Hazlitt preached
before the new Assembly of the States-General of New Jersey,
lectured at Philadelphia on the Evidences of Christianity, founded
the First Unitarian Church at Boston, and declined a proffered
diploma of D.D. In 1786-7 he returned to England and took up his
abode at Wem, in Shropshire. His elder son, John, was now old enough
to choose a vocation, and chose that of a miniature-painter. The
second child, Peggy, had begun to paint also, amateurishly in oils.
William, aged eight--a child out of whose recollection all memories
of Bandon and of America (save the taste of barberries) soon faded--
took his education at home and at a local school. His father
designed him for the Unitarian ministry.
The above dry recital contains a number of facts not to be
overlooked as predisposing causes in young Hazlitt's later career;
as that he was Irish by blood, intellectual by geniture, born into
dissent, and a minority of dissent, taught at home to value the
things of the mind, in early childhood a nomad, in later childhood
'privately educated'--a process which (whatever its merits) is apt
to develop the freak as against the citizen, the eccentric and lop-
sided as against what is proportionate and disciplined. Young
Hazlitt's cleverness and his passion for individual liberty were
alike precocious. In 1791, at the age of thirteen, he composed and
published in The Shrewsbury Chronicle a letter of protest against
the calumniators of Dr.
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