Hazlitt as Romantic

Hazlitt's credentials as a Romantic are placed within a biographical context, beginning with the observation that the profession of essayist was not the one to which he first aspired. He resorted to journalism only when he failed to become a Unitarian minister, painter, philosopher and lecturer. It is in his arguments concerning the imagination, particularly such aspects as "gusto," "sympathy" and "genius," that justification is found for aligning him with Romantic contemporaries. His ideas are argued to have a source in the theories of Joseph Priestley, his former teacher, who was also an influence on Coleridge and Wordsworth. Yet Hazlitt's association with those precursors is argued only to be partial, for he was ahead of his time both in his atheism, and rejection of necessitarian and millenarian philosophies.