ABSTRACT
Hazlitt, Table Talk (1821-22); review by Eyre Evans Crowe, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, XII (Aug. 1822), 157-166. Crowe (1799-1868), a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, became known as a historian after a career as a journalist and novelist. Now that Keats was dead and Hunt had been driven into exile, Hazlitt had become the chief target of “Maga.” Crowe’s onslaught is effective partly because his charges contain more than a grain of truth; Hazlitt had become disillusioned and embittered by this date. Yet the success of the article depends chiefly on rhetorical tricks and argumentum ad hominem. Noteworthy is the statement (p. 162) that John Clare, Allan Cunningham, and James Hogg would never have been noticed as poets, had they not been peasants. Hogg, of course, had been one of the moving spirits behind “Maga.” “Ebony” (p. 166) is, of course, William Blackwood himself.
