ABSTRACT
If there is anything that delights the author in Hazlitt beyond the charm of style and the unconscious portrait of a vain and powerful spirit which his works present it is the loving and tender way in which he returns again to the memory of the past. No later than yesterday, seated in the coffee room here there came into the tap of the hotel, a poor mad highland woman. The very terms of the problem suggest the solution. To everything near at hand the author applied his own stature, as a sort of natural unit of measurement, so that the author had no actual image of their dimensions, but their ratio to myself; so, of course, as one term of the proportion changed, the other changed likewise, and as the author own height increased his notion of things near at hand became equally expanded.
