Life & Mortality Quote by William Hazlitt

Hazlitt flips the usual piety around renown on its head: fame isn’t a laurel crown placed on the dead, it’s a tool handled by the living. The provocation lands because it punctures the comforting myth that greatness naturally rises and stays aloft. For Hazlitt, “antiquity” doesn’t transmit glory like a sealed estate; we curate it, polish it, and use it to flatter our own sense of taste and lineage. The dead don’t possess their reputation. We do.

The subtext is cultural power. When Hazlitt says “inheritance,” he’s pointing to who gets to distribute value: critics, institutions, educated publics, and the national storymakers who decide which names count as “great” and which get filed away as footnotes. “Lofty pride” is the tell. It’s not reverence so much as self-congratulation: by admiring the ancients, we quietly congratulate ourselves for being the kind of people who know to admire them. Canon-building becomes a moral performance.

Context matters. Hazlitt writes in a Britain obsessed with “the classics,” where Greek and Roman references served as social credentialing and political argument, and where Romantic-era critics were actively reshaping literary reputations in real time. His line reads as a warning against that cultural ventriloquism: the past is endlessly recruitable for present needs.

The intent isn’t to dismiss antiquity, but to expose the transaction. Fame is less a property than a relationship; it survives only as long as living communities keep spending attention on it. That’s a bracingly modern idea from a critic watching culture get manufactured before his eyes.