'There is a pleasure in painting which none but painters know.' In writing, you have to contend with the world; in painting, you have only to carry on a friendly strife with Nature. You sit down to your task, and are happy. From the moment that you take up the pencil, and look Nature in the face, you are at peace with your own heart. No angry passions rise to disturb the silent progress of the work, to shake the hand, or dim the brow: no irritable humours are set afloat: you have no absurd opinions to combat, no point to strain, no adversary to crush, no fool to annoy-you are actuated by fear...

'There is a pleasure in painting which none but painters know.' In writing, you have to contend with the world; in painting, you have only to carry on a friendly strife with Nature. You sit down to your task, and are happy. From the moment that you take up the pencil, and look Nature in the face, you are at peace with your own heart. No angry passions rise to disturb the silent progress of the work, to shake the hand, or dim the brow: no irritable humours are set afloat: you have no absurd opinions to combat, no point to strain, no adversary to crush, no fool to annoy-you are actuated by fear...

Excerpt from Liber Amoris or the New Pygmalion
With those critics who, because of the Liber Amoris, would rank Hazlitt with Rousseau, we cannot agree, primarily because in the "Confessions" of the latter we find, as we think, a higher and more conscious art, to say nothing of a formulation, from the experiences there narrated, of a philosophy that has had no little influence in the world. Rousseau's confession-fictions molded all his life and thoughts. Hazlitt simply wrote the story of his obsession by a nympholeptic idealization of a servant girl. He knew and yet refused wholly to admit...

The Spirit of The Age: Or Contemporary Portraits