University of Virginia Library

Warier than his predecessors, F. R. Waller and Arnold Glover, in their Complete Works of William Hazlitt,[1] P. P. Howe did not reprint in his own Complete Works [2] all the articles from the Edinburgh Review attributed to Hazlitt. In his Life of William Hazlitt [3] and in notes to the Complete Works (XVI, 419-421), he demonstrated carefully and convincingly that six reviews long associated with Hazlitt ought not to be regarded as chiefly from his hand. Howe did, however, reprint from the Edinburgh of December 1818 the review of Letters of Horace Walpole (XVI, 138-152), the prose style of which is so similar to Hazlitt's elsewhere that there was no apparent reason to doubt it. The personal directness and vigorous enthusiasm sound exactly like Hazlitt. Most of the quotations used to decorate the prose in the standard Hazlitt fashion appear, either wholly or in part, in other work certainly by Hazlitt.

But Howe slipped momentarily and forgot what he knew better than anyone else had before him, that Hazlitt had a young disciple of very great talent who so idolized him and who was so steeped in his work that he wrote prose almost indistinguishable from his master's. For John Hamilton Reynolds, as well as for Keats, there was one God, Shakespeare, and Hazlitt was His prophet. He followed Hazlitt's every word; he read Hazlitt's essays aloud in company to his friends;[4] he echoed Hazlitt's ideas and catch-phrases; and he repeated his quotations. The most extreme example of the last was Reynolds' following Hazlitt faithfully after Hazlitt had been led astray by Charles Lamb's confused recollection of what he thought was a passage from Dante: "Because on earth their names | In Fame's eternal volume shine for aye." Although the passage, which had only the faintest possible basis in Dante, resulted from what Lamb called his "Lying memory," Hazlitt was struck by it, accepted it at face value,

and quoted it in The Round Table (IV, 23, 369). Since it was good enough for Hazlitt, it was certainly good enough for Reynolds, who borrowed the second line from The Round Table to include in an essay in the Champion.[5]

One cannot rely upon the quotations in the review of Letters of Horace Walpole as proof of Hazlitt's hand. For example, both Hazlitt and Reynolds used elsewhere a brief passage which appears there: "He is himself—alone" (XVI, 146).[6] Before publication of the review, Hazlitt had used slight variations of the passage in A View of the English Stage (V, 183), Characters of Shakespear's Plays (IV, 192), and Lectures on the English Poets (V, 131). But in the Champion of 27 July 1817, Reynolds had quoted precisely those four words: "He is himself,—alone" (Selected Prose, p. 119). It is impossible to separate Hazlitt from Reynolds by such quotations because they shared them.

On two other occasions Howe learned the hard way how difficult it is to distinguish between Hazlitt's and Reynolds' prose. Trusting to his knowledge of Hazlitt's style, he reprinted in New Writings of Hazlitt: Second Series the theatrical review from the Examiner of 9 July 1820 and a review of Allan Cunningham's Sir Marmaduke Maxwell from the London Magazine of November 1822.[7] Later learning that Reynolds wrote both, he corrected the errors in Complete Works (XVIII, 471-472). It is not at all surprising that Howe should have been deceived; Hazlitt himself paid tribute to the success of Reynolds' imitation by linking him as "alter et idem" with himself (XVIII, 353).

But until now the error in attributing the review of Letters of Horace Walpole in the Edinburgh to Hazlitt has gone uncorrected. It is curious that one word used twice in the review should deny Hazlitt's authorship and establish Reynolds': "Cowper hath unwittingly beguiled us of many a long hour, by his letters to Lady Hesketh" and "[Walpole's] garrulity, moreover, hath a genius of its own" (XVI, 141, 146, italics supplied). Hazlitt did not use the obsolete form for the third person singular of the verb. In A New and Improved Grammar of the English Tongue (1809), he stated emphatically that hath is "Now never used, except in poetry, or on very solemn occasions" (II, 47). He reinforced the point by his later statement in the Grammar that "the most common construction is always the least objectionable" (II, 86-87), a position which Howe calls his

"general principle" (II, 288). He repeatedly and consistently favored currency of language and disapproved archaism in Lectures on the English Poets (V, 104-105), in "On Familiar Style" (VIII, 242-248), in the discussion of Horne Tooke in The Spirit of the Age (XI, 47-57), and in "English Grammar" (XX, 212-215).

Hazlitt's practice agreed impeccably with his principle. He used has thousands of times without a single hath in all the other work which he contributed to the Edinburgh Review (XVI) and in all the books which he published in 1817 and 1818: The Round Table, Characters of Shakespear's Plays, Lectures on the English Poets, and A View of the English Stage.[8] It seems highly unlikely that he ever in any of his works found a "very solemn occasion" to warrant the use of hath. The two haths in the review in question could not have resulted from editorial interpolation because Francis Jeffrey also used only has.[9]

Unlike Hazlitt, John Hamilton Reynolds did occasionally and arbitrarily allow himself the license to lapse into hath for the third person singular. In 1817 and 1818 he used hath in his prose no less than eleven times: in the theatrical reviews for the Champion, 23 February 1817, p. 61, 29 June 1817, p. 206, 17 August 1817, p. 261, 2 November 1817, p. 349, and 14 December 1817, p. 397 (twice); in a review of Hazlitt's Characters of Shakespear's Plays for the Champion, 20, 27 July 1817, pp. 230, 237 (twice) (reprinted in Selected Prose, pp. 114, 117); in his letter to Keats of 14 October 1818 (Letters, p. 12); and in a review of Hazlitt's Lectures on the English Comic Writers for the Scots Magazine of December 1818 (Selected Prose, p. 232). The eleven instances are especially significant because the volume of Reynolds' prose checked is so much less than that of Hazlitt—perhaps one-thirtieth. Reynolds too used has most of the time, but he sometimes substituted hath.

A quotation in the review in the Edinburgh corroborates Reynolds' hand: "[Walpole] sees only 'himself and the universe'" (XVI, 146). The phrase comes from The Round Table, where Hazlitt said of Wordsworth that "It is as if there were nothing but himself and the universe" (IV, 113). Although Hazlitt frequently reused not only phrases, but whole paragraphs and entire essays, he did not insert quotation marks for his own words. Certainly he would not think it necessary to be so scrupulous about such a brief phrase. But Reynolds would wish to set apart even four words by

the author whom he had just called "one of the most vigorous and spirited writers of the present age."[10]

It has long been known that Reynolds wrote something for the Edinburgh toward the close of 1818, though searchers for his work there have heretofore been frustrated by the erroneous attribution of the review of Letters of Horace Walpole to Hazlitt. On 16 December 1818, Keats wrote that Reynolds "has become an edinburgh Reviewer."[11] On 21 April 1821, Hazlitt wrote Hunt, "I got Reynolds to write in the Edinburgh Review, at a time when I had a great reluctance to ask any favour of Jeffrey, and from that time I never set eyes on him for a year and a half after."[12] Since Hazlitt was seeing Reynolds again in the summer of 1820 (XVIII, 471-472), the year and a half places Reynolds' contribution toward the close of 1818. On 13 July 1820, Reynolds wrote Jeffrey that he was reluctant to request "£40 or £50 on account" because he had "written so little hitherto" (Letters, p. 19). Nothing remotely resembling Reynolds' style, other than the review of Letters of Horace Walpole, appears in the December 1818 issue of the Edinburgh—or for that matter in the surrounding issues of September 1818 or March 1819. External evidence combines with internal evidence from the journal itself to lead clearly to the conclusion that Reynolds wrote the review of Letters of Horace Walpole.

Undoubtedly Reynolds' chief reasons for wishing to contribute were the prestige and remuneration which accompanied writing for the Edinburgh. The great Hazlitt himself wrote, "To be an Edinburgh Reviewer is, I suspect, the highest rank in modern literary society" (XII, 365). But an incidental advantage in reviewing this particular book was that it had been published by Reynolds' friend John Martin, whom he had known at least as early as 1814 when Martin published his Safie and Eden of Imagination and when Martin began printing Reynolds' poems and essays in his periodical, the Inquirer. Although the review is by no means a puff, it must nevertheless have been most welcome to Martin. The conclusion is especially interesting in this respect. Ostensibly Reynolds seems to be blaming Rodwell and Martin, and in the process he earns credit for objectivity: what a shame that so fascinating and valuable a book should be published in such an expensive edition, but, no matter, we expect that the demand will be so great that soon it will be republished in more economical form. What publisher would dislike that "attack"?

Another passage acquires additional meaning from realization that Reynolds wrote it:

Although Reynolds proceeds to cite Gray and Cowper as examples of poets who wrote valuable letters, he must also have had in the back of his mind the priceless letters from Keats which he had been receiving for two years.