William Hazlitt

William Hazlitt was a dissenting minister’s son who tried painting, turned to journalism, and became the finest critic and essayist of the Romantic age, writing on Shakespeare, the English poets, the age’s characters and his own passions with a directness that made enemies. Of Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen recalls an evening at Lamb’s when the company debated whom of the dead they would most like to meet, and is the model of the familiar essay. He was a radical who never forgave Wordsworth and Coleridge for growing conservative, and he died saying he had had a happy life.