"Hazlitt" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Daemonologie, p. 69. An instance of a fairy incubus is given in the "Life of Robin Goodfellow," Hazlitt's Fairy Mythology, p. 176.] ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... terrific diatribe against a foe. In either case, there might be "thoughts that breathe and words that burn"; still, there was but little of true criticism. The matchless papers on Spenser and Homer represent one class, and the articles on Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt the other. While the former exhibit the tender sympathy of a poet and the enthusiasm of a scholar, the latter reveal the uncompromising partisan, swinging the hangman's cord, and brandishing the scourge of scorpions. Of the novelist's three kinds of criticism—"the slash, the tickle, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... of that misleading phrase 'motiveless malignity,' has some fine remarks on Iago; and the essence of the character has been described, first in some of the best lines Hazlitt ever wrote, and then rather more fully by Mr. Swinburne,—so admirably described that I am tempted merely to read and illustrate these two criticisms. This plan, however, would make it difficult to introduce all that I wish to say. I propose, therefore, ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... generally believed to have been adapted from a story entitled "The Waking Man's Fortune" in Edward's collection of comic tales, 1570, which were retold somewhat differently in "Goulart's Admirable and Memorable Histories," 1607; both versions are reprinted in Mr. Hazlitt's "Shakspeare Library," vol. iv., part I, pp. 403-414. In Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry" we find the adventure told in a ballad entitled "The Frolicksome Duke; or, the Tinker's Good Fortune," from the Pepys collection: "whether it may be ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... large, and high, and round it, half-way up the dull yellow walls, ran an old carved gallery, relic of the time when it had been the studio of a hare-brained painter, a friend of Hazlitt and Coleridge, a believer in poor young Keats while the rest of the world laughed at him—in the very ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... the bearers of which have but recently departed from among us. Cyrus Redding, John Payne Collier, and Samuel Carter Hall still survive, and, it is to be hoped, are far off yet from the end of their honorable career; and William Hazlitt, Theodore Hook, Lord Campbell, Dr. Maginn, Dr. Croly, Thomas Barnes, William Jordan, and many others, belong as much to the present generation as to the past. Among other distinguished writers must ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... coming on the stage. Crabbe, Shelley, Keats, Croly, Hazlitt, Lockhart, Lamb, Hunt, Galt, Lady Morgan, Miss Mitford, Horace Smith, Hook, Milman, Miss Austen, and a host of others, were already on it. Many of these appear to have received rewards far greater than fall now to the lot of some of the most distinguished literary men. Crabbe is said to ...
— Letters on International Copyright; Second Edition • Henry C. Carey
... fulfil our destiny in the place that gave us birth. I should on this account like well enough to spend the whole of my life in travelling abroad if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home."—WILLIAM HAZLITT: On Going a Journey. ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... compositions and his celebrity. He grows the oracle of small coteries; and we can rarely get out of the impression that he is cockneyfied and conventional. Periodicals sadly mortgaged the claims that Hazlitt, and many others of his contemporaries, had upon a vast reversionary estate of Fame. But I here speak too politically; to some the res angustoe domi leave no option. And, as Aristotle and the Greek proverb have it, we ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... say that I am very proud to feel as grateful as I do, and not altogether hopeless of justifying, by effort at least, your most generous 'coming forward'. Hazlitt wrote his essays, as he somewhere tells us, mainly to send them to some one in the country who had 'always prophesied he would be something'!—I shall never write a line without thinking of the source of my first praise, be assured. I am, dear sir, Yours most truly and obliged, ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... are many and good at hand, yet perhaps the best are not the professional ones, but rather those who give us merely a delightful companionship and invite us to share their own favorite walks in Bookland. Such a choice companion, to name but one, awaits the student in Hazlitt's "Lectures on the English Poets." Of the author himself Charles Lamb says: "I never slackened in my admiration of him; and I think I shall go to my grave without finding, or expecting to find, such ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... both within and without the church, with green herbs, branches of box, flowers, rushes, and flags, for one year, after which such as can afford it lay down a stone."—Brand's Popular Antiquities, edited W. C. Hazlitt, vol. ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... refreshing to read the almost childlike expressions of Lanier. One feels often that the worship of what he calls his "sweet masters" is overdone, and that he praises far too highly some obscure sonneteer; but there is in his work the spirit of the romantic critic — the zest of Charles Lamb and Hazlitt for the old masters. Lowell, speaking of a period in his own life when he was delivering his early lectures at Lowell Institute, said: "Then I was at the period in life when thoughts rose in covies, . . . a ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... essayist in the really accepted manner of an essayist. He is really more a brilliant exponent of an original point of view. In other words, he essays to knock down opinions held by other essayists, whether writers or politicians. It would be manifestly absurd to praise Chesterton as being equal to Hazlitt, or condemn him as being inferior to J.S. Mill. Comparisons are usually odious, which is precisely the reason so much use is made of them. In this case any comparison is not only odious; it is worse, it is ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... and Toulouse, and Rennes, and Rouen, Amiens still wears that 'look of a capital' which is as unmistakeable, if also as undefinable, as Hazlitt found the 'look of a gentleman' to be. York and Exeter, for example, in England, have this look, while Liverpool and Hull have it not. There are traces of the Spaniards in Amiens, as there are wherever that most Roman of all the Latin peoples ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... of introduction from the Emperor Napoleon. I was not inclined to think much of either of them; but I knew Hazlitt was a friend of Lamb's; and I have a regard for Lamb, on account of his regard for his sister. So my porter asked Mr. Hazlitt to walk in; and so Mr. Hazlitt did. Presently I heard him say, in an aside to Mrs. Jameson, that women were usually very stupid; if not ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... in some instances as representing the eternities of human speculation, since their names had perhaps dawned upon his mind in concurrence with the very earliest suggestion of topics which they had treated, should overrate their intrinsic grandeur. Hazlitt accordingly is styled "The great thinker." But had he been such potentially, there was an absolute bar to his achievement of that station in act and consummation. No man can be a great thinker in our days upon large and elaborate questions without being also a great student. To think profoundly, ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... although genuine and hearty, is coarse and vulgar. He was superficial where Fielding showed deep insight; but he had a rude conception of generosity of which Fielding seems incapable. It is owing to this that "Strap" is superior to "Partridge."—Hazlitt, Comic Writers. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... one who was present remembers the delighted crowds that assembled nightly in the Tremont Temple, and no one who heard Dickens, during that eventful month of December, will forget the sensation produced by the great author, actor, and reader. Hazlitt says of Kean's Othello, "The tone of voice in which he delivered the beautiful apostrophe 'Then, O, farewell,' struck on the heart like the swelling notes of some divine music, like the sound of years of departed happiness." ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... friend's money; Fred Bayham had an ugly trick of borrowing shirts; and yet they were better people to fall among than Mr. Barnes. And though Falstaff was neither sober nor very honest, I think I could name one or two long-faced Barabbases whom the world could better have done without. Hazlitt mentions that he was more sensible of obligation to Northcote,[19] who had never done him anything he could call a service, than to his whole circle of ostentatious friends; for he thought a good companion emphatically ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... has Webster wrought the character of this white devil, that we seem to see her before us as in a picture. 'Beautiful as the leprosy, dazzling as the lightning,' to use a phrase of her enthusiastic admirer Hazlitt, she takes her station like a lady in some portrait by Paris Bordone, with gleaming golden hair twisted into snakelike braids about her temples, with skin white as cream, bright cheeks, dark dauntless eyes, and on her bosom, where it has been chafed by jewelled chains, a flush ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... especially the first and last. It is all very well for Keats in his airy manner to assert that beauty is truth, truth beauty, and that that is all he knows or needs to know. I, for one, need to know a lot more. And I never shall know. Nobody, not even Hazlitt nor Sainte-Beuve, has ever finally explained why he thought a book beautiful. I take the first fine lines that ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... in her literature was still, to a large extent, the romantic liberalism of Rousseau, the free and humane truisms that had refreshed the other nations, the return to Nature and to natural rights. But that which in Rousseau was a creed, became in Hazlitt a taste and in Lamb little more than a whim. These latter and their like form a group at the beginning of the nineteenth century of those we may call the Eccentrics: they gather round Coleridge and his decaying dreams or linger in the tracks of Keats and Shelley and Godwin; Lamb with his bibliomania ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... cypress from a garden in a populous community to the deep black mould of the west, and it grows to be a forest monarch. It is Hazlitt who says "the heart reposes in greater security on the immensity of nature's works, expatiates freely there and finds ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... maddening habit of italicizing a word or two in every sentence. Even these stern and desperate encounters, fit sports for the men of Albuera and Waterloo, become dull and vulgar, in that dreadful jargon. You have to tum to Hazlitt's account of the encounter between the Gasman and the Bristol Bull, to feel the savage strength of it all. It is a hardened reader who does not wince even in print before that frightful right-hander which felled the giant, and left him in "red ruin" from eyebrow to jaw. But ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to know what the author wore, how he sat, what the furniture of his desk and chamber, who cooked his meals for him, and with what appetite he approached them. "The mind soars by an effort to the grand and lofty" (so dipped Hazlitt in some favored ink-bottle)—"it is at home in the groveling, the ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... publisher,—robust, ruddy, good-naturedly acute,—and as he said with a smile that he would waive routine and take charge of my copy, I knew that the same hands had fastened upon the crude pages of Jane Eyre, and the best labors of Hazlitt, Ruskin, Leigh ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... [Footnote 491: Hazlitt's Dodsley, XV, 408. If the Kirkham picture represents the interior of any playhouse, it more likely represents the Cockpit, which was standing at the time of ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... of modern science, see Munro's translation and notes, fourth edition, book v, notes ii, p. 335. On the relation of several passages in Horace to the ideas of Lucretius, see Munro as above. For the passage from Luther, see the Table Talk, Hazlitt's translation, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... authors of all nations are to be found. You can step in any morning and have a chat with Lawrence, Reynolds, Lessing, Delaroche Hazlitt, Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Rossini, Willis, Irving, Anthon, Sigourney, Osgood, Booth, Kemble, Kean, Cooper, Vandenhoff, Palmerston, Pitt, O'Connel, Lamartine, Napoleon, Margaret Fuller, Charlotte Bronte, Lady Blessington, and others of note, who ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... hitherto escaped attention, and that it should not have been reprinted with some one of the countless impressions of the "History of the Plague of London," to which it forms an almost necessary accompaniment. The omission, I trust, will be repaired by Mr. HAZLITT the younger, DEFOE'S last and best editor, in his valuable edition of the works of that great novelist and political writer, now in the course of publication. It may be added, that a case precisely similar to that ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... hands, I loitered over the book-stall of the station, and stole a passage of conversation with a kindly clergyman whom I found looking at the pretty shilling editions filling the cases. I said, How nice it was to have Hazlitt in that green cloth; and he said, Yes, but he held for Gibbon in leather; and just then his train came in and he ran off to it, and left me to my guilt in not having gone to see Durham. It was now twilight, and too late; but there the charming ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... While under the immediate spell of her fascinating book, it was of course very delightful to me to make Mrs. Jameson's acquaintance, which I did at the house of our friends, Mr. and Mrs. Basil Montagu. They were the friends of Coleridge, Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Proctor (Barry Cornwall, who married Mrs. Montagu's daughter), and were themselves individually as remarkable, if not as celebrated, as many of their more famous friends. Basil Montagu was the son of the Earl of Sandwich and the beautiful Miss Wray, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... critical spirit of this age. Though most of the authors so far mentioned were critics, as well as essayists, you will find it helpful to read from the following: De Quincey, Hazlitt, Hallam, Ruskin, Whipple. If you can read but one work from DeQuincey, take, instead of a criticism, his "Confessions of an English Opium Eater," the style of which is considered masterly. Its sentences are melodious, ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... eighth and concluding lecture of Mr. Hazlitt's canons of criticism, delivered at the Surrey Institution (The English Poets, 1870, pp. 203, 204), I am accused of having 'lauded Buonaparte to the skies in the hour of his success, and then peevishly wreaking my disappointment on the god of my idolatry.' ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... apart from the extraordinary elements that undoubtedly characterised Chatterton, and constituted him a premature and prodigious birth intellectually, there was also in parts of his poems evidence of a healthy vigour which only needed favourable circumstances to develop into transcendent excellence. Hazlitt, holding with the one of these opinions, cries, 'If Chatterton had had a great work to do by living, he would have lived!' Others retort on the critic, 'On the same principle, why did Keats, whom you rate so high, perish so early?' The question altogether ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... had established themselves as friends of Rachel was a young attorney named George Hazlitt. He had gone to school with her in a small Wisconsin town. A year ago he had discovered her again in Chicago. The discovery had excited him. He was a young man with proprietary instincts. He had at ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... marvellous insight into vital truths, of a sane and ripe philosophy of life, of a wide and profound sympathy with the myriad thoughts and emotions of mankind. They write in verse simply because, as Hazlitt describes it, poetry is "the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our conception of anything." They write in verse because Nature herself insists ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... a case; and to the Turners he kept alive such gratitude for their assistance, that for years, and after he had begun to mount himself into higher zones, he continued to have that family to dinner on the anniversary of the operation. Not Hazlitt nor Rousseau had a more romantic passion for their past, although at times they might express it more romantically; and if Pepys shared with them this childish fondness, did not Rousseau, who left behind him the "Confessions," or Hazlitt, who wrote the "Liber ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was born at Cork in 1784, and died at Torquay in December, 1862, at the age of 78. His father was a teacher of elocution, who compiled a dictionary, and who was related to the Sheridans. He moved to London when his son was eight years old, and there became acquainted with William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb. The son, after his school education, obtained a commission in the army, but gave up everything for the stage, and made his first appearance at the Crow Street Theatre, in Dublin. He did not become a great actor, and when he took to ...
— The Hunchback • James Sheridan Knowles
... I am done, I shall find that I have forgotten much that was most influential, as I see already I have forgotten Thoreau, and Hazlitt, whose paper 'On the Spirit of Obligations' was a turning-point in my life, and Penn, whose little book of aphorisms had a brief but strong effect on me, and Mitford's Tales of Old Japan, wherein I learned for the first time the proper attitude of any rational man to his country's ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... lover of thought and not of action, of melancholy temper too, and prone to unpack his heart with words. Almost every one who has followed the argument thus far will be inclined to think of Romeo. Hazlitt declared that "Romeo is Hamlet in love. There is the same rich exuberance of passion and sentiment in the one, that there is of thought and sentiment in the other. Both are absent and self-involved; both live out of themselves in a world of imagination." Much of this is true and ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again unsuccessful and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction and the co-ordination of parts. I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann. I remember one of these monkey tricks, which was called THE VANITY OF MORALS: it was to have had a second part, THE VANITY OF KNOWLEDGE; ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had been signalised by an adventure in which Leech, Lemon, and myself took part with him, when, obtaining horses from Salisbury, we passed the whole of a March day in riding over every part of the Plain; visiting Stonehenge, and exploring Hazlitt's "hut" at Winterslow, birthplace of some of his finest essays; altogether with so brilliant a success that now (13th of November) he proposed to "repeat the Salisbury Plain idea in a new direction in mid-winter, to wit, Blackgang Chine in the Isle of Wight, with dark winter cliffs ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... are Saadi's Gulistan; Luther's Table-Talk; Aubrey's Lives; Spence's Anecdotes; Selden's Table-Talk; Boswell's Life of Johnson; Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe; Coleridge's Table-Talk; and Hazlitt's Life of Northcote. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... succession of Thomas de Quincey to this vacant throne? Shall it be Coleridge, 'the noticeable man with large, gray eyes,' or the stately Macaulay, or Carlyle, with his Moorish dialect and sardonic glance, or hale old Walter Scott, or Lamb, or Hazlitt, or Christopher North? The time was when Coleridge's literary fame was second to that of no other man. But he has suffered a disastrous eclipse; it has been articulately demonstrated that the vast body of his most valuable speculations, both in the department of philosophy, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... a genius for friendship; however much he might wish to be alone, he was, there can be little doubt, ever genial, ever his wise and whimsical self, even when suffering under the untimely advent of "Mr. Hazlitt, Mr. Martin Burney, or Morgan Demigorgon"; he had to suffer—or imagine that he suffered—from the effects of a personal charm of which he was wholly unaware; but if he had not been so friendlily accessible the world would ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... they were primarily intended. Perhaps they do not bear an appearance in print. But they are not for my brother-journalists to read nor for the judicious men of letters. I prefer to think that they are intended solely for those whom Hazlitt styled "sensible people." Hazlitt said that "the most sensible people to be met with in society are men of business and of the world." I am hoping that these will buy my book and that some of them ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... possess a good autobiography of Leigh Hunt. It is the first we have from a long list of celebrated men; and no one could give us such correct, discerning, and delightful insights into their usual life and true characters. Hazlitt, Lamb, Shelley, Keats, Byron, and a crowd of others become familiar to us in these pages. It was in the Examiner that the first compositions of Shelley and Keats were introduced to the British public; and the friendship which Mr. Hunt maintained ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... said, a wonder that Wordsworth should have been much impressed by such doctrines as these, but the evidence is strong that for a time they lay upon him like a nightmare. I will not quote the Borderers for a reason which will be seen presently, but the testimony of Hazlitt, Coleridge, the Prelude, and the Excursion is decisive. "Throw aside your books of chemistry," said Wordsworth to a young man, a student in the Temple, "and read Godwin on Necessity"' (Hazlitt's Spirit of the Age, p. 49, 3rd edition). Now it is a question, important historically, but more important ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... answer to the heavenly vision. There are days which will always have a place by themselves in our memory, nights whose stars have never set, because they brought us face to face with some great soul, and struck into life in an instant some new and mighty meaning. The ferment of soul which Hazlitt describes on the night when he walked home from his first talk with Coleridge is no exceptional experience; it comes to most young men who are susceptible to the influence of great thoughts coming for the first time into consciousness. ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... thing to say; the enormous difference lies in the manner in which each says it. The greatest effects recorded to have been produced by human language, have been produced by things which, in merely reading them, would not have appeared so very remarkable. Hazlitt tells us that nothing so lingered on his ear as a line from Home's Douglas, as ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... intellectual and moral guidance at his elder brother's hands. I told the story at a meeting of our Historical Society of Charles Emerson's coming into my study,—this was probably in 1826 or 1827,—taking up Hazlitt's "British Poets" and turning at once to a poem of Marvell's, which he read with his entrancing voice and manner. The influence of this poet is plain to every reader in some of Emerson's poems, and Charles' ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... fortune in the British funds, without much risk to himself. It is said he can scarcely write his own name, and it only requires a minute's conversation to inform you of the general ignorance of his mind; in short, he is one of Hazlitt's men, with only one idea, but that one entirely directed to the accumulation of gold. A few years since some of the more respectable members of the Stock Exchange, perceiving the thraldom in which the public funds of the country were held by the tricks and manouvres ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... of the Reformation, ed. by Henry Wace and C. A. Buchheim (1885), contains an English translation of Luther's "Theses," and of his three pamphlets of 1520. The best edition of Luther's complete works is the Weimar edition; English translations of portions of his Table Talk, by William Hazlitt, have appeared in the Bonn Library; and Luther's Correspondence and Other Contemporary Letters is now (1916) in course of translation and publication by Preserved Smith. J. W. Richard, Philip Melanchthon (1898) is a brief biography of one of the most famous friends ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... as nearly every line travesties some tragic passage once familiar to play-goers, and now utterly forgotten. But the following lines from one of the speeches of Lord Grizzle—a part admirably acted by Liston in later years [Footnote: Compare Hazlitt, On the Comic Writers of the Last Century.]—are a fair specimen of its ludicrous use (or rather ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... average politician. Robert Southey (1777-1843), the 'ultra servile sack-guzzler,' as Bentham pleasantly calls him in 1823,[151] was probably the best abused man, on his own side at least, among Mill's contemporaries. He was attacked by Mill himself, and savagely denounced by Byron and Hazlitt. He was not only a conspicuous writer in the Quarterly Review but, as his enemies thought, a renegade bought by pensions. It is, I hope, needless to defend him against this charge. He was simply an impatient man of generous instincts and ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... an archaeologist, and an admirable teacher who, while he valued the intellectual side of education, did not forget the importance of early moral training. It was under Mr. Burney that he first developed his talent as an artist, and Mr. Hazlitt tells us that a drawing-book which he used at school is still extant, and displays great talent and natural feeling. Indeed, painting was the first art that fascinated him. It was not till much later that he sought to find expression by pen ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... difficult you know. We cater for them by the thousand. At this moment," he said with a Napoleonic touch, "nearly five hundred phonographs are lecturing in different parts of London on the influence exercised by Plato and Swift on the love affairs of Shelley, Hazlitt, and Burns. And afterwards they write essays on the lectures, and the names in order of merit are put in conspicuous places. You see how your little germ has grown? The illiterate middle-class of your days ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... Hazlitt's life of Bonaparte appeared we had no English treatment of Bonaparte that was in any sense fair, and, by the way, Hazlitt's work is the only one in English I know of which gives the will of Bonaparte, an ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... His article on Hogarth is a masterly specimen of acute and subtile criticism. Hazlitt says it ought to be read by every lover of Hogarth and English genius. His paper on "The Tragedies of Shakspeare, considered with Reference to their Fitness for Stage-Representation," is, in the opinion of good judges, the noblest criticism ever written. The brief, "matterful" ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... on yesterday noon. William Hazlitt, is a thinking, observant, original man; of great power as a painter of character-portraits, and far more in the manner of the old painters than any living artist, but the objects must be before him. He has no imaginative ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... Goethe and Voltaire, remain to scoff with Jeremy Collier, is a third. There are causes from without that will always keep alive a certain measure of hostility towards the player. As long as the public, in Hazlitt's words, feel more respect for John Kemble in a plain coat than the Lord Chancellor on the Woolsack, so long will this public regard for the actor provoke the resentment of those whose achievements in art appeal less immediately, less strikingly, to their ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... appears to mean top-end and is generally shortened to -ett, e.g. Birkett (cf. Birkenhead), [Footnote: No doubt sometimes, like Burchett, Burkett, for the personal name Burchard, Anglo-Sax. Burgheard] Brockett (brook), Bromet, Bromhead (broom), Hazlitt (hazel). The same suffix appears to be present in Fossett, from fosse, and Forcett from force, a waterfall (Scand.). Broadhead is a nickname, like Fr. Grossetete and Ger. Breitkopf. The face-value of Evershed is boar's head. Morshead may be the nickname of mine host of the Saracen's ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... much as Forster of the literary history of the days when Dickens first "rose"; and when such men as Lamb, Campbell, Talfourd, Theodore Hook, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, and many more of that school ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald
... that at the same time I exulted in these ferocities I had mind enough and heart enough to find pleasure in the truer and finer work, the humaner work of other writers, like Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt, and Lamb, which became known to me at a date I cannot exactly fix. I believe it was Hazlitt whom I read first, and he helped me to clarify and formulate my admiration of Shakespeare as no one else had yet done; Lamb helped me too, and with all the dramatists, and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... and virtues of life. Even at the breakfast-table he was as neat and clean as a woman. At the ball, of which he was as fond as a child, he was scrupulously temperate, and in speech pure as a lady. Wills read Sharon Turner, Hazlitt, Pope, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and commented on all. Of Tennyson's In Memoriam he said it was wonderful for its frequent bordering on faults without ever reaching them. He was a student of literature as well as of astronomy and science. Much ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... from Frank, in the midst of the preparations on Wednesday, announcing that 'he was all right, and should be at Hazlitt's ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... soul as well as her intellect, I have no doubt that she had established subtile connections between it and the Bible likewise. As is apt to be the case with solitary students, Miss Bacon probably read late and rose late; for I took up Montaigne (it was Hazlitt's translation) and had been reading his journey to Italy a good while ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... speaker, and his methods throughout are suited to declamation and oratory. He lacks the ease and delicacy that we are accustomed to look for in the best prose writers, and occasionally one feels the justice of Johnson's stricture, that "he sometimes talked partly from ostentation", or of Hazlitt's criticism that he seemed to be "perpetually calling the speaker out to dance a minuet ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... mortar between the stones, each is held in place by the weight of the others, and helps to uphold the building. In reading, every word must be rendered clearly and articulately; to drop one out, or to slur it over, is to take a stone from an arch. Indeed, if Lamb and Hazlitt are right in thinking that Shakespeare's greatest plays cannot be acted, by the same token, Milton's greatest poems cannot be read aloud. For his most sonorous passages the human voice is felt to be too thin an instrument; the lightest word in the line demands some faint emphasis, ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... things should be thus with us, for a good essayist is the pleasantest companion imaginable. There are folk in plenty who have never read Montaigne at all; but there are few indeed who have read but a page of him, and that page but once. And the same may be said of Addison and Fielding, of Lamb and Hazlitt, of Sterne and Bacon and Ben Jonson, and all the members of their goodly fellowship. To sit down with any one of them is to sit down in the company of one of the 'mighty wits, our elders and our ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... jealousies. While he sought, with the fury of a pampered slave, to trample on those authors that were beneath him in rank or in popularity, he could on all occasions fawn with the sycophancy of a eunuch upon the noble, the rich, and the powerful. Hazlitt speaks of Moore as a "pug-dog barking from the lap of a lady of quality at inferior passengers." The description is far more applicable to Pope. We have much allowance to make for the influence exerted on his mind by his singularly crooked frame and sickly habit of body, by ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... fortunate as this scarlet-coated gentleman was Mr. Hudson, alias Hazlitt, who in 1770 stopped a post-chaise on Gateshead Fell, near Newcastle, and robbed the occupant, a lady who was returning to Newcastle from Durham. A poor-spirited creature was this Hudson, a little London clerk gone wrong, and he trembled so excessively ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... between population and the means of subsistence. In present conditions the numbers of the race are only kept from increasing far beyond the means of subsistence by vice, misery, and the fear of misery. [Footnote: This observation had been made (as Hazlitt pointed out) before Malthus by Robert Wallace (see A Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind, p. 13, 1753). It was another book of Wallace that suggested the difficulty to Godwin.] In the conditions imagined by Condorcet and Godwin these checks ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... recollect is Mrs. Barbauld, with whose works I became acquainted—before those of any other author, male or female—when I was learning to spell words of one syllable in her story-books for children.' So says Hazlitt in his lectures on living poets. He goes on to call her a very pretty poetess, strewing flowers ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... of the plot; but to the grand creation of Isabella, they award either silence or worse than silence. Johnson and the rest of the black-letter crew, pass over her without a word. One critic, a lady-critic too, whose name I will be so merciful as to suppress, treats Isabella as a coarse vixen. Hazlitt, with that strange perversion of sentiment and want of taste which sometimes mingle with his piercing and powerful intellect, dismisses Isabella with a slight remark, that "we are not greatly enamoured of her rigid chastity, nor can feel much confidence in the virtue that ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... wishing the bill to be anything else than final. Even with its limited franchise, he deemed it a very excellent bill; and the woolsack, to which it had elevated him, a very desirable seat. People did occasionally see that Hazlitt was in the right—that he was rather a man of speech than of action; that he was somewhat too imprudent for a leader, somewhat too petulant for a partisan; and that he wanted in a considerable ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... romantic exercise in the manner of Scribe. It is the sole example of a theme taken by him directly from comparatively modern history, and treated purely for its value as a study of contemporary intrigue. From this point of view it curiously exemplifies a remark of Hazlitt: "The progress of manners and knowledge has an influence on the stage, and will in time perhaps destroy both tragedy and comedy.... At last, there will be nothing left, good nor bad, to be desired or dreaded, on the theatre or ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... of Bonaparte appeared we had no English treatment of Bonaparte that was in any sense fair, and, by the way, Hazlitt's work is the only one in English I know of which gives the will of Bonaparte, an exceedingly ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... did the butchering business in the Anti-Jacobin." He was far heavier, in bludgeoning, than Jeffrey; while Hazlitt epitomized his principles of criticism with his accustomed vigour:—"He believes that modern literature should wear the fetters of classical antiquity; that truth is to be weighed in the scales of opinion and prejudice; that power is equivalent ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... and one of the most odious qualities in the world. It is vanity driven from all other shifts, and forced to appeal to itself for admiration.—HAZLITT. ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... the "Modern Midnight Conversation" from the same hand; three or four bewitching Romneys; a room full of beauties of the Court of Queen Anne; Henry VIII by Holbein; a wonderful Claude Lorraine; a head of Cervantes attributed to Velasquez; and four views of the Thames by Turner. Hazlitt, in his Sketches of the Picture Galleries of England, says of this collection:—"We wish our readers to go to Petworth ... where they will find the coolest grottoes and the ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... well-known Rape of the Sabine Women; 740, a most perfect work of his maturity, Orpheus and Eurydice (1659); and 742, Apollo and Daphne, his last work, left unfinished. Such are some of the more striking manifestations of this remarkable genius who alone, says Hazlitt, has the right to be considered as the painter of classical antiquity. His integrity was so rigid that he once returned part of the price paid for one of his works which he deemed excessive. To the modern, Poussin ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... poetry, that goes without saying; for the essential, defining element in poetry is music. You may have truth, beauty, imagination, emotion, but without music you have not yet got poetry. But it is hardly less true that prose should be read aloud. "The best test of good writing," said Hazlitt—and no man in his generation wrote better prose than he—"is, does it read well aloud." The sympathetic oral reading of a passage from any prose master, a reading that naturally indicates points of emphasis, shades of thought, nuances of feeling, ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... hand, the orthodox attitude, with even greater uniformity, has been shocked, or sometimes even unshocked, admiration. Hazlitt went into frequently quoted raptures over the "regality" of his character: and though to approve of him as a man would only be the pretence of a cheap paradoxer, general opinion seems to have gone various lengths in the same direction. There have, however, been a few dissenters: and I ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... that it turns against himself. French text: "Le lai du Cor, restitution critique," by F. Wulff, Lund, 1888, 8vo, written by Robert Biquet in the twelfth century; only one MS. (copied in England) has been preserved. English text: "The Cokwolds Daunce," from a MS. of the fifteenth century, in Hazlitt's "Remains of the early popular poetry of England," London, 1864, 4 vols, 8vo, vol. i. p. 35. Cf. Le "Mantel Mautaille," in Montaiglon and Raynaud, "Recueil General," vol. iii. and "La ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... for the dramatist. In the following year, in conjunction with his father-in-law, he purchased from Garrick the Drury Lane Theatre. They brought out several operas together; Linley's music in "The Duenna" and "The Beggar's Opera," being especially fine. Hazlitt speaks of the songs in them as having a joyous spirit of intoxication, and strains of the ...
— Some Old Time Beauties - After Portraits by the English Masters, with Embellishment and Comment • Thomson Willing
... vivid portraiture never was! Other men have painted single heads as well or better: but Hals stands alone in his gusto, his abundance, his surpassing brio. It is a thousand pities that neither Lamb nor Hazlitt ever made the journey to Haarlem, because only they among our writers on art could have brought a commensurate gusto to the praise of ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... met with a far from deserved neglect, owing in part no doubt to the singular failure on the part of most critics to apprehend correctly the nature and conditions of pastoral poetry.[278] Mr. W. C. Hazlitt, who edited Randolph's works in 1875, does not so much as mention the play in the perfunctory introduction, in which he chiefly follows the extravagant, pedantic, and utterly worthless article in the sixth volume of the Retrospective Review.[279] ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... that, judged by whatever standard of excellence it is possible for any reasonable human being to take, Lamb stands head and shoulders a better man than any of them. No need to stop to compare him with Godwin, or Hazlitt, or Lloyd; let us boldly put him in the scales with one whose fame is in all the churches—with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 'logician, ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... Hazlitt's critical essays has been planned to serve two important purposes. In the first place it provides the materials for an estimate of the character and scope of Hazlitt's contributions to criticism and so acquaints students with one of the greatest of English critics. And ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... are suspended, on which millions depend for the necessaries of life.' 'Garrick complained that when he went to read before the court, not a look or a murmur testified approbation; there was a profound stillness—every one only watched to see what the king thought.' Hazlitt's ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... have paraded the ribbon at Madame Cornelys's, or the Academy dinner! How Peter Pindar would have railed at it! Fifty years later, the noble Scott would have worn the Grand Cross and deserved it; but Gifford would have had it; and Byron, and Shelley, and Hazlitt, and Hunt would have been without it; and had Keats been proposed as officer, how the Tory prints would have yelled with rage and scorn! Had the star of Minerva lasted to our present time—but I pause, not because the idea is dazzling, but too awful. ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... classic a thing, if we do our part, as any which the past has treasured. There is a mirage over all literary associations. Keats and Lamb seem to our young people to be existences as remote and legendary as Homer, yet it is not an old man's life since Keats was an awkward boy at the door of Hazlitt's lecture-room, and Lamb was introducing Talfourd to Wordsworth as his own only admirer. In reading Spence's "Anecdotes," Pope and Addison appear no farther off; and wherever I open Bacon's "Essays," I ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... charged with having borrowed the design of Paradise Lost from some Italian author; and this allegation, coupled with that made by Mr. Darley, would, if founded, reduce our great national epic to what Hazlitt has described as "patchwork and plagiarism, the beggarly copiousness ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 208, October 22, 1853 • Various
... at once the basis of and the limit to all humor. He who lacks a fine perception of 'the difference between what things are and what they ought to be,' as the always-to-be-quoted Hazlitt expressed it, can never write humor. All the way through we shall find that mirth is a matter of relationships, of shift, of rigidity trying to be flexible, of something shocked ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... seven volumes, to which he added in 1905 The Life of Charles Lamb in two volumes. Another is Complete Works and Correspondence, edited by Canon Ainger (London, six volumes). Ainger also wrote an excellent short life of Lamb for the English Men of Letters series. Hazlitt and Percy Fitzgerald have revised Thomas Noon Talfourd's standard Letters of Charles Lamb, With a Sketch of His Life. Among sketches of the life of Charles and Mary Lamb may be noted Barry Cornwall's Charles Lamb—A Memoir; Fitzgerald, Charles Lamb: His Friends, His Haunts and His Books; ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... out of peril and strait. One day, for example, 'a member of our own mess roused the mob, by singing, from the windows of our dining-room, O Richard, O my King; and I had to snatch him from their fury.' (Norvins, Histoire de Napoleon, i. 47; Las Cases, Memoires translated into Hazlitt's Life of ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... another edition with the same title-page (Ed. C). The readings of Ed. C. I have occasionally borrowed from Dyce. It is supposed that the book "continued to be printed with Middleburgh on the title, and without date, as late as 1640" (Hazlitt). ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... representation of these are the most thorough, accurate, and comprehensive which exist at present either in English or German. Compare him or these tragedies with Goethe, with Schlegel, with Coleridge, with Hazlitt, with Ulrici, and it will be found that he excels them all in completeness. It is needless to add that he is able to excel them only by coming after them; and that it is by diligently digesting all the positive results of Shaksperian criticism that he has been ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... folk-lore of England was originally made up of Teutonic elements, which have been modified by Danish and Norman invasions, by remnants of old Keltic belief, and by the introduction of Christianity, which last degraded the good fairies into mischievous elves. (See Hazlitt, 'Fairy Mythology of Shakespeare,' Halliwell's 'Illustrations of the Fairy Mythology of Midsummer Night's Dream,' also Poet-Lore, April, 1891, 'Fairy-lore in Midsummer ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... 'sheen,' beautiful: 'shradds,' copses. 2.1: 'woodweel,' a small warbler. Percy, Ritson, Hazlitt, Halliwell, Child, Murray, Hales, and Furnivall, have variously identified it with the woodpecker, woodlark, redbreast, greenfinch, nuthatch, and 'golden ouzle.' 2.2: 'lyne,' tree. 3.4: 'wroken,' avenged. 4.1: 'swevens,' dreams. 5.1: 'Busk ye, bown ye' get ready. 7.3: 'capul-hide,' horse-skin. ...
— Ballads of Robin Hood and other Outlaws - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Fourth Series • Frank Sidgwick
... Burke's constitutional doctrines at the very outset. So did the Constitutional Society detect it. So did Mrs. Macaulay, Bishop Watson, and many other people. The story of Burke's inconsistency is, of course, as old as Sheridan. Hazlitt declared that the Burke of 1770 and the Burke of 1790 were not merely opposite persons, but deadly enemies. Mr. Buckle, who is full of veneration for the early writings, but who dislikes the later ones, gets over the difficulty by insisting that ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... Marcus Antonius. Cf. Antony and Cleopatra, III, xi, 37. Falstaff's famous cry was for 'spare men.' See 2 Henry IV, III, ii, 288. 'Sleek-headed' recalls Lamb's wish that the baby son of the tempestuous Hazlitt should be "like his father, with something of a better temper and a ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... in his possession for many years, was a copy in the handwriting of Sarah Stoddart (afterwards Mrs. Hazlitt). J. P. Collier notes certain differences between this MS., which he calls the 'Salisbury Copy', and the text of the First Edition. He goes on to say that before Christabel was published Coleridge lent him an MS. in his own handwriting, and he gives two or three readings from the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... current of the English literature produced before and after that year. In the year of the Queen's accession to the throne, the great writers of the early part of this century were either dead or silent. Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Lamb, Sheridan, Hazlitt, Mackintosh, Crabbe, and Cobbett, were gone. There were still living in 1837, Wordsworth, Southey, Campbell, Moore, Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, De Quincey, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Mitford, Leigh Hunt, Brougham, Samuel Rogers:—living, ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... the locum standi. It is proper, by the way, that we should inform the reader of this generation where to look for Coleridge's skirmishings with Malthus. They are to be found chiefly in the late Mr. William Hazlitt's work on that subject: a work which Coleridge so far claimed as to assert that it had been substantially made up from his own conversation.] But so you would do, if you tried the case of animal increase by still exterminating all but one replacing ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... this on the eastern side was occupied for many years by the artistic family of the Lawsons. Thomas Attwood, a pupil of Mozart and himself a great composer, died there in 1838. The house had formerly a magnificent garden, to the mulberries of which Hazlitt makes allusion in one of his essays. No. 18 was the home of the famous Don Saltero's museum. This man, correctly Salter, was a servant of Sir Hans Sloane, and his collection was formed from the overflowings of his master's. Some of the curiosities dispersed by the sale in 1799 ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... was devoted to Mary Lamb and her brother. When these two were at work on their Tales from Shakespear Martin Burney would sit with them and attempt to write for children too. Lamb's letter of May 24, 1830, to Sarah Hazlitt has some amusing stories of his friend, at whom (like George Dyer) he could laugh as well as love. Lamb speaks of him on one occasion as on the top round of his ladder of friendship. Writing to Sarah Hazlitt, Lamb says:—"Martin ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... though strangely colored, were never wanting long: but in general you could not call this aimless, cloud-capt, cloud-based, lawlessly meandering human discourse of reason by the name of "excellent talk," but only of "surprising;" and were reminded bitterly of Hazlitt's account of it: "Excellent talker, very,—if you let him start from no premises and come to no conclusion." Coleridge was not without what talkers call wit, and there were touches of prickly sarcasm in him, contemptuous enough of the world and its idols ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... hold him yourself," is older still; for it is to be found in "Mery Tales, Wittie Questions and Quicke Answeres Very pleasant to be Readde" (published by H. Wilkes in 1567), under the heading, "Of the Courtier that bad the boy holde his horse, xliii." This little book, by the way, is included in Hazlitt's collection of ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... works by these writers were ill-written and lacked depth of thought. Some were, however, masterpieces of original thinking and writing. The style of Mandeville, for example, has been eulogized extravagantly both by Hazlitt and Lord Macaulay. ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... the exact words: 'to rise to the height of its great argument and incorporate all its beauties in themselves.' There you have it—'to incorporate.' Do you remember that saying of Wordsworth's, casually dropped in conversation, but preserved for us by Hazlitt?—'It is in the highest degree unphilosophic to call language or diction the dress of our thoughts.... It is the incarnation of our thoughts.' Even so, I maintain to you, the first business of a learner in literature is to get complete hold of some undeniable masterpiece and ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... Hartington, Marquis of (afterwards sixth Duke of Devonshire) Harvey, Mrs. Jane Hatchard, Mr. John Hawke (Edward Harvey), third Lord Hay, Captain Hayley, his 'Triumphs of Temper,' Lord Byron's eulogy of Hayreddin Hazlitt, William, his style Headfort, Marchioness of 'HEBREW MELODIES' Helen, 'LINES on Canova's bust of' Hellespont, Lord Byron's swimming feat from Sestos to Abydos Hemans, Mrs., her 'Restoration' Character of her ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... objection, one takes leave to say, they misapprehend the thing criticised. To complain that 'love' and common morality have no place in satiric comedy is either to contemplate ridicule of them or to ask comedy to be other than satiric. We know what happened when the dramatists gave way: there followed, Hazlitt says, 'those do-me-good, lack-a-daisical, whining, make-believe comedies in the next age, which are enough to set one to sleep, and where the author tries in vain to be merry and wise in the same breath.' ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... could pass this play over and say nothing about it," says Hazlitt, "all that we can say must fall far short of the subject, or even of what we ourselves conceive of it. To attempt to give a description of the play itself, or of its effects upon the mind, is mere impertinence; yet we must say something. It is, then, the best of ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... tightened turban, the chief of the Indian jugglers begins with tossing up two brass balls, which is what any of us could do, and concludes with keeping up four at the same time, which is what none of us could do to save our lives." ... You remember Hazlitt's essay on the Indian Jugglers, and how their performance shook his self-conceit. "It makes me ashamed of myself. I ask what there is that I can do as well as this. Nothing..... Is there no one thing in which I can challenge competition, that I can bring as an ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... have always come when our activity was already flowing, our attention stimulated, and when, so to speak, the special artistic impressions were caught up into our other interests, and woven by them into our life. We can all recall unexpected delights like Hazlitt's in the odd volume of Rousseau found on the window-seat, and discussed, with his savoury supper, in the roadside inn, after his ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... little one" that I was tempted to add it to mark the general introduction of handkerchiefs. Having printed it, arose the question, 'Where did it come from?' No Weste's Schoole of Vertue could I find in catalogues, or by inquiring of the Duke of Devonshire, Mr W.C. Hazlitt, at the Bodleian, &c. Seager's Schoole of Vertue was the only book that turned up, and this I accordingly reprinted, as Weste's Booke of Demeanor seemed to be little more than an abstract of the first four Chapters of Seager ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... colleague to Rev. James Diman, in 1782. The senior pastor was a strict Calvinist, but the parish called as his colleague this young man of pronounced liberal views in theology. As early as 1784 Mr. Bentley was interested in the teachings of the English Unitarian, William Hazlitt,[32] who at that time visited New England. And in 1786 he was reading Joseph Priestley's book against the Trinity with approval. He soon after commended Dr. Priestley's short tracts as giving a good statement of the simple doctrines of ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... Hazlitt's genius was of a heavier type. As an essayist his work breathes the spirit of an earlier age; but as a literary critic he is a leader, and displays an inwardness in his appreciation that makes him in a sense the model of ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... generations, is a plain proof of how much fashions in taste affect the popularity of the British classics. It is true that three generations or so ago, Defoe's works were edited by both Sir Walter Scott and Hazlitt, and that this masterly piece of realism, "Captain Singleton," was reprinted a few years back in "The Camelot Classics," but it is safe to say that out of every thousand readers of "Robinson Crusoe" only one or two will have even heard of the "Memoirs of a Cavalier," ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... thrilling us by its power; but generally his sentiment and imagination break upon us in unexpected felicities, strangely better than what surrounds them. These have been culled by the affectionate admiration of Lamb, Hunt, and Hazlitt, and made familiar to all English readers. To prove how much finer, in its essence, his genius was than the genius of so eminent a dramatist as Massinger, we only need to compare Massinger's portions of the play of "The ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... "Books," said Hazlitt, "wind into the heart; the poet's verse slides into the current of our blood. We read them when young, we remember them when old. We read there of what has happened to others; we feel that it has happened to ourselves. They are to be had everywhere cheap and good. We breathe but the air ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... younger, Mary, who had the loving nickname of the "Jessamy Bride," exercised over him a strong fascination. Their social as well as personal charms are uniformly spoken of by all. Mary, who did not marry till after Goldsmith's death, lived long enough to be admired by Hazlitt, to whom she talked of the poet with affection unabated by age, till he "could almost fancy the shade of Goldsmith in the room, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... motion, on the Athanasian Creed, on fluxions, on phlogiston, on the physical cause of the Deluge, on Irish literature, on the origin of language, on the evidences for Christianity, and on all other sorts of unrelated topics. Hazlitt thought that the soul of Rabelais had passed into Amory, while a more recent critic can see in his long-winded discussions naught but the "light-headed ramblings of delirium." If we try to read John Buncle consecutively, the result ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... first came home to me, when an ancient dame, in the costume of the last century, with trembling fingers drew one of her husband from an antique cabinet, and descanted on the manly beauty of the deceased original, and the graceful genius of the young and lamented artist. Hazlitt wrote an ingenious essay on "A Portrait by Vandyck," which gives us an adequate idea of what such a masterpiece is to the eye and mind of genuine artistic perception and sympathy. Few sensations, or rather sentiments, are more inextricably made up of pleasure and sadness than ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... judgments passed on "Caleb Williams" by Godwin's contemporaries those of Hazlitt, Sir James Mackintosh, and Sir T. N. Talfourd were perhaps the most eulogistic, whilst De Quincey and Allan Cunningham criticized the book with considerable severity. Hazlitt's opinion is quoted from ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... Cousin and "the Doctor," George Moir and Madame de Stael, Dr. Fracastorius and Professor Keble, Martinus Scriblerus and Sir Thomas Browne, Macaulay and the Bishop of Cloyne, Collins and Gray and Sir James Mackintosh, Hazlitt and John Ruskin, Shakspeare and Jackson of Exeter, Dallas and De Quincey, and the six Taylors, Jeremy, William, Isaac, Jane, John Edward, and Henry. We would have had great pleasure in quoting what these famous women and men have written on the essence and ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... has been judged rather favorably by modern English critics. Mr. Hazlitt calls it, "though an imperfect and unequal performance, Marlowe's greatest work." Mr. Hallam remarks,—"There is an awful melancholy about Marlowe's Mephistopheles, perhaps more impressive than the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... he wanted the locum standi. It is proper, by the way, that we should inform the reader of this generation where to look for Coleridge's skirmishings with Malthus. They are to be found chiefly in the late Mr William Hazlitt's work on that subject: a work which Coleridge so far claimed as to assert that it had been substantially made up ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... slowly progressing at the expense of the landlord and the eating-house keeper, Haydon spent his leisure in literary rather than artistic circles. At Leigh Hunt's he met, and became intimate with Charles Lamb, Keats, Hazlitt, and John Scott. In January 1813 he writes: 'Spent the evening with Leigh Hunt at West End. His society is always delightful. I do not know a purer, more virtuous partner, or a more witty and enlivening man. We talked of his approaching imprisonment. He said ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... Judgment;' Shelley, his 'Prometheus,' and Wordsworth a new edition of his poems. Besides these giants in the field of literature, numerous stars of the second and third magnitude sent forth their light. Charles Lamb, Hazlitt, Barry Cornwall, Tom Moore, Allan Cunningham, Leigh Hunt, and others, were busy writing and publishing, and John Keats sent his swan-song from the tombs of the Eternal City. In the midst of this galaxy of genius and fame, John Clare stood, in a sense, neglected ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... Hazlitt belongs to a "class of men by whom literature is more than at any period disgraced." His style is suited for washerwomen, a "class of females with whom ... he and his friend Mr. Hunt particularly delight ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... of threescore,) and for cheerfulness of temper, as for the oddities which made him a laughing-stock for Professor Wilson and the reprobates of "Blackwood," a prodigious myth for the "Edinburgh" and "Quarterly," and a sort of Cocklane ghost for Sydney Smith, Hazlitt, Captain Parry, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... immense pasture offered by their voluminous and consistently admirable works, I ask in vain where are the great English critics of English literature. Beside these French critics, the best of our own seem either fragmentary or provincial—yes, curiously provincial. Except Hazlitt we have, I believe, no even approximately first-class writer who devoted his main activity to criticism. And Hazlitt, though he is very readable, has neither the urbaneness, nor the science, nor the learning, nor the wide ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... mansion, in New York, after Washington had left Franklin square, and taken up his abode in "M'Comb's house," on the west side of Broadway, near Trinity church. The following account of that visit, supposed to be from the pen of Hazlitt, appeared in the London New Monthly Magazine: "I remember my father telling me he was introduced to Washington, in 1790, by an American friend. A servant, well looking and well dressed, received the visitants at the door, and by him they were delivered over to an officer ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... Senator Jones, or by Representative Smith to Representative Jones, and confided by him in turn to Charlie White, of the Globe, or Eddie Burns, of the Democrat, would in turn be communicated to Robert Hazlitt, of the Press, or Harry Emonds, ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... that of the three notable writers whom the eighteenth century had produced, in the North American colonies, one was "the author (whoever he was) of the American Farmer's Letters." Crevecoeur was that unknown author; and Hazlitt said further of him that he rendered, in his own vividly characteristic manner, "not only the objects, but the feelings, of a new country." Great is the essayist's relish for passages descriptive ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... says, spreads a 'privation of moral light' over his characters, and therefore we can admire them without compunction. We are in an artificial world where we can drop our moral prejudices for the time being. Hazlitt more daringly takes a different position and asserts that one of Wycherly's coarsest plays is 'worth ten sermons'—which perhaps does not imply with him any high estimate of moral efficacy. There is, however, this much of truth, I take it, in Hazlitt's contention. Lamb's theory of the non-morality ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... "Ha! very well; very well, indeed!" said he. "Ben Jonson has said worse things" (I brightened up, but he went stammering on to the end of the sentence)—"and—and—and better!" A pinch of snuff concluded this compliment, which put a stop to my wit for the evening. I related the thing to Hazlitt, afterwards, who laughed. "Aye," said he, "you are never sure of him till he gets to the end. His jokes would be the sharpest things in the world, but that they are blunted by his good-nature. He wants malice—which is a pity." "But," said I, "his words at first seemed so—" ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... The face is ugly, and rather hatchet-shaped, with thick sensual lips, and is utterly unlike the poet himself, who was very beautiful to look upon. 'His countenance,' says a lady who saw him at one of Hazlitt's lectures, 'lives in my mind as one of singular beauty and brightness; it had the expression as if he had been looking on some glorious sight.' And this is the idea which Severn's picture of him gives. ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... are not set on anything but doing or being; nothing else is reliably permanent amid the fitful sunshine and shadow of human life. "Make hy claim of wages a zero; then hast thou the world at thy feet." [Footnote: In Maeterlinck's Measure of the Hours, he speaks of a sundial found near Venice by Hazlitt with the inscription, Horas non numero nisi serenas and quotes Hazlitt's remarks thereon: "What a fine lesson is conveyed to the mind to take no note of time but by its benefits, to watch only ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... classics on the top of the chest of drawers were not in the order I had left them. Izaak Walton had got to the left of Sir Thomas Browne, and the poet Burns was wedged disconsolately between two volumes of Hazlitt. Moreover a receipted bill which I had stuck in the Pilgrim's Progress to mark my place had been moved. Someone had been going ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... will become a very second-rate sort of a person indeed; for I now see with no little alarm, that one of his most delightful quaintnesses is to give way to the march of refinement, and be altogether ruined. Hazlitt, one the most original and talented of critics, has somewhere said, that there was not in any passage of Shakspeare any single word that could be changed to one more appropriate, and as an instance he gives a passage from Macbeth, which certainly is one of the most perfect ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 195, July 23, 1853 • Various |
