[citation needed] Political insight is by no means absent from Hazlitt's subsequent works, and publications such as The Spirit of the Age (1825) condemn figures such as Robert Southey for their abandonment of political radicalism, while Hazlitt's biography of Napoleon (four volumes; 1828–1830) aimed to defend his reputation against a biography from the Tory Sir Walter Scott.

Hazlitt regularly travelled from London to the village, and was particularly fond of staying at Winterslow Hut, an inn, where he could write in peace.

It concludes with a deeply personal account of an occasion when Hazlitt painted his father's portrait in the Unitarian chapel at Wem, Shropshire.

I think, but am not sure, that I finished this portrait (or another afterwards) on the same day that the news of the battle of Austerlitz came; I walked out in the afternoon, and, as I returned, saw the evening star set over a poor man's cottage with other thoughts and feelings than I shall ever have again.

After philosophically musing on the nature of greatness and genius, Hazlitt concludes the essay with a reprise of his obituary of John Cavanagh, a noted fives player who died in 1819.