Margaret Fuller’s Reading Worlds

WorkWilliam Hazlitt

“Lectures on the English Comic Writers”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830)

QuotedRead

Documented 1840

Letters

Selected engagements, in chronological order.

Totals count documented engagements, once at the earliest witness. How we count →

Reprints, Memoirs passages, and repeat notes within a single manuscript are shown but never counted twice. Evidence for this work is selective, not exhaustive. Methodology →

When Fuller engaged with this work

I. Childhood
II. Adolescence
III. Self-Directed
IV. Transcendentalist1record
V. New York
VI. Europe
✦. Memoirs (1852)
1810
1820
1832
1836
1844
1846
1850
1840—

Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson

p175
quoted · read
“Accept a miracle instead of wit, / All these dull lines by Spenser's pencil writ!”

Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. II. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984.

Hudspeth identified this explicitly: 'Fuller's modification of Hazlitt's quip in "On Wit and Humour" (in “Lectures on the English Comic Writers” [London, 1819], p. 23): "Wit may sometimes, indeed, be shown in compliments as well as satire; as in the common epigram "Accept a miracle, instead of wit: / See two dull lines with Stanhope's pencil writ."' Fuller substitutes 'Spenser's pencil' for 'Stanhope's pencil' and changes 'See' to 'All these.'