Word: hazlitt
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This Lake Country episode was typical of William Hazlitt's embittered, upsy-downsy life. Born Under Saturn is the first full-length biography in 20 years of the saturnine, unhappy man who was one of 19th-Century England's most brilliant, irascible and unpopular essayists (Lectures on English Poets, Spirit of the Age). The book is passionately pro-Hazlitt. White-haired, scholarly Catherine MacDonald Maclean (Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years} defends Hazlitt with the slashing vigor of a mother defending a slightly subnormal child...
...Hazlitt, who as a child intensely dis liked the U.S., was almost a U.S. writer. His sister happened upon one of 1782's best-sellers - J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer. The Hazlitts were enchanted with its lyrical mixture of democracy and agriculture. Father Hazlitt, a struggling Unitarian minister, decided to emigrate. Soon Parson Hazlitt established Boston's first Unitarian church. But ill-health and parish problems (he would rather "die in a ditch," he said, than kowtow to his congregation) drove Parson Hazlitt back to Britain. Wrote...
...History of the Puritans, and Calamy's Account of the Two Thousand Ejected Ministers. Guests were surprised when the child entertained them with discussions of "such matters as the Test and the Corporation Acts, or the interpretation of a point in Scripture:" At the age of 13, Hazlitt published a passionate defense of the Reverend Joseph Priestley, radical and scientist. But his zeal for religion faltered; young Hazlitt decided to become a painter. Art proved tumultuous. When his canvases displeased him - as they often did - Hazlitt slashed them to pieces in fits of rage. Nice girls also displeased Hazlitt...
...Hazlitt made the traditional switch from unsuccessful artist to art critic. Soon a host of outstanding artists were plucking his neat barbs from their thin skins...
Progressing to dramatic criticism, Hazlitt stirred up a histrionic storm by suggesting, in the modern vein, that what appealed to Shakespeare's Desdemona most was Othello's dark skin. Cried Critic Henry Crabb Robinson: "A gross attack on the pretensions to chastity in women." As political commentator, Hazlitt was even more savage. He once called the future Duke of Wellington "a weak mind and an able body," King Ferdinand of Spain "a royal marmoset." If he had not written so brilliantly, he might soon have found no editor to publish him. Hazlitt sometimes confused integrity with tactlessness...