ABSTRACT
First published in The Tatler, I, 28 September 1830, pp. 81–2; see headnote above, pp. 117-20. It was reprinted in Hunt, Literary, pp. 275–81. Hunt reviewed William Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespear’s Plays in The Examiner for 1817. For his Companion review of Hazlitt’s Plain Speaker, see above, pp. 56–75. Hazlitt died on 18 September 1830. When Hunt heard the news, he was in the middle of another article and interrupted himself to turn to Hazlitt’s death. It was a fitting tribute, as he well knew, for Hazlitt had interrupted himself in a similar way in his Spirit of the Age (1825), where he ceases a ‘strain of somewhat peevish invective’ upon hearing news of ‘the death of Lord Byron’ (Hazlitt, Works, vol. xi, pp. 77–8). ‘We had written thus far’, Hunt declares,
when news was brought us of an event which put an end to the pleasure of our mood, – the death of one, who we thought would have had a new life given him by the late glorious change in France, and who would not have thought it beneath his sympathy with greater things, to express his satisfaction at the name and the hopes of this paper. We mean Mr Hazlitt, who died on Saturday, at a quarter past four o’clock, at his lodgings in Frith Street, Soho. Mr Hazlitt was one of the profoundest writers of the day, an admirable reasoner (no one got better or sooner at the heart of a question than he did) the best general critic, the greatest critic on art that ever appeared (his writing on that subject cast a light like a painted window), exquisite in his relish of poetry, an untameable lover of liberty, and with all his humour and irritability (of which no man had more) a sincere friend, and a generous enemy. No one man has said higher things than he of Sir Walter Scott, and other Tory writers, for whose politics he had an aversion amounting to loathing; and no one’s claims have been or will be, more unfairly treated by the herd of those writers. But posterity will do justice to the man, that wrote for truth and mankind.
The disorder that was fatal to Mr Hazlitt arose from one of the common infirmities of a man of letters, a weak stomach. He was not careful of it, and will resent it no longer. He has gone, and left others to toil, – not in vain, nor without the greatest consolation, now that the world has seen its hopes renewed: nor were his latter hours without the joy and the triumph, which all the rest of his life had deserved that he should feel. (The Tatler, I, 20 September, 1830, p. 53)
Eight days later Hunt produced the following, longer account.