A miniature portrait was taken of Hazlitt when a child in America. His brother took a miniature portrait of him in 1791, oil portraits at the ages of nineteen and thirty, and a miniature on ivory about 1808. Bewick made a chalk drawing of him in Scotland in 1822; and late in life he made a portrait of himself. A cast was taken after death, from which and some portraits Joseph Durham [q. v.] made a bust (W. C. Hazlitt, i. xvii). He appears as an ‘investigator’ in Haydon's picture of ‘Christ's Entry into Jerusalem.’ His face was eminently intellectual, with a very fine brow and a sensitive and expressive mouth. His appearance was injured by his slovenly dress. Though fragile in appearance he was a good fives-player, and could walk forty or fifty miles a day (Patmore, iii. 65).
Hazlitt's habits are fully described, perhaps with some over-colouring, by Patmore. A morbid self-consciousness, or, as Patmore calls it, an ‘ingrained selfishness’ (i. 272), clouded his life. He suffered from an exaggerated shyness; his domestic troubles deprived him of a home, and his easiness in taking offence made him solitary. ‘I have quarrelled,’ he says, ‘with almost all my old friends’ (‘Pleasures of Hating’ in the Plain Speaker). In his last years he visited no one except the Basil Montagus, Northcote, Leigh Hunt, and Patmore. He fancied that footmen thought him unfit to appear in a drawing-room, and that if his servants neglected him they must have read the attacks in ‘Blackwood’ (Patmore, ii. 352). He had many passing adorations for women, and yet was ill at ease with them, and even resented their intended favours as affronts (ib. ii. 301). He was inclined to suspect his friends of abusing him behind his back. He often retorted supposed offences by allusions in his essays, which if not clear enough he took care to explain. Patmore dwells upon the diabolical scowl which resented abuse of Napoleon or any insult to his pet sensibilities. His excessive touchiness was stimulated by the brutal abuse of political antagonists. When at his ease he could talk admirably and with genuine frankness. He was welcome at Lamb's Wednesday evenings, till their intimacy declined, and at the Southampton Coffee-house, where he generally dined or supped, and held forth to a less distinguished audience. Lamb called him, ‘in his natural and healthy state, one of the finest and wisest spirits breathing’ (Letter to Southey), and his later friends, Patmore, Procter, J. S. Knowles, and W. Hone, recognised his finer qualities under his strange infirmities of temper.
Hazlitt possessed a keen intellect and an intense sensibility to all æsthetic impressions. An artist by nature, he was brought up as a strict dissenter. The tastes and opinions imbibed in his youth became stereotyped. His early dogmas were sacred to him; he boasted of never changing an opinion after he was sixteen. His ‘love of truth’ or of his early opinions, right or wrong, was equally proof against interest and against experience. His opponents were wicked by nature, and conversion or even development the mark of a turncoat. His literary and artistic appreciations were equally dominated by the youthful impressions, endeared by early associations. He defended them with the psychological acuteness shown in his first book upon abstract questions, and afterwards applied to the analysis of character. Practice improved his facility in uttering judgments which had already been cast into clear-cut moulds in personal discussions, and in the solitary reveries to which he recurs so fondly. In later life he trusted too much to impressions no longer as vivid or as thoroughly absorbed as those of his youth, and permitted himself to be biassed by personal antipathy. Yet he never descends to mere verbiage, and his general appreciation of literary excellence often struggled successfully (as in the case of the Waverley novels) against his hatred of an author's politics. His criticisms are hardly equal, however, to the directly personal confessions which, if not always edifying, bear the impress of a keen mind and a singularly sensitive nature, stimulated by a lively interest on the subject. The wayward ill-temper which alienated his contemporaries has also limited the circle of his posthumous friends. Yet few men have written so much at so high a level, and no contemporary surpassed him in terseness and vivacity of style.
His works are as follows (the later editions were edited by his son, and the collections of essays had appeared in various periodicals, especially the ‘London Magazine’ and ‘Colburn's New Monthly;’ many of them were differently arranged in various editions, for notices of which, with a collection of criticisms, see Mr. A. Ireland's ‘List of the Writings of William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt,’ 1868): 1. ‘Essay on the Principles of Human Action; being an Argument in favour of the natural disinterestedness of the Human Mind. To which are added some Remarks on the Systems of Hartley and Helvetius,’ 1805. 2. ‘Free Thoughts on Public Affairs,’ 1806. 3. Abridgment of Abraham Tucker's ‘Light of Nature,’ 1807. 4. ‘Eloquence of the British Senate’ (selection of speeches in parliament, with notes), 1807. 5. ‘Reply to
