<DIV>Provocatively and congenially at home in this new collection of his city essays, the engaging late-18th-century and early-19th-century English prose writer William Hazlitt sparkles with urban wit and gossip. Characters from the Regency spring to life in these essays, including William Wordsworth and Lord Byron, sportsmen and dandies, street jugglers and footmen, and coffee house bores. <br></div>