– ALL THAT IS WORTH REMEMBERING –

they were suppressed with unstinting ruthlessness by the government and in any case their aims were, by our standards, modest. No one argued for universal suffrage, the idea of giving women the vote being inconceivable (though they were allowed to write political pamphlets, canvass, and act as patrons of constituencies), and very few advocated even manhood suffrage. ‘Democracy’ was a dirty word, associated with mobrule and the guillotine; it was certainly not the objective of those who pushed through the Reform Act of 1832, which continued to tie the franchise to property.

Foreign though it seems to us, that was the political environment in which Hazlitt lived, and it informs every essay in this volume. When in ‘On the Connexion between Toad-Eaters and Tyrants’ he condemned those who prostituted their pens ‘to the mock-heroic defence of the most bare-faced of all mummeries, the pretended alliance of kings and people!’ (p.31), he took a risk: those writers-turned-whores were his former friends, Southey, Coleridge and Wordsworth, and they had the ear of those in power. Southey and Coleridge did not hesitate to write to the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, demanding that journalists like Hazlitt be imprisoned.

That did not discourage him from quizzing more exalted icons. In his day the king could declare wars, form governments, and raise armies, and his consent was indispensable if Parliament was to formulate and implement legislation. That made calling him ‘mad-

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