Priestley: a performance which, for the
gravity of its thought as for the balance of its expression, would
do credit to ninety-nine grown men in a hundred. At fifteen, his
father designing that he should enter the ministry, he proceeded to
the Unitarian College, Hackney; where his master, a Mr. Corrie,
found him 'rather backward in many of the ordinary points of
learning and, in general, of a dry, intractable understanding', the
truth being that the lad had set his heart against the ministry,
aspiring rather to be a philosopher--in particular a political
philosopher. At fourteen he had conceived ('in consequence of a
dispute one day, after coming out of Meeting, between my father and
an old lady of the congregation, respecting the repeal of the
Corporation and Test Acts and the limits of religious toleration')
the germ of his Project for a New Theory of Civil and Criminal
Legislation, published in his maturer years (1828), but drafted and
scribbled upon constantly in these days, to the neglect of his
theological studies. His father, hearing of the project, forbade him
to pursue it.
Thus four or five years at the Unitarian College were wasted, or, at
least, had been spent without apparent profit; and in 1798 young
Hazlitt, aged close upon twenty, unsettled in his plans as in his
prospects, was at home again and (as the saying is) at a loose end;
when of a sudden his life found its spiritual apocalypse.
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