ABSTRACT
It is not easy to find dispassionate analysis of the work of William Hazlitt in the 1820s. The essayist was a controversial figure and comment is often deeply partisan: laudatory from the left (most notably in the journals associated with the Hunts) and antipathetic, often viciously so, from the right (the Quarterly, Blackwood’s). This was so much the case that Patmore’s imitation of an essay from ‘The Spirit of the Age’ series, which began in the New Monthly Magazine in January 1824, begins by asserting that ‘We are going to perform a novel undertaking. It is, to speak the truth of William Hazlitt’. ‘The Spirit of the Age. William Hazlitt’ sees Patmore attempt the difficult trick of imitating Hazlitt’s manner whilst simultaneously offering an account of the critic’s achievement. Thus sonorous imitation of Hazlitt in full cry against Tory journalists, political apostates and the ‘hag Legitimacy’ becomes part of an assessment of Hazlitt’s own political, journalistic and literary career. Imitation is here doubly critical; in the true Hazlittian manner, ‘W. H.’ is preoccupied with the nature of genius, but here Hazlitt’s ‘familiar style’ is made to assume a self-analytical posture.
