602 



HAZLETON 



HAZLITT 



is deep red ; and both of these are highly esteemed. 

 These particular varieties are propagated by suckers 

 which are more or less freely produced, by layers, 

 and by budding and grafting. The tree is exten- 

 sively grown in some parts of England for coppice- 

 yrood, being reared for this purpose from seed. The 

 young straight stems and branches are employed for 

 making crates, baskets, hurdles, hoops, stakes, &c. ; 

 and the larger wood for charcoal, which is in great 

 request for forges, for the manufacture of gun- 

 powder and artists' crayons. Chips of the wood are 

 in Italy sometimes put in turbid wine for the pur- 

 pose of fining it ; and the roots are used by cabinet- 

 makers for veneering. Magical properties have been 

 ascribed to hazel-rods by the credulous, as it was 

 of them the Divining-rod (q.v. ) was formed for the 

 purpose of discovering water, minerals, or buried 

 treasure. From the wood an empyreumatic oil is 

 extracted, which is a vermifuge, and alleged to be a 

 cure for toothache. Hazel-nuts yield, on pressure, 

 about half their weight of a bland fixed oil, often 

 called nut-oil in Britain, the hazel-nut being popu- 

 larly known by the term nut alone ; but in Germany 

 it is walnut-oil which is usually called nut-oil. 

 Hazel-nut oil has drying properties, and is much 

 used by painters ; it is also used by perfumers as a 

 basis with which to mix expensive fragrant oils ; 

 and it has been employed medicinally in coughs. 



The larva of a weevil (Balaninus nucum) feeds 

 on the kernels of hazel-nuts. The parent female 

 makes a hole into the nut .by means of her long 

 snout, and there deposits an egg. Great numbers 

 of nuts are thus destroyed. 



The Beaked Hazel ( C. rostrata ), a species having 

 a very hairy fruit-cup prolonged into a long beak, 

 is a native of the northern parts of America. Its 

 kernel is sweet. The Constantinople Hazel (C. 

 cohirna], the nuts of which are considerably larger 

 than those of the common hazel, is a native of the 

 Levant, from which the fruit is imported into 

 Britain. It is much used for expressing oil, but is 

 a less pleasant fruit than many kinds of cob-nut 

 and filbert. A Himalayan species of hazel (C. 

 ferox) has a spiny fruit-cup, and an excessively 

 hard nut. Barcelona nuts are the nuts of a variety 

 of the common hazel, kiln-dried before their expor- 

 tation from Spain. Hazel-nuts not subjected to 

 this process cannot be kept long without losing in 

 part their agreeable flavour, and contracting a 

 sensible rancidity, except in air-tight vessels, in 

 which they are said to remain fresh even for years. 



HazlctOIl, a city of Pennsylvania, 80 miles 

 NNW. of Philadelphia, has ironworks, lumber- 

 mills, and railway-car shops, but is of importance 

 mainly as the chief business centre of the rich 

 Lehigh coalfield. Pop. (1880) 6935 ; ( 1900) 14,230. 



Il;i/litt, WILLIAM, was born at Maidstone on 

 April 10, 1778. His father was a Unitarian clergy- 

 man who belonged to the county of Antrim. In his 

 fifteenth year he began to study in the Unitarian 

 College at Hackney, with the view of becoming a 

 dissenting minister, a design which he early aban- 

 doned. . In 1798 he formed the acquaintance of 

 Coleridge, who encouraged him to compose his 

 Essay on the Principles of Human Action ('the 

 only thing,' he said, ' which I ever piqued myself 

 upon writing ' ), which was not published, however, 

 until 1805. For some time he endeavoured to earn 

 a living as a portrait-painter; and, according to 

 Northcote, would have become a great artist had 

 he not forsaken his easel for his desk. In 1806 he 

 published his Free Thoughts on Public Affairs, and 

 in 1807 his Reply to the Essay on Population by the 

 Rev. T. R. Malthus. After his marriage with Miss 

 Stoddart in 1808 he lived at the village of Winters- 

 low, in Wiltshire, until 1812, when he removed to 

 York Street, Westminster, and found employment 



as a writer on the Morning Chron icle and Examiner. 

 From 1814 to 1830 he contributed to the Edinburgh 

 Review. His Round Table : a Collection of Essays 

 on Literature, Men, and Manners, and the most 

 popular of his works, his Characters of Shakespeare 's 

 Plays, appeared in 1817. Between 1818 and 1821 

 he delivered lectures at the Surrey Institute, which 

 were afterwards published under the titles Lectures 

 on the English Poets, on the English Comic Writers, 

 and on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Eliza- 

 beth. His marriage proved an unhappy one, and, 

 after living for some time apart, Hazlitt and his 

 wife were divorced in 1822. He was fond of retir- 

 ing to Winterslow Hut, a coaching-house on the 

 high-road from London to Salisbury. At this lonely 

 inn, which stands amid bleak wolds on the verge 

 of Salisbury Plain, he wrote most of the essays 

 which he contributed to the London Magazine, and 

 which were afterwards republished in his Table Talk 

 (1821) and Plain Speaker (1826). An unfortunate 

 passion for the daughter of a tailor with whom 

 he lodged found expression in the Liber Amoris, 

 or the New Pygmalion (1823), a book of a strong 

 though painful interest. In 1824 he married a lady 

 of some means, who travelled with him to Italy, 

 but left him, for causes which can only be conjec- 

 tured, during the return journey, and never joined 

 him again. His Selections from the English Poets 

 and Sketches of the Principal Picture Galleries in 

 England appeared in 1824 ; his Spirit of the Age, 

 or Contemporary Portraits, which some critics 

 consider the ripest in thought and most felicitous 

 in style of all his works, in 1825 ; and his Life of 

 Napoleon Bonaparte in 1828-30. His last years 

 were darkened by ill-health and money difficulties. 

 He died on September 18, 1830. 



Wayward and irascible, a prey to melancholy, 

 and too often the victim of a rash and haughty self- 

 confidence, Hazlitt was at bottom generous, ardent, 

 and sincere. But his defects were sharpened by 

 unsuccess, and above all by the scurrilous malignity 

 with which his character and his writings were 

 traduced by hired libellers of adverse politics. The 

 scope of -his powers was never recognised by his 

 contemporaries, though, as Thackeray has said, 

 there were probably not in all England twelve men 

 with powers so varied. His genius had many 

 facets. He excelled in description and in narra- 

 tive, in reflection and in critical analysis. He 

 wrote of nature and of art and the characters of 

 men ; as a critic of the drama he has never been 

 equalled. He was one of the deadliest contro- 

 versialists, a master of epigram and burning in- 

 vective and withering irony. His letter to William 

 Gifford stands unsurpassed as an example of polished 

 vituperation. His judgment was at times clouded 

 by prejudice and distorted by his love of para- 

 dox. But of all the Georgian critics he was 

 the most eloquent, the most catholic, the most 

 thoroughly equipped. He never wrote in cold 

 blood ; he welcomed excellence everywhere. He did 

 justice alike to the Lakers and to the Queen Anne 

 men. He was not less discriminating than en- 

 thusiastic. His style ranges from lively gossip to 

 glowing rhapsody ; at its best it touches one of the 

 high-water marks of English, it is at once so vigor- 

 ous and so graceful, so lucid and so rich, so ex- 

 quisitely apt are the epithets, so firmly built are 

 the sentences, so noble is the rhythm of the periods. 

 His autobiographic essays are perhaps of all his 

 works the most delightful stamped with the seal 

 of truth, tremulous with pathos, and bathed in the 

 light of poetic imagination. His writings have 

 never gained the recognition they merit ; yet, with 

 I all his defects, it would be hard to point to Hazlitt's 

 master in all the ranks of English critics. 



See G. Saintsbury's article in Macmillan's Magazine 

 for 1887 ; Leslie Stephen's Hours in a Library (2d 



