the local school. He devoted much attention to the education of his son, William, with the intention that he would also become a Unitarian minister. While the Reverend William Hazlitt's intensive tutoring of his son may explain in part the brilliance of the latter's subsequent writings, it was also responsible for his physical and mental breakdown under the strain of his father's expectations. When the younger Hazlitt left the New College at Hackney after only two years, thereby signalling that he would never follow his father into the Unitarian ministry, the latter was bitterly disappointed. In 1798, Samuel Taylor Coleridge visited Hazlitt at Wem – an encounter which was later described by Hazlitt's son in the essay "My First Acquaintance with Poets". In the essay, Hazlitt's life at Wem is described as follows: While Hazlitt's failure to secure a powerful position in the Unitarian ministry may have been a source of disappointment for him, he continued to participate in Unitarian debate on a national level. In addition to producing three volumes of sermons while living at Wem, he was a regular contributor to periodicals such as the Protestant Dissenter's Magazine and the Universal Theological Magazine. In 1801 (possibly early 1802), Hazlitt's son William returned to Wem to paint his portrait. Sitting in the chapel at Wem, with the winter sun raking across the subject's face, the painter described his 64-year-old father as "then in a green old age, with strong-marked features, and scarred with the smallpox", who read an old copy of Shaftesbury's Characteristics as he sat. The painting – now in Maidstone Museum and Art Gallery – was shown at the prestigious Royal Academy summer exhibition in 1802. Paulin has argued that the younger Hazlitt's reference to Shaftesbury is significant, because it establishes "a deliberate connection between advanced Whig culture and his father in the tiny Unitarian meeting-house in Wem". In his retirement, Hazlitt lived at Addlestone in Surrey, at Bath in Somerset, and at Crediton in Devon, where he died in 1820. Notes References Burley, Stephen (2010). "'In this Intolerance I Glory': William Hazlitt (1737–1820) and the Dissenting Periodical", The Hazlitt Review (3), 9–24. Wu, Duncan (2000). "'Polemical divinity': William Hazlitt at the University of Glasgow", Romanticism (6), 163–77. Wu, Duncan (2007). "Hazlitt, William (1737–1820)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press accessed 25 Nov 2011. Further reading Burley, Stephen (2011). "Hazlitt the Dissenter: Religion, Philosophy, and