People who
have less personal interest in the matter need not be so modest. I will
confess, at any rate, to preferring the men who have sown some new seed
of thought above the heroes whose names mark epochs in history. I would
rather make the nation's ballads than give its laws, dictate principles
than carry them into execution, and leaven a country with new ideas than
translate them into facts, inevitably mangling and distorting them in
the process. And therefore I would rather have written 'Hamlet' than
defeated the Spanish Armada; or 'Paradise Lost,' than have turned out
the Long Parliament; or 'Gray's Elegy,' than have stormed the heights of
Abram; or the Waverley Novels, than have won Waterloo or even Trafalgar.
I would rather have been Voltaire or Goethe than Frederick or Napoleon;
and I suspect that when the poor historian of the nineteenth century
begins his superhuman work, he will, as a thorough philosopher,
attribute more importance to two or three recent English writers than to
all the English statesmen who have been strutting