Hazlitt, William

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote memorably that though ‘we are mighty fine fellows nowadays, we cannot write like Hazlitt’ (1881: 79), and William Hazlitt (1778–1830) is certainly among the most powerful writers of English non‐fictional prose. What is more, the subjects of his writing are dazzling in their variety. Anger (both political and personal) motivated him often – a recruiting sergeant for detractors during his lifetime and since – but so did his many enthusiasms. Excited by philosophy, he was not always the most coherent of thinkers and there are many contradictions in both his life and his work. But of all the great Romantics, William Hazlitt was perhaps the most consistent in his determination to uphold the principles of republicanism and the French Revolution, whose aftermath marked him as a very young man. He knew many of the other important figures of the time: Coleridge and Wordsworth were early acquaintances and friends; Lamb and Keats were close admirers; Hunt and Haydon were literary collaborators. But he was not a convivial man who maintained friendships easily, and although he was at the heart of English Romanticism, his work is singular and makes a part of larger trends only uneasily. Although he is arguably the period's greatest critic of art and literature as well as being a political journalist, autobiographer, philosopher, historian, lecturer, and editor, it is chiefly as an essayist that we should remember him; and in those essays, many of which aspire to the quality of lyric poems, he surely has few if any equals. The rivals, if indeed there are any, are Samuel Johnson, Matthew Arnold, and George Orwell.