HAZLITT, WILLIAM (1778-1830), British literary critic and essayist, was born on April 10, 1778 at Maidstone, where his father, William Hazlitt, was minister of a Unitarian congregation. The father took the side of the Americans in their struggle with the mother-country, and during a residence at Bandon, Co. Cork, interested himself in the welfare of some American prisoners at Kinsale. In 1783 he migrated with his family to America, but in the winter of 1786-87 returned to England, and settled at Wem in Shropshire. His son William was sent in 1793 to the Hackney theological college. He returned, probably in 1794, to Wem, where he led a desultory life until 1802, and then decided to be come a portrait painter. His elder brother John was already estab lished as a miniature painter in London. In Jan. 1798 young Haz litt heard S. T. Coleridge preach at Shrewsbury. Coleridge en couraged William Hazlitt's interest in metaphysics, and in the spring of the next year Hazlitt visited Coleridge at Nether Stowey and made the acquaintance of Wordsworth. On visits to his brother in London he began his long friendship with Charles Lamb, said to have been founded on a remark of Lamb's inter polated in a discussion between Coleridge, Godwin and Holcroft, "Give me man as he is not to be." In Oct. 1802 he went to Paris to copy portraits in the Louvre, and spent four happy months in Paris. He soon found he was not likely to excel as a portrait painter ; his last portrait, one of Charles Lamb as a Venetian sen ator (now in the National Portrait Gallery), was executed in 1805. In that year he published his first book, An Essay on the Principles of Human Action . . . , which had occupied him at intervals for six or seven years. Other works followed.
In 1808 Hazlitt married Sarah Stoddart. His domestic life was unhappy. His wife was an unromantic, business-like woman, while he himself was fitful and moody, and impatient of restraint. The dissolution of the ill-assorted union was nevertheless deferred for 14 years, during which much of Hazlitt's best literary work had been produced. Mrs. Hazlitt had inherited a small estate at Winterslow near Salisbury, and here the Hazlitts lived until 1812, when they removed to 19 York street, Westminster, a house that was once Milton's. Hazlitt was parliamentary reporter and subse quently dramatic critic for the Morning Chronicle; he also con tributed to the Champion and The Times; but his closest connec tion was with the Examiner, owned by John and Leigh Hunt. In conjunction with Leigh Hunt he undertook the series of articles called The Round Table, a collection of essays on literature, men and manners which were originally contributed to the Examiner. To this time belong his View of the English Stage (1818) , and Lectures on the English Poets (i818), on the English Comic Writers (1819), and on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth (1821) . By these works, together with his Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (1817), and his Table Talk; or Original Essays on Men and Manners (1821-22), his reputation as a critic and essayist was established. Next to Coleridge, Hazlitt was perhaps the most powerful exponent of the dawning percep tion that Shakespeare's art was no less marvellous than his genius; and Hazlitt's criticism did not, like Coleridge's, remain in the con dition of a series of brilliant but fitful glimpses of insight, but was elaborated with steady care. His lectures on the Elizabethan dramatists performed a similar service for the earlier, sweeter and simpler among them, such as Dekker, till then unduly eclipsed by later writers like Massinger.
As an essayist Hazlitt is equally great. He was intensely sub jective, and the essence of his commentary, whatever the theme, is derived from himself. But Hazlitt's political sympathies and antipathies were vehement, and he had taken the unfashionable side. The Quarterly Review attacked him violently, stopped the sale of his writings for a time and blighted his credit with pub lishers. Hazlitt retaliated by his Letter to William Gifford (1819), accusing the editor of deliberate misrepresentation. In downright abuse and hard-hitting, Hazlitt proved himself more than a match even for Gifford. By the writers in Blackwood's Magazine Hazlitt was also scurrilously treated. He had become estranged from his early friends, the Lake poets, by what he uncharitably but not unnaturally regarded as their political apostasy. His inequalities of temper separated him for a time even from Leigh Hunt and Charles Lamb, and on the whole the period of his most brilliant literary success was that when he was most soured and broken. Domestic troubles supervened; he had gone to live in Southamp ton Buildings in Sept. 1819, and his marriage, long little more than nominal, was dissolved in consequence of the infatuated passion he had conceived for his landlord's daughter, Sarah Walker. His own record of the transaction, published by himself under the title of Liber Amoris, or the New Pygmalion (1823), is an unpleasant but remarkable psychological document. Later cured of his mistress, he married a widow, a Mrs. Bridgewater. They travelled on the Continent for a year but finally separated. Hazlitt's study of the Italian masters during this tour, described in a series of letters contributed to the Morning Chronicle, had a deep effect upon him, and perhaps conduced to that intimacy with the cynical old painter Northcote which, shortly after his return, engendered a curious but eminently readable volume of The Con versations of James Northcote, R.A. (183o) . The respective shares of author and artist are not always easy to determine. During the recent agitations of his life he had been writing essays, collected in 1826 under the title of The Plain Speaker: opinions on Books, Men and Things (1826). The Spirit of the Age; or Contemporary Portraits (1825), a series of criticisms on the lead ing intellectual characters of the day, is in point of style perhaps the most splendid and copious of his compositions. He now under took a work which was to have crowned his literary reputation, but which can hardly be said to have even enhanced it—The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (4 vols., 1828-3o). Owing to the failure of his publishers Hazlitt received no recompense for this laborious work. He died on Sept. 18, 183o. Charles Lamb was with him to the last.
Hazlitt's grandson, WILLIAM CAREW HAZLITT, the bibliographer, was born on Aug. 22, 1834. He was educated at the Merchant Taylors' school and was called to the bar at the Inner Temple in 1861. Among his many publications may be noted his invaluable Handbook to the Popular Poetical and Dramatic Literature of Great Britain, from the Invention of Printing to the Restoration (1867), supplemented in 1876, 1882, 1887 and 1889, a General In dex by J. G. Gray appearing in 1893. He published further contri butions to the subject in Bibliographical Collections and Notes on Early English Literature made during the years (I ) and a Manual for the Collector and Amateur of Old English Plays . . . (1892). He was the chief editor of the useful 1871 edition of Warton's History of English Poetry, and compiled the Cata logue of the Huth Library (188o) . He died in 1913.
The list of the first William Hazlitt's works also includes: Political Essays, with Sketches of Public Characters (1819) ; Sketches of the Principal Picture Galleries in England . . . (1824) ; Characteristics; in the Manner of Rochefoucauld's Maxims (1823) ; Select Poets of Great Britain: to which are prefixed Critical Notices of each Author (1825) ; Notes of a Journey through France and Italy . . . (1826) ; The Life of Titian; with Anecdotes of the Distinguished Persons of his Time (183o), nominally by James Northcote ; an article on the "Fine Arts" contributed to the seventh edition of the Encyclopcedia Britannica; and posthumous collections made by his son.
The Collected Works of William Hazlitt (12 vols., 1902-04), ed. A. R. Waller and A. Glover, with introd. by W. E. Henley, does not include the life of Napoleon. There are many modern reprints of isolated works. The most copious source of information respecting Hazlitt is the Memoirs of William Hazlitt, with Portions of his Correspondence (2 vols., 1867), by his grandson. W. C. Hazlitt, a medley rather than a memoir, yet full of interest. There is an excellent monograph on William Hazlitt (i9o2) by Augustine Birrell, in the "English Men of Letters" series, and one in French by J. Douady (1907) , who also published a bibliography of his works. See also P. P. Howe, Life of William Hazlitt (i922). Valuable biographical particulars have been preserved in P. G. Patmore, My Friends and Acquaintances (1854) ; in Crabb Robinson's Diary; in Lamb's cor respondence; and in W. C. Hazlitt, Lamb and Hazlitt (Iwo). A full bibliographical list of his writings, with a collection of the most remarkable critical judgments upon them from all quarters, was pre pared by Alexander Ireland (1868) . Further information on the Haz litt family is to be found in W. C. Hazlitt, Four Generations of a Lit erary Family (2 vols., 1897) .