function--' A genuine criticism should, as I take it, repeat the
colours, the light and shade, the soul and body of a work.' This
contention, for which Hazlitt fought all his life and fought
brilliantly, is familiar to us by this time as the gage flung to
didactic criticism by the 'impressionist', and in our day, in the
generation just closed or closing, with a Walter Pater or a Jules
Lemaitre for challenger, the betting has run on the impressionist.
But in 1817 Hazlitt had all the odds against him when he stood up
and accused the great Dr. Johnson of having made criticism 'a kind
of Procrustes' bed of genius, where he might cut down imagination to
matter-of-fact, regulate the passions according to reason, and
translate the whole into logical diagrams and rhetorical
declamation'.

Thus he says of Shakespeare's characters, in contradiction to what
Pope had observed, and to what every one else feels, that each
character is a species, instead of being an individual. He in fact
found the general species or DIDACTIC form in Shakespeare's
characters, which was all he sought or cared for; he did not find
the individual traits, or the DRAMATIC distinctions which
Shakespeare has engrafted on this general nature, because he felt no
interest in them.

Nothing is easier to prove than that in this world nobody ever
invented anything. So it may be proved that, Johnson having written
'Great thoughts are always general', Blake had countered him by
affirming (long before Hazlitt) that 'To generalize is to be an
idiot. To particularize is the great distinction of merit': even as
it may be demonstrable that Charles Lamb, in his charming personal
chat about the Elizabethan dramatists and his predilections among