Text: Edgar Allan Poe (?), Literary, Broadway Journal (New York), May 3, 1845, vol. 1, no. 18, p. ???-???

[page 284, column 2, continued:]

Table-Talk. By William Hazlitt. Part 1. No. 6 of Wiley and Putnam's Library of Choice Reading, pp. 200. Price 37 1-2 cts.

This is a reprint of the two volumes published in Paris by Galignani, under the author's own supervision, the essays having been selected from the four volumes published by himself in London. The second part will comprise the essays which the author would probably have included in another series which he intended to publish in Paris. It would be hardly a remove from sheer impertinence to recommend the essays of Hazlitt to ordinary readers; he has been more universally read in this country than any other English essayist, if we except Macaulay. His egotism, though as obtrusive as Cobbett's, is one of the charms of his style, for it is only the egotism of a dunce that is offensive. The two first essays in this volume, on the pleasure of painting, we would recommend to the consideration of all young artists who have not been abroad. The author had made very satisfactory progress in the art when he went to the Louvre while it contained the fruits of Napoleon's conquests in Italy, and he abandoned his easel. He saw a variety of excellence that he felt himself unable ever to equal, and he gave up painting in despair. Yet he had, unquestionably, the genius of a painter, and his writings on art are among the most valuable of his productions. His principles may be safely trusted, but his criticisms on pictures must be taken with many grains of allowance for his enthusiasm. He could see charms in a picture which no one else could discover, and as his criticisms were generally based upon recollections, he sometimes attributed qualities and features to a work which on inspection it was found to lack. The essay in this collection on a picture by Nicolas Poussin would lead a novice to expect qualities in a landscape which no work of art can ever possess. The critic attributes to the work itself the sublime ideas which it suggested to his mind, but which the painter himself probably never knew. But the essay in the collection from which most practical good may be gained is that on the ignorance of the learned. It is just the thing to take the starch out of a pedant and a book-worm, and we would recommend it to the sensible ignorant for their consolation.