very little boy
to America, but passed the greater part of his youth at Wem in
Shropshire, where the interview with Coleridge, which decided his fate,
took place. Yet for some time after that, he was mainly occupied with
studies, not of literature, but of art. He had been intended for his
father's profession, but had early taken a disgust to it. At such
schools as he had been able to frequent, he had gained the character of
a boy rather insusceptible of ordinary teaching; and his letters (they
are rare throughout his life) show him to us as something very like a
juvenile prig. According to his own account, he "thought for at least
eight years" without being able to pen a line, or at least a page; and
the worst accusation that can truly be brought against him is that, by
his own confession, he left off reading when he began to write. Those
who (for their sins or for their good) are condemned to a life of
writing for the press know that such an abstinence as this is almost
fatal. Perhaps no man ever did good work in periodical writing, unless
he had previously had a more or less prolonged period of reading, with
no view to writing. Certainly no one ever did other than very faulty
work if, not having such a store to draw on, when he began writing he
left off reading.

The first really important event in Hazlitt's life, except the visit
from Coleridge in 1798, was his own visit to Paris after the Peace of
Amiens in 1802--a visit authorised and defrayed by certain commissions
to copy pictures at the Louvre, which was then, in consequence of French
conquests, the picture-gallery of Europe. The chief of these
commissioners was a Mr. Railton, a person of some fortune at Liverpool,
and the father of a daughter who, if she was anything like her portrait,
had one of the most beautiful faces of modern times. Miss Railton was
one of Hazlitt's many loves: it was, perhaps, fortunate for her that the
course of the love did not run smooth. Almost immediately on his return,
he made acquaintance with the Lambs, and, as Mr. W. C. Hazlitt, his
grandson and biographer, thinks, with Miss Stoddart, his future wife.
Miss Stoddart, there is no doubt, was an elderly coquette, though
perfectly "proper." Besides the "William" of her early correspondence
with Mary Lamb, we hear of three or four other lovers of hers between
1803 and 1808, when she married Hazlitt. It so happens that one, and
only one, letter of his to her has been preserved. His biog