William Hazlitt ? essayist, critic, associate of Coleridge and Wordsworth ? died in Soho lodging house in 1830 at the age of 52. His final words ? ?Well, I?ve had a happy life? ? astonished his listeners, for pain and suffering had been his frequent companions. In this book Maurice Whelan imaginatively takes hold of his subject and places him firmly at the beginning of the 21st century, approaching Hazlitt from a fresh point of view. Hazlitt was not only a great investigator of the inner world and precursor to Freud; he also went beyond the founder of psychoanalysis in anticipating modern psychological developments. Whelan argues strongly that Hazlitt should be taken seriously as a thinker and writer of extraordinary relevance in our present world ? a true spirit of our age.