grandson and biographer--'was one long beau jour to him'. His
allusions to it are constant. He returned to England in 1803, with
formed tastes and predilections, very few of which he afterwards
modified, much less forsook.

We next find him making a tour as a portrait-painter through the
north of England, where (as was to be expected) he attempted a
portrait of Wordsworth, among others. 'At his desire', says
Wordsworth, 'I sat to him, but as he did not satisfy himself or my
friends, the unfinished work was destroyed.' He was more successful
with Charles Lamb, whom he painted (for a whim) in the dress of a
Venetian Senator. As a friend of Coleridge and Wordsworth he had
inevitably made acquaintance with the Lambs. He first met Lamb at
one of the Godwins' strange evening parties and the two became
intimate friends and fellow theatre-goers.

Hazlitt's touchy and difficult temper suspended this inintimacy in
later years, though to the last Lamb regarded him as 'one of the
finest and wisest spirits breathing'; but for a while it was
unclouded. At the Lambs', moreover, Hazlitt made acquaintance with a
Dr. Stoddart, owner of some property at Winterslow near Salisbury,
and his sister Sarah, a lady wearing past her first youth but yet
addicted to keeping a number of beaux to her string. Hazlitt,
attracted to her from the first,--he made a gloomy lover and his
subsequent performances in that part were unedifying--for some years
played walking gentleman behind the leading suitors with whom Miss
Stoddart from time to time diversified her comedy. But Mary Lamb was
on his side; the rivals on one excuse or another went their ways or
were dismissed; and on May 1, 1808, the marriage took place at St.
Andrew's Church, Holborn. Lamb attended, foreboding little happiness