WITH Sketches of Public Characters. BY WILLIAM HAZLITT. "Come, draw the cartan, shew the picture." LONDON: PRINTED FOR WILLIAM HONE, 45, LUDGATE HILL. 1819. "Pitt and Buonaparte". An Examination of Mr. Malthus's Doctrines On the Originality of Mr. Malthus's Essay 269, 276 To JOHN HUNT, Esq. THE tried, steady, zealous, and conscientious advocate of the liberty of his country, and the rights of mankind; One of those few persons who are what they would be thought to be; sincere without offence, firm but temperate; uniting private worth to public principle; a friend in need, a patriot without an eye to himself ; who never betrayed an individual or a cause he pretended to serve-in short, that rare character, a man of common sense and common honesty, This volume is respectfully and gratefully inscribed by THE AUTHOR. PREFACE. I AM no politician, and still less can I be said to be a party-man: but I have a hatred of tyranny, and a contempt for its tools; and this feeling I have expressed as often and as strongly as I could. I cannot sit quietly down under the claims of barefaced power, and I have tried to expose the little arts of sophistry by which they are defended. I have no mind to have my person made a property of, nor my understanding made a dupe of. I deny that liberty and slavery are convertible terms, that right and wrong, truth and falsehood, plenty and famine, the comforts or wretchedness of a people, are matters of perfect indifference. That is all I know of the matter; but on these points I am likely to remain incorrigible, in spite of any arguments that I have seen used to the contrary. It needs no sagacity to discover that two and two make four; but to persist in maintaining this obvious position, if all the fashion, authority, hypocrisy, and venality of mankind were arrayed against it, would require a considerable effort of personal courage, and would soon leave a man in a |