the changing events were bringing
about corresponding changes in the ideals of such early votaries to
liberty as Coleridge and Wordsworth, Hazlitt continued to cling to his
enthusiastic faith, but at the same time the spectacle of a world which
turned away from its brightest dreams made of him a sharp critic of human
nature, and his sense of personal disappointment turned into a bitterness
hardly to be distinguished from cynicism. In a passionate longing for a
better order of things, in the merciless denunciation of the cant and
bigotry which was enlisted in the cause of the existing order, he
resembled Byron. The rare union in his nature of the analytic and the
emotional gave to his writings the very qualities which he enumerated as
characteristic of the age, and his consistent sincerity made his voice
distinct above many others of his generation.

Hazlitt's earlier years reveal a restless conflict of the sensitive and
the intellectual. His father, a friend of Priestley's, was a Unitarian
preacher, who, in his vain search for liberty of conscience, had spent
three years in America with his family. Under him the boy was accustomed
to the reading of sermons and political tracts, and on this dry
nourishment he seemed to thrive till he was sent to the Hackney
Theological College to begin his preparation for the ministry. His
dissatisfaction there was not such as could be put into words--perhaps a
hunger for keener sensations and an appetite for freer inquiry than was
open to a theological student even of a dissenting church. After a year at
Hackney he withdrew to his father's home, where he found nothing more
definite to do than to "solve some knotty point, or dip in some abstruse
author, or look at the sky, or wander by the pebbled sea-side."[2] This
was probably the period of his most extensive reading. He absorbed the
English novelists and essayists; he saturated himself with the sentiment
of Rousseau; he studied Bacon and Hobbes and Berkeley and Hume; he became
fascinated, in Burke, by the union of a wide intellect with a brilliant
fancy and consummate rhetorical skill.[3] Though he called himself at this
time dumb and inarticulate, and the idea of ever making literature his
profession had not suggested itself to him, he was eager to talk about the
things he read, and in Joseph Fawcett, a retired minister, he found an
agreeable companion. "A heartier friend or honester critic I never coped
withal."[4] "The writings of S