Take up your abode in the deepest glen, or on the wildest heath, in the remotest province of the kingdom, where the din of commerce is not heard, and where the wheels of pleasure make no trace, even there humanity will find you, and sympathy, under some of its varied aspects, will creep beneath the humble roof. Collins, Rory W. (2018). "What Does It Mean to be Human, and Not Animal? Examining Montaigne's Literary Persuasiveness in 'Man is No Better Than the Animals' ". Sloth: A Journal of Emerging Voices in Human-Animal Studies. 4 (1). Montaigne's essay topics spanned the entire spectrum of the profound to the trivial, with titles ranging from "Of Sadness and Sorrow" and "Of Conscience" to "Of Smells" and "Of Posting" (referring to posting letters). Montaigne wrote at the height of the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598) between Catholics and protestant Huguenots. Christianity in the 15th and 16th centuries saw Protestant authors consistently attempting to subvert Church doctrine with reason and scholarship. Consequently, some Catholic scholars embraced skepticism as a means to discredit all reason and scholarship and accept Church doctrine through faith alone. [7]

I mean, it’s the same thing as everyone binging Netflix or whatever during the pandemic: you just needed entertainment, you might have needed to be occupied and needed stories. And performances are more bite-sized, depending on the thing; like each individual unit of performance, each country is a bite-sized thing, but part of a broader show that tells a story of unity and a celebration of the different ways that… I don’t want to say that a national identity can be expressed, because I’m not particularly fond of the nationalism of Eurovision, even though I understand it’s integral to the whole thing. [ laughs] But [each performance] is the expression of a person and all of their diversity coming from a certain country and bringing that to the stage. I think it’s important to do and to see.” Nearly two centuries after his death, William Hazlitt still seems to exist in the margins. He registers with many of us, if he registers at all, as a dim figure from college English, briefly consulted, then forgotten. Few read him anymore.Of Judging of the Death of Another; That the Mind Hinders Itself; That Our Desires are Augmented by Difficulty; Of Glory; Of Presumption He also published The History of the Venetian Republic: Her Rise, Her Greatness, and Her Civilization (1860) [9] and Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine (1886). [10] William Carew Hazlitt (1882). Bibliographical Collections and Notes on Early English Literature 1474-1700: Second Supplement. Quaritch.

At Cotton's death in 1687 he was insolvent and left his estates to his creditors. He was buried in St James's Church, Piccadilly, on 16 February 1687. [3] Titi Lucretii Cari De rerum natura libri sex (Montaigne.1.4.4)". Cambridge Digital Library . Retrieved 9 July 2015. The family of Hazlitt's father were Irish Protestants who moved from the county of Antrim to Tipperary in the early 18th century. Also named William Hazlitt, Hazlitt's father attended the University of Glasgow (where he was taught by Adam Smith), [9] receiving a master's degree in 1760. Not entirely satisfied with his Presbyterian faith, he became a Unitarian minister in England. In 1764 he became pastor at Wisbech in Cambridgeshire, where in 1766 he married Grace Loftus, daughter of a recently deceased ironmonger. Of their many children, only three survived infancy. The first of these, John (later known as a portrait painter), was born in 1767 at Marshfield in Gloucestershire, where the Reverend William Hazlitt had accepted a new pastorate after his marriage. In 1770, the elder Hazlitt accepted yet another position and moved with his family to Maidstone, Kent, where his first and only surviving daughter, Margaret (usually known as "Peggy"), was born that same year. [10] Childhood, education, young philosopher (1778–1797) [ edit ] Childhood [ edit ] House in Wem, Shropshire where the Reverend William Hazlitt and his family lived between 1787 and 1813A Consideration upon Cicero; That the Relish of Good and Evil Depends in a Great Measure upon Opinion; Not to Communicate a Man's Honour; Of the Inequality Amongst Us; Of Sumptuary Laws; Of Sleep; Of the Battle of Dreux; Of Names; Of the Uncertainty of our Judgment He got a contract for that collection, and the result, published in 1994, was The Art of the Personal Essay, which takes the reader from the ancient musings of Seneca and Plutarch to the modern ones of Annie Dillard and Gore Vidal. The book has been widely adopted by colleges and universities, for use in survey courses as well as courses that focus specifically on the essay. And thus did this Rodney Dangerfield of genres (“The essay has been considered minor even though it’s an ancient, distinguished form,” Lopate says) assume its rightful place in academia. Lopate’s collection follows the development of the essay as it becomes ever more elastic, expanding to encompass personality-suffused criticism as well as the “new journalism” of the sixties and seventies, as practiced by Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, and Norman Mailer.

Hazlitt, William, 1811-1893, trans.: Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China (2 volumes; London: Office of the National Illustrated Library, n.d.), by Evariste Régis Huc Of Custom, and That We Should not Easily Change a Law Received; Various Events from the Same Counsel; Of Pedantry William, the youngest of the surviving Hazlitt children, was born in Mitre Lane, Maidstone, in 1778. In 1780, when he was two, his family began a nomadic lifestyle that was to last several years. From Maidstone his father took them to Bandon, County Cork, Ireland; and from Bandon in 1783 to the United States, where the elder Hazlitt preached, lectured, and sought a ministerial call to a liberal congregation. His efforts to obtain a post did not meet with success, although he did exert a certain influence on the founding of the first Unitarian church in Boston. [11] In 1786–87 the family returned to England and settled in Wem, in Shropshire. Hazlitt would remember little of his years in America, save the taste of barberries. [12] Education [ edit ]

Hazlitt’s complete works fill more than 20 volumes, and anthologists have done an uneven job of culling from this massive trove the pieces that are truly memorable, a challenge that has also, one gathers, diminished his profile. In William Hazlitt: Selected Writings, editor Jon Cook dutifully collects some standout essays, although in the interest of scholarly breadth, he also throws in some selections that haven’t aged well, such as excerpts from Hazlitt’s book about Napoleon. A sharper and more accessible read is Wu’s All That Is Worth Remembering: Selected Essays. This kind of ingenuity has made Hazlitt something of a writer’s writer, endearing him to fellow scribes who have a special admiration for his technical skill.

Defence of Seneca and Plutarch; The Story of Spurina; Means to Carry on a War According to Julius Caesar; Of Three Good Women; Of the Most Excellent Men; Of the Resemblance of Children to Their FathersHis lecturing in particular had drawn to Hazlitt a small group of admirers. Best known today is the poet John Keats, [115] who not only attended the lectures but became Hazlitt's friend in this period. [8] The two met in November 1816 [116] through their mutual friend, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, and were last seen together in May 1820 at a dinner given by Haydon. [117] In those few years before the poet's untimely death, the two read and admired each other's work, [118] and Keats, as a younger man seeking guidance, solicited Hazlitt's advice on a course of reading and direction in his career. [119] Some of Keats's writing, particularly his key idea of " negative capability", was influenced by the concept of "disinterested sympathy" he discovered in Hazlitt, [120] whose work the poet devoured. [121] Hazlitt, on his part, later wrote that of all the younger generation of poets, Keats showed the most promise, and he became Keats's first anthologist when he included several of Keats's poems in a collection of British poetry he compiled in 1824, three years after Keats's death. [122] On 22 March 1803, at a London dinner party held by William Godwin, Hazlitt met Charles Lamb and his sister Mary. [54] A mutual sympathy sprang up immediately between William and Charles, and they became fast friends. Their friendship, though sometimes strained by Hazlitt's difficult ways, lasted until the end of Hazlitt's life. [55] He was fond of Mary as well, and—ironically in view of her intermittent fits of insanity—he considered her the most reasonable woman he had ever met, [56] no small compliment coming from a man whose view of women at times took a misogynistic turn. [57] Hazlitt frequented the society of the Lambs for the next several years, from 1806 often attending their famous "Wednesdays" and later "Thursdays" literary salons. [58] Portrait of Charles Lamb by William Hazlitt, 1804 Of War-Horses, or Destriers; Of Ancient Customs; Of Democritus and Heraclitus; Of the Vanity of Words; Of the Parsimony of the Ancients; Of a Saying of Caesar; Of Vain Subtleties; Of Smells; Of Prayers; Of Age Performance offers story, and often a human story, even if it is, like, far-fetched or fantastical or nonsensical. And I think that really fills in people’s sense of self, and ‘self’ in the context of a broader humanity. Performance is a way to escape, obviously: you can focus on someone else’s expression for a minute and be entertained and distracted by it. But I think on a deeper level all theatre, performance, drag, anything is a way to inspire delight and a feeling of belonging because ultimately the people performing are the same as you: they’re people. And I think it’s really important and powerful for those stories and those emotions to be told and expressed during a pandemic, in whatever way. There was an article on The Tatler itself. Mostly his political commentary was reserved for other vehicles, but included was a "Character of the Late Mr. Pitt", a scathing characterisation of the recently deceased former Prime Minister. Written in 1806, Hazlitt liked it well enough to have already had it printed twice before (and it would appear again in a collection of political essays in 1819).