Excerpt from Hazlitt: Selected Essays
In preparing this selection from Hazlitt's many essays I have had in view the possible needs of students in Training Colleges, candidates for the Board of Education's Certificate examination, pupils in the highest forms of schools, and even those general readers who may care to have certain fine prose pieces "extra-illustrated," as it were, by appropriate annotation. My actual teaching experience with the second of these groups has shown me that one can take nothing for granted in the students' general knowledge. I have found that even the simplest allusions need elucidation and the simplest foreign phrases translation. If therefore some of the notes seem unnecessary, readers should remember that what is unnecessary to them may be useful to others.
The choice of essays will be found to embody a departure from the usual procedure in the case of Hazlitt, who is generally represented in students' editions by Characters of Shakespear's Plays. The present selection ranges through the whole of Hazlitt's essays from The Round Table to the posthumous pieces. The first four essays show him as the Boswell of Lamb and the candid friend of Wordsworth and Coleridge. The next three are an extension of this group, forming a pleasant parallel to Lamb's Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading and his delightful essays on the old actors. The next three show a very attractive and original Hazlitt - Hazlitt the enthusiastic critic or "gustator" of fine pictures. The last three show us Hazlitt savouring things of the world, rejoicing in the multitude of sporting crowds and in the solitude of lonely wanderings. If it be urged that political essays have been excluded, the answer must be that there is no essay of Hazlitt that is not political. Whether his subject be Poussin or pugilism, it is odd if he cannot get in a few thrusts at apostate poets and government tools.
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