The book "The Spirit of the Age; or, Modern Portraits" by the famous British writer William Hazlitt is a collection of essay portraits of prominent writers, politicians and cultural figures of the Romantic period. The author offers the reader to feel the spirit of his time, blinded by the specificity of each of the displayed images. Each portrait is a balanced analytical description of the personality, which is put on paper by the sharp pen of a restless literary critic. The reader is immersed in the atmosphere of the era, where each individual creature described by Hazlitt reproduces a peculiar "spirit of the era", deserving of attention and analysis. "The spirit of the age; or, Modern portraits" is not only literary characteristics of outstanding personalities, but also a kind of chronicle of the era, which can challenge our modern ideas about history and culture.