New Writings of William Hazlitt (review)
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The great historian Élie Halévy said that he got his best preparation for writing England in 1815 by reading straight through the run of Leigh and John Hunt’s Examiner. Appreciation almost as categorical—allowing for certain irregularities in the record—has been felt by many for Hazlitt’s essays, reviews, comments, and squibs of 1815–25, including some of the materials collected here. They vary enormously in manner and approach, from parliamentary reports that are really summaries of debates, to comments on the political developments of the day, to brief chronicles of painting and theater, to substantial book reviews and political essays. They vary too in the certainty with which they can be ascribed to Hazlitt. A wonderful catalog-article like the British Institution review of 1817 carries his accent of style so unmistakably that one would be happy to welcome it against any external doubts. A piece like the Yellow Dwarf essay defending William Hone in his libel trial, besides the sharpness of the reporting, has such historical interest in any case that its presence in this fine collection vindicates itself. [End Page 514]
David Bromwich, Sterling Professor of English at Yale University and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is the author of Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic, Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking, A Choice of Inheritance: Self and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost, Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s, and Skeptical Music: Essays on Modern Poetry.
