In some instances Hazlitt was consciously the aggressor, but his attacks were never wanton. He denounced Wordsworth and Coleridge and Southey because they were renegades from the cause which lay nearest to his heart. Their apostasy was an unforgivable offence in his eyes, and his wrath was proportioned to the admiration which he otherwise entertained for them. It is true that he treated their motives hastily and unjustly, but none of his opponents set him the example of charity. In the earlier years of their acquaintance Coleridge had spoken of Hazlitt as a "thinking, observant, original man." one who "says things that are his own in a way of his own,"[29] whereas after their estrangement he discovered that Hazlitt was completely lacking in originality. Wordsworth, being offended at Hazlitt's review of the "Excursion," peevishly raked up an old scandal and wrote to Haydon that he was "not a proper person to be admitted into respectable society."[30] Perhaps Hazlitt was not as "respectable" as his poet-friends, but he had a better sense of fair play. At any rate, in a complete balancing of the accounts, Hazlitt's frequent displays of ill-temper are offset by the insidious, often unscrupulous baitings which he suffered from his opponents. Naturally his bitterness was extended to his reflections on mankind in general. He felt as if the human race had wilfully deceived his sanguine expectations, and he poured out his grievances against its refractoriness, taking revenge for his public and his private wrongs, in a passage in which high idealism is joined with personal spite, in which he has revealed himself in all his strength and weakness, and involved his enemies in a common ruin with himself. It concludes the essay "On the Pleasure of Hating":