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Hazlitt's one of those difficult personalities too. I sometimes wonder if that's partly why he's so unread, though it's probably more to the point that he's as relentlessly allusive to contemporary micro-events and figures as Byron is in the Don Juan intro, which I swear single-handedly reduced Byron's readership by at least fifty percent this last century. With Byron you can skip to Canto One though, or if you're patient can get there shortly and not look back. Hazlitt wasn't careful to clearly direct at least a chunk of his work toward universal/personal interest, the way Emerson did, with his often deceptively self-help focus and absurdly general titles, which given the limited appeal of essays for most people means Emerson gets most of the small pile of chips. Once you know enough about his era, though, Hazlitt's use of highly specific contemporary examples to make universal points becomes awesomely fruitful and entertaining. He's more or less a secret pleasure for professors, graduate students, and maybe historians studying the Romantic period at this point. Which makes me sad.

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More moved by this new pope than I probably should be.