Characters of Shakespeares Plays | Page 2

germ of his Project for a New Theory of Civil
and Criminal Legislation, published in his maturer years (1828), but
drafted and scribbled upon constantly in these days, to the neglect of

his theological studies. His father, hearing of the project, forbade him
to pursue it.
Thus four or five years at the Unitarian College were wasted, or, at
least, had been spent without apparent profit; and in 1798 young Hazlitt,
aged close upon twenty, unsettled in his plans as in his prospects, was
at home again and (as the saying is) at a loose end; when of a sudden
his life found its spiritual apocalypse. It came with the descent of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge upon Shrewsbury, to take over the charge of a
Unitarian Congregation there.
He did not come till late on the Saturday afternoon before he was to
preach; and Mr. Rowe [the abdicating minister], who himself went
down to the coach in a state of anxiety and expectation to look for the
arrival of his successor, could find no one at all answering the
description, but a round-faced man, in a short black coat (like a
shooting-jacket) which hardly seemed to have been made for him, but
who seemed to be talking at a great rate to his fellow-passengers. Mr.
Rowe had scarce returned to give an account of his disappointment
when the round-faced man in black entered, and dissipated all doubts
on the subject by beginning to talk. He did not cease while he stayed;
nor has he since.
Of his meeting with Coleridge, and of the soul's awakening that
followed, Hazlitt has left an account (My First Acquaintance with Poets)
that will fascinate so long as English prose is read. 'Somehow that
period [the time just after the French Revolution] was not a time when
NOTHING WAS GIVEN FOR NOTHING. The mind opened, and a
softness might be perceived coming over the heart of individuals
beneath "the scales that fence" our self-interest.' As Wordsworth wrote:
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very Heaven.
It was in January, 1798, that I was one morning before daylight, to
walk ten miles in the mud, to hear this celebrated person preach. Never,
the longest day I have to live, shall I have such another walk as this
cold, raw, comfortless one in the winter of 1798. Il-y- a des
impressions que ni le tems ni les circonstances peuvent effacer.
Dusse-je vivre des siecles entiers, le doux tems de ma jeunesse ne peut
renaitre pour moi, ni s'effacer jamais dans ma memoire. When I got
there the organ was playing the 100th Psalm, and when it was done Mr.
Coleridge rose and gave out his text, 'And he went up into the mountain

to pray, HIMSELF, ALONE.' As he gave out this text, his voice 'rose
like a stream of distilled perfumes', and when he came to the two last
words, which he pronounced loud, deep, and distinct, it seemed to me,
who was then young, as if the sounds had echoed from the bottom of
the human heart, and as if that prayer might have floated in solemn
silence through the universe ... The preacher then launched into his
subject, like an eagle dallying with the wind.
Coleridge visited Wem, walked and talked with young Hazlitt, and
wound up by inviting the disciple to visit him at Nether Stowey in the
Quantocks. Hazlitt went, made acquaintance with William and Dorothy
Wordsworth, and was drawn more deeply under the spell. In later years
as the younger man grew cantankerous and the elder declined, through
opium, into a 'battered seraph', there was an estrangement. But Hazlitt
never forgot his obligation.
My soul has indeed remained in its original bondage, dark, obscure,
with longings infinite and unsatisfed; my heart, shut up in the
prison-house of this rude clay, has never found, nor will it ever find, a
heart to speak to; but that my understanding also did not remain dumb
and brutish, or at length found a language that expresses itself, I owe to
Coleridge.
Coleridge, sympathizing with the young man's taste for philosophy and
abetting it, encouraged him to work. upon a treatise which saw the light
in 1805, An Essay on the Principles of Human Action: Being an
Argu-ment in favour of the Natural Disinterestedness of the Human
Mind. Meantime, however,--the ministry having been renounced--the
question of a vocation became more and more urgent, and after long
indecision Hazlitt packed his portmanteau for London, resolved to learn
painting under his brother John, who had begun to do prosperously.
John taught him some rudiments, and packed him off to Paris, where he
studied for some four months in the Louvre and learned to idolize
Bonaparte. This sojourn in Paris--writes his grandson and
biographer--'was