opinions, and I might have ignored honours and prizes, so many students had succumbed to the temptation that I have never blamed him for refusing.
I read many hours every day at that time. The major duomo of Colonel Westenra, brother of Lord Rossmore, did me the inestimable service of lending me books, one volume at a time, from his master's library, and I dipped into many new reservoirs of thought. One curious result is worth noting; I read Blackwood's Magazine from the days of the Chaldee Manuscript down to the pasquinades on Peel for granting Catholic Emancipation. The wild drolleries of Maginn, the rhapsodies of Wilson, and Lockhart's letters of Timothy Tickler, which rivalled Cobbett in vigour and Sydney Smith in pungency, gave me infinite enjoyment. But they did not convince or persuade me the least in the world. The constant object of their obloquy was the Cockney school, Hazlitt, Hunt, Lamb, and their associates, whom they mauled in every number. But the rabid critics sometimes quoted a passage from the writings they condemned; and I was so fascinated by the spirit of Hazlitt that a few years later I bought a file of the Examiner to become better acquainted with him and his colleagues, and his portrait hung over my writing-desk for nearly a generation. An evidence, I think, that malice overdone misses its aim.[1]
- ↑ Hazlitt was a man whose heart was tortured by the injustice with which the world was governed, and he was proportionately abhorred by all who profited by injustice. The present generation have probably an imperfect idea of the insolence to which this great pioneer of public justice was habitually subjected. Here is a specimen. Christopher North, it may be premised, was a nom de plume of the editor of Blackwood, and the colour of the cover of the journal was olive, whereas that of the Liberal organ, the Edinburgh Review, was blue trimmed with yellow: "'Thus saith our Christopher to his gallant crew, 'Up with the olive flag down with the blue Fire upon Hallam, fire upon Hume, Fire upon Jeffrey, fire upon Brougham, Fire upon Sydney, fire upon Moore, But spit upon Hazlitt The son '" Two generations have since passed, and there are few readers competent to judge who would not rather have the reputation of Hazlitt than that of his assailants or of any of the men whom they preferred to him.
