The language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power.
—William Hazlitt, essay on Coriolanus
William Hazlitt (1778–1830) was a democrat in his youth, along with Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, his contemporaries in England’s first Romantic generation. Unlike them he was a democrat still when he died. He stood on the side of “the people and … the people’s rights,” he said in the preface to his Political Essays (1819), “against those who say they have no rights, that they are the property, the goods, the chattels, the livestock on the estate of Legitimacy.” Hazlitt defended the revolution in France not only in its early constitutional phase, which most Englishmen did, but also in its Jacobin and Napoleonic phases, during the long period of Britain’s war with France and the fearful Tory reaction (fearful of French ideas and French invasions). His partisanship wasn’t blind. He admired Napoleon, he doted on him, yet he allowed that he was a tyrant—but “he was not … a tyrant by right divine. Tyranny in him was not sacred: it was not eternal: it was not sanctioned by all the laws of religion and morality.” Hazlitt wrote much about politics but disclaimed being a politician and still more “a party-man.” Obviously he was no Tory. But neither was he a Whig:
A modern Whig is but a fag-end of a Tory. The old Whigs [who opposed the war with France] were in principle what the modern Jacobins
