In
later years as the younger man grew cantankerous and the elder
declined, through opium, into a 'battered seraph', there was an
estrangement. But Hazlitt never forgot his obligation.
My soul has indeed remained in its original bondage, dark, obscure,
with longings infinite and unsatisfed; my heart, shut up in the
prison-house of this rude clay, has never found, nor will it ever
find, a heart to speak to; but that my understanding also did not
remain dumb and brutish, or at length found a language that
expresses itself, I owe to Coleridge.
Coleridge, sympathizing with the young man's taste for philosophy
and abetting it, encouraged him to work. upon a treatise which saw
the light in 1805, An Essay on the Principles of Human Action: Being
an Argu-ment in favour of the Natural Disinterestedness of the Human
Mind. Meantime, however,--the ministry having been renounced--the
question of a vocation became more and more urgent, and after long
indecision Hazlitt packed his portmanteau for London, resolved to
learn painting under his brother John, who had begun to do
prosperously. John taught him some rudiments, and packed him off to
Paris, where he studied for some four months in the Louvre and
learned to idolize Bonaparte. This sojourn in Paris--writes his
grandson and biographer--'was one long beau jour to him'.
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