William Hazlitt

William Hazlitt is the best essayist in English and was disliked by nearly everyone who knew him. He was the son of a Unitarian minister, raised in dissent and educated for a ministry he refused, and spent his twenties trying and failing to be a portrait painter - which is why he writes about pictures better than any critic of the century. He heard Coleridge preach at nineteen and walked ten miles through mud to do it, and wrote about it twenty-five years later in an essay that is the finest account of what it was like to be young in the 1790s. He then quarrelled with Coleridge and Wordsworth permanently, on the grounds that they had abandoned the revolution, and he never abandoned it: he kept a bust of Napoleon after Waterloo, when it was ridiculous to do so, and wrote a four-volume life of him. He made his living by journalism at a furious rate - theatre criticism, parliamentary sketches, The Spirit of the Age, On the Pleasure of Hating, the essay on Indian jugglers, the essay on going a journey. He also wrote a book about being rejected by his landlord's daughter, Liber Amoris, published it, and was mocked for it for the rest of his life. His prose is the reason he survived the personal wreckage. It is fast, concrete and quotable, built on short declarative sentences at a time when the fashion was for balanced periods, and it reads as though it were being spoken by someone in a temper. He married twice, divorced once under Scottish law by a procedure that required him to swear to his own adultery, and quarrelled with almost every friend he had, Lamb excepted. He died in Soho at fifty-two, owing money. His last recorded words were that he had had a happy life, which almost nobody who knew him would have guessed.

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