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duties, the model of an4 exemplary parish priest.?The heroine's friendship to be sought after by a young woman in the same neighbourhood, of talents and shrewdness, with light eyes and a fair skin, but having a considerable degree of wit, heroine shall shrink from the acquaintance.?From this outset, the story will proceed, and contain a striking variety of adventures. Heroine and her father never above a5 fortnight together in one place, he being driven from his curacy by the vile arts of some totally unprincipled and heartless young man, desperately in love with the heroine, and pursuing her with unrelenting passion?no sooner settled in one country of Europe than they are necessitated to quit it and retire to another?always making new acquaintance, and always obliged to leave them.?This will of course exhibit a wide variety of characters?but there will be no mixture; the scene will be for ever shifting from one set of people to another?but all the good will be unexceptionable in every respect?and there will be no foibles or weaknesses but with the wicked, who will be completely depraved and infamous, hardly a resemblance of humanity left in them.?Early in her career, in the progress of her first removals, heroine must meet with the hero?all perfection of course?and only prevented from paying his addresses to her,6 by some excess of refine- ment.?Wherever she goes, somebody falls in love with her, and she receives repeated offers of marriage?which she always refers wholly to her father, exceedingly angry that he should not be first applied to.?Often carried away by the anti-hero, but rescued either by her father or the hero?often reduced to support herself and her father by her talents and work for her bread;? continually cheated and defrauded of her hire,7 worn down to a skeleton, and now and then starved to death?. At last, hunted out of civilized society, denied the poor shelter of the humblest cottage, they are compelled to retreat into Kamschatka8 where the poor father, quite worn down, finding his end approaching, throws himself on the ground, and after four or five hours of tender advice and paternal admonition to his miserable child, expires in a fine burst of literary enthusiasm, intermingled with invectives again [st] holders of tythes.?Heroine inconsolable for some time?but afterwards crawls back towards her former country?having at least twenty narrow escapes of falling into the hands of anti-hero?and at last in the very nick of time, turning a corner to avoid him, runs into the arms of the hero himself, who having just shaken off the scruples which fetter'd him before, was at the very moment setting off in pursuit of her.?The tenderest and completest eclaircissement9 takes place, and they are happily united.?Throughout the whole work, heroine to be in the most elegant society and living in high style. The name of the work not to be Emma?but of the same sort as S & S and P & P.
1816
porting the Anglican Church and clergy) and thought his own story of having buried his mother would make good material for her novel.
4. Mr. Sherer [Austen's note]. 5. Many critics [Austen's note]. 6. I.e., seeking her hand in marriage. 7. Wages. 8. Kamchatka: peninsula on the eastern edge of Asia, extending into the Bering Sea, acquired by Russia in the 18th century. The novels of Austen's contemporaries tended to be cosmopolitan in setting and often did send heroines wandering across Europe. Austen, however, may be thinking particularly of Sophie de Cottin's Elizabeth; or Exiles of Siberia (1806; English translation, 1809).
9. French: the clarification of mysteries and misunderstandings that brings a narrative to closure.
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WILLIAM HAZLITT 1778-1830
'I started in life,' William Hazlitt wrote, 'with the French Revolution, and I have lived, alas! to see the end of it. . . . Since then, I confess, I have no longer felt myself young, for with that my hopes fell.' He was born into a radical circle, for the elder William Hazlitt, his father, was a Unitarian minister who declared from the pulpit his advocacy both of American independence and of the French Revolution. When young William was five years old, his father took the family to America in search of liberty and founded the first Unitarian church in Boston, but four years later he returned to settle at Wem, in Shropshire. Despite the persistent attacks of reviewers and the backsliding of his once-radical friends, Hazlitt never wavered in his loyalty to liberty, equality, and the principles behind the overthrow of the monarchy in France. His first literary production, at the age of thirteen, was a letter to a newspaper in indignant protest against the mob that sacked Joseph Priestley's house, when the scientist and preacher had celebrated publicly the second anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. His last book, published in the year he died, was a four-volume life of Napoleon, in which he expressed a vehement, but qualified, admiration of Napoleon as a man of heroic will and power in the service of the emancipation of mankind.
Hazlitt was a long time finding his vocation. When he attended the Hackney College, London, between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, he plunged into philosophical studies. In 1799 he took up the study of painting and did not relinquish the ambition to become a portraitist until 1812. His first books dealt with philosophy, economics, and politics; and his first job as a journalist was as parliamentary reporter for the Morning Chronicle. It was not until 1813, when he was thirty-six, that he began contributing dramatic criticism and miscellaneous essays to various periodicals and so discovered what he had been born to do. Years of wide reading and hard thinking had made him thoroughly ready: within the next decade he demonstrated himself to be a highly popular lecturer on Shakespeare, Elizabethan drama, and English poetry from Chaucer to his own day; a superb connoisseur of the theater and of painting; a master of the familiar essay; and with Coleridge, one of the two most important literary critics of his time. Coleridge elaborates his theory of poetry as part of a general philosophy of human imagination and human society. Hazlitt, on the other hand, disapproves of what he calls the 'modern or metaphysical school of criticism.' His distinctive critical gift is to communicate what he calls his 'impressions,' that is, the immediacy of his firsthand responses to a passage or work of literature.
Unlike his contemporaries Coleridge, Lamb, and De Quincey, whose writings look back to the elaborate prose stylists of the earlier seventeenth century, Hazlitt developed a fast-moving, hard-hitting prose in a style that he called 'plain, point-blank speaking.' He wrote, indeed, nearly as fast as he talked, almost without correction and (despite the density of literary quotations) without reference to books or notes. This rapidity was possible only because his essays are relatively planless. Hazlitt characteristically lays down a topic, then piles up relevant observations and instances; the essay accumulates instead of developing; often, it does not round to a conclusion, but simply stops. Hazlitt's prose is unfailingly energetic, but his most satisfying essays, considered as works of literary art, are those that, like 'My First Acquaintance with Poets,' have a narrative subject matter to give him a principle of organization.
In demeanor Hazlitt was awkward and self-conscious; Coleridge described him in 1803 as 'brow-hanging, shoe-contemplative, strange.' He had grown up as a member of a highly unpopular minority, in both religion and politics; he found his friends deserting to the side of reaction; and his natural combativeness was exacerbated by the persistent abuse directed against him by writers in the conservative press and periodicals. In the course of his life, he managed to quarrel, in private and in print, with almost everyone whom he had once admired and liked, including Coleridge,
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Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt, and even his most intimate and enduring friend, Charles Lamb. But what appealed to his admirers, as to modern readers of his essays, is his courage and uncompromising honesty, and above all his
