for himself on Headington Hill. This was his happiest and most fruitful period. Freed from college routine, he was able to devote himself whole-heartedly to advanced work. At home his influence extended year by year. Abroad he commanded a respect such as only a small minority of British scholars have ever enjoyed. His relations with colleagues in different foreign countries were of the friendliest character. With some of them he was in constant communication, giving and receiving much helpful criticism. The outbreak of war in 1914 thus came on him as a stunning blow, and its progress was to bring him the loss of intimate friends. At the end of 1915 the continuous strain and anxiety induced an attack of cerebral haemorrhage. Despite a partial recovery he never regained full vigour. On 1 September 1919 the end came quite suddenly.
When Haverfield first approached it, the subject of Roman Britain was, to use his own phrase, ‘the playground of the amateur’. Before his death he could claim that ‘our scientific knowledge of the island, however liable to future correction and addition, stands by itself among the studies of the Roman Empire’. He might truthfully have added that this was his own achievement. And it was accomplished almost single-handed; such good work as was done by others, was done largely through his inspiration and example. Although he did not live to produce the systematic treatise which he contemplated, the bibliography of his writings, containing as it does some five hundred entries, is a singularly impressive monument. Master of a nervous and exceptionally lucid style, he penetrated into every nook and corner of his subject, bringing to bear upon its problems, not only a vast knowledge of miscellaneous details, but a breadth of outlook, a sureness of touch, and a sanity of judgement that never failed to illuminate. Conspicuous in the long list are his two sets of Additamenta (1892, 1913) to the Berlin Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, his Romanization of Roman Britain (1905, 4th ed. 1923), and the numerous chapters which he contributed to the Victoria County History. His Ford lectures, The Roman Occupation of Britain, published posthumously in 1924, provide the most convenient conspectus of his results.
[Family papers; private information; personal knowledge. For fuller details see biographical notices in Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. ix and English Historical Review, 1920. There is a bibliography in Journal of Roman Studies, vol. viii. The first of these notices and the bibliography are reprinted, with additions, in the Ford lecture volume.]
HAZLITT, WILLIAM CAREW (1834–1913), bibliographer and man of letters, was born in London 22 August 1834. He was the eldest son of William Hazlitt, registrar of the court of bankruptcy, by his wife, Catherine Reynell, and a grandson of William Hazlitt [q.v.], the essayist. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School from 1842 to 1850, and after experimenting in journalism, in civil engineering, and, during the Crimean War, as a supernumerary clerk at the War Office, he published in 1858 The History of the Origin and Rise of the Republic of Venice, which in revised and extended forms reappeared in 1860 as a History of the Venetian Republic, and in 1900 and 1915 as The Venetian Republic, its Rise, its Growth, its Fall.
After eating dinners at the Inner Temple Hazlitt was called to the bar in 1861, but he was now becoming interested in the old books which he recorded in a Handbook to the Popular, Poetical and Dramatic Literature of Great Britain from the Invention of Printing to the Restoration (1867). To listing and editing these he devoted much of the rest of his life, examining thousands of old books as they passed through the sale rooms. Three series of Bibliographical Collections and Notes, with two supplements to the third, were published by him during the years 1876 to 1889, followed by a General Index, compiled by G. J. Gray (1893), and a fourth series in 1903. Written on odd bits of paper in a difficult hand, his notes, when they appeared in print, were sometimes inexact, but the Collections and Notes is still a much-used book of reference. In his old age Hazlitt gave much time to bringing all his notes together, with many new ones, as a Consolidated Bibliography, and made the cost of printing this a first charge on a reversionary bequest to the British Museum, the balance of which was to form a fund for purchasing early English books. The preparation of his Handbook enabled Hazlitt to give much valuable help to Henry Huth [q.v.] in the formation of the latter's well-known library, and he frequently offered bargains from the sale rooms to the British Museum and elsewhere. His methods of work and experiences are revealed in his Confessions of a Collector (1897) and in his two volumes, The Hazlitts (1911) and The Later Hazlitts (1912).
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