terne, Fielding, Cervantes, Richardson,
Rousseau, Godwin, Goethe, etc. were the usual subjects of our discourse,
and the pleasure I had had, in reading these authors, was more than
doubled."[5] How acutely sensitive he was to all impressions at this time
is indicated by the effect upon him of the meeting with Coleridge and
Wordsworth of which he has left a record in one of his most eloquent
essays, "My First Acquaintance with Poets." But his active energies were
concentrated on the solution of a metaphysical problem which was destined
to possess his brain for many years: in his youthful enthusiasm he was
grappling with a theory concerning the natural disinterestedness of the
human mind, apparently adhering to the bias which he had received from his
early training.

But being come of age and finding it necessary to turn his mind to
something more marketable than abstract speculation, he determined, though
apparently without any natural inclination toward the art, to become a
painter. He apprenticed himself to his brother John Hazlitt, who had
gained some reputation in London for his miniatures. During the peace of
Amiens in 1802, he travelled to the Louvre to study and copy the
masterpieces which Napoleon had brought over from Italy as trophies of
war. Here, as he "marched delighted through a quarter of a mile of the
proudest efforts of the mind of man, a whole creation of genius, a
universe of art,"[6] he imbibed a love of perfection which may have been
fatal to his hopes of a career. At any rate it was soon after, while he
was following the profession of itinerant painter through England, that he
wrote to his father of "much dissatisfaction and much sorrow," of "that
repeated disappointment and that long dejection which have served to
overcast and to throw into deep obscurity some of the best years of my
life."[7]

When Hazlitt abandoned painting, he fell back upon his analytic gift as a
means of earning a living. Not counting his first published work, the
Essay on the Principles of Human Action, which was purely a labor of love
and fell still-born from the press, the tasks to which he now devoted his
time were chiefly of the kind ordinarily rated as job work. He prepared an
abridgement of Abraham Tucker's Light of Nature, compiled the Eloquence of
the British Senate, wrote a reply to Malthus's Essay on Population, and
even composed an elementary English Grammar. It would be a mistake to
suppose that these labors were