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A lively, wide-ranging collection of writing by nineteenth-century luminary William Hazlitt—a pioneering art and theatre critic, a radical political commentator, and one of the English language’s greatest essayists.
“I am no politician, and still less can I be said to be a party-man: but I have a hatred of tyranny, and a contempt for its tools; and this feeling I have expressed as often and as strongly as I could. I cannot sit quietly down under the claims of barefaced power, and I have tried to expose the little arts of sophistry by which they are defended.”
Of the great writers of the English Romantic age, William Hazlitt comes closest to the modern sensibility. A dissident in politics, a radical commentator on the discontents of the Regency years, he was also an admired theatre and art critic, and a generous appreciator of the new poetry of Wordsworth, Keats, and others.
David Bromwich—the author of Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic—has selected the best of Hazlitt’s essays to represent the continuous strength and inventiveness of his prose. This volume includes familiar essays such as “On the Pleasure of Painting” and “On the Pleasure of Hating,” as well as Hazlitt’s memoir of his early encounters with Coleridge and Wordsworth, “My First Acquaintance with Poets.” Here, too, are his inimitable sketches of Shakespeare’s characters, and sharply rendered portraits of contemporaries such as Jeremy Bentham, William Godwin, Sir Walter Scott, and Lord Byron.
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William Hazlitt (1778–1830) is widely regarded as one of the greatest essayists in the English language, known for his art and literary criticism and his radical political commentary. Also an accomplished painter, Hazlitt befriended many other prominent nineteenth-century figures during his life, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, John Keats, and Stendhal. Among his most admired works are the collections Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, Table-Talk, and The Spirit of the Age.
David Bromwich is Sterling Professor of English at Yale University. His books include Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic, Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s, The Intellectual Career of Edmund Burke, and, most recently, American Breakdown: The Trump Years and How They Befell Us. He edited the anthology Writing Politics for NYRB Classics in 2020.
