Thursday, January 18, 2024

The end of Hazlitt

 William Hazlitt, a great English essayist and a friend of Charles Lamb, died Sept. 18, 1830 at age 52.

Eric G. Wilson says: “The landlady was so eager to show the room to potential lodgers she hid the body under the bed.”

Wilson, whose biography of Lamb is excellent, says that Lamb grieved and mourned what ought to be. But he invariably looked on what actually is the case with humor.

Lamb’s humor is often dark and, at times, insufferably bleak. But stories like this make me think it had something to do with times, the manners of the day, what actually was the case, rather than what should have been.

I’m not saying that our times are better.

• Source: Eric G. Wilson, Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb; Yale University Press, 2022, p. 444.

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