In 1798 Hazlitt had his immortal meeting at Wem with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He described himself at this period as “dumb, inarticulate, helpless, like a worm by the wayside,” striving in vain to put on paper the thoughts which oppressed him, shedding tears of vexation at his inability, and feeling happy if in eight years he could write as many pages. The abiding influence of his First Poet he has acknowledged in an imperishable chapter. For a long while he still kept in “the o’erdarkened ways” of Malthus and Tucker, or in the shadow, dear to him, of Hobbes; but in 1817 the floodgates broke, the pure current gushed out; and in the _Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays_ we have the primal pledge of Hazlitt as we know him, “such as had never been before him, such as will never be again.” From a “dumbness” and diffidence extreme, he developed into the readiest of writers; his sudden pages, year after year, transcribed in his slant large hand, went to the printers rapidly and at first draft. The longer he used his dedicated pen, the freer, the brighter, the serener it grew. In the fourteen or fifteen of his books which deal with genius and the conduct of life, there is, throughout, an indescribable unaffected zest, a self-same and unwavering certitude of handling. Once he learned his trade, he gave himself a large field and an easy rein. He never warmed towards a subject chosen for him. His conversation was non-professional. He considered a discussion as to the likelihood of the weather’s holding up for to-morrow as “the end and privilege of a life of study.” In London, as soon as he had abandoned painting, he became a parliamentary reporter, and began to lecture on the English philosophers and metaphysicians. He furnished his famous dramatic criticisms to _The Morning Chronicle_, _The Champion_, _The Examiner_, and _The Times_, and he acted later as home editor of _The Liberal_. He married, on May-day of 1808, Miss Sarah Stoddart, who owned the property near Salisbury where he afterwards spent melancholy years alone. He fulfilled one human duty perfectly, for he loved and reared his son. A most singular infatuation for the unlovely daughter of his landlady; a second inauspicious marriage in 1824 with a Mrs. Isabella Bridgwater; a prolonged journey on the Continent; the failure of the publishers of his _Life of Napoleon_, which thus in his needful days brought him no competence; a long illness heroically borne, and a burial in the parish churchyard of St. Anne’s, under a headstone raised, in a romantic remorse after an estrangement, by Charles Wells, the author of _Joseph and his Brethren_,—these round out the meagre details of Hazlitt’s life. He died in the arms of his son and of his old friend Charles Lamb,[63] on the 18th of September, 1830, at 6 Frith Street, Soho.