It was from Nether-Stowey that Hazlitt dated his regard for poetry. But if literature came late to him, as (his father’s office and his own metaphysical inklings aiding) it did, he ever cherished a pure and ardent passion for it, once it had come. Yet he was by no means widely read, and in his last years seldom finished a new book. First and last, indeed, he was a man of few books and fewer authors. Shakespeare, Burke, Cervantes, Rabelais, Milton, the _Decameron_, the _Nouvelle Héloïse_ and the _Confessions_, Richardson’s epics of the parlour and Fielding’s epics of the road—these things and their kind he read intensely; and, when it pleased him to speak of them, it was ever in the terms of understanding and regard. Yet it was long ere he had any thought of writing; and it was necessity alone that made him a man of letters. In the beginning, the Pulpit proving impossible, he turned to painting for a career, and, after certain studies, presumably under his elder brother John,[4] and possibly under Northcote, he went to the Paris of the First Consul, and painted there for some four months in a Louvre which the thrift of Bonaparte had stored with the choicest plunder in Italian Art. I know not whether or no he could ever have been a painter. Haydon, who neither loved nor understood him, and was, besides, a man who could greatly dare and ‘toil terribly’—Haydon says that he was at once too lazy and too timid ever to succeed in painting: an art in which, as Haydon showed, and as Millet was presently to say, ‘You must flay yourself alive, and give your skin.’[5] I do not think that Hazlitt was daunted by what may be called the painfulness of painting; for in letters he was soon enough to prove that he had in him to face a world in arms, and to tincture his writings, if need were, with the best blood of his heart. In any case, after divers essays at copying in the Louvre,[6] and certain attempts at portraiture on his return to England,[7] he found that he could not excel; that, in fact, he was neither Titian nor Rembrandt, nor could he even be Sir Joshua. So he painted no more, but went on _reading_ certain painters: very much, I assume, as he went on taking certain authors; because he loved them for themselves, and found emotions—and not only emotions, but sensations[8]—in them.