ABSTRACT
William Hazlitt might have lost faith in the older S. T Coleridge, and Charles Lamb might be living on the memory rather than the actuality of their friendship for most of the time, but both essayists felt a deep and lasting debt to Coleridge for his help in forming their mature mental character. When Lamb was exploring his own past, affectionately but with a persistent cast of melancholy, in the Elia essays, his friend Hazlitt was pouring out an unfailing stream of personal opinion, topical comment and direct autobiography in essay after essay. The climax of irrefutable good sense to which Lamb’s parody of Robert Southey’s style leads is, of course, all the more effective because Southey himself had held Socinian views while under Coleridge’s influence, as Lamb well knew, and might tell the world some day. Hazlitt’s essays frequently touch upon, or consider at length, the intellectual, conversational and literary capacities of his friends.
