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Prose

Notes 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 crept into our reasonings on men and manners.... The
love of life is ... in general, the effect not of our enjoyments, but of our passions”.
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”. 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”. And in “On
Good-Nature”, “Good nature, or what is often considered as such, is the most selfish of all the
virtues....”
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”.
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, 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..
Though Hazlitt was still following the model of the older periodical essayists, these quirks, together
with his keen social and psychological insights, began here to coalesce into a style very much his
own.

14.2 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.
His approach was something new. There had been criticisms 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”. Somewhat loosely organised, 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.
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”.
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.

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