Hazlitt on English Literature: An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature — Key Ideas to Explore

The Critic's Personality as Method

Zeitlin's introduction insists that Hazlitt's personality is inseparable from his criticism. The excerpts bear this out: in the essay on Coleridge, Hazlitt describes not only Coleridge's intellectual range—from Greek tragedians to Hartley's associationism to Berkeley's idealism—but also the effect of his conversation, noting that “as the impassioned critic speaks and rises in his theme, you would think you heard the voice of the Man hated by the Gods.” Hazlitt's own voice is equally present; he characterizes Coleridge's self-reference as “without being an egotist, for in him the individual is always merged in the abstract and general.” This is not a detached judgment but a personal observation that reveals Hazlitt's own criteria for sincerity and intellectual engagement.

Chronological Structure and Pedagogical Intent

The anthology is arranged to present “a chronological and almost continuous account of English literature from its beginning in the age of Elizabeth down to Hazlitt's own day.” Zeitlin supplements the essays with notes that identify quotations, explain allusions, and indicate Hazlitt's debts to earlier critics. He describes these notes as containing “a body of detailed information, which may be used, if so desired, for disciplinary purposes.” This apparatus, combined with the editor's introduction, positions the volume as a teaching tool. Yet the excerpts themselves resist easy categorization: Hazlitt's prose is digressive, personal, and often more interested in the writer's character than in abstract literary principles.

Hazlitt's Prose Texture: Allusion and Energy

Hazlitt's critical style is dense with allusion and metaphor. In the Coleridge excerpt, he catalogs the philosopher's reading—Malebranche, Cudworth, Lord Brook, Butler, Leibniz—in a breathless list that mimics intellectual enthusiasm. He describes Leibniz's Pre-established Harmony as “rearing its arch above his head, like the rainbow in the cloud, covenanting with the hopes of man.” Such figurative language is characteristic: Hazlitt often reaches for vivid, even extravagant images to convey the effect of a writer's thought. The editor's notes, by tracing these allusions, help modern readers see the range of Hazlitt's own reading and the associative logic of his criticism.

Readers approaching this collection should attend to the interplay between Zeitlin's editorial framework and Hazlitt's unruly prose. The notes and introduction offer a scholarly scaffolding, but the essays themselves reward a slower reading that follows Hazlitt's associative leaps. Pay particular attention to how he uses biographical detail—his own encounters with writers, his judgments of their character—as a lens for critical evaluation. This volume is less a systematic history than a series of vivid, opinionated encounters with English literature.

There’s something tender about how Hazlitt’s judgments feel like confessions, each essay a portrait of the man behind the reading. That same intertwining of person and perception lingers in An independent daughter — Background and Themes, where biography quietly shapes every verdict. I keep thinking how criticism, at its best, is just memory wearing a critical face.