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Prose

Notes The easy life he had spoken of to Northcote had largely vanished by the time that conversation
was published about a year before his death. By then he was overwhelmed by the degradation of
poverty, frequent bouts of physical as well as mental illness—depression caused by his failure to

find find true love and by his inability to bring to fruition his defence of the man he worshipped
as a hero of liberty and fighter of despotism.
Although Hazlitt retained a few devoted admirers, his reputation among the general public had
been destroyed by the cadre of reviewers in Tory periodicals whose efforts Hazlitt had excoriated
in “On the Jealousy and the Spleen of Party”.According to John Wilson of Blackwood’s Magazine,
for example, Hazlitt had already “been excommunicated from all decent society, and nobody
would touch a dead book of his, any more than they would the body of a man who had died of the
plague”.
This dark period was marked by a stream of short articles for weekly magazines like The Atlas,
written to generate desperately needed cash. Nor has time been kind to the life of Napoleon itself.
However much Hazlitt hoped it would be his masterpiece, it was not merely a financial failure.
Although its four volumes represent his longest work, that work, as was eventually demonstrated,
is a hodge-podge of mostly borrowed materials, poorly integrated, only about a fifth consisting of
Hazlitt’s own words. Here and there, a few inspired passages stand out, such as the following:
I have nowhere in any thing I may have written declared myself to be a Republican; nor should I
think it worth while to be a martyr and a confessor to any form or mode of government. But what
I have staked health and wealth, name and fame upon, and am ready to do so again and to the last
gasp, is this, that there is a power in the people to change its government and its governors. Hazitt
managed to complete The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte shortly before his death, but did not live to
see it published in its entirety.
Last years
Plaque in Bouverie Street, London, marking the site of William Hazlitt’s house. The site of Hazlitt’s
grave in the churchyard of St Anne’s, Soho, with a new memorial commissioned following a
campaign led by Tom Paulin.

Few details remain of Hazlitt’s daily life in his last years. Much of his time was spent by choice in
the bucolic setting of Winterslow. But he needed to be in London for business reasons. There, he
seems to have exchanged visits with some of his old friends, but few details of these occasions
were recorded. Often he was seen in the company of his son and son’s fiancee. Otherwise, he
continued to produce a stream of articles to make ends meet.
In 1828, Hazlitt found work reviewing for the theatre again (for The Examiner). In playgoing he
found one of his greatest consolations. One of his most notable essays, “The Free Admission”,
arose from this experience.As he explained there, attending the theatre was not merely a great
solace in itself; the atmosphere was conducive to contemplating the past, not just memories of the
plays themselves or his reviewing of past performances, but the course of his whole life. In words
written within his last few months, the possessor of a free admission to the theatre, “ensconced in
his favourite niche, looking from the ‘loop-holes of retreat’ in the second circle ... views the
pageant of the world played before him; melts down years to moments; sees human life, like a
gaudy shadow, glance across the stage; and here tastes of all earth’s bliss, the sweet without the
bitter, the honey without the sting, and plucks ambrosial fruits and amaranthine flowers (placed
by the enchantress Fancy within his reach,) without having to pay a tax for it at the time, or
repenting of it afterwards.”
He found some time to return to his earlier philosophical pursuits, including popularised
presentations of the thoughts expressed in earlier writings. Some of these, such as meditations on
“Common Sense”, “Originality”, “The Ideal”, “Envy”, and “Prejudice”, appeared in The Atlas in
early 1830. At some point in this period he summarised the spirit and method of his life’s work as

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