But Mary Lamb was
on his side; the rivals on one excuse or another went their ways or
were dismissed; and on May 1, 1808, the marriage took place at St.
Andrew's Church, Holborn. Lamb attended, foreboding little happiness
to the couple from his knowledge of their temperaments. Seven years
after (August 9, 1815), he wrote to Southey. 'I was at Hazlitt's
marriage, and had like to have been turned out several times during
the ceremony. Anything awful makes me laugh.' The marriage was not a
happy one.
Portrait-painting had been abandoned long before this. The Essay on
the Principles of Human Action (1805) had fallen, as the saying is,
stillborn from the press: Free Thoughts on Public Affairs (1806) had
earned for the author many enemies but few readers: and a treatise
attacking Malthus's theory of population (1807) had allured the
public as little. A piece of hack-work, The Eloquence of the British
Senate, also belongs to 1807: A New and Improved Grammar of the
English Tongue for the use of Schools to 1810. The nutriment to be
derived from these works, again, was not of the sort that
replenishes the family table, and in 1812 Hazlitt left Winterslow
(where he had been quarrelling with his brother-in-law), settled in
London in 19 York Street, Westminster--once the home of John Milton-
-and applied himself strenuously to lecturing and journalism.
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