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William Hazlitt

William Hazlitt was born in 1778 at Maidstone. His parents were revolutionaries and intellectual deists familiar with the works of Priestley, Price and Godwin. In 1783 the family emigrated to America, but they found life there disappointing and returned to England in 1788, settling at Wem in Shropshire. Hazlitt rejected his father's wish that he should become a Unitarian Minister, but in 1798 he heard Coleridge's last sermon, which proved a turning-point in his career. Coleridge encouraged him to pursue his interest in philosophy and Hazlitt later wrote several such works, including An Essay on the Principles of Human Action (1805), An Abridgement of 'The Light of Nature pursued by Abraham Tucker' (1807) and his great attack on Malthus, A Reply to the Essay on Population (1807). Art was one of his greatest passions and his training in Paris left its mark on his writing. Unlike his literary contemporaries, such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, Hazlitt remained a radical all his life, and this commitment made him many enemies.

Much of his writing is ephemeral, but there is a body of literary and social criticism which holds an important place in English literature. A great essayist, he handled a wide range of styles, from the abstract and formal ideas in 'On Reason and Imagination' to the colloquialism of 'The Fight'. In 1812 he became Parliamentary Reporter for the Morning Chronicle and was soon filling its columns with essays on diverse subjects and brilliant accounts of the London stage.

His collected essays from the Examiner, published under the title of The Round Table, are a notable contribution to the literature of radical protest. In 1820 he began submitting essays to the London Magazine, which were to become the first volume of Table Talk (2 vols., 1821-2). In the same year he fell in love with a young girl, and this disastrous period in his life is recounted in Liber Amoris. Hazlitt recovered and began writing again, and in 1825 The Spirit of the Age was published. His last great task was The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (4 vols., 1828-30). William Hazlitt died in 1830