The Spirit of the Age – William Hazlitt

This volume presents two works by perhaps Britain’s finest essayist, William Hazlitt. His celebrated essay, ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’, is a brilliant image of writers at work in their youth. The sense of pomise in the descriptions of Wordsworth and Coleridge is unsurpassed. Later, in The Spirit of the Age, Hazlitt comes as judge, testing twenty-four of his contemporaries against the necessity of time, the necessity to believe in progress, to advance the state of our fellow man. Lurking behind this grand judgemental hauteur is a subtle-eyed psychology, and wonderful flashes of human understanding remind one of Hazlitt’s inimitable pursuit of the ‘gusto’ of living.

Robert Woof’s introductory notes place Hazlitt’s subjects in a wider context, indicating the general scope of their lives, and showing how they touch upon each other’s activities.

Illustrating Hazlitt’s prose portraits are a series of actual portraits (chiefly from the National Portrait Gallery) by a rich variety of painters who offer their own images of those men who, for Hazlitt, best represented the Spirit of the Age.