found him 'rather backward in many of the ordinary points of
learning and, in general, of a dry, intractable understanding', the
truth being that the lad had set his heart against the ministry,
aspiring rather to be a philosopher--in particular a political
philosopher. At fourteen he had conceived ('in consequence of a
dispute one day, after coming out of Meeting, between my father and
an old lady of the congregation, respecting the repeal of the
Corporation and Test Acts and the limits of religious toleration')
the germ of his Project for a New Theory of Civil and Criminal
Legislation, published in his maturer years (1828), but drafted and
scribbled upon constantly in these days, to the neglect of his
theological studies. His father, hearing of the project, forbade him
to pursue it.

Thus four or five years at the Unitarian College were wasted, or, at
least, had been spent without apparent profit; and in 1798 young
Hazlitt, aged close upon twenty, unsettled in his plans as in his
prospects, was at home again and (as the saying is) at a loose end;
when of a sudden his life found its spiritual apocalypse. It came
with the descent of Samuel Taylor Coleridge upon Shrewsbury, to take
over the charge of a Unitarian Congregation there.

He did not come till late on the Saturday afternoon before he was to
preach; and Mr. Rowe [the abdicating minister], who himself went
down to the coach in a state of anxiety and expectation to look for
the arrival of his successor, could find no one at all answering the
description, but a round-faced man, in a short black coat (like a
shooting-jacket) which hardly seemed to have been made for him, but
who seemed to be talking at a great rate to his fellow-passengers.
Mr. Rowe had scarce returned to give an account of his