British essayist and critic — the greatest essayist in the English language after Montaigne according to many assessments — whose essays on painting, literature, and character combined personal passion with critical intelligence in a way that has not been surpassed.
Creates the personal critical essay as a literary form — Hazlitt's combination of intimate subjectivity, strong judgment, and wide-ranging allusion in essays on everything from painters to fistfighting established the model for the personal critical essay that the London Magazine and later Victorian criticism developed.
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