Volume 31, Number 8 · May 10, 1984
The Keenest Critic
By M.H. Abrams
Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic
by David Bromwich
Oxford University Press, 450 pp., $35.00
William Hazlitt at first planned to follow his father into the Unitarian ministry, became instead a painter of portraits, then turned to writing on philosophy, economics, and politics. Not until his mid-thirties did he discover his vocation as a public lecturer and prolific contributor to periodicals. In the twenty years before his death in 1830, he produced enough to fill almost twenty volumes of his collected Works, including superb criticism of English dramatists, poets, and novelists, the best commentaries on painting in the England of his day, remarkable analyses of the English theater and its actors, comments on the contemporary political scene that are of permanent interest, and more than a hundred informal essays which, as David Bromwich says, are 'more observing, original, and keen-witted than any others in the language.'
Review, 4561 words
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