to the couple from his knowledge of their temperaments. Seven years
after (August 9, 1815), he wrote to Southey. 'I was at Hazlitt's
marriage, and had like to have been turned out several times during
the ceremony. Anything awful makes me laugh.' The marriage was not a
happy one.

Portrait-painting had been abandoned long before this. The Essay on
the Principles of Human Action (1805) had fallen, as the saying is,
stillborn from the press: Free Thoughts on Public Affairs (1806) had
earned for the author many enemies but few readers: and a treatise
attacking Malthus's theory of population (1807) had allured the
public as little. A piece of hack-work, The Eloquence of the British
Senate, also belongs to 1807: A New and Improved Grammar of the
English Tongue for the use of Schools to 1810. The nutriment to be
derived from these works, again, was not of the sort that
replenishes the family table, and in 1812 Hazlitt left Winterslow
(where he had been quarrelling with his brother-in-law), settled in
London in 19 York Street, Westminster--once the home of John Milton-
-and applied himself strenuously to lecturing and journalism. His
lectures, on the English Philosophers, were delivered at the Russell
Institution: his most notable journalistic work, on politics and the
drama, was done for The Morning Chronicle, then edited by Mr. Perry.
From an obituary notice of Hazlitt contributed many years later
(October 1830) to an old magazine I cull the following:

He obtained an introduction, about 1809 or 1810, to the late Mr.
Perry, of The Morning Chronicle, by whom he was engaged to report
Parliamentary debates, write original articles, etc. He also
furnished a number of theatrical articles on the acting of Kean. As
a political writer he was apt to be too violent; though in general