ABSTRACT
Coleridge, Statesman’s Manual (1816); review by William Hazlitt, Edinburgh Review, XXVII (Dec. 1816), 444–459. Hazlitt’s antipathy for Coleridge during this period is well known. Its causes are less obvious, but I believe that a close reading of some of Hazlitt’s more oblique remarks on Coleridge — particularly in his essay “On Going on a Journey” — reveals that Hazlitt was so dissatisfied with Coleridge and his lack of achievements because Hazlitt identified his own hopeful youth with the Coleridge of “My First Acquaintance with Poets.” When Hazlitt’s best hopes for himself had not been realized, he objectified his disappointment with himself into a disappointment with his mentor. In “On Going on a Journey” Hazlitt writes of his need for sympathy with his own past self: “I could stand on some tall rock, and overlook the precipice of years that separates me from what I then was. I was at that time going shortly to visit the poet whom I have named. Where is he now? Not only I myself have changed — the world, which was then new to me, has become old and incorrigible.”
