William Hazlitt

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) was an English essayist and critic, a master of the familiar essay. The son of a Unitarian minister, he trained as a painter before turning to journalism and lecturing. His meeting with Coleridge and Wordsworth in 1798, recalled years later in "My First Acquaintance with Poets," marked his youth. He wrote theater and art criticism, lectures on the English poets and on Shakespeare's characters, the essays of Table Talk and The Plain Speaker, and The Spirit of the Age, a gallery of portraits of his contemporaries. A lifelong radical, he admired Napoleon and quarreled with most of his friends.