ABSTRACT
The critic William Hazlitt (1775–1829) mentioned Defoe on a number of occasions. In his published Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1818) he briefly instanced Colonel Jack as representative of the ‘secondary’ novels, and stated that it left ‘an impression on the mind more like that of things than words’. In Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine for February 1818, ii, 556–62, a lecture entitled ‘Of Poetry in General’ is reported by an unnamed correspondent. In this, Robinson Crusoe is aligned with Pilgrim’s Progress and Boccaccio, the three writers producing work ‘coming nearest to poetry without being so’. Hazlitt describes them as ‘poetry in kind,’ worthy to be married to the highest poetic language.
