Hazlitt's rare first work, an essay on political rights, was one that he struggled with for eight years. Conceived of in 1796 as an essay " On the Disinterestedness of the Human Mind," it was many times laid aside, and not completed until 1804. When attacked as a third-rate writer in the August 1818 number of Blackwood's magazine, Hazlitt rated it above everything else he had subsequently written, retorting: "you state my pretensions quite as high or higher that I should. It is not everyone who can write third-rate books. There is no work of mine which I should class as even third-rate except my Principles of Human Action, a book which I daresay you never heard of, and which I am afraid you would not understand for the same reason that you never heard of it, namely the abstruseness of the style and matter" (quoted by Catherine Maclean, p. 389)