I've been reading a used copy of
Table Talk by William Hazlitt that I picked up somewhere. It's apparently out of print, which is a pity, because I'm finding it very enjoyable. Amazon does offer his
Selected Writings.
Hazlitt was active at the height of the Romantic period of English literature and his essays reflect the outlook of the age wonderfully.
Today, we are too loaded down with “theoretical perspectives” and knowledge of our “implication” in various types of evil systems to be able to write with the enthusiasm and optimism that he shows. Here he is on the joys of reading and thinking, from his essay “On the Past and Future”:
How many ideas and trains of sentiment, long and deep and intense, often pass through the mind in only one day's thinking or reading, for instance! How many such days are there in a year, how many years in a long life, still occupied with something interesting, still recalling some old impression, still recurring to some difficult question and making progress in it, every step accompanied with a sense of power, and every moment conscious of 'the hight endeavour or the glad success'; for the mind seizes only in that which keeps it employed and is wound up to a certain pitch of pleasurable excitement or lively solicitude by the necessity of its own nature.
Try getting that kind of humanism into a modern refereed journal.
In another essay, “On Genius and Common Sense,” he tells of someone who had been charged with treason who “retired soon after into Wales to write an epic poem”. That's some spunk.
Wikipedia has a good entry on him.
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