Table-Talk by William Hazlitt (best pdf reader for ebooks txt) 📕

bosom with his little arms, which made a sort of great chair for it; and notwithstanding the vivacity which sparkled in his eyes, he sat perfectly still. Quite delighted with the scene, I sat down on a plough opposite, and had great pleasure in drawing this little picture of brotherly tenderness. I added a bit of the hedge, the barn-door, and some broken cartwheels, without any order, just as they happened to lie; and in about an hour I found I had made a drawing of great expression and very correct design without having put in anything of my own. This confirmed me in the resolution I had made before, only to copy Nature for the future. Nature is inexhaustible, and alone forms the greatest masters. Say what you will of rules, they alter the true features and the natural expression.”

↩

It is at present covered with a thick slough of oil and varnish (the perishable vehicle of the English school), like an envelope of goldbeaters’ skin, so as to be hardly visible. ↩

Men in business, who are answerable with their fortunes for the consequences of their opinions, and are therefore accustomed to ascertain pretty accurately the grounds on which they act, before they commit themselves on the event, are often men of remarkably quick and sound judgements. Artists in like manner must know tolerably well what they are about, before they can bring the result of their observations to the test of ocular demonstration. ↩

The famous Schiller used to say, that he found the great happiness of life, after all, to consist in the discharge of some mechanical duty. ↩

The rich “impasting” of Titian and Giorgione combines something of the advantages of both these styles, the felicity of the one with the carefulness of the other, and is perhaps to be preferred to either. ↩

Leonardo da Vinci. ↩

Titian. ↩

Michaelangelo. ↩

Correggio. ↩

Annibal Caracci. ↩

Rubens. ↩

Raphael. ↩

If we take away from the present the moment that is just by and the moment that is next to come, how much of it will be left for this plain, practical theory to rest upon? Their solid basis of sense and reality will reduce itself to a pin’s point, a hair line, on which our moral balance-masters will have some difficulty to maintain their footing without falling over on either side. ↩

A treatise on the Millennium is dull; but who was ever weary of reading the fables of the Golden Age? On my once observing I should like to have been Claude, a person said, “they should not, for that then by this time it would have been all over with them.” As if it could possibly signify when we live (save and excepting the present minute), or as if the value of human life decreased or increased with successive centuries. At that rate, we had better have our life still to come at some future period, and so postpone our existence century after century ad infinitum. ↩

In like manner, though we know that an event must have taken place at a distance, long before we can hear the result, yet as long as we remain in ignorance of it, we irritate ourselves about it, and suffer all the agonies of suspense, as if it was still to come; but as soon as our uncertainty is removed, our fretful impatience vanishes, we resign ourselves to fate, and make up our minds to what has happened as well as we can. ↩

Discourse XIII, volume II, pp. 113⁠–⁠117. ↩

Sentiment has the same source as that here pointed out. Thus the “Ranz des Vaches,” which has such an effect on the minds of the Swiss peasantry, when its well-known sound is heard, does not merely recall to them the idea of their country, but has associated with it a thousand nameless ideas, numberless touches of private affection, of early hope, romantic adventure and national pride, all which rush in (with mingled currents) to swell the tide of fond remembrance, and make them languish or die for home. What a fine instrument the human heart is! Who shall touch it? Who shall fathom it? Who shall “sound it from its lowest note to the top of its compass?” Who shall put his hand among the strings, and explain their wayward music? The heart alone, when touched by sympathy, trembles and responds to their hidden meaning! ↩

I do not here speak of the figurative or fanciful exercise of the imagination, which consists in finding out some striking object or image to illustrate another. ↩

Mr. Wordsworth himself should not say this, and yet I am not sure he would not. ↩

The only good thing I have ever heard come of this man’s singular faculty of memory was the following. A gentleman was mentioning his having been sent up to London from the place where he lived to see Garrick act. When he went back into the country he was asked what he thought of the player and the play. “Oh!” he said, “he did not know: he had only seen a little man strut about the stage and repeat 7,956 words.” We all laughed at this, but a person in one corner of the room, holding one hand to his forehead, and seeming mightily delighted, called out, “Ay, indeed! And pray, was he found to be correct?” This was the supererogation of literal matter-of-fact curiosity. Jedediah Buxton’s counting the number of words was idle enough; but here was a fellow who wanted someone to count them over again to see if he