Education Quote by William Hazlitt

Hazlitt’s jab lands because it pretends to be a compliment while quietly demoting Samuel Johnson from towering sage to brilliant slacker. “Lazy learned man” is a beautifully barbed pairing: learnedness implies discipline, laziness implies its absence, and Hazlitt wants both to be true. Johnson’s mind, in this portrait, is less a library than a furnace - powered by talk. The line elevates conversation over composition, as if Johnson’s real genius lived in the room, not on the page, and the books were just the ash left afterward.

The subtext is Hazlitt staking out his own critical values. As a Romantic-era critic suspicious of institutional authority, he can’t resist puncturing the 18th century’s great moralist. Johnson becomes a symbol of the old order: intellectually formidable, socially dominant, but also reliant on habit and inherited forms. “Too often by rote” isn’t merely about style; it’s about cognition. Hazlitt implies Johnson could slide into prefabricated wisdom, repeating himself with the confidence of a man whose reputation lets him.

Context sharpens the knife. By Hazlitt’s time, Johnson was already canonized - Boswell had turned him into a character as much as a writer. Hazlitt exploits that celebrity, suggesting the famous “Johnsonian” manner was a kind of performance, a practiced rhetoric that could outrun fresh thinking. He grants Johnson “much and well” to keep the criticism credible, then pivots to the real charge: a mind that preferred the thrill of assertion to the slow labor of revision.