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213. Note. Claude's Liber Veritatis, now in the possession of the Duke of Devonshire, is not a collection of original sketches, but a record of his pictures with inscriptions showing for whom they were painted.

215. Human face divine. Paradise Lost, 111. 44.

ON THE IMITATION OF NATURE

221. Blinking Sam.' See Mrs. Piozzi's Anecdotes, etc. (Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. G. B. Hill, 1. 313).

ON THE IDEAL

223. Might ascend, etc. Henry V. Prologue.

·

224. Obscurity her curtain,' etc. From a poem To the Honourable and Reverend F. C. in Dodsley's Collection of Poems, vol. vi. (1758), p. 138. The poem (anonymously published) was written by Sneyd Davies (17091769), and was addressed to Frederick Cornwallis, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. See The Gentleman's Magazine, vol. L. p. 174, and Nichols's Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century,

vol. I.

226. Whose end,' etc. Hamlet, Act II. Sc. 2.

228. We have heard it observed, etc. By Coleridge, probably. See vol. iv. p. 217.

CHARLEMAGNE: OU L'ÉGLISE DÉLIVRÉE

230. The brother of Buonaparte. Lucien Buonaparte (1775-1840), Prince of Canino. The present review of his Charlemagne, etc. is signed 'W. H.'

231. Henriade. Voltaire's epic (1723).

THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED

235. The true Florimel, etc. The Faerie Queene, 111. viii.

236. Another epic poem. La Cirnéide (1819).

LUCIEN BUONAPARTE'S COLLECTION, ETC.

This article is signed 'W. H.'

237. 'Vile durance.' Kenrick's Falstaff's Wedding (1766), Act 1. Sc. 2. "The mistress or the saint.' Cf. Goldsmith, The Traveller, 152.

Jocunda. The portrait of Mona Lisa, wife of Francesco del Giocondo. 239. Laborious foolery. Hazlitt seems to be quoting from himself. See his Letter On Modern Comedy' (1813), vol. viii. p. 554.

240. 'Come, then, the colours,' etc. Pope, Moral Essays, 11. 17-20.

Watteau. Antoine Watteau (1684-1721).

Guerin. Pierre Narcisse Guérin (1774-1833). The picture referred to is now in the Louvre.

241. The Deluge by Girodet. This picture of Anne Louis Girodet's (1767-1824) is in the Louvre.

242. Lefebre. Hazlitt presumably refers to Robert Le Fèvre's (1756-1830) portrait of Napoleon now in the Gallery at Versailles.

BRITISH INSTITUTION

These three notices of the Exhibition at the British Institution are signed' W. H.'

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243. C. L. Eastlake. Charles Lock Eastlake (1793-1865), elected President of the Royal Academy and knighted in 1850; Director of the National Gallery from 1855.

244.

'Antique Roman. Hamlet, Act v. Sc. 2.

A hint from a high quarter. Hazlitt presumably refers to the fact that Canning had not been in office since his quarrel with Castlereagh in 1809.

A great book is a great evil. A saying of Voltaire's. Cf. vol. v. (Lectures on the English Poets), p. 114.

"It is place, etc. Cymbeline, Act II. Sc. 3.

245. G. Hayter. George (afterwards Sir George) Hayter (1792-1871). "Ezra' gained a prize of £200.

His

Mr. Harlowe's Hubert and Arthur. By George Henry Harlow (1787-1819), a pupil of Sir Thomas Lawrence.

'Deep scars, etc. Paradise Lost, 1. 601.

Miss Geddes. Margaret Sarah Geddes (1793-1872), better known as Mrs.
Carpenter, and a portrait painter.

Chalon. Alfred Edward Chalon (1781-1860).

Burnetts, etc. James M. Burnet (1788-1816) and John Burnet (1784-1868);
Anthony Vandyke Copley Fielding (1787-1855); Thomas Christopher
Hofland (1777-1843); John Glover (1767-1849). Both the Nasmyths,
Alexander (1758-1840) and Peter (1787-1831), were represented at the
Exhibition.

246. W. Collins.

THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
William Collins (1788-1847).
247. Bone. Robert Trewick Bone (1790-1840).
H. Howard. Henry Howard (1769-1847).

H. Singleton. Henry Singleton (1766-1839).

P. H. Rogers. Philip Hutchins Rogers (1794-1853).

J. Wilson. John Wilson (1774-1855).

248. The ablest landscape painter, etc. Turner. Cf. vol. 1. (The Round Table), P. 76 note.

248. B. Barker.

THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED

Benjamin Barker (1776-1838).
Ab. Cooper. Abraham Cooper (1787-1868).
W. Westall. William Westall (1781-1850).

249. J. Stark. James Stark (1794-1859).

P. Dewint. Peter De Wint (1784-1849).

A. Sauerweide. Alexander Sauerweid (1782-1844).
'War is a game,' etc. Cowper, The Task, v. 187-8.

ON MR. WILKIE'S PICTURES

This

249. Archbishop Herring's letters.

and note.

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Cf. vol. v. (Lectures on the English Poets), p. 141

250. The highest authority on art. From this point the rest of the essay was incorporated in the Lecture on Hogarth. See vol. viii. pp. 139-141.

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251. To shew vice [virtue],' etc. Hamlet, Act III. Sc. 2.

'The very error,' etc. Cf. It is the very error of the moon.' Othello, Act v.

Sc. 2.

252. "Your lungs begin to crow,' etc.

As You Like It, Act 11. Sc. 7.

[CHARACTER OF MR. WORDSWORTH'S NEW POEM,

THE EXCURSION]

Under this heading Hazlitt contributed to The Examiner three papers which he afterwards partly republished with omissions and variations in two essays in The Round Table. See vol. 1. pp. 111-125. These omissions and variations are given below.

At the beginning of the first essay as published in The Round Table add from the first (August 21, 1814) of The Examiner articles the following passage :— 'In power of intellect, in lofty conception, in the depth of feeling, at once simple and sublime, which pervades every part of it and which gives to every object an almost preternatural and preterhuman interest, this work has seldom been surpassed. If the subject of the Poem had been equal to the genius of the Poet, if the skill with which he has chosen his materials had accorded with the power exerted over them, if the objects (whether persons or things) which he makes use of as the vehicle of his feelings had been such as immediately and irresistibly to convey them in all their force and depth to others, then the production before us would indeed have "proved a monument," as he himself wishes it, worthy of the author and of his country. Whether, as it is, this most original and powerful performance may not rather remain like one of those stupendous but half-finished structures, which have been suffered to moulder into decay, because the cost and labour attending them exceeded their use or beauty, we feel it would be rather presumptuous in us to determine.'

At the end of the first paragraph on p. 112 add the following note :

'Every one wishes to get rid of the booths and bridges in the Park,' in order to have a view of the ground and water again. Our Poet looks at the more lasting and serious works of men as baby-houses and toys, and from the greater elevation of his mind regards them much in the same light as we do the Regent's Fair and Mr. Vansittart's "permanent erections.”" For 'He sees all things in himself' (p. 112, 1. 28) read 'He sees all things in his own mind; he contemplates effects in their causes, and passions in their principles.'

To the words 'our very constitution' (p. 113, 1. 8) Hazlitt in The Examiner appends, as a note, "God knew Adam in the elements of his chaos, and saw him in the great obscurity of nothing." Sir Thomas Browne.'

For 'The general and the permanent' (p. 113, l. 12) read 'The common and the permanent.'

The words 'interlocutions between Lucius and Caius' (p. 113, l. 19) are not between quotation marks in the magazine.

The Examiner for Aug. 28, 1814 contained a second essay on the same subject, republished in The Round Table, except that the opening paragraph was somewhat curtailed. In place of the paragraph in The Round Table 'We could have wished,' etc. (vol. I. p. 113) read :

'We could have wished that Mr. Wordsworth had given to his work

1 Hazlitt refers to what The Examiner calls the 'regal raree-show' in the Parks at the beginning of August 1814. A sham fight on the Serpentine was one of the features.

the form of a philosophical poem altogether, with only occasional digressions or allusions to particular instances. There is in his general sentiments and reflections on human life a depth, an originality, a truth, a beauty, and grandeur both of conception and expression, which place him decidedly at the head of the poets of the present day, or rather which place him in a totally distinct class of excellence. But he has chosen to encumber himself with a load of narrative and description which, instead of assisting, hinders the progress and effect of the general reasoning. Almost all this part of the work, which Mr. Wordsworth has inwoven with the text, would have come in better in plain prose as notes at the end. Indeed, there is something evidently inconsistent, upon his own principles, in the construction of the poem. For he professes, in these ambiguous illustrations, to avoid all that is striking or extraordinary-all that can raise the imagination or affect the passions—all that is not every way common and necessarily included in the natural workings of the passions in all minds and in all circumstances. Then why introduce particular illustrations at all which add nothing to the force of the general truth, which hang as a dead weight upon the imagination, which degrade the thought and weaken the sentiment, and the connection of which with the general principle it is more difficult to find out than to understand the general principle itself? It is only by an extreme process of abstraction that it is often possible to trace the operation of the general law in the particular illustration, yet it is to supply the defect of abstraction that the illustration is given. Mr. Wordsworth indeed says finely, and perhaps as truly as finely,' etc. Instead of saying that Wordsworth's powers of description and fancy seem to be little inferior to those of his classical predecessor, Akenside (p. 114), Hazlitt, in The Examiner, made the very different statement that 'his powers of description and fancy seem to be little inferior to those of thought and sentiment.'

To the quotation on page 116, Poor gentleman,' etc.

Hazlitt adds, as a

note, 'Love in a Wood.' After the words 'any thing but dull' (p. 116, l. 22) add, from The Examiner, 'Rasselas indeed is dull; but then it is privileged dulness.'

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After natural exercise of others' (p. 117, 1. 7) add 'The intellectual and the moral faculties of man are different; the ideas of things and the feelings of pleasure and pain connected with them.' There are a few other trifling verbal alterations in this paragraph. The note on the word 'solitary' on p. 117 is not in The Examiner.

A third essay on the same subject was published in The Examiner for October 2, 1814. This was reprinted with a few omissions and additions in The Round Table (see vol. 1. pp. 120-125).

The opening paragraph in The Round Table is condensed from the following:'Poetry may be properly divided into two classes; the poetry of imagination and the poetry of sentiment. The one consists in the power of calling up images of the most pleasing or striking kind; the other depends on the strength of the interest which it excites in given objects. The one may be said to arise out of the faculties of memory and invention, conversant with the world of external nature; the other from the fund of our moral sensibility. In the combination of these different excellences the perfection of poetry consists; the greatest poets of our own or other countries have been equally distinguished for richness of invention and depth of feeling. By the greatest poets of our own country, we mean Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton, who evidently possessed both kinds of

imagination, the intellectual and moral, in the highest degree. Young and Cowley might be cited as the most brilliant instances of the separation of feeling from fancy, of men who were dazzled by the exuberance of their own thoughts and whose genius was sacrificed to their want of taste. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, whose powers of feeling are of the highest order, is certainly deficient in fanciful invention: his writings exhibit all the internal power, without the external form of poetry. He has none of the pomp and decoration and scenic effect of poetry: no gorgeous palaces nor solemn temples awe the imagination: no cities rise with glistering spires and pinnacles adorned1: we meet with no knights pricked forth on airy steeds: no hair-breadth scapes and perilous accidents 2 by flood or field. Either from the predominant habit of his mind, not requiring the stimulus of outward impressions, or from the want of an imagination teeming with various forms, he takes the common everyday events and objects of nature, or rather seeks those that are the most simple and barren of effect; but he adds to them a weight of interest from the resources of his own mind, which makes the most insignificant things serious and even formidable. All other interests are absorbed in the deeper interest of his own thoughts, and find the same level. His mind magnifies the littleness of his subject, and raises its meanness; lends it his strength, and clothes it with borrowed grandeur. With him a mole-hill, covered with wild thyme, assumes the importance of "the great vision of the guarded mount "3: a puddle is filled with preternatural faces, and agitated with the fiercest storms of passion; and to his mind, as he himself informs us, and as we can easily believe,

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The meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." '4

After the words among these northern Arcadians' (vol. 1. p. 121) Hazlitt quotes ll. 411-439 of Book v. of The Excursion.

The short paragraph on p. 122 reads in The Examiner :

'We think it is pushing our love or admiration of natural objects a good deal too far, to make it a set-off against a story like the preceding, which carries that concentration of self-interest and callousness to the feelings of others to its utmost pitch, which is the general character of those who are cut off by their mountains and valleys from an intercourse with mankind, even more than of the country-people.'

In The Examiner, after the words 'the beautiful poem of Hart Leap Well, the essay concludes as follows :

'We conceive that about as many fine things have passed through Mr. Wordsworth's mind as, with five or six exceptions, through any human mind whatever. The conclusion of the passage we refer to is admirable, and comes in like some dying close in music :-[The Excursion, Book VII., 11. 976-1007].

'If Mr. Wordsworth does not always write in this manner, it is his own fault. He can as often as he pleases. It is not in our power to add to, or take away from, the pretensions of a poem like the present, but if our opinion or wishes could have any weight, we would take our leave of it by saying-Esto perpetua !'

The first two of these Examiner articles are referred to by Lamb in a letter

1 Paradise Lost, II. 550.

2 Wordsworth himself says (Hart-Leap Well) 'The moving accident is not my trade.' 3 Lycidas, 161.

4 Wordsworth's Ode, Intimations of Immortality, 206-7.

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