William Hazlitt

Liber Amoris, Or, the New Pygmalion William Hazlitt

Publisher Marketing: 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 that he was an hallucinant upon the subject. Into his rhapsodies, his rages, there entered always a sense of the fact that he was making a fool of himself. He poised, in a mental agony as real as it now appears ridiculous to us, between passion and reason. Men a thousand, as strong, as cultured, as critical as Hazlitt have had such "affairs" before and since. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.