ABSTRACT
Hazlitt had been trying to write his then-intractable ‘metaphysical choke-pear’, the Essay on the Principles of Human Action, for several years before his celebrated visit to Coleridge and Wordsworth in Somerset in the summer of 1797. During that visit he made a walking tour along the Bristol Channel with Coleridge as far as Linton, where, while staying at the village inn, they were told by a local fisherman that a boy had drowned off Linton beach the previous day, and that the villagers had tried to save him at peril of their own lives. When asked why they had taken such a risk the fisherman said ‘he did not know how it was that they ventured, but, Sir, we have a nature towards one another’ (xvii, 121). Coleridge turned to Hazlitt and remarked that this was a fine illustration of Hazlitt's theory of natural disinterestedness, which the latter had been explaining to him during the course of that summer (xvii, 113–14).
