and did so throughout the year, with the exception of one month (November). At the beginning of 1821 he handed over this monthly task to another, and no longer wrote, save incidentally, about the stage. These London Magazine articles were reprinted by his son in 1851, along with large selections from the View of the English Stage, under the general title of Criticisms and Dramatic Essays of the English Stage.

We are afforded some curious glimpses of Hazlitt's habits as a playgoer. His own account, quoted above, of his rupture with the Morning Chronicle seems to indicate that he was not considered, in dress and personal appearance, a creditable representative of that organ. Perhaps some of Mr. Perry's ducal friends had been shocked by the shabbiness of his velvet collar, and the general Bohemianism of his exterior; though one is rather surprised to learn that anything else was expected in those days of a "writing fellow." His eccentricities, at any rate, must have made him a well-known figure to the playgoers of the day, and he must often have enjoyed the pleasure (for a pleasure it was to him) of being pointed out to country cousins as one of the literary celebrities of the metropolis. His grandson writes (Memoirs of William Hazlitt, ii. 310):

"A visit to the theatre in Mr. Hazlitt's company was not always the most comfortable thing in the world. He had a slow way of moving on such occasions, which, to less habitual playgoers, was highly trying. He took my mother to the play one evening, when he was in HalfMoon Street-it must have been in 1828: there was a great crowd, but he was totally unmoved by that circumstance. At the head of the staircase he had to sign the Free Admission Book, and perfectly unconscious that he was creating a blockade, he looked up at the attendant in the middle of the operation—a rather lengthy one with him-and said, 'What sort of a house is there to-night, sir?' It was a vast

relief to his two companions, my mother and her elder sister, when they had run the gauntlet of all this and were safe in their places."

Hazlitt's friend, P. G. Patmore, known to readers of the Liber Amoris, gives a more detailed account of his manner of playgoing, which must refer, however, to his later years. It is certain that in earlier times he did not "invariably" resort to the second tier of boxes, for he has numerous allusions to taking, like Charles X. of France, "his place in the pit." "It is pleasant," he writes, "to have your opinion quoted against yourself, and your own sayings repeated to you as good things. I was once talking to an intelligent man in the pit, and criticising Mr. Knight's performance of Filch. 'Ah!' he said, 'little Simmons was the fellow to play that character.' He added, 'There was a most excellent remark made upon his acting it in the Examiner (I think it was), That he looked as if he had the gallows in one eye, and a pretty girl in the other.' I said nothing, but was in remarkably good humour the rest of the evening." The saying, of course, was Hazlitt's own, in an article not included in this volume. Again, he tells 2 how, "having got into the middle of the pit, at considerable risk of broken bones, to see Mr. Kean in one of his early parts," he perceived a little behind him two young men attired in the height of fashion, who he thought might be Lord Byron and Mr. Hobhouse, but who turned out to be two clerks in the Victualling Office. It is clear, then, that in his early critical days Hazlitt was not tied to the boxes; but Mr. Patmore's account is doubtless correct enough as regards later years, when the now famous critic was on the free list, and, it must

"On the Disadvantages of Intellectual Superiority" (Table Talk). 2" Whether Actors ought to sit in the Boxes " (Table Talk).

I

be remembered, was not regularly engaged in criticism. So much premised, we let Mr. Patmore 1 speak for himself:

"When Hazlitt dined at all-which was often not more than two or three times a week-this meal seemed only a sort of preliminary to his everlasting Tea, for which he returned home as soon as he had dined, and usually sat over it for a couple of hours. Afterwards he almost invariably passed two or three hours at one or other of the large theatres, placing himself as invariably in a back corner seat of the second tier of boxes, and, if possible, shrouding himself from view, as if he felt himself a weed that had no business there,' in such a scene of light, gaiety, and artificial seeming.

"To the play itself, on these occasions, he paid scarcely any attention, even when he went there in his capacity as a writer for the critical journals; for, notwithstanding the masterly truth and force of most of his decisions on plays and actors, I will venture to say that, in almost every case, except those of his two favourites, Kean and Liston, they might be described as the result of a few hasty glances and a few halfheard phrases. From these he drew instant deductions that it took others hours of observation to reach, and as many more of labour to work out. In this respect his faculty was, I imagine, never before equalled or even approached; and his consciousness of and confidence in it led him into a few ridiculous blunders. Still, upon the whole, he was doubtless right in trusting to these brief oracles and broken revelations, rather than pursuing them to their ultimate sources-as most others must do if they would hope to expound them truly and intelligibly for his was a mind that would either take its own course or none; it was not to be 'constrained by mastery' of rule or discipline. It was a knowledge of this truth, and his habit of acting on it, which constituted the secret of his success as a writer."

Talfourd, in the following passage from his introduction to Hazlitt's Literary Remains,2 bears out in somę measure Mr. Patmore's remarks on the critic's habit of inattention to plays and acting which did not vividly 2 Vol. i. p. cxx.

My Friends and Acquaintance, vol. ii. p. 317.

interest him ; and no one, indeed, can blame him for "criticising new plays" (such as came in his way) "with a reluctant and indecisive hand." Talfourd's comparison between Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt is particularly interesting, and probably just enough; but it can scarcely be doubted that Hazlitt's criticisms, by reason of the greater decision and vigour of their style, have left, and will always leave, the deeper impression on the reader's mind :

"The strong sense of pleasure, both intellectual and physical, naturally produced in Hazlitt a rooted attachment to the theatre, where the delights of the mind and the senses are blended; where the grandeur of the poet's conceptions is, in some degree, made palpable, and luxury is raised and refined by wit, sentiment, and fancy. His dramatic criticisms are more pregnant with fine thoughts on that bright epitome of human life than any others which ever were written; yet they are often more successful in making us forget their immediate subjects than in doing them justice. He began to write with a rich fund of theatrical recollections; and, except when Kean, or Miss Stephens, or Liston supplied new and decided impulses, he did little more than draw upon this old treasury. The theatre to him was redolent of the past: images of Siddons, of Kemble, of Bannister, of Jordan, thickened the air; imperfect recognitions of a hundred evenings, when mirth or sympathy had loosened the pressure at the heart, and set the springs of life in happier motion, thronged around him, and 'more than echoes talked along the walls.' He loved the theatre for these associations, and for the immediate pleasure which it gave to thousands about him, and the humanising influences it shed among them, and attended it with constancy to the very last; and to those personal feelings and universal sympathies he gave fit expression; but his habits of mind were unsuited to the ordinary duties of the critic. The players put him out. could not, like Mr. Leigh Hunt, who gave theatrical criticism a place in modern literature, apply his graphic powers to a detail of a performance, and make it interesting by the delicacy of his touch; encrystal the cobweb intricacies of a plot with the sparkling dew of his own fancy-bid the light plume wave in the fluttering grace of his style-or 'catch ere she fell the Cynthia of the minute,' and fix the airy charm in

He

lasting words. In criticism, thus just and picturesque, Mr. Hunt has never been approached; and the wonder is, that instead of falling off with the art of acting, he even grew richer; for the articles of the Tatler, equalling those of the Examiner in niceness of discrimination, are superior to them in depth and colouring. But Hazlitt required a more powerful impulse; he never wrote willingly, except on what was great in itself, or, forming a portion of his own past being, was great to him; and when both these felicities combined in the subject, he was best of all-as upon Kemble and Mrs. Siddons. Mr. Kean satisfied the first requisite only, but in the highest possible degree. His extraordinary vigour struck Hazlitt, who attended the theatre for the Morning Chronicle, on the night of his débût, in the very first scene, and who, from that night, became the most devoted and efficient of his supporters. Yet if, on principle, Hazlitt preferred Kean to Kemble, and sometimes drew parallels between them disparaging to the idol of his earlier affections, there is nothing half so fine in his eloquent eulogies on the first, as in his occasional recurrences to the last, when the stately form which had realised full many a boyish dream of Roman greatness' came back upon his heart again,' and seemed to reproach him for his late preference of the passionate to the ideal. He criticised new plays with a reluctant and indecisive hand, except when strong friendship supplied the place of old recollection, as in the instances of Barry Cornwall and Knowles -the first of whom, not exhausting all the sweetness of his nature in scenes of fanciful tenderness and gentle sorrow, cheered him by unwearied kindness in hours of the greatest need—and the last, as kind and as true, had, even from a boy, been the object of his warmest esteem."

The often-quoted remark, "the players put him out," is probably to be accepted with a certain reservation. Hazlitt's critical career really falls into two parts, repre sented by the two divisions of this volume. In the first he is the regular critic of either a daily or a weekly paper, who is bound to concentrate his thoughts on individual productions and performances, and to report as well as to judge the occurrences of a given evening. At this period, if "the players put him out," he was successful in dis

1 See Dramatic Essays, vol. i.