J. B. Priestley was an essay writer of the first order, a born essayist, or, more appositely in this context, a natural pupil of William Hazlitt. His own portrait of the master was, as readers can see here for themselves, not something dashed off in a moment, but the expression of a lifetime's experience; an example of the art worthy to take its place beside Hazlitt 's best, in his own masterpiece, The Spirit of the Age. It is word perfect, almost thought perfect, and since that balance has been so skilfully struck, nothing written here must be allowed to disturb it. But in the past half-century, since Priestley wrote his British Council essay, or, more precisely, since he formed his firm judgement on these matters in the 1930s, several developments have still further enhanced the estimate of Hazlitt's greatness.

Not many decades ago, no such honour or pre-eminence would have been accorded him. Hazlitt was still regarded as an outsider: his politics or his morals or the two together still seemed to forbid his proper recognition. In the 1930s Priestley himself was regarded as hopelessly biased or mistaken when he mentioned William Hazlitt in the same breath as Charles Lamb. Priestley also wrote, then and thereafter, most perceptively and lovingly about Charles Lamb; indeed he probably understood better than anyone else the subtle, ever-changing appreciation of their competing virtues. Once, the palm was accorded without a contest to Lamb; but assuredly, now, Hazlitt has overtaken his friendly rival, and not even Priestley who did so much with such authority, first to resurrect Hazlitt and then to keep the scales weighing fairly, is here to witness the spectacle.

Priestley sometimes took the view that Hazlitt was more successful as an essayist than as a critic, but often no sharp distinction could be drawn between the two, and sometimes there were moments, famous or not so famous, when Hazlitt expressed the spirit of the age and put his own individual imprint upon it. Which was it when he heard his first recital of the Lyrical Ballads at Nether Stowey from the mouths of Wordsworth and Coleridge themselves, and ‘the sense of a new style and a new spirit in poetry came over me’? (The Complete Works, vol. 17, p. 117).