Liber Amoris, Or, The New Pygmalion

Excerpt from Liber Amoris or the New Pygmalion
With those critics who, because of the Liber Amoris, would rank Hazlitt with Rousseau, we cannot agree, primarily because in the "Confessions" of the latter we find, as we think, a higher and more conscious art, to say nothing of a formulation, from the experiences there narrated, of a philosophy that has had no little influence in the world. Rousseau's confession-fictions molded all his life and thoughts. Hazlitt simply wrote the story of his obsession by a nympholeptic idealization of a servant girl. He knew and yet refused wholly to admit that he was an hallucinant upon the subject. Into his rhapsodies, his rages, there entered always a sense of the fact that he was making a fool of himself. He poised, in a mental agony as real as it now appears ridiculous to us, between passion and reason. Men a thousand, as strong, as cultured, as critical as Hazlitt have had such "affairs" before and since.
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