The Spirit of the Age

The early Christians would have been puzzled by this polarisation. As readers of the Jewish Bible, they knew that the Spirit had been at work since the beginning, brooding over the waters from which creation emerged, giving breath and life to the world and humankind. They also knew that this always present Spirit had frequently done striking and different things, not least to bring God's judgment to bear by clothing itself with particular human beings - Gideon, say, or Jephthah - and to enable prophets to speak a word that was not just their own, but God's.

What's more, they knew that God had promised a fresh outpouring of the Spirit when the age to come arrived. This had happened, they believed, through Jesus's death and resurrection; and one of the reasons was that they found the promises coming true. They discovered the Spirit at work with the same bipolarity they read in the Bible, only now throughout the whole community of God's people. The quiet sense of the presence of Jesus, as natural as breathing, and the mighty Pentecost hurricane, were, for them, two points on a continuum. A further Pentecost challenge is the passage in John's Farewell Discourses, where Jesus, promising the Spirit to his followers, announces that part of its work will be to demonstrate that the world is in the wrong John We try to bring a few of them to the wider audience we feel they deserve!

The one which is more prevalent on the Continent is marked by a continuing interest in the big questions of the meaning of life and our place in the world. The other, known as analytical philosophy, dominates in Britain and the U. Over the last year this magazine has been trying to encourage some communication between these two schools of thought by explaining the main ideas of each. A Church of England clergyman was recently sacked for writing a book saying that he no longer believed in an objective, external God and arguing for a Christianity based instead on the idea that God is an aspect of each of us.

We touch on this controversy with a review of that book and with an article claiming that religion would still make sense even if there was no external God.

We live in a very interconnected, media-orientated civilisation. How much has each of these discussions been affected by the others, and by the wider culture around it? A few decades ago, Anglo-American analytical philosophy was dominated by a group of thinkers known as the logical positivists. And if reason can no longer be considered as "the sole and self-sufficient ground of morals", [68] we must thank Godwin for having shown us why, by having "taken this principle, and followed it into its remotest consequences with more keenness of eye and steadiness of hand than any other expounder of ethics.

Hazlitt moves on to Godwin's accomplishments as a novelist. For over a century, many critics took the best of his novels, Caleb Williams , as a kind of propaganda novel, written to impress the ideas of Political Justice on the minds of the multitude who could not grasp its philosophy; [69] this was what Godwin himself had claimed in the book's preface.

'Spirit of the Ages' Museum: Myth, Fable and Fairy Tale Art

But Hazlitt was impressed by its strong literary qualities, and, to a lesser extent, those of St. Hazlitt devoted considerable thought to Scott's novels over several years, somewhat modifying his views about them; [71] this is one of two discussions of them in this book, the other being in the essay on Scott. Here, it is Godwin's method that is seen as superior. Rather than, like Scott, creating novels out of "worm-eaten manuscripts Hazlitt then comments on Godwin's other writings and the nature of his genius.

His productions are not spontaneous but rather rely on long, laboured thought. This quality also limits Godwin's powers of conversation, so he fails to appear the man of genius he is. Godwin either goes to sleep himself, or sets others to sleep. The scholar, critic, and intellectual historian Basil Willey , writing a century later, thought that Hazlitt's "essay on Godwin in The Spirit of the Age is still the fairest and most discerning summary I know of". Samuel Taylor Coleridge — was a poet , philosopher, literary critic , and theologian who was a major force behind the Romantic movement in England.

No single person had meant more to Hazlitt's development as a writer than Coleridge, who changed the course of Hazlitt's life on their meeting in Unlike the accounts of Bentham and Godwin, Hazlitt's treatment of Coleridge in The Spirit of the Age presents no sketch of the man pursuing his daily life and habits. There is little about his appearance; the focus is primarily on the development of Coleridge's mind.

Coleridge is a man of undoubted "genius", whose mind is "in the first class of general intellect". In an extensive account later acclaimed as brilliant, [79] even "a rhetorical summit of English prose", [80] Hazlitt surveys the astonishing range and development of Coleridge's studies and literary productions, from the poetry he wrote as a youth, to his deep and extensive knowledge of Greek dramatists, "epic poets He records Coleridge's fascination also with the poetry of Milton and Cowper , and the "wits of Charles the Second's days".

Rousseau , and Voltaire ". Fichte and Schelling and Lessing ". Having followed in its breadth and depth Coleridge's entire intellectual career, Hazlitt now pauses to ask, "What is become of all this mighty heap of hope, of thought, of learning, and humanity? It has ended in swallowing doses of oblivion and in writing paragraphs in the Courier. Hazlitt treats Coleridge's failings more leniently here than he had in earlier accounts [84] as he does others of that circle who had with him earlier "hailed the rising orb of liberty". Hazlitt characterises the age itself as one of "talkers, and not of doers.

The accumulation of knowledge has been so great, that we are lost in wonder at the height it has reached, instead of attempting to climb or add to it; while the variety of objects distracts and dazzles the looker-on. Coleridge [is] the most impressive talker of his age Coleridge", The Spirit of the Age. As for Coleridge's having gone over "to the unclean side " [83] in politics, however regrettable, it may be understood by looking at the power then held by government-sponsored critics of any who seemed to threaten the established order.

Following his typical method of explaining by antitheses, [87] Hazlitt contrasts Coleridge and Godwin. The latter, having far less general capacity, nevertheless was capable of fully utilizing his talents by focusing intently on work he was capable of; while the former, "by dissipating his [mind], and dallying with every subject by turns, has done little or nothing to justify to the world or to posterity, the high opinion which all who have ever heard him converse, or known him intimately, with one accord entertain of him.

Critic David Bromwich finds in what Hazlitt does portray of Coleridge the man—metaphorically depicting the state of his mind—as rich with allusions to earlier poets and "echoes" of Coleridge's own poetry: Coleridge has a "mind reflecting ages past": He who has seen a mouldering tower by the side of a chrystal lake, hid by the mist, but glittering in the wave below, may conceive the dim, gleaming, uncertain intelligence of his eye; he who has marked the evening clouds uprolled a world of vapours , has seen the picture of his mind, unearthly, unsubstantial, with gorgeous tints and ever-varying forms The Reverend Edward Irving — was a Scottish Presbyterian minister who, beginning in , created a sensation in London with his fiery sermons denouncing the manners, practices, and beliefs of the time.

His sermons at the Caledonian Asylum Chapel were attended by crowds that included the rich, the powerful, and the fashionable. Curious visitors to the chapel, along with some uneasy regular members of the congregation, [93] would have been faced with a man of "uncommon height, a graceful figure and action, a clear and powerful voice, a striking, if not a fine face, a bold and fiery spirit, and a most portentous obliquity of vision" with, despite this slight defect, "elegance" of "the most admirable symmetry of form and ease of gesture", as well as "sable locks", a "clear iron-grey complexion, and firm-set features".

Moreover, with the sheer novelty of a combination of the traits of an actor, a preacher, an author—even a pugilist—Irving. He does not spare their politicians, their rulers, their moralists, their poets, their players, their critics, their reviewers, their magazine-writers He makes war upon all arts and sciences, upon the faculties and nature of man, on his vices and virtues, on all existing institutions, and all possible improvement Irving, with his reactionary stance, has "opposed the spirit of the age".

Lord Liverpool " Prime Minister at the time. But Irving's popularity, which Hazlitt suspected would not last, [99] was a sign of another tendency of the age: Irving", The Spirit of the Age. Part of Irving's appeal was due to the increased influence of evangelical Christianity , notes historian Ben Wilson; the phenomenon of an Edward Irving preaching to the great and famous would have been inconceivable thirty years earlier.

And the inescapable fact of Irving's dominating physical presence, Wilson also agrees, had its effect. As a case in point, Hazlitt brings in Irving's own mentor, the Scottish theologian, scientist , philosopher, and minister Dr. Thomas Chalmers — , whom Hazlitt had heard preach in Glasgow. Chalmers' follower Irving, on the other hand, gets by on the strength of his towering physique and the novelty of his performances; judging him as a writer his For the Oracles of God, Four Orations had just gone into a third edition , [] Hazlitt finds that "the ground work of his compositions is trashy and hackneyed, though set off by extravagant metaphors and an affected phraseology John Kinnaird suggests that in this essay, Hazlitt, with his "penetration" and "characteristically ruthless regard for truth", in his reference to Irving's "portentous obliquity of vision" insinuates that "one eye of Irving's imagination Kinnaird also notes that Hazlitt's criticism of Irving anticipated the judgement of Irving's friend, the essayist, historian, and social critic Thomas Carlyle , in his account of Irving's untimely death a few years later.

John Horne Tooke — was an English reformer, grammarian , clergyman , and politician. He became especially known for his support of radical causes and involvement in debates about political reform, and was briefly a Member of the British Parliament. By the time he was profiled as the third of "The Spirits of the Age" in Hazlitt's original series, Tooke had been dead for a dozen years.

He was significant to Hazlitt as a "connecting link" between the previous age and the present.

Hazlitt had known Tooke personally, having attended gatherings at his home next to Wimbledon Common until about Horne Tooke", writes Hazlitt, "was in private company, and among his friends, the finished gentleman of the last age. His manners were as fascinating as his conversation was spirited and delightful. Tooke's greatest delight, as seen by Hazlitt, was in contradiction, in startling others with radical ideas that at the time were considered shocking: His mastery of the art of verbal fencing was such that many eagerly sought invitation to his private gatherings, where they could "admire" his skills "or break a lance with him.

Horne Tooke", The Spirit of the Age. Tooke was in Hazlitt's view much less successful in public life. In private, he could be seen at his best and afford amusement by "say[ing] the most provoking things with a laughing gaiety". He did not really seem to believe in any great "public cause" or "show He would rather be against himself than for any body else. Hazlitt also notes that there was more to Tooke's popular gatherings than verbal repartee. Having been involved in politics over a long life, Tooke could captivate his audience with his anecdotes, especially in his later years:.

Hazlitt felt that Tooke would be longest remembered, however, for his ideas about English grammar. By far the most popular English grammar of the early 19th century was that of Lindley Murray , and, in his typical method of criticism by antitheses, [87] Hazlitt points out what he considers to be its glaring deficiencies compared to that of Tooke: A century and a half later, critic John Kinnaird saw this essay on Horne Tooke as being essential to Hazlitt's implicit development of his idea of the "spirit of the age".

Not only did Tooke's thinking partake of the excessive "abstraction" that was becoming so dominant, [] it constituted opposition for the sake of opposition, thereby becoming an impediment to any real human progress. It was this sort of contrariness, fueled by "self-love", that, according to Kinnaird, is manifested in many of the later subjects of the essays in The Spirit of the Age. Hazlitt's criticism of Tooke's grammatical work has also been singled out. Critic Tom Paulin notes the way Hazlitt's subtle choice of language hints at the broader, politically radical implications of Tooke's linguistic achievement.

Paulin observes also that Hazlitt, himself the author of an English grammar influenced by Tooke, recognised the importance of Tooke's grammatical ideas in a way that presaged and accorded with the radical grammatical work of William Cobbett , whom Hazlitt sketched in a later essay in The Spirit of the Age.

The spirit of the age

In Hazlitt's view, the essence of Scott's mind lay in its "brooding over antiquity. This was true of his poetry as much as his prose. But, in Hazlitt's view, as a poet, his success was limited, even as a chronicler of the past. His poetry, concedes Hazlitt, has "great merit", abounding "in vivid descriptions, in spirited action, in smooth and glowing versification. It is light, agreeable, effeminate, diffuse. The matter is altogether different with Scott the novelist. But the popularity of the novels was such that fanatically devoted readers fiercely debated the respective merits of their favourite characters and scenes.

He is the "amanuensis of truth and history" by means of a rich array of characters and situations. From Waverley , the first of these books, published in , he recalls "the Baron of Bradwardine, stately, kind-hearted, whimsical, pedantic; and Flora MacIvor". Next, in Old Mortality , there are.

Leonard's Crags, and Butler, and Dumbiedikes, eloquent in his silence, and Mr. Bartoline Saddle-tree and his prudent helpmate, and Porteous, swinging in the wind, and Madge Wildfire, full of finery and madness, and her ghastly mother. He continues enthusiastically through dozens of others, exclaiming, "What a list of names!

The Spirit of the Age

What a host of associations! What a thing is human life! What a power is that of genius! His works taken together are almost like a new edition of human nature. This is indeed to be an author! Writing a century and a half later, critic John Kinnaird observes that Hazlitt was "Scott's greatest contemporary critic" and wrote the first important criticism of the novel, particularly in the form it was then beginning to assume.

But Hazlitt had begun to recognise the degree of imagination Scott had to apply in order to bring dry facts to life. Hazlitt also recognised that, at his best, Scott conveyed his characters' traits and beliefs impartially, setting aside his own political bias. Having faithfully and disinterestedly described "nature" in all its detail was in itself a praiseworthy accomplishment. Scott the man, laments Hazlitt, was quite different from Scott the poet and novelist. Even in his fiction, there is a notable bias, in his dramatisation of history, toward romanticising the age of chivalry and glorifying "the good old times".

Scott was known to be a staunch Tory. Hazlitt grants that Scott was "amiable, frank, friendly, manly in private life" and showed "candour and comprehensiveness of view for history". Hazlitt concludes this account by lamenting that the man who was " by common consent the finest, most humane and accomplished writer of his age [could have] associated himself with and encouraged the lowest panders of a venal press Lord Byron — was the most popular poet of his day, a major figure of the English Romantic movement , and an international celebrity.

Besides reviewing his poetry and some of his prose, Hazlitt had contributed to The Liberal , a journal Byron helped establish but later abandoned. He grapples with his subject, and moves, and animates it by the electric force of his own feelings Despite being impressed by such passages, Hazlitt also voices serious reservations about Byron's poetry as a whole: Such "wild and gloomy romances" like " Lara , the Corsair , etc. Byron's dramas are undramatic. This is shown especially in the early parts of Don Juan , where, "after the lightning and the hurricane, we are introduced to the interior of the cabin and the contents of wash-hand basins.

The range of Byron's characters, Hazlitt contends, is too narrow. Returning again and again to the type that would later be called the " Byronic hero ", [] "Lord Byron makes man after his own image, woman after his own heart; the one is a capricious tyrant, the other a yielding slave; he gives us the misanthrope and the voluptuary by turns; and with these two characters, burning or melting in their own fires, he makes out everlasting centos of himself.

Byron, observes Hazlitt, was born an aristocrat, but "he is the spoiled child of fame as well as fortune. He would force them to admire in spite of decency and common sense. His Lordship is hard to please: In the course of characterising Byron, Hazlitt glances back to Scott, subject of the preceding chapter, and forward to Wordsworth and Southey, each of whom secures his own essay later in The Spirit of the Age.

Scott, the only one of these writers who rivals Byron in popularity, notes Hazlitt in a lengthy comparison, keeps his own character offstage in his works; he is content to present "nature" in all its variety. While Byron's poetry, with all its power, is founded on "commonplaces", Wordsworth's poetry expresses something new, raising seemingly insignificant objects of nature to supreme significance.

He is capable of seeing the profundity, conveying the effect on the heart, of a "daisy or a periwinkle", thus lifting poetry from the ground, "creat[ing] a sentiment out of nothing. Although Hazlitt says he does not much care for Byron's satires criticising especially the heavy-handedness of the early English Bards and Scotch Reviewers , [] he grants that "the extravagance and license of [Byron's poem] seems a proper antidote to the bigotry and narrowness of" Southey's.

Hazlitt argues that "the chief cause of most of Lord Byron's errors is, that he is that anomaly in letters and in society, a Noble Poet. His muse is also a lady of quality. The people are not polite enough for him: He hates the one and despises the other. By hating and despising others, he does not learn to be satisfied with himself. In conclusion—at least his originally intended conclusion—Hazlitt notes that Byron was now in Greece attempting to aid a revolt against Turkish occupation.

With this sentence the chapter would have ended; but Hazlitt adds another paragraph, beginning with an announcement that he has just then learned of Byron's death. This sobering news, he says, has put "an end at once to a strain of somewhat peevish invective". Rather than withhold what he has written or refashion it into a eulogy, however, Hazlitt maintains that it is "more like [Byron] himself" to let stand words that were "intended to meet his eye, not to insult his memory.

Lord Byron is dead: Let that be his excuse and his epitaph! While Hazlitt showed an "obvious relish" [] for some of Byron's poetry, on the whole his attitude toward Byron was never simple, [] and later critics' assessments of Hazlitt's view of Byron's poetry diverge radically. Andrew Rutherford, who includes most of The Spirit of the Age essay on Lord Byron in an anthology of criticism of Byron, himself expresses the belief that Hazlitt had a "distaste for Byron's works".

Grayling asserts that Hazlitt "was consistent in praising his 'intensity of conception and expression' and his 'wildness of invention, brilliant and elegant fancy, [and] caustic wit'. Robert Southey — was a prolific author of poetry, essays, histories, biographies , and translations , and Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from to Hazlitt first met Southey in London in Years earlier, a reaction by the establishment to the reformers had already begun to set in, [] and, after another fifteen years, the English political atmosphere had become stifling to the champions of liberty.

His earlier extreme radical position was implied in his play Wat Tyler , which seemed to advocate violent revolt by the lower classes. Now he expressed a stance of absolute support of the severest reprisals against any who dared criticise the government, [] declaring that "a Reformer is a worse character than a housebreaker".

Wordsworth and Coleridge supported Southey and tried to discredit Hazlitt's attacks. By , when Hazlitt reviewed the history of his relationship with Southey, his anger had considerably subsided. As with the other character sketches in The Spirit of the Age , he did his best to treat his subject impartially. He opens this essay with a painterly image of Southey as an embodiment of self-contradiction: While he supposed it possible that a better form of society could be introduced than any that had hitherto existed He is ever in extremes, and ever in the wrong!

In a detailed psychological analysis, Hazlitt explains Southey's self-contradiction: He maintains that there can be no possible ground for differing from him, because he looks only at his own side of the question! He says that 'a Reformer is a worse character than a house-breaker,' in order to stifle the recollection that he himself once was one!

Despite Southey's then assumed public "character of poet-laureat and courtier", [] his character at bottom is better suited to the role of reformer. Southey is not of the court, courtly. Every thing of him and about him is from the people. Southey", The Spirit of the Age. Surveying the range of Southey's voluminous writings, constituting a virtual library, [] Hazlitt finds worth noting "the spirit, the scope, the splendid imagery, the hurried and startled interest" [] of his long narrative poems, with their exotic subject matter. His prose volumes of history, biography, and translations from Spanish and Portuguese authors, while they lack originality, are well researched and are written in a "plain, clear, pointed, familiar, perfectly modern" style that is better than that of any other poet of the day, and "can scarcely be too much praised.

Southey's major failing is that, with a spirit of free inquiry that he cannot suppress in himself, he attempts to suppress free inquiry in others. He does not advocate the slave-trade, he does not arm Mr. Malthus's revolting ratios with his authority, he does not strain hard to deluge Ireland with blood.

In Southey's personal appearance, there is something eccentric, even off-putting: Continuing with a more balanced view than any he had expressed before, Hazlitt notes Southey's many fine qualities: In all the relations and charities of private life, he is correct, exemplary, generous, just. We never heard a single impropriety laid to his charge. Rash in his opinions", concludes Hazlitt, Southey "is steady in his attachments—and is a man, in many particulars admirable, in all respectable—his political inconsistency alone excepted!

Historian Crane Brinton a century later applauded Hazlitt's "fine critical intelligence" in judging Southey's character and works.

Paulin especially notes allusive and tonal subtleties in Hazlitt's poetic prose that served to highlight, or at times subtly qualify, the portrait of Southey he was trying to paint. This, Paulin observes, is an example of how Hazlitt "invest[s] his vast, complex aesthetic terminology with a Shakespearean richness William Wordsworth was an English poet, often considered, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to have inaugurated the Romantic movement in English poetry with the publication in of their Lyrical Ballads.

Hazlitt was introduced to Wordsworth by Coleridge, and both had a shaping influence on him, who was privileged to have read Lyrical Ballads in manuscript. Though Hazlitt was never close with Wordsworth, their relationship was cordial for many years. But there was another cause for the rupture. Hazlitt had reviewed Wordsworth's The Excursion in , approvingly, but with serious reservations. The Excursion was notoriously demeaned by the influential Francis Jeffrey in his Edinburgh Review criticism beginning with the words, "This will never do", [] while Hazlitt's account was later judged to have been the most penetrating of any written at the time.

Despite his grievous disappointment with a man he had once thought an ally in the cause of humanity, after nearly ten years of severe and sometimes excessive criticism of his former idol some of it in reaction to Wordsworth's attempt to impugn his character , [] as with his other former friends of the period, in The Spirit of the Age Hazlitt attempts to reassess Wordsworth as fairly as he can. Wordsworth's genius is a pure emanation of the Spirit of the Age. It is something entirely new: Wordsworth "tries to compound a new system of poetry from [the] simplest elements of nature and of the human mind Wordsworth's poetry conveys what is interesting in the commonest events and objects.

It probes the feelings shared by all. It "disdains" the artificial, [] the unnatural, the ostentatious, the "cumbrous ornaments of style", [] the old conventions of verse composition. His subject is himself in nature: No one has shown the same imagination in raising trifles into importance: He is in this sense the most original poet now living Wordsworth", The Spirit of the Age.

Hazlitt notes that, in psychological terms, the underlying basis for what is essential in Wordsworth's poetry is the principle of the association of ideas. But to [Wordsworth], nature is a kind of home". Wordsworth's poetry, especially when the Lyrical Ballads had been published 26 years earlier, was such a radical departure that scarcely anyone understood it. Even at the time Hazlitt was writing this essay, "The vulgar do not read [Wordsworth's poems], the learned, who see all things through books, do not understand them, the great despise, the fashionable may ridicule them: To one class of readers he appears sublime, to another and we fear the largest ridiculous.

Hazlitt then briefly comments on some of Wordsworth's more recent "philosophical production" which for example, "Laodamia" he finds "classical and courtly If there are a few lines in Byron's poems that give him the heartfelt satisfaction that so many of Wordsworth's poems do, it is only when "he descends with Mr. Wordsworth to the common ground of a disinterested humanity" by "leaving aside his usual pomp and pretension. Ten years earlier Hazlitt had reviewed what was then Wordsworth's longest and most ambitious published poem, The Excursion , and he briefly remarks on it here.

Though he does not disdainfully dismiss it as Jeffrey had, he expresses serious reservations. It includes "delightful passages Thus it ends up being both inadequate philosophy and poetry that has detached itself from the essence and variety of life. As in his essays in this book on other subjects he had seen personally, Hazlitt includes a sketch of the poet's personal appearance and manner: Wordsworth, in his person, is above the middle size, with marked features, and an air somewhat stately and Quixotic.

Then Hazlitt comments on the nature of Wordsworth's taste in art and his interest in and judgements of artists and earlier poets. His tastes show the elevation of his style, but also the narrowness of his focus. Wordsworth's artistic sympathies are with Poussin and Rembrandt, showing an affinity for the same subjects. Like Rembrandt, he invests "the minute details of nature with an atmosphere of sentiment". Related to this, asserts Hazlitt, is the undramatic nature of Wordsworth's own poetry. This is the result of a character flaw, egotism. And yet, Hazlitt reflects, as is frequently the case with men of genius, an egotistic narrowness is often found together with an ability to do one thing supremely well.

Hazlitt concludes with a psychological analysis of the effect on Wordsworth's character of his disappointment with the poor reception of his poetry. Wordsworth has gained an increasing body of admirers "of late years". This will save him from "becoming the God of his own idolatry! The 20th-century critic Christopher Salvesen notes that Hazlitt's observation in The Spirit of the Age that Wordsworth's poetry is "synthetic" [] characterises it best, [] and Roy Park in an extensive study expresses the view that Hazlitt, as the poet's contemporary, most completely understood the essence of his poetry as a significant component of the "spirit of the age".

Sir James Mackintosh — , widely admired as one of the most learned men in Europe, was a Scottish lawyer, legislator , educator , philosopher, historian , scholar , and Member of Parliament from to Mackintosh came to Hazlitt's attention as early as , when he published his Vindiciae Gallicae , a defence of the French Revolution, then unfolding. Written as a response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France , it was warmly received by liberal thinkers of the time. Mackintosh thereafter became a bitter disappointment to Hazlitt.

Looking back at the elder man's change of political sentiments, Hazlitt observed that the lecturer struck a harsh note if he felt it were a triumph to have exulted in the end of all hope for the "future improvement" of the human race; rather it should have been a matter for "lamentation".

Navigation menu

Eleven years later, in his summing up of Mackintosh's place among his contemporaries, as elsewhere in The Spirit of the Age , Hazlitt attempts a fair reassessment. As he analyses the characteristics of Mackintosh as a public speaker, a conversationalist, and a scholarly writer, Hazlitt traces the progress of his life, noting his interactions with Edmund Burke over the French Revolution, his tenure as chief judge in India, and his final career as Member of Parliament. Of his qualifications in this regard, Hazlitt remarks, "Few subjects can be started, on which he is not qualified to appear to advantage as the gentleman and scholar.

There is scarce an author he has not read; a period of history he is not conversant with; a celebrated name of which he has not a number of anecdotes to relate; an intricate question that he is not prepared to enter upon in a popular or scientific manner. As he praises Mackintosh's impressive talents and intellect, however, Hazlitt also brings out his limitations. In demolishing his adversaries, including Godwin and the reformers in his famous lectures, Mackintosh "seemed to stand with his back to the drawers in a metaphysical dispensary, and to take out of them whatever ingredients suited his purpose.

1. The Spirit of the Age - Wikipedia?
2. ;
3. The Mountains of Channadran (Wizards Destiny Book 3)!

In this way he had an antidote for every error, an answer to every folly. The writings of Burke, Hume , Berkeley, Paley , Lord Bacon , Jeremy Taylor, Grotius , Puffendorf , Cicero , Aristotle , Tacitus , Livy , Sully , Machiavel , Guicciardini , Thuanus , lay open beside him, and he could instantly lay his hand upon the passage, and quote them chapter and verse to the clearing up of all difficulties, and the silencing of all oppugners.

In his characteristic fashion, Hazlitt looks back to an earlier subject of these essays and compares Mackintosh with Coleridge. While the latter's genius often strays from reality, his imagination creates something new. Mackintosh, on the other hand, with a similarly impressive command of his subject matter, mechanically presents the thinking of others. There is no integration of his learning with his own thinking, no passion, nothing fused in the heat of imagination.

This preference for book learning and lack of intense involvement in the world around him were detrimental to Mackintosh's later career, even though he drifted back to a more liberal political stance. Hazlitt, who heard him speak in Parliament, observes that, just as his previous appointment as a judge in India was unsuited to a man who worked out his thought in terms of "school-exercises", Mackintosh's mind did not fit well the defender of political causes, which needed more passionate engagement.

Too much "interest" rather than pure "love of truth" enters into the decisions made in Parliament. And "the judgment of the House is not a balance to weigh scruples and reasons to the turn of a fraction. Sir James, in detailing the inexhaustible stores of his memory and reading, in unfolding the wide range of his theory and practice, in laying down the rules and the exceptions, in insisting upon the advantages and the objections with equal explicitness, would be sure to let something drop that a dexterous and watchful adversary would easily pick up and turn against him Mackintosh, like Coleridge, shines as one of the great conversationalists in an age of "talkers, not of doers".

In speaking, as in his later writing, the "trim, pointed expression [and] ambitious ornaments There is no principle of fusion in the work; he strikes after the iron is cold, and there is a want of malleability in the style. However much Hazlitt tries to be fair to Mackintosh, in the view of Tom Paulin, nearly two centuries later, subtle stylistic elements in his account of Mackintosh, even in the latter's triumphant lectures, undermine his own account of him as an impressively learned man, casting the scholarly jurist and Member of Parliament in a ridiculous light and showing him to be "a self-caricaturing absurdity".