"The New-Invented Patent-Lamp of Etymology": Hazlitt, Horne Tooke, and the Philosophy of Language

This article considers the way in which particular trends in eighteenth-century philology and philosophy were reassessed and re-evaluated in the early nineteenth century, and the main focus falls upon William Hazlitt's various responses to the linguistic theorizing of well-known political radical John Horne Tooke. The primary intention is to elucidate the manner in which some of Hazlitt's linguistic and philosophical preoccupations developed in direct response to particular dominant trends in late eighteenth-century philological thought, and it will be argued that, although he sometimes appears to express contradictory views concerning the work of Horne Tooke, a careful assessment of his writings suggests that he consistently responded to the latter's etymological speculations in a coherent, if complex, manner.