This collection includes: Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, Lectures on the English Poets, Liber Amoris, The Spirit of the Age, and Table-Talk. According to Wikipedia: "William Hazlitt (10 April 1778 – 18 September 1830) was an English writer, remembered for his humanistic essays and literary criticism, and as a grammarian and philosopher. He is now considered one of the great critics and essayists of the English language,] placed in the company of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell, but his work is currently little-read and mostly out of print. During his lifetime he befriended many people who are now part of the 19th-century literary canon, including Charles and Mary Lamb, Stendhal, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth."