William Hazlitt

The 20-year-old Hazlitt met and was strongly impressed by Coleridge, and visited him in the Lake District, incensing Wordsworth by his brazen pursuit of local women. Shelley, Byron and Southey were among the radical writers Hazlitt befriended in London, while Stendhal, a fellow-spirit, was met in Paris. Hazlitt rented Bentham’s house, suggesting to him that his own theories were over-rated (Bentham evicted him over unpaid rent). Charles Lamb, a particularly staunch friend, acknowledged that Hazlitt’s conversation was matchless despite his truculent quarrelsome humour, inflicted on everyone. Hazlitt called the matricide Mary Lamb the only truly sensible woman he’d known.