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Prose

Notes There is no dogma, however fierce or foolish, to which these persons have not set their seals, and
tried to impose on the understandings of their followers, as the will of Heaven, clothed with all the
terrors and sanctions of religion. How little has the human understanding been directed to find
out the true and useful! How much ingenuity has been thrown away in defense of creeds and
systems! How much time and talents have been wasted in theological controversy, in law, in
politics, in verbal criticism, in judicial astrology and in finding out the art of making gold! What
actual benefit do we reap form the writings of a Laud or Whitgift, or of Bishop Bull or Bishop
Waterland, or Prideaux’ Connections or Beausobre, or Calmet, or St Augustine, or Puffendorf, or
Vattel, or from the more literal but equally learned and unprofitable labours of Scaliger, Cardan,
and Scioppius? How many grains of sense are there in their thousand folio or quarto volumes?
What would the world lose if they were committed to the flames to-morrow? Or are they not
already ‘gone to the vault of all the Capulets’? Yet all these were oracles in their time, and would
have scoffed at you or me, at common sense and human nature, for differing with them. It is our
turn to laugh now.
To conclude this subject. The most sensible people to be met with in society are men of business
and of the world, who argue from what they see and know, instead of spinning cobweb distinctions
of what things ought to be. Women have often more of what is called good sense then men. They
have fewer pretensions; are less implicated in theories; and judge of objects more from their
immediate and involuntary impression on the mind, and, therefore, more truly and naturally.
They cannot reason wrong; for they do not reason at all. They do not think or speak by rule; and
they have in general more eloquence and wit, as well as sense, on that account. By their wit, sense
and eloquence together, they generally contrive to govern their husbands. Their style, when they
write to their friends (not for the booksellers), is better than that of most authors. — Uneducated
people have most exuberance of invention and the greatest freedom from prejudice. Shakespeare’s
was evidently an uneducated mind, both in the freshness of his imagination and the variety of his
views; as Milton’s was scholastic, in the texture both of his thoughts and feelings. Shakespeare
had not been accustomed to write themes at school in favour of virtue or against vice. To this we
owe the unaffected but healthy tone of his dramatic morality. It we wish to know the force of
human genius we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning
we may only study his commentators.
Self Assessment
1. Choose the correct options:
(i) Hazlitt’s family settled at
(a) Maidstone (b) Shropshire
(c) Hackney (d) None of these
(ii) Hazlitt was employed as the Parliamentary reporter for the Morning Chronicle.
(a) 1813 (b) 1812 (c) 1815 (d) 1810
(iii) ‘Characters of Shakespeare’ was written by
(a) Hazlitt (b) Charles Lamb
(c) Coleridge (d) William Wordsworth
(iv) Leigh Hunt edited a radical journal entitled
(a) The Examiner (b) Edinburgh Review
(c) English Poets (d) None of these

17.3 Summary

• William Hazlitt has a sharp, idiomatic, familiar style. His is the pure diction and aphorism.
Consciousness and propriety of words and phrases is a great characteristic of him. Its true’s

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