mired poets of the day, were known to have expressed admiration of it, he naturally preferred his own judg

credit commonly given him a 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 be almost called common to the genus vatum. Dante is esteemed a vigorous and original writer : yet it has been clearly shewn 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 a single 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. Shakespeare 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

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

ment; but I 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. Review; that the hisses were at the author, because his "daily prose" was "understood to be dedicated to the support of all

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 Shakespeare 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? 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.

in the Ed. Review of thirty years since. clxix

that courtiers think should be supported: "5 what Mr. Coleridge endeavoured 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 behaviour toward 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 analyzed at this day in pages 314-15 of vol. xxviii. of the Ed. Review. Utter disregard 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

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

6 This fine specimen of a modern Philippic,-an Edinboro', Anti-Lakiad,—is contained in the review of the Literary Life of August, 1817. I would wish any reader who has the oppor tunity, 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

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 neighbour 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 honourable men which honourable men would not do now, or would gain great dishonour by doing ; money intended for the benefit of the Public, especially for making men living members of the Church and

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 fine-drawn sketches; otherwise we might say of the writers:

Νήπιοι, οὐκ ἴσασιν ἔσῳ πλέον ἥμισυ πάντος.

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

followers of Christ, public functionaries too often thought they might employ according to their own private fancies; and such a notion has even been acted on by men undoubtedly public-spirited and disinterested. A dimness of vision on the subject of duty prevailed among the servants of the public in general; and reviewers were not more clear-sighted than the rest; they thought themselves quite at liberty to make the public taste in literature subservient to their own purposes as members of a party; to choke up with rubbish and weeds the streams of Parnassus, if a political adversary might be annoyed thereby, though all parties alike had an interest in the water;-to bring the most sweeping and frightful charges against their opponents in general terms, whether they had or had not the slightest power to verify them in particulars. Against this system the Biographia Literaria contains a strong protest, a protest to which private feeling has given a piquancy, but which in the main it has not corrupted or falsified. I regret that my Father, in exposing what he held to be wrong methods of acting on the public mind, should have been betrayed into any degree of discomposure in his own; but I feel confident, that he would not have given way to indignation on these subjects, if he had not believed his cause to be the cause of the public also; that the things of which he complained were parts of a system, the offences of which against principle it was matter of principle to point out.

I have not brought forward these grounds of complaint out of any resentment against those who shewed so much against my Father, or,-(I say it for my own sake not as deeming it important to others,)-in any feeling of disrespect for their characters in the main. I make no doubt of their possessing all the wit, worth