Hazlitt, WILLIAM, was born at Maidstone on April 10, 1778. His father was a Unitarian clergyman who belonged to the county of Antrim. In his fifteenth year he began to study in the Unitarian College at Hackney, with the view of becoming a dissenting minister, a design which he early abandoned. In 1798 he formed the acquaintance of Coleridge, who encouraged him to compose his Essay on the Principles of Human Action ('the only thing,' he said, 'which I ever piqued myself upon writing'), which was not published, however, until 1805. For some time he endeavoured to earn a living as a portrait-painter; and, according to Northcote, would have become a great artist had he not forsaken his easel for his desk. In 1806 he published his Free Thoughts on Public Affairs, and in 1807 his Reply to the Essay on Population by the Rev. T. R. Malthus. After his marriage with Miss Stoddart in 1808 he lived at the village of Winterslow, in Wiltshire, until 1812, when he removed to York Street, Westminster, and found employment as a writer on the Morning Chronicle and Examiner. From 1814 to 1830 he contributed to the Edinburgh Review. His Round Table: a Collection of Essays on Literature, Men, and Manners, and the most popular of his works, his Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, appeared in 1817. Between 1818 and 1821 he delivered lectures at the Surrey Institute, which were afterwards published under the titles Lectures on the English Poets, on the English Comic Writers, and on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth. His marriage proved an unhappy one, and, after living for some time apart, Hazlitt and his wife were divorced in 1822. He was fond of retiring to Winterslow Hut, a coaching-house on the high-road from London to Salisbury. At this lonely inn, which stands amid bleak woods on the verge of Salisbury Plain, he wrote most of the essays which he contributed to the London Magazine, and which were afterwards republished in his Table Talk (1821) and Plain Speaker (1826). An unfortunate passion for the daughter of a tailor with whom he lodged found expression in the Liber Amoris, or the New Pygmalion (1823), a book of a strong though painful interest. In 1824 he married a lady of some means, who travelled with him to Italy, but left him, for causes which can only be conjectured, during the return journey, and never joined him again. His Selections from the English Poets and Sketches of the Principal Picture Galleries in England appeared in 1824; his Spirit of the Age, or Contemporary Portraits, which some critics consider the ripest in thought and most felicitous in style of all his works, in 1825; and his Life of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1828-30. His last years were darkened by ill-health and money difficulties. He died on September 18, 1830.
Wayward and irascible, a prey to melancholy, and too often the victim of a rash and haughty self-confidence, Hazlitt was at bottom generous, ardent, and sincere. But his defects were sharpened by unsuccess, and above all by the scurrilous malignity with which his character and his writings were traduced by hired libellers of adverse politics. The scope of his powers was never recognised by his contemporaries, though, as Thackeray has said, there were probably not in all England twelve men with powers so varied. His genius had many facets. He excelled in description and in narrative, in reflection and in critical analysis. He wrote of nature and of art and the characters of men; as a critic of the drama he has never been equalled. He was one of the deadliest controversialists, a master of epigram and burning invective and withering irony. His letter to William Gifford stands unsurpassed as an example of polished vituperation. His judgment was at times clouded by prejudice and distorted by his love of paradox. But of all the Georgian critics he was the most eloquent, the most catholic, the most thoroughly equipped. He never wrote in cold blood; he welcomed excellence everywhere. He did justice alike to the Lakers and to the Queen Anne men. He was not less discriminating than enthusiastic. His style ranges from lively gossip to glowing rhapsody; at its best it touches one of the high-water marks of English, it is at once so vigorous and so graceful, so lucid and so rich, so exquisitely apt are the epithets, so firmly built are the sentences, so noble is the rhythm of the periods. His autobiographic essays are perhaps of all his works the most delightful—stamped with the seal of truth, tremulous with pathos, and bathed in the light of poetic imagination. His writings have never gained the recognition they merit; yet, with all his defects, it would be hard to point to Hazlitt's master in all the ranks of English critics.
See G. Saintsbury's article in Macmillan's Magazine for 1887; Leslie Stephen's Hours in a Library (2d series, 1877); and Bulwer Lytton's Quarterly Essays (1875). A collection of Hazlitt's works in 7 vols.—exclusive of the Life of Napoleon—has been edited by his grandson, W. C. Hazlitt, who also wrote Memoirs of him (2 vols. 1867). Alexander Ireland issued an annotated List of his writings (1868), and an admirable selection from his writings, with a brief essay on his life and characteristics as an author (1889).