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After giving up school, Hazlitt spent three years painting, reading Rousseau, and pursuing the life of a ‘solitary thinker.’ At the end of 1797 his father was excited at the prospect of the appointment of a new Unitarian minister at Shrewsbury. The candidate was a young man who seemed to be everything that the Reverend Hazlitt had hoped for in his son – a philosopher, a fearless radical, and apparently a talented preacher. His name was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the young William Hazlitt went off to hear him deliver a trial sermon. A couple of days later, Coleridge came to Wem and spent an evening talking to the Unitarian minister; he also noticed his shy young admirer and invited him to come and stay in his little cottage at Nether Stowey just the other side of Bristol: he could meet his friend William Wordsworth, and they could take long philosophical walks together.