There is a passage in Hazlitt’s The Spirit of the Age—it comes in the essay on “The Late Mr. Horne Tooke”—that defines not only its eponymous subject but an entire class of failed writers. “He generally ranged himself on the losing side,” wrote Hazlitt, “and had rather an ill-natured delight in contradiction, and in perplexing the understandings of others, without leaving them any clue to guide them out of the labyrinth into which he had led them. He understood, in its perfection, the great art of throwing the onus probandi on his adversaries, and so could maintain almost any opinion, however absurd or fantastical, with fearless impunity.”

Writers of this class are remembered for their follies, rather than their wisdom, for their follies have a representative character. What they illuminate is not the distilled intelligence of their time but its shibboleths and chimeras. These they have the talent to make so entertaining that their writings seem for a while audacious and even original. It is only later, in the sober light of retrospection, that we come to understand that the “ill-natured delight in contradiction” in such writers had only succeeded in trivializing every important subject they touched upon. In the end this ability to “maintain almost any opinion, however absurd or fantastical,” turns out to have been an act, a performance, a role that never required the writers themselves to live by any of the ideas they so easily espoused. There was always a new role to