Hazlitt, William

William Hazlitt
A self-portrait from about 1802
Born	10 April 1778(1778-04-10) Maidstone, Kent, England
Died	18 September 1830(1830-09-18) (aged 52) Soho, London, England
Occupation	Essayist, literary critic, painter, philosopher
Notable work(s)	Characters of Shakespear's Plays, Table Talk, The Spirit of the Age, On the Pleasure of Hating, Notes Of A Journey Through France And Italy, The Plain Speaker
Influences Rembrandt, George Berkeley, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Edmund Burke, Joseph Fawcett, William Cobbett, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Influenced John Keats, Stendhal

William Hazlitt (10 April 1778 – 18 September 1830) was an English writer, remembered for his humanistic essays and literary criticism, and as a grammarian and philosopher. He is now considered one of the great critics and essayists of the English language,^[1][2] placed in the company of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell.^[3][4] Yet his work is currently little-read and mostly out of print.^[5][6] During his lifetime he befriended many people who are now part of the 19th-century literary canon, including Charles and Mary Lamb, Stendhal, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth.

[edit] Life and works

[edit] Background

Hazlitt's father's family were Irish Protestants who moved from the county of Antrim to Tipperary in the early 18th century. His father, also named William Hazlitt, attended the University of Glasgow (where he was taught by Adam Smith),^[7] receiving a master's degree in 1760. Not entirely content with his Presbyterian faith, he became a Unitarian minister in England. In 1764 he became pastor at Wisbech in Cambridgeshire, where in 1766 he married Grace Loftus, daughter of a recently deceased ironmonger. Of their many children, only three survived infancy. The first of these, John (later known as a portrait painter) was born in 1767 at Marshfield in Gloucestershire, where the Reverend William Hazlitt had accepted a new pastorate after his marriage. In 1770, the elder Hazlitt accepted yet another position and moved with his family to Maidstone, Kent, where his first and only surviving daughter, Margaret (usually known as "Peggy"), was born that year.^[8]

[edit] Childhood

House in Wem, Shropshire where William Hazlitt and his family lived between 1787 and 1813

Stone plaque above the front door of William Hazlitt's former family home in Wem

William, the youngest of the surviving Hazlitt children, was born in Mitre Lane, Maidstone, in 1778. In 1780, when he was two, his family began a migratory existence that was to last several years. From Maidstone his father took them to Bandon, County Cork, Ireland; and from Bandon in 1783 to the United States, where Mr. Hazlitt preached, lectured, and founded the First Unitarian Church at Boston. In 1786–87 the family returned to England and lived at Wem, in Shropshire. William would remember little of his years in America, save the taste of barberries.^[9]

[edit] Education

Hazlitt was educated at home and at a local school until 1793, when his father sent him to a Unitarian seminary on what was then the outskirts of London, the Unitarian New College at Hackney (commonly referred to as Hackney College).^[10] Although Hazlitt stayed there for only about two years,^[11] its impact was enormous.

The curriculum at Hackney included a grounding in the Greek and Latin classics, mathematics, and, of course, religion. Much of this was traditional; however, the tutelage having been strongly influenced by eminent Dissenting thinkers of the day like Richard Price and Joseph Priestley,^[12] there was also much that was nonconformist. Priestley, whom Hazlitt had read and who was also one of his teachers, was an impassioned commentator on political issues of the day. This, along with the turmoil in the wake of the French Revolution, sparked in Hazlitt and his classmates lively debates on these issues, as they saw their world being transformed around them.^[13]

Changes were taking place within the young Hazlitt as well. While, out of respect for his father, Hazlitt never openly broke with his religion, he suffered a loss of faith, and left Hackney before completing his preparation for the ministry.^[14]

Although he rejected the Unitarian theology,^[15] Hazlitt's time at Hackney left him with much more than religious skepticism. He had read widely and formed habits of independent thought and respect for the truth that remained with him for life.^[16] He had thoroughly absorbed a belief in liberty and the rights of man, and of the mind as an active force which, by disseminating knowledge, through both the sciences and the arts, could reinforce the natural tendency in humanity toward the good. He had had impressed upon him the ability of the individual, working both alone and within a mutually supportive community, to effect beneficial change by adhering to strongly held principles. The belief of many Unitarian thinkers in the natural disinterestedness of the human mind had also laid a foundation for the young Hazlitt's own philosophical explorations along those lines. And, though harsh experience and disillusionment later compelled him to qualify some of his early ideas about human nature, he was left with a hatred of tyranny and persecution that he retained to his last days.^[17]

[edit] The young philosopher

Returning home, around 1795, his thoughts were directed in more secular channels, encompassing not only politics but, increasingly, modern philosophy, which he had begun to read with fascination at Hackney. He spent much of his time in intensive study of English, Scottish, and Irish thinkers like John Locke, David Hartley, George Berkeley, and David Hume, and French thinkers like Claude Adrien Helvétius, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, the Marquis de Condorcet, and Baron d'Holbach.^[18] From then on Hazlitt's goal was to become a philosopher. His thoughts were focused on man as a social and political animal, and, even more intensely, on the philosophy of mind, what would later be called psychology.

In this period he discovered Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who became one of the most important influences on the budding philosopher's thought, and Edmund Burke, whose writing style impressed him enormously.^[19] He was painstakingly working out a treatise on the "natural disinterestedness of the human mind",^[20] meant to disprove the idea that man is naturally selfish, a fundamental concept in most of the philosophy of the day.^[21] Hazlitt's treatise would not be published for a number of years, after further reading, and after other changes had occurred to alter the course of his career, but to the end of his life he would think of himself as a philosopher.^[22]

Around 1796, Hazlitt was encouraged and inspired by a retired clergyman who had become a reformer of note, Joseph Fawcett. Hazlitt was awed by the enormous breadth of Fawcett's tastes. From Fawcett, in the words of biographer Ralph Wardle, he imbibed a love for "good fiction and impassioned writing," Fawcett being "a man of keen intelligence who did not scorn the products of the imagination or apologize for his tastes." They discussed the radical thinkers of their day, and, important for understanding the breadth and depth of Hazlitt's own taste in his later critical writings, everything literary from John Milton's Paradise Lost to Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy.^[23]

Somewhat earlier, he had also met William Godwin, the reformist thinker whose Political Justice took the thinking world by storm at this time. Hazlitt was never to feel entirely in sympathy with Godwin's philosophy, but it gave him much food for thought.^[24]

Besides residing with his father while trying to find his voice and work out his thoughts as a philosopher, he often in these years stayed with his older brother John, who had studied under Joshua Reynolds and was following a career as a portrait painter. He also spent delighted evenings at the theatre in London then,^[25] but did not yet know how this too would be important to his later writing. Mostly at this time he led a contemplative existence, still feeling frustrated in being unable to express on paper the thoughts and feelings that churned within him.^[26] The course of this existence was now to be interrupted by the single event that, with its aftermath, had an impact on his career greater than any other.

[edit] "First acquaintance with poets"

In January 1798, Hazlitt encountered, preaching at the Unitarian chapel in Shrewsbury, the minister Samuel Taylor Coleridge, soon much better known as a poet, critic, and philosopher. He was dazzled. "I could not have been more delighted if I had heard the music of the spheres", he wrote years later in his essay "My First Acquaintance with Poets".^[27] "Poetry and Philosophy had met together. Truth and Genius had embraced, under the eye and with the sanction of religion."

Later still, long after they had parted ways, Hazlitt would speak of Coleridge as "the only person I ever knew who answered to the idea of a man of genius."^[28] That Hazlitt learned to express his thoughts "in motley imagery or quaint allusion," that his understanding "ever found a language to express itself, I owe to Coleridge", he later wrote.^[29] In conversation afterwards, Coleridge for his part expressed interest in the younger man's germinating philosophical ideas and offered encouragement.

In April he joined Coleridge at his residence in Nether Stowey, where they both spent time with the poet William Wordsworth. Again, Hazlitt was enraptured. While he was not immediately struck by Wordsworth's appearance, when he observed the look in Wordsworth's eye as he contemplated a sunset, he reflected, "With what eyes these poets see nature!" When he read his poetry he realized that this was something entirely new, and he began to see that Wordsworth's was the mind of a true poet. At that time, the three shared a passion for the ideas of liberty and rights of man. They tramped back and forth across the countryside, talking of poetry, philosophy, and the political movements that were changing the earth. This unity of spirit was not to last, but it gave Hazlitt, just twenty years old, validation of the idea that there is much to be learned and appreciated in poetry as well as the philosophy to which he was already devoted, and the encouragement to pursue his own thinking and writing.^[30]

[edit] The itinerant painter

Meanwhile, the fact remained that Hazlitt had chosen not to follow a pastoral career. Although he never abandoned his goal of writing a philosophical treatise on the disinterestedness of the human mind, it had to be put aside indefinitely. Still dependent on his father, he was now obliged to earn his own living. Artistic talent seemed to run on his mother's side of the family. Starting in 1798 he became increasingly fascinated by paintings. His brother, John, had by now become a successful painter of miniature portraits. So it occurred to William that he might earn a living similarly, and he began to take lessons from John.^[31]

Hazlitt also visited various picture galleries, and he began to get work doing portraits, painting somewhat in the style of Rembrandt.^[32] And so he managed to make something of a living for a time, travelling back and forth between London and the country, wherever he could get work. By 1802, his work was considered good enough that a portrait he had recently painted of his father was accepted for exhibition by the Royal Academy.^[33]

Later in 1802, Hazlitt was commissioned to travel to Paris and copy several works of the old masters hanging in the Louvre. This was one of the great opportunities of his life. Over a period of three months, he spent long hours in rapture studying the paintings. He later thought long and hard about what he had seen, and this provided substance for a considerable body of art criticism some years afterward. He also had an opportunity to see Napoleon (at a distance), whom he idolized as the rescuer of the common man from the oppression of royal "Legitimacy".^[34] Eighteen years later, Hazlitt reviewed nostalgically the "pleasure in painting, which none but painters know", and all the delight he found in this art, in his essay "On the Pleasure of Painting".^[35]

Back in England, Hazlitt again travelled up into the country, having obtained more work painting portraits. One commission again proved fortunate, as it brought him back in touch with Coleridge and Wordsworth. He painted portraits of both, as well as of Coleridge's son Hartley. Always endeavouring to paint the best pictures he could, even if they failed to flatter their subjects, he produced results not found satisfactory by either poet. (And yet Wordsworth and their friend Robert Southey thought his portrait of Coleridge a better likeness than one by the celebrated James Northcote.)^[36]

In this period also a mishap occurred that shadowed his life for many years. The young Hazlitt rarely felt comfortable in the society of women, especially those of the upper and middle classes. Tormented by sexual desires, he sought the company of prostitutes and "loose women" of lower social and economic strata. During his last stay in the Lake District with Coleridge, his actions led to a near disastrous blunder, as a misunderstanding of the intentions of one local woman led to an altercation, followed by Hazlitt's precipitous retreat from the town under cover of darkness. This strained his relationship with Coleridge and Wordsworth, which was already coming apart at the seams for other reasons.^[37]

[edit] Marriage, family, and friends

In 1803, Hazlitt met Charles Lamb and his sister Mary. There was an immediate sympathy between William and Charles, and they became fast friends. The friendship, though sometimes strained by Hazlitt's difficult ways, lasted until the end of Hazlitt's life.^[38] He was fond of Mary as well, and—ironically in view of her intermittent fits of insanity—he considered her the most reasonable woman he had ever met.^[39] (Coming from one whose view of women at times took a misogynistic turn,^[40] this was high praise indeed.)

Portrait of Charles Lamb by William Hazlitt, 1804

Hazlitt frequented the society of the Lambs for the next several years. He was not getting much work as a painter, but now he finally found the opportunity to complete his philosophical treatise, which was published in 1805 as An Essay on the Principles of Human Action: Being an Argument in favour of the Natural Disinterestedness of the Human Mind. This gained him little notice as an original thinker, and no money. Hazlitt's outrage at events then taking place in English politics in reaction to Napoleon's wars led to his writing and publishing, at his own expense (though he had almost no money), a political pamphlet, Free Thoughts on Public Affairs (1806). Finally, he began to find enough work to support himself, if just barely. Although the treatise he valued above anything else he wrote was never, at least in his own lifetime, recognized for what he believed was its true worth, it brought him attention as one who had a grasp of contemporary philosophy. He therefore was commissioned to abridge and write a preface to a now obscure work of mental philosophy, The Light of Nature Pursued by Abraham Tucker (originally published in seven volumes from 1765 to 1777), which appeared in 1807^[41] and may have had some influence on his own later thinking.^[42]

Hazlitt also contributed three letters to William Cobbett's Weekly Political Register at this time, scathing critiques of Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population (1798 and later editions). Another project that came his way was a compilation of parliamentary speeches, released in 1807 as The Eloquence of the British Senate. In the prefaces to the speeches, he began to show a skill he would later develop to perfection, the art of the pithy character sketch. He was able to get more work as a portrait painter as well.^[43]

In 1808, Hazlitt married Sarah Stoddart, a friend of Mary Lamb's and sister of John Stoddart. Although incompatibilities would later drive the couple apart, at first the union seemed to work well enough. Miss Stoddart was an unconventional woman who would be accepted by one as unconventional in his way as Hazlitt, and would in turn tolerate his eccentricities. It was hardly a match of love, but at first there were signs of a certain playful, affectionate behaviour between them. They made an agreeable social foursome with the Lambs, who visited them when they set up a household in Winterslow, a village a few miles from Salisbury, Wiltshire, in southern England. The couple had three sons over the next few years, but only one who survived infancy, William, born in 1811 (to be the father of William Carew Hazlitt).^[44]

Now, as the head of a family, Hazlitt was more than ever in need of money. Through William Godwin, with whom he was frequently in touch, he obtained a commission to write an English grammar, published at the end of 1809 as A New and Improved Grammar of the English Tongue. Another project that came his way was the work that was published as Memoirs of the Late Thomas Holcroft, a compilation of autobiographical writing by the recently deceased playwright, novelist, and radical political activist, together with additional material by Hazlitt himself. Though completed in 1810, this work did not see the light of day until 1816, and so provided no financial gain to satisfy the needs of a young husband and father. But Hazlitt had not abandoned his ambitions as a painter. He found opportunities for landscape painting in the environs of Winterslow, and he spent considerable time in London getting commissions for portraits.^[45]

In January 1812 Hazlitt embarked on a sometime career as a lecturer, in this first instance in a series of talks on the British philosophers, at the Russell Institution in London. A central thesis of the talks was that Thomas Hobbes, rather than John Locke, had laid the foundations of modern philosophy. After a shaky beginning, Hazlitt gained some attention (as well as much-needed money) by these lectures, and they gave him an opportunity to expound some of his own ideas.^[46]

The year 1812 also seems to have been the last in which Hazlitt entertained serious ambitions to make a living as a painter. Although he had demonstrated some talent, the results of his most impassioned efforts never failed to fall far short of the standards he had set for himself by comparison with such masters as Rembrandt, Titian, and Raphael. Nor did his commissioned portraits often please their subjects, as he obstinately refused to sacrifice to flattery what he considered truth.^[47]

But other opportunities awaited him.

[edit] The journalist

In October 1812, Hazlitt was hired by The Morning Chronicle as a parliamentary reporter. Soon he met John Hunt, publisher of The Examiner, and his younger brother Leigh Hunt, the poet and essayist, who edited the weekly paper. Hazlitt admired both as champions of liberty, and befriended especially the younger Hunt, who found work for him. He began to contribute miscellaneous essays to The Examiner in 1813, and the scope of his work for the Chronicle was expanded to include drama criticism, literary criticism, and political essays. In 1814 The Champion was added to the list of periodicals that accepted Hazlitt's by-now profuse output of literary and political criticism. A critique of Joshua Reynolds' theories about art appeared there as well, one of Hazlitt's major forays into art criticism.^[48]

Having by 1814 become established as a journalist, Hazlitt had begun to earn a satisfactory living. A year earlier, with the prospect of a steady income, he had moved his family to a house at 19 York Street, Westminster, which had been occupied by the poet John Milton, whom Hazlitt admired above all other English poets except Shakespeare. As it happened, Hazlitt's landlord was the philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham. Hazlitt was to write considerably about both Milton and Bentham over the next few years.^[49]

His circle of friends expanded, though he never seems to have been particularly close with any but the Lambs and to an extent Leigh Hunt and the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon. His poor tolerance for any who, he thought, had abandoned the cause of liberty, along with his frequent outspokenness, even tactlessness, in social situations made it difficult for many to feel close to him, and at times he tried the patience of even Charles Lamb.^[50] His criticism of Wordsworth's poem The Excursion lavished extreme praise on the poet—and equally extreme censure. Wordsworth, who seems to have been unable to tolerate anything less than unqualified praise, was enraged, and relations between the two became cooler than ever.^[51]

Though Hazlitt continued to think of himself as a "metaphysician" (less often as a painter; he had by now given up his professional ambitions along those lines), he began to feel comfortable in the role of journalist. His self-esteem received an added boost when in early 1815 he began to contribute regularly to the quarterly The Edinburgh Review, the most distinguished periodical on the Whig side of the political fence (its rival The Quarterly Review occupied the Tory side). Writing for so highly respected a publication was considered a major step up from writing for weekly papers, and Hazlitt was proud of this connection.^[52]

On June 18, 1815, Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo. Having idolized Napoleon for years, Hazlitt took it as a personal blow. The event seemed to him to mark the end of hope for the common man against the oppression of "legitimate" monarchy.^[53] Profoundly depressed, he took up heavy drinking and was reported to have walked around unshaven and unwashed for weeks.^[54] He idolized and spoiled his son, William Jr., but in most respects his household grew increasingly disordered over the next year, his marriage deteriorated, and he spent more and more time away from home. As a part-time drama critic, he found an excuse to spend evening after evening at the theatre. Afterwards he spent time among those friends who could tolerate his irascibility, the number of whom dwindled as a result of his sometimes outrageous behaviour.^[55]

Hazlitt continued to produce articles on miscellaneous topics for The Examiner and other periodicals, including political diatribes against any whom he felt ignored or minimized the needs and rights of the common man. Defection from the cause of liberty had become easier in light of the oppressive political atmosphere in England at that time, in reaction to the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Opposing this tendency, the Hunts were his primary allies. Lamb, who tried to remain uninvolved politically, tolerated his abrasiveness, and that friendship managed to survive, if only just barely in the face of Hazlitt's growing bitterness, short temper, and propensity for hurling invective at friends and foes alike.^[56]

For relief from all that weighed on his mind, Hazlitt became a passionate player at a kind of racquet ball similar to the game of Fives (a type of handball of which he was a fan) in that it was played against a wall. He played with savage intensity, dashing around the court like a madman, drenched in sweat, and was accounted a good player. More than just a distraction from his woes, this devotion led to musings on the value of competitive sports and on human skill in general, expressed in writings like his notice of the "Death of John Cavanagh" (a celebrated Fives player) in The Examiner on February 9, 1817, and the essay "The Indian Jugglers" in Table-Talk (1821).^[57]

Early in 1817, a series of Hazlitt's essays that had appeared in The Examiner in a regular column called "The Round Table" was collected in book form, including a few contributions by Leigh Hunt. Hazlitt's contributions to The Round Table were written somewhat in the manner of the periodical essays of the day, a genre defined by such eighteenth-century magazines as The Tatler and The Spectator.^[58]

The range of topics typified his output in succeeding years: Shakespeare ("On the Midsummer Night's Dream"), Milton ("On Milton's Lycidas"), art criticism ("On Hogarth's Marriage a-la-mode"), aesthetics ("On Beauty"), drama criticism ("On Mr. Kean's Iago"; Hazlitt was the first critic to champion the acting talent of Edmund Kean),^[59] social criticism ("On the Tendency of Sects", "On the Causes of Methodism", "On Different Sorts of Fame").

There was an article on The Tatler itself. Mostly his political commentary was reserved for other vehicles, but included was a "Character of the Late Mr. Pitt", a scathing characterisation of the recently deceased former Prime Minister. Written in 1806, Hazlitt liked it well enough to have already had it printed twice before (and it would appear again in a collection of political essays in 1819).

Some essays blend Hazlitt's social and psychological observations in a way calculatedly thought-provoking, presenting to the reader the "paradoxes" of human nature.^[60] The first of the collected essays, "On the Love of Life", explains, "It is our intention, in the course of these papers, occasionally to expose certain vulgar errors, which have kept into our reasonings on men and manners.... The love of life is ... in general, the effect not of our enjoyments, but of our passions".^[61]

Again, in "On Pedantry", Hazlitt declares that "The power of attaching an interest to the most trifling or painful pursuits ... is one of the greatest happinesses of our nature".^[62] In "On Different Sorts of Fame", "In proportion as men can command the immediate and vulgar applause of others, they become indifferent to that which is remote and difficult of attainment".^[63] And in "On Good-Nature", "Good nature, or what is often considered as such, is the most selfish of all the virtues...."^[64]

Many of the components of Hazlitt's style begin to take shape in these Round Table essays. Some of his "paradoxes" are so hyperbolic as to shock when encountered out of context: "All country people hate each other", for example, from the second part of "On Mr. Wordsworth's Excursion".^[65] He interweaves quotations from literature old and new. They help drive his points home, and (as some critics have felt) he used quotations as a device as well as anyone ever has,^[66] yet all too often he gets the quotes wrong. In one of his essays on Wordsworth he misquotes that very poet:

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of glory in the grass, of splendour in the flower....^[67]

(See Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.)

Though Hazlitt was still following the model of the older periodical essayists,^[68] these quirks, together with his keen social and psychological insights, began here to coalesce into a style very much his own.^[69]

[edit] Success—and trouble

In this period, the state of Hazlitt's marriage continued its downward spiral; he was writing furiously for several periodicals to make ends meet; waiting so far in vain for the collection The Round Table to be issued as a book (which it finally was in February 1817); suffering bouts of illness; and making enemies by his venomous political diatribes. He found relief by a change of course, shifting his critical focus from the acting of Shakespeare's plays to the substance of them. The result was Characters of Shakespear's Plays (1817), a collection of critical essays on the drama of William Shakespeare.^[70]

His approach was something new. There had been critics of Shakespeare before, but either they were not comprehensive or they were not aimed at the general reading public. As Ralph Wardle put it, before Hazlitt wrote this book, "no one had ever attempted a comprehensive study of all of Shakespeare, play by play, that readers could read and reread with pleasure as a guide to their understanding and appreciation".^[71] Somewhat loosely organized, and even rambling, the studies offer personal appreciations of the plays that are unashamedly enthusiastic. Hazlitt does not present a measured account of the plays' strengths and weaknesses, as did Dr. Johnson, or view them in terms of a "mystical" theory, as Hazlitt thought his contemporary A.W. Schlegel did (though he approves of many of Schlegel's judgements and quotes him liberally). Without apology, he addresses his readers as fellow lovers of Shakespeare and shares with them the beauties of what he thought the finest passages of the plays he liked best.^[72]

Readers took to it, the first edition selling out in six weeks. It received favourable reviews as well, not only by Leigh Hunt, a close friend who might have shown bias, but by Francis Jeffrey, the editor of The Edinburgh Review, a notice that Hazlitt greatly appreciated. (Hazlitt had contributed to that quarterly, had exchanged business correspondence with Jeffrey, and held him in great respect, but they had never met and were in no sense personal friends.) Jeffrey saw the book not as a learned study of Shakespeare's plays but rather as a loving appreciation of them, and an insightful and eloquent one at that, "a book of considerable originality and genius".^[73]

Now looking at the prospect of being out of debt, and enjoying critical and popular acclaim, Hazlitt could relax a bit and bask in the light of his growing fame.^[74]

Meanwhile, however, Hazlitt's reputation in literary circles had become tarnished, apparently by retaliatory rumours spread by such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, whom he had continued to criticize openly for their personal failings in contrast to their earlier actual or potential accomplishments.^[75] And the worst was yet to come.

But Hazlitt soon found a new source of satisfaction, along with escape from his financial woes, in a return to the lecture hall. In early 1818 he delivered a series of talks on "the English Poets", from Chaucer to his own time. His presentation was uneven in quality, but ultimately the lectures were judged a success. In making the arrangements for the lectures, he also met Peter George Patmore, Secretary of the Surrey Institution, where the lectures were presented, and soon to become a friend and confidant of Hazlitt's in the most troubled period of the latter's life.^[76]

The Surrey Institution lectures were printed in book form, followed by a collection of his drama criticism, A View of the English Stage, and the second edition of Characters of Shakespear's Plays.^[77] Hazlitt's career as a lecturer gained some momentum, and his growing popularity allowed him to get a collection of his political writings published as well, Political Essays, with Sketches of Public Characters.^[78] Lectures on "the English Comic Writers" soon followed, and these as well were published in book form.^[79] After them came lectures on dramatists who were Shakespeare's contemporaries, published as Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth. The latter did not go over so well as lectures, but were reviewed enthusiastically after they were published.^[80]

More trouble was brewing, however. Hazlitt was attacked brutally in the Tory The Quarterly Review, and Blackwood's Magazine. One Blackwood's article mocked him as "pimpled Hazlitt", accused him of ignorance, dishonesty, and obscenity, and incorporated vague physical threats. Though Hazlitt was rattled by these attacks, he sought legal advice and sued. The lawsuit against Blackwood's was finally settled out of court in his favour.^[81] Yet the attacks did not entirely cease. The Quarterly Review issued a review of Hazlitt's published lectures in which he was condemned as ignorant and his writing as unintelligible. Such partisan onslaughts brought spirited responses. One, unlike an earlier response to the Blackwood's attack that never saw the light of day, was published, as A Letter to William Gifford, Esq. (1819; Gifford was the editor of the Quarterly). (Among other things, this pamphlet was notable for Hazlitt's use of the term "ultracrepidarian", which he might have coined; see Ultracrepidarianism.) In this pamphlet Hazlitt presented what amounted to an apologia for his life and work thus far and showed he was well able to defend himself.^[82] Yet Hazlitt's attackers had done their damage. Not only was he personally shaken, he found it more difficult to have his works published, and once more he had to struggle for a living.^[83]

[edit] Solitude and infatuation

His lecturing in particular had drawn to Hazlitt a small group of admirers. Best known today is the poet John Keats,^[84] but there were others, such as the diarist and chronicler Henry Crabb Robinson^[85] and the novelist Mary Russell Mitford.^[86] But the rumours that had been spread demonizing him, along with the vilifications of the Tory press, not only hurt his pride but seriously obstructed his ability to earn a living. Income from his lectures had also proved insufficient to keep him afloat.

His thoughts drifted to gloom and misanthropy. His mood was not improved by the fact that by now there was no pretense of keeping up appearances: his marriage had failed. Years earlier he had grown resigned to the lack of love between him and Sarah. He had been visiting prostitutes and displayed more idealized amorous inclinations toward a number of women whose names are lost to history. Now in 1819, he was unable to pay the rent on their rooms at 19 York Street and his family were evicted. That was the last straw for Sarah, who moved into rooms with their son and broke with Hazlitt for good, forcing him to find his own accommodations. He would sometimes see his son and even his wife, with whom he remained on speaking terms, but they were effectively separated.^[87]

For long periods, for solace and so he could concentrate on his writing, he frequently retreated to the country, staying at "The Hut", an inn at Winterslow, near where his wife had some property (he had come to love that countryside at the beginning of his marriage). He shut himself away like a hermit and returned to contributing to periodicals, including the recently reestablished (1820) London Magazine, to which he contributed drama criticism and miscellaneous essays.^[88]

Roman road towards Middle Winterslow.

One idea that particularly bore fruit was that of a series of articles called "Table-Talk". (Many were written expressly for inclusion in the book of the same name, Table-Talk; or, Original Essays, which appeared in different editions and forms over the next few years.) These were essays in the "familiar style" of the sort that had begun with Montaigne two centuries earlier, and wer