SOURCE: "Hazlitt and 'First Principles'," in Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 29, No. 2, Summer, 1990, pp. 241-55.

In this essay, Mulvihill contends that Hazlitt's method of inferring character is not impressionistic, as has been claimed, but empiricist, using seemingly insignificant traits to discover the general principles of character.

As Recently As 1981, Marilyn Butler termed William Hazlitt's writings "impressionistic and personal."' Thus to at least one eminent student of romanticism a response to Hazlitt premised on his apparently "idiosyncratic critical posture" (Butler 173) remains adequate even after decades of scholarship arguing the contrary. Such a view reflects the persistence of what John Kinnaird has called "the myth of Hazlitt's 'critical impressionism.'"² In this view, Hazlitt's forte as a critic is "emotive self-dramatization, rather than sustained thought" (Butler 171)—Hazlitt being somehow incapable of "a defined, consistent philosophy of life" or even "a consistent point of view," according to an earlier commentator.³

"Thus...