naïveté by the family biographer. Rid of his wife and cured of his mistress, he shortly afterwards astonished his friends by marrying a widow. “All I know,” says his grandson, “is that Mrs Bridgewater became Mrs Hazlitt.” They travelled on the continent for a year and then parted finally. Hazlitt’s study of the Italian masters during this tour, described in a series of letters contributed to the Morning Chronicle, had a deep effect upon him, and perhaps conduced to that intimacy with the cynical old painter Northcote which, shortly after his return, engendered a curious but eminently readable volume of The Conversations of James Northcote, R.A. (1830). The respective shares of author and artist are not always easy to determine. During the recent agitations of his life he had been writing essays, collected in 1826 under the title of The Plain Speaker: opinions on Books, Men and Things (1826). The Spirit of the Age; or Contemporary Portraits (1825), a series of criticisms on the leading intellectual characters of the day, is in point of style perhaps the most splendid and copious of his compositions. It is eager and animated to impetuosity, though without any trace of carelessness or disorder. He now undertook a work which was to have crowned his literary reputation, but which can hardly be said to have even enhanced it—The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (4 vols., 1828–1830). The undertaking was at best premature, and was inevitably disfigured by partiality to Napoleon as the representative of the popular cause, excusable in a Liberal politician writing in the days of the Holy Alliance. Owing to the failure of his publishers Hazlitt received no recompense for this laborious work. Pecuniary anxieties and disappointments may have contributed to hasten his death, which took place on the 18th of September 1830. Charles Lamb was with him to the last.
Hazlitt had many serious defects of temper. His consistency was gained at the expense of refusing to revise his early impressions and prejudices. His estimate of a man’s work was too apt to be decided by sympathy or the reverse with his politics. For Scott, however, he had a great admiration, although they were far enough apart in politics. He was a compound of intellect and passion, and the refinement of his critical analysis is associated with vehement eloquence and glowing imagery. He was essentially a critic, a dissector and, as Bulwer justly remarks, a much better judge of men of thought than of men of action. The paradoxes with which his works abound never spring from affectation; they are in general the sallies of a mind so agile and ardent as to overrun its own goal. His style is perfectly natural, and yet admirably calculated for effect. His diction, always rich and masculine, seems to kindle as he proceeds; and when thoroughly animated by his subject, he advances with a succession of energetic, hard-hitting sentences, each carrying his argument a step further, like a champion dealing out blows as he presses upon the enemy. Although, however, his grasp upon his subject is strenuous, his insight into it is rarely profound. He can amply satisfy men of taste and culture; he cannot, like Coleridge or Burke, dissatisfy them with themselves by showing them how much they would have missed without him. He is a critic who exhibits, rather than reveals, the beauties of an author. But all shortcomings are forgotten in the genuineness and fervour of the writer’s self-portraiture. The intensity of his personal convictions causes all he wrote to appear in a manner autobiographic. Other men have been said to speak like books, Hazlitt’s books speak like men. To read his works in connexion with Leigh Hunt’s and Charles Lamb’s is to be introduced into one of the most attractive of English literary circles, and this alone will long preserve them from oblivion.
His son, William Hazlitt (1811–1893), was born on the 26th of September 1811. The separation between his parents did not prevent him from being on affectionate terms with both of them. He early began to write for the Morning Chronicle, and in 1833 married Caroline Reynell. He was the author of many translations, chiefly from the French, and of some works on the law of bankruptcy. He was called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1844, and became registrar in the court of bankruptcy. He held this position for more than thirty years, retiring two years before his death, which took place at Addlestone, Surrey, on the 23rd of February 1893.
Hazlitt’s grandson, William Carew Hazlitt, the bibliographer, was born on the 22nd of August 1834. He was educated at the Merchant Taylors’ school and was called to the bar of the Inner Temple in 1861. Among his many publications may be noted his invaluable Handbook to the Popular, Poetical and Dramatic Literature of Great Britain, from the Invention of Printing to the Restoration (1867), supplemented in 1876, 1882, 1887 and 1889, a General Index by J. G. Gray appearing in 1893. He published further contributions to the subject in Bibliographical Collections and Notes on Early English Literature made during the years 1893–1903 (1903), and a Manual for the Collector and Amateur of Old English Plays ... (1892). He was the chief editor of the useful 1871 edition of Warton’s History of English Poetry, and compiled the Catalogue of the Huth Library (1880).
The list of the first William Hazlitt’s works also includes: Political Essays, with Sketches of Public Characters (1819); Sketches of the Principal Picture Galleries in England ... (1824); Characteristics; in the Manner of Rochefoucauld’s Maxims (1823); Select Poets of Great Britain: to which are prefixed Critical Notices of each Author (1825); Notes of a Journey through France and Italy ... (1826); The Life of Titian; with Anecdotes of the Distinguished Persons of his Time (1830), nominally by James Northcote; an article on the “Fine Arts” contributed to the seventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica; and posthumous collections made by his son.
A comprehensive edition of The Collected Works of William Hazlitt (12 vols., 1902–1904) does not include the life of Napoleon. It contains an introduction by W. E. Henley, and was issued under the superintendence of A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover, and there are many modern reprints of isolated works. The most copious source of information respecting Hazlitt is the Memoirs of William Hazlitt, with Portions of his Correspondence (2 vols., 1867), by his grandson, W. C. Hazlitt, a medley rather than a memoir, yet full of interest. A slight but appropriate sketch had previously been prefixed by his son to his Literary Remains ... (2 vols., 1836), accompanied by estimates of his intellectual character by Bulwer and by Talfourd, who had been his fast friend. There is an excellent monograph on William Hazlitt (1902) by Mr Augustine Birrell, in the “English Men of Letters” series, and one in French by J. Donady (Paris, 1907), who also published a bibliography of his works. Valuable biographical particulars have been preserved in Barry Cornwall’s memoirs of Lamb; in the My Friends and Acquaintances (1854) of Mr P. G. Patmore, Hazlitt’s most intimate associate in his later years; in Crabb Robinson’s Diary, and in Lamb’s correspondence. A full bibliographical list of his writings, with a collection of the most remarkable critical judgments upon them from all quarters, was prepared by Alexander Ireland (1868). Further information on the Hazlitt family is to be found in Mr W. C. Hazlitt’s Four Generations of a Literary Family (2 vols., 1897). The chief interest of this desultory book is the considerable extracts from the diary of Margaret [Peggy] Hazlitt, which describes the Hazlitt experiences in America. See also “William Hazlitt” in Sir L. Stephen’s Hours in a Library (ed. 1892, vol. ii.), and Lamb and Hazlitt, further Letters and Records hitherto unpublished (1900), by W. C. Hazlitt.
HEAD, SIR EDMUND WALKER, Bart. (1805–1868), English
colonial governor and writer on art, was the son of the Rev.
Sir John Head, Bart., rector of Rayleigh, Essex. He was educated
at Winchester school and Oriel College, Oxford, and taking his
degree with first-class honours in classics, he became fellow of
Merton College. On his father’s death in 1838, he succeeded
to the baronetcy as 8th baronet. His services as poor-law
commissioner, to which post he was appointed in 1841 after
five years as assistant-commissioner, procured for him in 1847
the office of lieutenant-governor of New Brunswick, whence
he passed in 1854 to the governor-generalship of Canada, which
he retained till 1861. The following year, having returned to
England, Head was nominated a civil service commissioner.
In 1857 he was sworn of the Privy Council, and in 1860 was
decorated as K.C.B., while in the course of his career he received
the degrees of D.C.L. at Oxford and LL.D. at Cambridge. He
died in London on the 28th of January 1868, the baronetcy
becoming extinct, as his only son had died in 1859.
Sir Edmund Head wrote the article “Painting” in the Penny Cyclopaedia; A Handbook of the Spanish and French Schools of Painting (1845); Shall and Will, or two Chapters on Future Auxiliary Verbs (1856); and Ballads and other Poems, Original and Translated (1868). He also edited F. T. Kugler’s Handbook of Painting of the
