A Little English Gallery

Beauclerk died at his Great Russell Street house on March 11, 1780. He had been failing steadily under visitations of his old trouble since 1777, when he lay sick unto death at...

Miss Hawkins, in her _Memoirs_, names him as the person with whom Johnson was certainly seen to the fairest advantage. His deferent suave manner was the best foil possible to th...

His mind turned to paradoxes and inverted meanings, and the analysis of his own tenacious dreams, in an England of pikes and bludgeons and hock-carts and wassail-cakes. “A proud...

Clarendon quietly indicts Sir John Danvers as a “proud, formal, weak man,” such as Cromwell “employed and contemned at once.” George Bate gives him a harder character, saying th...

There was prescience in that couplet. As early, at least, as 1607-8, the widow’s long privacy ended, probably while she was at her “howse at Charing Cross,” watching over the pr...

Hazlitt’s erratic levees among coffee-house wits and politicians, his slack dress, his rich and fitful talk, his beautiful fierce head, go to make up any accurate impression of...

“Teach me Thy love to know, That this new light which now I see May both the work and workman show: Then by a sunbeam I will climb to Thee!”

THE titles of William Hazlitt’s first books bear witness to the ethic spirit in which he began life. From his beloved father, an Irish dissenting minister, he inherited his unwo...

Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustration. See 54219-h.htm or 54219-h.zip: (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/542...

The major blot on the literature of the English stage of the period is not its libertinism, but rather its concomitant utter heartlessness. “Arrogance” (so, according to Erasmus...

Fear and forecast of what is only too likely to befall the helpless, depressed Farquhar in the April long ago, when he lay dying of consumption, and when, with a fortitude which...

He is the most ingenuous and agreeable egoist we have had since the seventeenth-century men. It must be remembered how little he was in touch outwardly with social and civic aff...

[32] Anthologies and cyclopædias nowadays, especially since Dr. John Brown and Principal Shairp drew attention to the Silurist in their pages, are more than likely to admit him....