The Spirit of the Age to have inaugurated the Romantic movement in English poetry with the publication in 1798 of their "Lyrical Ballads". Hazlitt was introduced to Wordsworth by Coleridge, and both had a shaping influence on him, who was privileged to have read "Lyrical Ballads" in manuscript. Though Hazlitt was never close with Wordsworth, their relationship was cordial for many years. As between Coleridge and Hazlitt, as well as Southey and Hazlitt, differences between Wordsworth and Hazlitt over politics were a major cause of the breakdown of their friendship. But there was another cause for the rupture. Hazlitt had reviewed Wordsworth's "The Excursion" in
Lake Poets Shelley, finding his hero's house full of fashionable people and Wordsworth himself away canvassing for the local Tory candidate. Keats moved on to Scotland which provided him with the inspiration he sought (and where, in particular, he felt the influence of Robert Burns). Byron did not visit the Lakes, but he ridiculed the isolation and narrowness of mind of the older Lake Poets, as well as of their abandonment of radical politics. The hale and hearty John Wilson provided an alternative take on the role of Lake Poet. He lived near Windermere between 1808 and 1815 and knew the older