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Prose

Notes masters as Raphael and Leonardo, whose technique he adopted. Commissioned by Coleridge and
William Wordsworth to paint their portraits, Hazlitt spent the summer of 1803 at their homes in
the Lake District. His political views and quarrelsome nature, however, offended the poets.
Moreover, his moral conduct was suspect, and his friendship with them ended when he was
forced to leave the Lake District in fear of reprisals for his assault on a woman. As a painter,
Hazlitt achieved little success. He moved to London in 1804 and began to direct his energies
toward writing.
In London Hazlitt became a close friend of Charles and Mary Lamb, at whose weekly social
gatherings he became acquainted with literary society. Through the Lambs he also met Sarah
Stoddart, whom he married in 1808. During this time Hazlitt wrote philosophical works that were
criticized for their dense prose style. In 1811 Hazlitt began working as a journalist; he held the
positions of parliamentary correspondent for the Morning Chronicle, drama critic and political
essayist for Leigh Hunt’s Examiner, and columnist for the Edinburgh Review. The liberal political
views expressed in Hazlitt’s writing incurred resentment from the editors of and contributors to
Tory journals such as Blackwood’s Magazine and the Quarterly Review, who attacked Hazlitt’s works
and his character. In 1818 Hazlitt published a collection of his lectures on English literature and in
1822 John Scott of the London Magazine invited him to contribute essays to a feature entitled
“Table-Talk.” The reflective pieces he wrote were well received and are now among Hazlitt’s most
acclaimed works. During this period of success, however, Hazlitt’s marriage was failing and he
became involved in an unfortunate affair with the daughter of an innkeeper. He chronicled his
obsession with this young woman in Liber Amoris; or, the New Pygmalion (1823). After a divorce
from his wife, Hazlitt entered into a second unsuccessful marriage with a rich widow. He continued
to write until his death in 1830, producing numerous essays, a series of sketches on the leading
men of letters of the early nineteenth century entitled The Spirit of the Age (1825), and a biography
of Napoleon Bonaparte (1826-30).

18.2 Major Works

Hazlitt’s most important works are often divided into two categories: literary criticism and familiar
essays. Of his literary criticism Hazlitt wrote, “I say what I think: I think what I feel. I cannot help
receiving certain impressions from things; and I have sufficient courage to declare (somewhat
abruptly) what they are.” Representative of his critical style is Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays
(1817), which contains subjective, often panegyrical commentary on such individual characters as
Macbeth, Othello, and Hamlet. This work introduces Hazlitt’s concept of “gusto,” a term he used
to refer to qualities of passion and energy that he considered necessary to great art. In accord with
his impressionistic approach to literature, Hazlitt’s concept of gusto also suggests that a passionate
and energetic response is the principal criterion for gauging whether or not a work achieves
greatness. Hazlitt felt that Shakespeare’s sonnets lacked gusto and judged them as passionless and
unengaging despite the “desperate cant of modern criticism.” Hazlitt was no less opinionated on
the works of his contemporaries. In the final section of Lectures on the English Poets (1812) he
criticized Coleridge and Wordsworth, whose emphasis on nature and the common aspects of life
acknowledged, in his view, “no excellence but that which supports its own pretensions.” In addition
to literature, Hazlitt also focused on drama and art in his critical essays, many of which are
collected in A View of the English Stage (1818) and Sketches of the Principal Picture-Galleries in England
(1824).
The many and varied familiar essays that Hazlitt wrote for magazine publication and collected in
the volumes of The Round Table, Table-Talk, and The Plain Speaker are usually considered his finest
works. Critics differentiate between the essays of The Round Table and those in Table-Talk and The
Plain Speaker: the former contain observations on “Literature, Men, and Manners” in a style that
tends to imitate the essays of Addison and Montaigne, while the latter focus on Hazlitt’s personal

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