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CHISWICK PRESS :-C. WHITTINGHAM AND CO., TOOKS COURT,
CHANCERY LANE.

PREFACE.

HE first edition of the SPIRIT OF THE AGE in book

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form appeared in an octavo volume of pp. 424 in 1825. The contents had been partly communicated as separate articles to the New Monthly Magazine. A second edition, making only pp. 408, and printed in smaller size and type, came out in the same year. The Characters were differently arranged; an addition to that of Coleridge was made; a new one on Cobbett was first introduced; and a few errors of the press were corrected. In 1858, the author's son produced a third impression, with a criticism on Canning incorporated.

I have in my possession portions of the original autograph of this interesting work, and I have collated them, so far as they go; but the MS., while it rectifies a few mistakes here and there, exhibits (I suspect), on the whole, readings deliberately rejected by the author himself in proof. On the other hand, from a copy of the second issue of 1825, belonging to Mr. C. W. Reynell, a few verbal changes in Hazlitt's own hand have been introduced.

When I told Jeffrey," says Hazlitt, "that I had composed a work, in which I had in some sort handled

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about a score of leading characters, he remarked: Then you will have one man against you, and the remaining nineteen for you.' I have not found it so."

But apart from the intrinsic merit of this series of literary portraitures, the character of the persons described has a tendency to confer on the volume a standard value, and to stamp it with permanence. Leigh Hunt, indeed, blamed his old friend for his habit of assailing indiscriminately both sides in politics, and thought that it contributed to injure the Liberal cause, which none could hold dearer than Hazlitt. There was something in this, of course; and it is curious to observe how, in the same way, the writer speaks in the handsomest terms of men who, like Campbell, had treated him with little else than abuse.

Charles Lamb, in a letter to his Quaker correspondent Barton, of February 10, 1825, says: "The Spirit of the Age is by Hazlitt: The characters of Coleridge, &c., he had done better in former publications, the praise and the abuse much stronger, &c., but the new ones are capitally done. Horne Tooke is a matchless portrait. He has laid too many colours on my likeness; but I have had so much injustice done me in my own name, that I make a rule of accepting as much overmeasure to Elia as gentlemen think proper to bestow."

BARNES COMMON, Surrey,

November 1st, 1885.

W. CAREW HAZLITT.

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