ABSTRACT
Hazlitt’s description of Shelley is unusual in having been published during the poet’s lifetime. Other accounts based on personal knowledge of Shelley were posthumous: attempts either to form or to exploit his reputation. Written by friends and followers, these memoirs presented themselves as sympathetic, even if sympathy was characterized by the effort to exculpate Shelley from the misconduct or intellectual folly of which his opponents accused him. Hazlitt’s portrait is written by a member of the liberal, literary circles in which Shelley moved for a time, but is satirical rather than admiring. He was often enough mocked by those who did not know him and were his natural ideological foes; this text is interesting (and unique) because its satire comes from a writer who did know him, and who might have been expected to have shared his political discontent.
