ision. There may be others who, in different parts of their work,
are more unequal than he is; but with him the inequality is pervading,
and shows itself in his finest passages, in those where he is most at
home, as much as in his hastiest and most uncongenial taskwork. It could
not, indeed, be otherwise, because the inequality itself is due less to
an intellectual than to a moral defect. The clear sunshine of Hazlitt's
admirably acute intellect is always there; but it is constantly obscured
by driving clouds of furious prejudice. Even as the clouds pass, the
light may still be seen on distant and scattered parts of the landscape;
but wherever their influence extends, there is nothing but thick
darkness, gusty wind and drenching rain. And the two phenomena, the
abiding intellectual light, and the fits and squalls of moral darkness,
appear to be totally independent of each other, or of any single will or
cause of any kind. It would be perfectly easy, and may perhaps be in
place later, to give a brief collection of some of the most absurd and
outrageous sayings that any writer, not a mere fool, can be charged
with: of sentences not representing quips and cranks of humour, or
judgments temporary and one-sided, though having a certain relative
validity, but containing blunders and calumnies so gross and palpable,
that the man who set them down might seem to have forfeited all claim to
the reputation either of an intelligent or a responsible being. And yet,
side by side with these, are other passages (and fortunately a much
greater number) which justify, and more than justify, Hazlitt's claims
to be as Thackeray says, "one of the keenest and brightest critics that
ever lived"; as Lamb had said earlier, "one of the wisest and finest
spirits breathing."

The only exception to be taken to the well-known panegyric of Elia is,
that it bestows this eulogy on Hazlitt "in his natural and healthy
state." Unluckily, it would seem, by a concurrence of all testimony,
even the most partial, that the unhealthy state was quite as natural as
the healthy one. Lamb himself plaintively wishes that "he would not
quarrel with the world at the rate he does"; and De Quincey, in his
short, but very interesting, biographical notice of Hazlitt (a notice
entirely free from the malignity with which De Quincey has been
sometimes charged), declares with quite as much truth as point, that
Hazlitt's guiding principle was, "Whatever is, is wrong." He was the