Life & Mortality Quote by William Hazlitt

Hazlitt’s jab lands because it flatters the idea of learning while quietly indicting the way learning can curdle into insulation. Calling the scholar “like a book written in a dead language” isn’t just a metaphor for difficulty; it’s an accusation of self-enclosure. A dead language suggests something preserved, exact, and prestigious - but also cut off from ordinary life, requiring initiation. The scholar becomes an artifact: impressive on the shelf, less useful in the room.

The subtext is a warning about culture turning into credential. Hazlitt, a critic by trade and a polemicist by temperament, spent his career arguing that taste and judgment weren’t the private property of the academy. He distrusted systems that convert intelligence into hierarchy. So the sting here isn’t aimed at knowledge itself, but at a kind of knowledge performed as distance - scholarship that signals, “Not for you.”

That’s why the line reads less like anti-intellectualism than an early critique of gatekeeping. “It is not every one that can read in it” carries a double edge: yes, some texts are hard; but some people choose to be hard to read. Hazlitt is sketching a social scene as much as an educational one: the learned person who speaks in citations, the conversationalist who hides behind jargon, the institution that mistakes obscurity for depth.

In Hazlitt’s Romantic-era context - when print culture was expanding and public debate was becoming a mass sport - the quote argues for intellectual vitality over embalmed expertise. Scholarship should translate, not entomb.