due time, a harvest of fruit for his own enrichment. I think he did not deny these obligations, even while he was privately expressing that personal pique and hostile feeling, which he vented to the public under cover of patriotism and concern for the people. Under cover, I say, without impugning his sincerity, and earnestness in either; the former, the angry feeling against Mr. Coleridge, he made no secret of among his associates in general. Under the circumstances my Father was to be excused for supposing that this gentleman of "judgment and talents" had been employed to run down the Lay Sermon in the E. Review, on account of his known talents for satire, and the severe judgments he had already published on himself in particular; but, as this has been denied, I have withdrawn two expressions which contain the imputation; the passage concerning the satirist himself I have not thought fit to withdraw.

Mr. Jeffrey's demeanor at the lakes in 1810 should never have been brought into this question; but from a natural wish to maintain the general truthfulness, if not the prudence and propriety, of my Father's language on the subject, I cannot help saying, that Lord Jeffrey's own account of it serves quite as well as Mr. Coleridge's, to illustrate the difference,-I think I may say the discrepancy,-between the gentleman conducting himself kindly and courteously in social life, and the same gentleman performing his duty as a reviewer. My Father had undergone no essential change, in the interval, either as a poet, a politician, or a man, nor had he shown any. The Friend was before the public. To pay compliments, even when they are no more than the genuine overflow of the soul, is a mark of complacency; but to have made efforts to "gratify" a gentleman under a notion that he "liked to receive compliments," was a still greater exercise of politeness. The critique of Christabel did not seem quite symphonious with compliments paid to the poetic mind of him who was best known to the public as the author of The Ancient Mariner, a poem which, equally with that and on very similar grounds, deserved to be called a "mixture of raving and drivelling." "I cheerfully acquit" the writer of any the

An article on Coleridge in the Penny Cyclopædia, which, together

least perception of merit in the poem ; although Scott and Byron, the most admired poets of the day, were known to have expressed admiration of it, he naturally preferred his own judgment; but I

with some misstatements of fact, contains the Ed. Review opinions on my Father's merits as an author, to wit, that he had next to none at all, and seems to have been written by a disciple of the critic who pronounced Christabel worthless with the exception of one passage, after referring to what was pointed out on this subject by Mr. Dequincey, proceeds thus: "Of this habit" (that of "trusting to others for suggestions which he improved, and for ideas which he elaborated"), another instance is supplied by Alvar's dungeon soliloquy in the Remorse (Act v., Scene 1), the ideas, and, to a certain extent, the words of which are derived from Caleb's prison scliloquy in Caleb Williams." Impressive writer in his own line as I knew Mr. Godwin to be, I was surprised to learn that he had written anything so poetical as Alvar's dungeon soliloquy. Anxious however to give him his due I took up Caleb Williams, and for pleasure, as well as duty, read it all through for the second time in my life. I perused with special care the three powerful chapters in which Caleb describes his imprisonment; I found that he dwells upon the "squalid solitude" of his forced abode, and Alvar mentions "friendless solitude;" that he speaks of a groan uttered in sleep, and Alvar speaks of " groaning and tears;" but with these exceptions I found neither the ideas nor the words of Alvar's soliloquy in Caleb Williams. My Father may possibly have been led to make the reflections and form the images of that soliloquy by Godwin's striking novel, as Thomson was led to write The Seasons by the perusal of Nature; but he certainly did not borrow them ready made therefrom. The closest resemblance to Caleb Williams that I can find in the Remorse is not in Act v, but in Act i., where Alvar says,

"My own life wearied me!

And but for the imperative voice within,

With mine own hand I had thrown off the burthen."

66

At the end of Chap. xi., Vol. ii., Caleb says, "I meditated suicide and ruminated, in the bitterness of my soul, upon the different means of escaping from the lead of existence." Caleb is restrained from self-murder, not by "an imperative voice within," a voice which "calmed" while it "quelled;" his words are, "still some inexplicable suggestion withheld my hand. I clung with desperate fondness to this shadow of existence, its mysterious attractions and its hopeless prospects." The three preceding pages are very fine in their way, but have nothing in common with the Remorse except of the most general description. Indeed unless my Father had been the first man that ever described imprisonment, he could not have avoided some general similarity with former describers.

The whole article I would recommend as a study to those who are desir

will take upon me to say, however true this may be, that no mere poetical demerits ever called forth such a vehement explosion of hisses as that with which Christabel was greeted in the E.

ous of acquiring the art of depreciation; the principle of which rests on the force of contrast with a pretence of candor, and may be thus thrown into the form of a rule; give the man praise à minori in order to take away all the credit commonly given him à majori: exalt other men, in order to pull him down from his seat, although these other men would themselves be the first to replace him in it. The Cyclopædist denies my Father originality of mind on plausible grounds, perhaps, and yet, I think, on insufficient ones. The habit of obtaining from others "suggestions to improve" and "ideas to elaborate" may almost be called common to the genus vatum. Dante is esteemed a vigorous and original writer: yet it has been clearly shown that the vision of the boy monk Alberico "served as a model for the entire edifice of his poem," and furnished him with some of his striking details.* Dante adopted everything in the Vision that he could turn to advantage, and left it to his commentators to make his acknowledgments to the youthful Visionary. Milton borrowed from all quarters, as may be seen in Todd's edition of his works. Tasso took wholesale from preceding Italian poets and from the Classics. Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard contains scarcely an image or sentiment that is entirely new, and in all his other poems he helps himself without scruple to the ideas and sometimes to the words of other poets. Shakspeare is full of borrowed pegs to hang his thoughts upon. Lord Byron declared that these charges of plagiarism against particular poets were a folly, since all poets are guilty of it. I think that almost all poets borrow a good deal in one way or another; but there is a difference in the mode of their borrowing; some take the thoughts and images of other writers and combine them with new matter; some take a great deal of what constitutes the substance and brilliancy of their compositions from historical or descriptive books in prose. Writers of a rich and ornate style borrow more than those of a severer cast: Byron borrowed far more from books than Crabbe, and Mr. Wordsworth has borrowed less, I believe, than any other great poet. Nature is the book that he has studied the most. The Penny Cyclopædist has added nothing but a mare's nest to Mr. Dequincey's instances of borrowing in my Father, of which Mr. Dequincey himself thought so little, that in spite of them all, he "most heartily believed" my Father" as entirely original in all his capital pretensions, as any one man that ever has existed; as Archimedes in ancient days, or as Shakspeare in modern."

An author is to be judged, in respect of original power, by the total result of his productions. Is the whole a new thing, or is there in the whole a something new interfused? Can you find the like elsewhere?

* See the Essay on this subject, extracted from an ancient manuscript, prefixed to Zotti's Dante, p. 19 42.

Review; that the hisses were at the author, because his " daily prose" was understood to be dedicated to the support of all that courtiers think should be supported:" what Mr. Coleridge endeavored to support being first the war against the would-be invader and subjugator of his country; secondly, the Church of England. No matter for the "compliments;" now in 1847; no, nor the disparagements either; "not of a pin ;"-as the tedious man says in Measure for Measure. I do not recur to them on their own account. Perhaps an editor may "lawfully" make himself pleasant to gentlemen whom afterwards he shall be obliged to expose as "whining and hypochondriacal poets" in his review; but it does seem rather a special, and somewhat pliant and elastic law, that can permit a gentleman to be sociable and friendly in his private behavior towards persons, whom, some years afterwards, casting his eye back on their literary and political career, it will be his duty to stigmatize, not only as men of “inordinate vanity and habitual effeminacy,”—that is a trifle,—but—upon whose heads he is bound to pour that dark flood of politico-personal accusations which may be seen and analysed at this day in pages 314-15 of vol. xxviii. of the Ed. Review. Utter disre

By this test my Father's writings must be tried, and perhaps they will be found to stand it better than those of many an author, who has carefully abstained from any formal or avoidable borrowing. That his are "the works of one who requires something from another whereon to hang whatever he may himself have to say," is just such a specious objection as the former. But it should be considered that every writer, in moral or religious disquisition, starts in fact from previous thought, whether he expressly produces it or not. In the Aids to Reflection and in the Remains my Father has given his thoughts in the form of comments on passages in the works of other men; and this he did, not from want of originality of mind, but from physical languor,—the want of continuous energy, -together with the exhaustive intensity, with which he entered into that particular portion of a subject to which his attention was directed. I do not believe, however, that the value of what he has left behind is so much impaired by its immethodical form as people at first sight imagine. The method and general plan of a literary work are often quite arbitrary, and sometimes, for the sake of preserving regularity of structure in the architecture of a book, a writer is obliged to say a great deal which is but introductory to that of his own which he has to impart.

5 Ed. Review, vol. xxvii., p. 67.

This fine specimen of a modern Philippic,-an Edinboro' Anti-Lakrad,

gard of consequences to the public,—vanity and effeminacy,— violence and vulgarity,-fantastic trickery,-a morbid appetite for infamy with an ardent love of corruption,-folly that reels with a sickening motion from one absurdity to another,-adherence to notions that are audacious and insane, revolting and nonsensical, entire want of charity, common sense, wisdom, and humanity, romantic servility,-heartless vice,-these are attributes of the man-they cannot be confined solely to the politician. We may charitably presume, indeed, that he who penned this tirade (one stroke of which I have passed by as too “rank” for my pen), never imagined that the characters he was blackening in effigy would look a single shade the darker to any one who beheld them as a neighbor of flesh and blood in actual life-the life of truth and reality; but is it not a strange state of things, when we must believe respecting an organ of public opinion, that it is not most unconscientious only because it is out of the domain of conscience altogether, and declaims upon virtue and vice, wisdom and folly,—the vice and folly of individuals—without any earnest feeling or belief on subjects, which demand the utmost earnestness and carefulness from all who think or speak of them? Thirty years ago many things were done by honorable men which honorable men would not do now, or would gain great dishonor by doing; money intended for the benefit of the public, especially for making men living members of the Church and followers of Christ, public functionaries too often thought they might employ according to their own private fancies; and such

—is contained in the review of the Literary Life of August, 1817. I would wish any reader who has opportunity, to compare it with the language, tone, and character of Remarks on the present mode of conducting Critical Journals, contained in the second volume of this work. The reviewer adds, "This is the true history of our reformed Anti-Jacobin poets, the life of one of whom is here recorded;" and then takes up Mr. C. by himself again, still more in that style, which is described in the B. L., where it speaks of the critic losing himself in the pasquillant.

The readers of the E. R. of that day were not fond of subtleties or finedrawn sketches; otherwise we might say of the writers:

Νήπιοι, οὐκ ἴσασιν ὅσῳ πλέον ἥμισυ πάντος.

Such criticism prevents the assailed from seeing their real faults, while it precludes others from any knowledge of their excellences.