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Published in 1825, The spirit of the age is a collection of portraits--celebratory and critical--of Hazlitt's contemporaries. Some are of personal friends or those whom Hazlitt particularly admired (Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge), while others are less flattering. Of Sir Walter Scott, Hazlitt says
The cells of his memory are vast, various, full even to bursting with life and motion; his speculative understanding is empty, flaccid, poor, and dead.
and of Robert Southey
His inquiries are partial and hasty, his conclusions raw and unconcocted, and with a considerable infusion of whim and humour and a monkish spleen.
Besides poets and authors Hazlitt portrays politicians and journalists, preachers and philosophers. Some are still well-known, while others have lapsed into obscurity. They are delineated with a waspish wit, their arguments demolished, their literary style criticised. Some are summed up and dismissed with one devastating sentence.
Mr. Bentham, perhaps, over-rates the importance of his own theories.
(Lord Byron) cares little what it is he says, so that he can say it differently from others.
It is clear that he (Wordsworth) is either mad or inspired.
Mr. Wilberforce is far from being a hypocrite; but he is, we think, as fine a specimen of moral equivocation as can well be conceived.
Mr. Moore converts the wild harp of Erin into a musical snuff-box!
One has no notion of him (William Cobbett) as making use of a fine pen, but a great mutton-fist.
Elsewhere Hazlitt makes use of wit and logic to refute both Bentham's theory of Utilitarianism and Malthus' arguments on population, and to analyze Rev. Irving's preaching style, and deplores the journalistic style of Mr. Gifford of the Quarterly Review:
His Journal, then, is a depository for every species of political sophistry and personal calumny. There is no abuse or corruption that does not there find a jesuitical palliation or a bare-faced vindication. There we meet the slime of hypocrisy, the varnish of courts, the cant of pedantry, the cobwebs of the law, the iron hand of power. Its object is as mischievous as the means by which it is pursued are odious.
A sample extract from one of the essays in The spirit of the age is available on this website.
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Page created 23 December 2002 and last
updated 2 January 2003
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