William Hazlitt, 1778-1830, was born in Maidstone, England.  His father was a Unitarian clergyman, and he was sent to a college of that denomination to be educated for the ministry; but having a greater taste for art than theology, he resolved, on leaving school, to devote himself to painting.  He succeeded so well in his efforts as to meet the warmest commendation of his friends, but did not succeed in satisfying his own fastidious taste.  On this account he threw away his pencil and took up his pen.  His works, though numerous, are, with the exception of a life of Napoleon, chiefly criticisms on literature and art.

Hazlitt is thought to have treated his contemporaries with an unjust severity; but his genial appreciation of the English classics, and the thorough and loving manner in which he discusses their merits, make his essays the delight of every lover of those perpetual wellsprings of intellectual pleasure.  His “Table Talk,” “Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays,” “Lectures on the English Poets,” and “Lectures on the Literature of the Elizabethan Age,” are the works that exhibit his style and general merits in their most favorable light. ###

Coming forward and seating himself on the ground, in his white dress and tightened turban, the chief of the Indian jugglers begins with tossing up two brass balls, which is what any of us could do, and concludes by keeping up four at the same time, which is what none of us could do to save our lives, not if we were to take our whole lives to do it in.

Is it then a trifling power we see at work, or is it not something next to miraculous?  It is the utmost stretch of human ingenuity, which nothing but the bending the faculties of body and mind to it from the tenderest infancy with incessant, ever-anxious application up to manhood, can accomplish or make even a slight approach to.  Man, thou art a wonderful animal, and thy ways past finding out!  Thou canst do strange things, but thou turnest them to small account!

To conceive of this extraordinary dexterity, distracts the imagination and makes admiration breathless.  Yet it costs nothing to the performer, any more than if it were a mere mechanical deception with which he had nothing to do, but to watch and laugh at the astonishment of the spectators.  A single error of a hair’s breadth, of the smallest conceivable portion of time, would be fatal; the precision of the movements must be like a mathematical truth; their rapidity is like lightning.

To catch four balls in succession, in less than a second of time, and deliver them back so as to return with seeming consciousness to the hand again; to make them revolve around him at certain intervals, like the planets in their spheres; to make them chase each other like sparkles of fire, or shoot up like flowers or meteors; to throw them behind his back, and twine them round his neck like ribbons, or like serpents; to do what appears an impossibility, and to do it