them, was already putting into practice what he did not trouble to
theorize. But when it comes to setting out the theory, grasping the
worth of the principle, stating it and fighting for it, I think
Hazlitt may fairly claim first share in the credit.

He did not, when he wrote the following pages, know very much, even
about his subject. As his biographer says:

My grandfather came to town with very little book-knowledge ... He
had a fair stock of ideas ... But of the volumes which form the
furniture of a gentleman's library he was egregiously ignorant ...
Mr. Hazlitt's resources were emphatically internal; from his own
mind he drew sufficient for himself.

Now while it may be argued with plausibility, and even with truth,
that the first qualification of a critic--at any rate of a critic of
poetry--is, as Jeffrey puts the antithesis, to FEEL rather than to
KNOW; while to be delicately sensitive and sympathetic counts more
than to be well-informed; nevertheless learning remains respectable.
He who can assimilate it without pedantry (which is another word for
intellectual indigestion) actually improves and refines his feelings
while enlarging their scope and at the same time enlarging his
resources of comparison and illustration. Hazlitt, who had something
like a genius for felicitous, apposite quotation, and steadily
bettered it as he grew older, would certainly have said 'Yes' to
this. At all events learning impresses; it carries weight: and
therefore it has always seemed to me that he showed small tact, if
some modesty, by heaping whole pages of Schlegel into his own
preface.