NOTES THE ROUND TABLE ON THE Love of LiFE This essay formed No. 3 of the Round Table series, the first two having been contributed by Leigh Hunt. To numbers 2, 3, 4 the following motto was prefixed: Sociali fœdere mensa. Milton. A Table in a social compact joined.' PAGE 1. That sage. Hazlitt perhaps refers to Bacon's lines 2. 'What then remains, but that we still should cry which are taken from an epigram in the Greek Anthology. 'The schoolboy,' says Addison. See The Spectator, No. 93. Hope and fantastic expectations, etc. Jeremy Taylor's Holy Dying, Chap. i. § 3, par. 4. 'An ounce of sweet, etc. A dram of sweete is worth a pound of sowre.' The Faerie Queene, Book 1. Canto iii. 30. This line formed the motto of Leigh Hunt's Indicator. Paradise Lost, II. 145-151. 3. And that must end us, etc. In The Examiner Hazlitt publishes the following passage as a note to this quotation : 'Many persons have wondered how Bonaparte was able to survive the shock of that tremendous height of power from which he fell. But it was that very height which still rivetted his backward gaze, and made it impossible for him to take his eye from it, more than from a hideous spectre. The sun of Austerlitz still rose upon his imagination, and could not set. The huge fabric of glory which he had raised, still "mocked his eyes with air." He who had felt his existence so intensely could not consent to lose it !' 4. Are made desperate, etc. Wordsworth's Excursion, Book vi. The following note is appended to this essay in The Examiner: 'It is proper to notice that an extract from this article formerly appeared in another publication. A series of Criticisms on the principal English Poets will shortly be commenced, and till concluded, will appear alternately with the other subjects of the Round Table.' The publication referred to was The Morning Chronicle for September 4, 1813, where, under the heading 'Common Places,' the substance of the paragraph beginning The love of life is, in general, the effect,' and the following paragraph will be found. The plan for criticisms of the English Poets was not adhered to. Hazlitt shortly afterwards (1818) delivered a course of Lectures on the English Poets which was published in the same year. 1 Antony and Cleopatra, Act IV. Scene 14. ON CLASSICAL EDUCATION This essay formed the greater part of No. 7 of the Round Table series. The first three paragraphs are from one of Hazlitt's Common Places' in The Morning Chronicle, September 25, 1813. PAGE 4. ‘A discipline of humanity. Bacon's Essays, Of Marriage and Single Life. Probably Cobbett, of whom Hazlitt says in another place: He is a self-taught man, and has the faults as well as excellences of that class of persons in their most striking and glaring excess."' (Table Talk, Character of Cobbett.) 6. The world is too much with us, etc. Misquoted from Wordsworth's Sonnet. Falstaff's reasoning about honour. See 1 Henry IV. Act v. Scene 1. They that are whole, etc. St. Matthew, ix. 12. In The Examiner this essay concluded with the following passage: "We do not think a classical education proper for women. It may pervert their minds, but it cannot elevate them. It has been asked, Why a woman should not learn the dead languages as well as the modern ones? For this plain reason, that the one are still spoken, and have immediate associations connected with them, and the other not. A woman may have a lover who is a Frenchman, or an Italian, or a Spaniard; and it is well to be provided against every contingency in that way. But what possible interest can she feel in those oldfashioned persons, the Greeks and Romans, or in what was done two thousand years ago? A modern widow would doubtless prefer Signor Tramezzani to Æneas, and Mr. Conway would be a formidable rival to Paris. No young lady in our days, in conceiving an idea of Apollo, can go a step beyond the image of her favourite poet: nor do we wonder that our old friend, the Prince Regent, passes for a perfect Adonis in the circles of beauty and fashion. Women in general have no ideas, except personal ones. They are mere egotists. They have no passion for truth, nor any love of what is purely ideal. They hate to think, and they hate every one who seems to think of anything but themselves. Everything is to them a perfect nonentity which does not touch their senses, their vanity, or their interest. Their poetry, their criticism, their politics, their morality, and their divinity, are downright affectation. That line in Milton is very striking "He for God only, she for God in him."2 Such is the order of nature and providence; and we should be sorry to see any fantastic improvements on it. Women are what they were meant to be; and we wish for no alteration in their bodies or their minds. They are the creatures of the circumstances in which they are placed, of sense, of sympathy and habit. They are exquisitely susceptible of the passive impressions of things: but to form an idea of pure understanding or imagination, to feel an interest in the true and the good beyond themselves, requires an effort of which they are incapable. They want principle, except that which consists in an adherence to established custom; and this is the reason of the severe laws which have been set up as a barrier against every infringement of decorum and propriety in women. It has been observed by an ingenious writer of the present day, that women want imagination. This 1 For Tramezzani and William Augustus Conway (1789-1828), who were not favourites of Harlitt, see A View of the English Stage. Paradise Lost, IV. 299 |