A life spent among paintings, in study and in love for art, is a happy and peaceful dream, or rather, it is dreaming and being awake at the same time, with "the sober certainty of waking bliss", with romantic voluptuousness. of a visionary and abstracted living. A prominent member of the multitude of English essayists, William Hazlitt (1778-1830) was, before being a writer, a painter, as well as a notable art critic.