Great as Hazlitt was as a miscellaneous and Montaignesque essayist, he was greater as a literary critic. Literature was, though he coquetted with art, his first and most constant love; it was the subject on which, as far as English literature is concerned (and he knew little and is still less worth consulting about any other), he had acquired the largest and soundest knowledge; and it is that for which he had the most original and essential genius. His intense prejudices and his occasional inadequacy make themselves felt here as they do everywhere, and even here it is necessary to give the caution that Hazlitt is never to be trusted when he shows the least evidence of dislike for which he gives no reason. But to any one who has made a little progress in criticism himself, to any one who has either read for himself or is capable of reading for himself, of being guided by what is helpful and of neglecting what is not, there is no greater critic than Hazlitt in any language. He will sometimes miss--he is never perhaps so certain as his friends Lamb and Hunt were to find--exquisite individual points. Prejudice, accidental ignorance, or other causes may sometimes invalidate his account of authors or of subjects in general. But still the four great collections of his criticism, _The Characters of Shakespeare_, _The Elizabethan Dramatists_, _The English Poets_, and _The English Comic Writers_, with not a few scattered things in his other writings, make what is on the whole the best corpus of criticism by a single writer in English on English. He is the critics' critic as Spenser is the poets' poet; that is to say, he has, errors excepted and deficiencies allowed, the greatest proportion of the strictly critical excellencies--of the qualities which make a critic--that any English writer of his craft has ever possessed.
_Blackwood's Magazine_, the headquarters, the citadel, the _place d'armes_ of the opposition to the Cockney school and of criticism and journalism that were Tory first of all, enlisted a younger set of recruits than those hitherto mentioned, and the special style of writing which it introduced, though exceedingly clever and stimulating, lent itself rather less to dispassionate literary appreciation than even the avowedly partisan methods of the _Edinburgh_. In its successful form (for it had a short and inglorious existence before it found out the way) it was launched by an audacious "skit" on the literati of Edinburgh written by John Wilson, John Gibson Lockhart, and James Hogg, while very soon after its establishment it was joined by a wild and witty Bohemian scholar from the south of Ireland, William Maginn, who, though before long he drifted away to other resorts, and ere many years established in _Fraser_ a new abode of guerilla journalism, impressed on _Blackwood_ itself, before he left it, several of its best-known features, and in particular is said to have practically started the famous _Noctes Ambrosianæ_. Of Hogg, enough has been said in a former chapter. For the critical purpose of "Maga," as _Blackwood's Magazine_ loved to call itself, he was rather a butt, or, to speak less despiteously, a stimulant, than an originator; and he had neither the education nor indeed the gifts of a critic. Of each of the others some account must be given, and Maginn will introduce yet another flight of brilliant journalists, some of whom, especially the greatest of all, Carlyle, lived till far into the last quarter of the present century.