The Spirit of the Age; Or, Contemporary Portraits — Context and Discussion

The Child-Philosopher and the Quotation-Machine

In the Bentham essay, Hazlitt dwells on the philosopher's reclusive domesticity: 'He has lived for the last forty years in a house in Westminster, overlooking the Park, like an anchoret in his cell, reducing law to a system, and the mind of man to a machine.' The image of the hermit-legislator is deliberately paradoxical—a man who would reform the world yet barely stirs from his study. Hazlitt extends the contrast by noting Bentham's refusal of a gift from Emperor Alexander: 'the philosopher, to his eternal honour, returned' the miniature in a gold snuff-box. The detail is chosen to illustrate a principled indifference to worldly honors.

By contrast, the portrait of Sir James Mackintosh presents a man whose learning is entirely borrowed. Hazlitt describes his lectures as 'a kind of philosophical centos'—patchworks of other writers' thoughts. Mackintosh 'seemed to stand with his back to the drawers in a metaphysical dispensary, and to take out of them whatever ingredients suited his purpose.' The critique is devastating: the orator's brilliance is not his own. Hazlitt even quotes an unnamed critic who said 'he did not think a man of genius could speak for two hours without saying something by which he would have been electrified.' The implication is that Mackintosh, for all his fluency, lacked original genius.

The Politics of Proximity: Burke's Shadow

Hazlitt traces Mackintosh's political conversion to a personal meeting with Edmund Burke. The 'sudden and violent change' in Mackintosh's views, he writes, 'was attributed to a personal interview which he had had a little before his death with Mr. Burke, at his house at Beaconsfield.' This is a key moment in the collection: Hazlitt treats intellectual allegiance as something that can be transferred through physical proximity. Burke himself is described as 'the great apostate from liberty and betrayer of his species,' a judgment that reveals Hazlitt's own political sympathies. Yet he acknowledges the power of Burke's later writing, calling the Regicide Peace 'a work imposing, solid in many respects, abounding in facts and admirable reasoning.'

The portrait of Mackintosh becomes a case study in how personal influence can override principle. Hazlitt notes that Mackintosh's recantation 'was not a matter of triumph or exultation' but 'a subject of regret, of slow, reluctant, painful admission.' The language suggests that Hazlitt sees political apostasy as a kind of tragedy—a loss of hope that 'pointed to future improvement.' The reader is left to wonder whether any of the other portraits in the collection will show similar reversals, or whether steadfastness is possible in an age of shifting opinions.

The Portraitist's Method: Contrast as Argument

Throughout the excerpts, Hazlitt relies on a technique of juxtaposition. He sets Bentham's global reputation against his local anonymity, Mackintosh's borrowed learning against his oratorical success, and Burke's apostasy against his literary power. The effect is to make each portrait a miniature drama of competing forces. Hazlitt does not simply describe his subjects; he places them in a field of tensions—between the abstract and the concrete, the systematic and the eccentric, the original and the derivative.

This method is visible even in the collection's structure. The table of contents pairs figures: 'Mr. Campbell—Mr. Crabbe,' 'Mr. Brougham—Sir F. Burdett,' 'Lord Eldon—Mr. Wilberforce.' The reader is invited to compare and contrast. Hazlitt's own voice is never neutral; he judges, praises, and condemns. But his judgments are always grounded in specific observations—a returned snuff-box, a quoted remark, a description of a lecture hall. The result is a work that is as much about the art of character-writing as it is about the characters themselves.

Hazlitt's portraits reward readers who attend to the small, telling detail—the gesture, the habit, the borrowed phrase. The essays are not biographies but encounters, each one shaped by the author's own convictions and antipathies. To read them is to watch a critic at work, measuring his contemporaries against an exacting standard of intellectual honesty. The collection offers no final verdict on the age, only a series of vivid, disputatious sketches that invite the reader to form their own.

I keep thinking about how Hazlitt caught people mid-contradiction—the great mind fumbling for a quotation, the radical living like a child. It made me remember another quiet book, one that traces how girls grow into themselves while the world half-watches. There’s a tenderness in that watching, like holding a breath. Stray Thoughts for Girls — Inside the Classic stayed with me the same way, less about answers than about the soft weight of becoming.