William Hazlitt

William Hazlitt (1778 to 1830) was an English essayist, drama and literary critic, painter, social commentator and philosopher, now counted among the finest critics and essayists in the English language. Born in Maidstone, the son of a Unitarian minister, he was also a painter. His Characters of Shakespear's Plays appeared in 1817, followed by lectures on the English comic writers and on the dramatists of the age of Elizabeth, and by the essay collection Table-Talk, which mixed the literary and the conversational. He befriended Charles and Mary Lamb, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Keats, and Rousseau was an early influence on his thinking. Despite his standing among historians of literature, his work is today little read.