good things of this life, as they are commonly called.
He was not so great a metaphysician as he thought himself. He "shows to
the utmost of his knowledge, and that not deep"; a want of depth not
surprising when we find him confessing that he had to go to Taylor, the
Platonist, to tell him something of Platonic ideas. It may be more than
suspected that he had read little but the French and English
philosophers of the eighteenth century; a very interesting class of
persons, but, except Condillac, Hume, and Berkeley, scarcely
metaphysicians. As for his politics, Hazlitt seems to me to have had no
clear political creed at all. He hated something called "the hag
legitimacy," but for the hag despotism, in the person of Bonaparte, he
had nothing but love. How any one possessed of brains could combine
Liberty and the first Napoleon in one common worship is, I confess, a
mystery too great for me; and I fear that any one who could call
"Jupiter Scapin" "the greatest man who ever lived," must be entirely
blind to such constituents of greatness as justice, mercy, chivalry, and
all that makes a gentleman. Indeed, I am afraid that "gentleman" is
exactly what cannot be predicated of Hazlitt. No gentleman could have
published the _Liber Amoris_, not at all because of its so-called
voluptuousness, but because of its shameless kissing and telling. But
the most curious example of Hazlitt's weaknesses is the language he uses
in regard to those men with whom he had both political and literary
differences. That he had provocation in some cases (he had absolutely
none from Sir Walter Scott) is perfectly true. But what provocation will
excuse such things as the following, all taken from one book, the
_Spirit of the Age_? He speaks of Scott's "zeal to restore the spirit of
loyalty, of passive obedience, and of non-resistance," as an
acknowledgment for his having been "created a baronet by a prince of the
House of Brunswick." Alas for dates and circumstances, for times and
seasons, when they stand in the way of a fling of Hazlitt's! In the
character of Scott himself an entire page and a half is devoted to an
elaborate peroration in one huge sentence, denouncing him in such terms
as "pettifogging," "littleness," "pique," "secret and envenomed blows,"
"slime of rankling malice and mercenary scorn," "trammels of servility,"
"lies," "garbage," etc. etc. The Duke of Wellington he always speaks of
as a brainless noodle, forgetting apparently that the d