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    tiiges inqre right , if they had a particle of the same spirit that I have . It is not the individual , but thirty millions of his subjects that call me to account in his name , and who havebotli the rignt and the power . They have tne power , but let them beware how the exercise of it turns against their own rights . It is not the idol , but the worshippers who are to be feared , and who , by degrading one of their own rank , make themselves liable to be branded with the same disqualifications and penalties /

    From an examination of various private letters sent to different members of his family , it appears that Hazlitt , notwithstanding the education , he had received , both from his father and at the Unitarian college at Hackney , conceived a distaste for the clerical profession even before he had completed his studies . He alludes to this circumstance , somewhat painfully , in his Essay on

    the Knowledge of Character , ' as having occasioned much disappointment to his father , who had entertained high hopes of him , and whose sympathy with his aspirations was damped , arid almost withdrawn , for ever after . His first passion was an intense love of abstract truth , for which he searched , without ceasing , from childhood to the grave ; his second was a devoted love of painting ; and this he bound in vivid consummation with the former , using it as a rich

    vehicle for his thoughts , and clothingthem with a figured garment , original in design , startling in effect , gorgeous in colouring , and powerful in its expression of the deepest feelings and noblest hopes of humanity . It appears that he commenced his first regular essay , The Principles of Human Action , ' at about the age of eighteen , and

    laboured painfully ( both from the abstruse nature of the argument and his inability to express his thoughts clearly ) at the composition during the same time that he was pursuing his early study of painting in France . In his essay on ' The Pleasure of Painting , ' he says :

    * My first initiation in the mysteries of art was at the Orleans gallery : it was there I formed my taste , such as it is ; so that I am irreclaimably of the old school in painting . I was staggered when I saw the works there collected , and looked at them with wondering and with longing eyes . A mist passed away from my sight : the scales fell olF . A new sense came upon me , a new heaven and a new earth stood before me . I t ^ aw the soul speaking in the face— ' * hands that the rod of empire might have ewayed " in mighty ages past . '

    This sudden impression may se ^ m wonderful many when they learn that a short time previously he was ' not only totally ignorant of , but insensible to the beauties of art . ' It was the first sight of the assemblage of ' the greatest , that produced the miraculous

    effect . He had heard of the names of Titian , Raphael , Guido , I ) pmenichino , the Caracci ; but to see them face to f ace , to be in tli ? j * $ pfrB room with their deathless productions , was like brealt-Wft SfliW ? JPijihty spell—was almost an eflfept of necromancy . Frpm mat tim ? he lived in a world of pictures . ' He felt tHe loud

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    and Character of William HazlitL 635

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Oct. 2, 1835, page 635, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2650/page/7/