Chapter 3

[Footnote 3:

"But who is this, what thing of sea or land? Female of sex it seems, That so bedeck'd, ornate, and gay, Comes this way sailing Like a stately ship Of Tarsus, bound for the isles Of Javan or Gadire, With all her bravery on, and tackle trim, Sails fill'd, and streamers waving, Courted by all the winds that hold them play; An amber-scent of odorous perfume Her harbinger, a damsel train behind!"]

August 9. 1832.

BAPTISMAL SERVICE.--JEWS' DIVISION OF THE SCRIPTURE.--SANSKRIT.

I think the baptismal service almost perfect. What seems erroneous assumption in it to me, is harmless. None of the services of the church affect me so much as this. I never could attend a christening without tears bursting forth at the sight of the helpless innocent in a pious clergyman's arms.

* * * * *

The Jews recognized three degrees of sanctity in their Scriptures:--first, the writings of Moses, who had the [Greek: autopsia]; secondly, the Prophets; and, thirdly, the Good Books. Philo, amusingly enough, places his works somewhere between the second and third degrees.

* * * * *

The claims of the Sanskrit for priority to the Hebrew as a language are ridiculous.

August 11. 1832.

HESIOD.--VIRGIL.--GENIUS METAPHYSICAL.--DON QUIXOTE.

I like reading Hesiod, meaning the Works and Days. If every verse is not poetry, it is, at least, good sense, which is a great deal to say.

* * * * *

There is nothing real in the Georgies, except, to be sure, the verse.[1] Mere didactics of practice, unless seasoned with the personal interests of the time or author, are inexpressibly dull to me. Such didactic poetry as that of the Works and Days followed naturally upon legislation and the first ordering of municipalities.

[Footnote 1: I used to fancy Mr. Coleridge _paulo iniquior Virgilio_, and told him so; to which he replied, that, like all Eton men, I swore _per Maronem_. This was far enough from being the case; but I acknowledge that Mr. C.'s apparent indifference to the tenderness and dignity of Virgil excited my surprise.--ED.]

* * * * *

All genius is metaphysical; because the ultimate end of genius is ideal, however it may be actualized by incidental and accidental circumstances.

* * * * *

Don Quixote is not a man out of his senses, but a man in whom the imagination and the pure reason are so powerful as to make him disregard the evidence of sense when it opposed their conclusions. Sancho is the common sense of the social man-animal, unenlightened and unsanctified by the reason. You see how he reverences his master at the very time he is cheating him.

_August_ 14. 1832.

STEINMETZ.--KEATS.

Poor dear Steinmetz is gone,--his state of sure blessedness accelerated; or, it may be, he is buried in Christ, and there in that mysterious depth grows on to the spirit of a just man made perfect! Could I for a moment doubt this, the grass would become black beneath my feet, and this earthly frame a charnel-house. I never knew any man so illustrate the difference between the feminine and the effeminate.

* * * * *

A loose, slack, not well-dressed youth met Mr. ---- and myself in a lane near Highgate.---- knew him, and spoke. It was Keats. He was introduced to me, and staid a minute or so. After he had left us a little way, he came back and said: "Let me carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your hand!"--"There is death in that hand," I said to ----, when Keats was gone; yet this was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself distinctly.

_August_ 16. 1832.

CHRIST'S HOSPITAL.--BOWYER.

The discipline at Christ's Hospital in my time was ultra-Spartan;--all domestic ties were to be put aside. "Boy!" I remember Bowyer saying to me once when I was crying the first day of my return after the holidays, "Boy! the school is your father! Boy! the school is your mother! Boy! the school is your brother! the school is your sister! the school is your first cousin, and your second cousin, and all the rest of your relations! Let's have no more crying!"

* * * * *

No tongue can express good Mrs. Bowyer. Val. Le Grice and I were once going to be flogged for some domestic misdeed, and Bowyer was thundering away at us by way of prologue, when Mrs. B. looked in, and said, "Flog them soundly, sir, I beg!" This saved us. Bowyer was so nettled at the interruption that he growled out, "Away, woman! away!" and we were let off.

_August_ 28. 1832.

ST. PAUL'S MELITA.

The belief that Malta is the island on which St. Paul was wrecked is so rooted in the common Maltese, and is cherished with such a superstitious nationality, that the Government would run the chance of exciting a tumult, if it, or its representatives, unwarily ridiculed it. The supposition itself is quite absurd. Not to argue the matter at length, consider these few conclusive facts:--The narrative speaks of the "barbarous people," and "barbarians,"[1] of the island. Now, our Malta was at that time fully peopled and highly civilized, as we may surely infer from Cicero and other writers.[2] A viper comes out from the sticks upon the fire being lighted: the men are not surprised at the appearance of the snake, but imagine first a murderer, and then a god from the harmless attack. Now in our Malta there are, I may say, no snakes at all; which, to be sure, the Maltese attribute to St. Paul's having cursed them away. Melita in the Adriatic was a perfectly barbarous island as to its native population, and was, and is now, infested with serpents. Besides the context shows that the scene is in the Adriatic.

[Footnote 1: Acts xxviii. 2. and 4. Mr. C. seemed to think that the Greek words had reference to something more than the fact of the islanders not speaking Latin or Greek; the classical meaning of [Greek: Barbaroi].-ED.]

[Footnote 2: Upwards of a century before the reign of Nero, Cicero speaks at considerable length of our Malta in one of the Verrine orations. See Act. ii. lib. iv. c. 46. "Insula est Melita, judices," &c. There was a town, and Verres had established in it a manufactory of the fine cloth or cotton stuffs, the _Melitensis vestis_, for which the island is uniformly celebrated:--

"Fertilis est Melite sterili vicina Cocyrae Insula, quam Libyci verberat unda freti."

Ovid. Fast. iii. 567.

And Silius Italicus has--

----"telaque _superba_ _Lanigera_ Melite."

Punic. xiv. 251.

Yet it may have been cotton after all--the present product of Malta. Cicero describes an _ancient_ temple of Juno situated on a promontory near the town, so famous and revered, that, even in the time of Masinissa, at least 150 years B.C., that prince had religiously restored some relics which his admiral had taken from it. The plunder of this very temple is an article of accusation against Verres; and a deputation of Maltese (_legati Melitenses_) came to Rome to establish the charge. These are all the facts, I think, which can be gathered from Cicero; because I consider his expression of _nudatae urbes_, in the working up of this article, a piece of rhetoric. Strabo merely marks the position of Melita, and says that the lap-dogs called [Greek: kunidia Melitaia] were sent from this island, though some writers attribute them to the other Melite in the Adriatic, (lib. vi.) Diodorus, however, a Sicilian himself by birth, gives the following remarkable testimony as to the state of the island in his time, which, it will be remembered, was considerably before the date of St. Paul's shipwreck. "There are three islands to the south of Sicily, each of which has a city or town ([Greek: polin]), and harbours fitted for the safe reception of ships. The first of these is Melite, distant about 800 stadia from Syracuse, and possessing several harbours of surpassing excellence. Its inhabitants are rich and luxurious ([Greek: tous katoikountas tais ousiais eudaimonas]). There are artizans of every kind ([Greek: pantodapous tais exgasias]); the best are those who weave cloth of a singular fineness and softness. The houses are worthy of admiration for their superb adornment with eaves and brilliant white-washing ([Greek: oikias axiologous kai kateskeuasmenas philotimos geissois kai koniamasi pezittotezon])."-- Lib. v. c. 12. Mela (ii. c. 7.) and Pliny (iii. 14.) simply mark the position.--ED.]

* * * * *

The Maltese seem to have preserved a fondness and taste for architecture from the time of the knights--naturally enough occasioned by the incomparable materials at hand.[1]

[Footnote 1: The passage which I have cited from Diodorus shows that the origin was much earlier.--ED.]

_August_ 19. 1832.

ENGLISH AND GERMAN.--BEST STATE OF SOCIETY.

It may be doubted whether a composite language like the English is not a happier instrument of expression than a homogeneous one like the German. We possess a wonderful richness and variety of modified meanings in our Saxon and Latin quasi-synonymes, which the Germans have not. For "the pomp and _prodigality_ of Heaven," the Germans must have said "_the spendthriftness_."[1] Shakspeare is particularly happy in his use of the Latin synonymes, and in distinguishing between them and the Saxon.

[Footnote 1: _Verschwendung_, I suppose.--ED.]

* * * * *

That is the most excellent state of society in which the patriotism of the citizen ennobles, but does not merge, the individual energy of the man.

September 1. 1832.

GREAT MINDS ANDROGYNOUS.--PHILOSOPHER'S ORDINARY LANGUAGE.

In chemistry and nosology, by extending the degree to a certain point, the constituent proportion may be destroyed, and a new kind produced.

* * * * *

I have known _strong_ minds with imposing, undoubting, Cobbett-like manners, but I have never met a _great_ mind of this sort. And of the former, they are at least as often wrong as right. The truth is, a great mind must be androgynous. Great minds--Swedenborg's for instance--are never wrong but in consequence of being in the right, but imperfectly.

* * * * *

A philosopher's ordinary language and admissions, in general conversation or writings _ad populum_, are as his watch compared with his astronomical timepiece. He sets the former by the town-clock, not because he believes it right, but because his neighbours and his cook go by it.

_January_ 2. 1833.

JURIES.--BARRISTERS' AND PHYSICIANS' FEES.--QUACKS.--CAESAREAN OPERATION.-- INHERITED DISEASE.

I certainly think that juries would be more conscientious, if they were allowed a larger discretion. But, after all, juries cannot be better than the mass out of which they are taken. And if juries are not honest and single-minded, they are the worst, because the least responsible, instruments of judicial or popular tyranny.

I should he sorry to see the honorary character of the fees of barristers and physicians done away with. Though it seems a shadowy distinction, I believe it to be beneficial in effect. It contributes to preserve the idea of a profession, of a class which belongs to the public,--in the employment and remuneration of which no law interferes, but the citizen acts as he likes _in foro conscientiae_.

* * * * *

There undoubtedly ought to be a declaratory act withdrawing expressly from the St. John Longs and other quacks the protection which the law is inclined to throw around the mistakes or miscarriages of the regularly educated practitioner.

* * * * *

I think there are only two things wanting to justify a surgeon in performing the Caesarean operation: first, that he should possess infallible knowledge of his art: and, secondly, that he should be infallibly certain that he is infallible.

* * * * *

Can any thing he more dreadful than the thought that an innocent child has inherited from you a disease or a weakness, the penalty in yourself of sin or want of caution?

* * * * *

In the treatment of nervous cases, he is the best physician, who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.

_January_ 3. 1833.

MASON'S POETRY.

I cannot bring myself to think much of Mason's poetry. I may be wrong; but all those passages in the Caractacus, which we learn to admire at school, now seem to me one continued _falsetto_.

_January_ 4. 1833.

NORTHERN AND SOUTHERN STATES OF THE AMERICAN UNION.--ALL AND THE WHOLE.

Naturally one would have thought that there would have been greater sympathy between the northern and north-western states of the American Union and England, than between England and the Southern states. There is ten times as much English blood and spirit in New England as in Virginia, the Carolinas, &c. Nevertheless, such has been the force of the interests of commerce, that now, and for some years past, the people of the North hate England with increasing bitterness, whilst, amongst those of the south, who are Jacobins, the British connection has become popular. Can there ever be any thorough national fusion of the Northern and Southern states? I think not. In fact, the Union will be shaken almost to dislocation whenever a very serious question between the states arises. The American Union has no _centre_, and it is impossible now to make one. The more they extend their borders into the Indians' land, the weaker will the national cohesion be. But I look upon the states as splendid masses to be used, by and by, in the composition of two or three great governments.

* * * * *

There is a great and important difference, both in politics and metaphysics, between _all_ and _the whole_. The first can never be ascertained as a standing quantity; the second, if comprehended by insight into its parts, remains for ever known. Mr. Huskisson, I thought, satisfactorily refuted the ship owners; and yet the shipping interest, who must know where the shoe pinches, complain to this day.

_January_ 7, 1833.

NINTH ARTICLE.--SIN AND SINS.--OLD DIVINES.--PREACHING EXTEMPORE.

"Very far gone," is _quam longissime_ in the Latin of the ninth article,-- as far gone as possible, that is, as was possible for _man_ to go; as far as was compatible with his having any redeemable qualities left in him. To talk of man's being _utterly_ lost to good, is absurd; for then he would be a devil at once.

* * * * *

One mistake perpetually made by one of our unhappy parties in religion,-- and with a pernicious tendency to Antinomianism,--is to confound _sin_ with _sins_. To tell a modest girl, the watchful nurse of an aged parent, that she is full of _sins_ against God, is monstrous, and as shocking to reason as it is unwarrantable by Scripture. But to tell her that she, and all men and women, are of a sinful nature, and that, without Christ's redeeming love and God's grace, she cannot be emancipated from its dominion, is true and proper.[1]

[Footnote 1: In a marginal scrap Mr. C. wrote:--"What are the essential doctrines of our religion, if not sin and original sin, as the necessitating occasion, and the redemption of sinners by the Incarnate Word as the substance of the Christian dispensation? And can these be intelligently believed without knowledge and steadfast meditation. By the unlearned, they may be worthily received, but not by the unthinking and self-ignorant, Christian."--ED.]

* * * * *

No article of faith can be truly and duly preached without necessarily and simultaneously infusing a deep sense of the indispensableness of a holy life.

* * * * *

How pregnant with instruction, and with knowledge of all sorts, are the sermons of our old divines! in this respect, as in so many others, how different from the major part of modern discourses!

* * * * *

Every attempt, in a sermon, to cause emotion, except as the consequence of an impression made on the reason, or the understanding, or the will, I hold to be fanatical and sectarian.

* * * * *

No doubt preaching, in the proper sense of the word, is more effective than reading; and, therefore, I would not prohibit it, but leave a liberty to the clergyman who feels himself able to accomplish it. But, as things now are, I am quite sure I prefer going to church to a pastor who reads his discourse: for I never yet heard more than one preacher without book, who did not forget his argument in three minutes' time; and fall into vague and unprofitable declamation, and, generally, very coarse declamation too. These preachers never progress; they eddy round and round. Sterility of mind follows their ministry.

_January_ 20. 1833.

CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

When the Church at the Reformation ceased to be extra-national, it unhappily became royal instead; its proper bearing is intermediate between the crown and the people, with an inclination to the latter.

* * * * *

The present prospects of the Church weigh heavily on my soul. Oh! that the words of a statesman-like philosophy could win their way through the ignorant zealotry and sordid vulgarity of the leaders of the day!

_February_ 5. 1833.

UNION WITH IRELAND.

If any modification of the Union takes place, I trust it will be a total divorce _a vinculo matrimonii_. I am sure we have lived a cat and dog life of it. Let us have no silly saving of one crown and two legislatures; that would be preserving all the mischiefs without any of the goods, if there are any, of the union.

I am deliberately of opinion, that England, in all its institutions, has received injury from its union with Ireland. My only difficulty is as to the Protestants, to whom we owe protection. But I cannot forget that the Protestants themselves have greatly aided in accelerating the present horrible state of things, by using that as a remedy and a reward which should have been to them an opportunity.[1]

If the Protestant Church in Ireland is removed, of course the Romish Church must be established in its place. There can be no resisting it in common reason.

How miserably imbecile and objectless has the English government of Ireland been for forty years past! Oh! for a great man--but one really great man,-- who could feel the weight and the power of a principle, and unflinchingly put it into act! But truly there is no vision in the land, and the people accordingly perisheth. See how triumphant in debate and in action O'Connell is! Why? Because he asserts a broad principle, and acts up to it, rests all his body on it, and has faith in it. Our ministers--true Whigs in that-- have faith in nothing but expedients _de die in diem_. Indeed, what principles of government can _they_ have, who in the space of a month recanted a life of political opinions, and now dare to threaten this and that innovation at the huzza of a mob, or in pique at a parliamentary defeat?

[Footnote 1: "Whatever may be thought of the settlement that followed the battle of the Boyne and the extinction of the war in Ireland, yet when this had been made and submitted to, it would have been the far wiser policy, I doubt not, to have provided for the safety of the constitution by improving the quality of the elective franchise, leaving the eligibility open, or like the former, limited only by considerations of property. Still, however, the scheme of exclusion and disqualification had its plausible side. The ink was scarcely dry on the parchment-rolls and proscription-lists of the Popish parliament. The crimes of the man were generalized into attributes of his faith; and the Irish catholics collectively were held accomplices in the perfidy and baseness of the king. Alas! his immediate adherents had afforded too great colour to the charge. The Irish massacre was in the mouth of every Protestant, not as an event to be remembered, but as a thing of recent expectation, fear still blending with the sense of deliverance. At no time, therefore, could the disqualifying system have been enforced with so little reclamation of the conquered party, or with so little outrage on the general feeling of the country. There was no time, when it was so capable of being indirectly useful as a _sedative_ in order to the application of the remedies directly indicated, or as a counter-power reducing to inactivity whatever disturbing forces might have interfered with their operation. And had this use been made of these exclusive laws, and had they been enforced as the precursors and negative conditions,--but, above all, as _bonâ fide_ accompaniments, of a process of _emancipation_, properly and worthily so named, the code would at this day have been remembered in Ireland only as when, recalling a dangerous fever of our boyhood, we think of the nauseous drugs and drenching-horn, and congratulate ourselves that our doctors now-a-days know how to manage these things less coarsely. But this angry code was neglected as an opportunity, and mistaken for a _substitute_: _et hinc illae* lacrymae!_"--Church and State, p. 195.]

* * * * *

I sometimes think it just possible that the Dissenters may once more be animated by a wiser and nobler spirit, and see their dearest interest in the church of England as the bulwark and glory of Protestantism, as they did at the Revolution. But I doubt their being able to resist the low factious malignity to the church which has characterized them as a body for so many years.

_February_ 16. 1833.

FAUST.----MICHAEL SCOTT, GOETHE, SCHILLER, AND WORDSWORTH.

Before I had ever seen any part of Goethe's Faust[1], though, of course, when I was familiar enough with Marlowe's, I conceived and drew up the plan of a work, a drama, which was to be, to my mind, what the Faust was to Goethe's. My Faust was old Michael Scott; a much better and more likely original than Faust. He appeared in the midst of his college of devoted disciples, enthusiastic, ebullient, shedding around him bright surmises of discoveries fully perfected in after-times, and inculcating the study of nature and its secrets as the pathway to the acquisition of power. He did not love knowledge for itself--for its own exceeding great reward--but in order to be powerful. This poison-speck infected his mind from the beginning. The priests suspect him, circumvent him, accuse him; he is condemned, and thrown into solitary confinement: this constituted the _prologus_ of the drama. A pause of four or five years takes place, at the end of which Michael escapes from prison, a soured, gloomy, miserable man. He will not, cannot study; of what avail had all his study been to him? His knowledge, great as it was, had failed to preserve him from the cruel fangs of the persecutors; he could not command the lightning or the storm to wreak their furies upon the heads of those whom he hated and contemned, and yet feared. Away with learning! away with study! to the winds with all pretences to knowledge! We _know_ nothing; we are fools, wretches, mere beasts. Anon I began to tempt him. I made him dream, gave him wine, and passed the most exquisite of women before him, but out of his reach. Is there, then, no knowledge by which these pleasures can be commanded? _That way_ lay witchcraft, and accordingly to witchcraft Michael turns with all his soul. He has many failures and some successes; he learns the chemistry of exciting drugs and exploding powders, and some of the properties of transmitted and reflected light: his appetites and his curiosity are both stimulated, and his old craving for power and mental domination over others revives. At last Michael tries to raise the Devil, and the Devil comes at his call. My Devil was to be, like Goethe's, the universal humorist, who should make all things vain and nothing worth, by a perpetual collation of the great with the little in the presence of the infinite. I had many a trick for him to play, some better, I think, than any in the Faust. In the mean time, Michael is miserable; he has power, but no peace, and he every day more keenly feels the tyranny of hell surrounding him. In vain he seems to himself to assert the most absolute empire over the Devil, by imposing the most extravagant tasks; one thing is as easy as another to the Devil. "What next, Michael?" is repeated every day with more imperious servility. Michael groans in spirit; his power is a curse: he commands women and wine! but the women seem fictitious and devilish, and the wine does not make him drunk. He now begins to hate the Devil, and tries to cheat him. He studies again, and explores the darkest depths of sorcery for a receipt to cozen hell; but all in vain. Sometimes the Devil's finger turns over the page for him, and points out an experiment, and Michael hears a whisper--"Try _that_, Michael!" The horror increases; and Michael feels that he is a slave and a condemned criminal. Lost to hope, he throws himself into every sensual excess,--in the mid-career of which he sees Agatha, my Margaret, and immediately endeavours to seduce her. Agatha loves him; and the Devil facilitates their meetings; but she resists Michael's attempts to ruin her, and implores him not to act so as to forfeit her esteem. Long struggles of passion ensue, in the result of which his affections are called forth against his appetites, and, love-born, the idea of a redemption of the lost will dawns upon his mind. This is instantaneously perceived by the Devil; and for the first time the humorist becomes severe and menacing. A fearful succession of conflicts between Michael and the Devil takes place, in which Agatha helps and suffers. In the end, after subjecting him to every imaginable horror and agony, I made him triumphant, and poured peace into his soul in the conviction of a salvation for sinners through God's grace.

The intended theme of the Faust is the consequences of a misology, or hatred and depreciation of knowledge caused by an originally intense thirst for knowledge baffled. But a love of knowledge for itself, and for pure ends, would never produce such a misology, but only a love of it for base and unworthy purposes. There is neither causation nor progression in the Faust; he is a ready-made conjuror from the very beginning; the _incredulus odi_ is felt from the first line. The sensuality and the thirst after knowledge are unconnected with each other. Mephistopheles and Margaret are excellent; but Faust himself is dull and meaningless. The scene in Auerbach's cellars is one of the best, perhaps the very best; that on the Brocken is also fine; and all the songs are beautiful. But there is no whole in the poem; the scenes are mere magic-lantern pictures, and a large part of the work is to me very flat. The German is very pure and fine.

The young men in Germany and England who admire Lord Byron, prefer Goethe to Schiller; but you may depend upon it, Goethe does not, nor ever will, command the common mind of the people of Germany as Schiller does. Schiller had two legitimate phases in his intellectual character:--the first as author of the Robbers--a piece which must not be considered with reference to Shakspeare, but as a work of the mere material sublime, and in that line it is undoubtedly very powerful indeed. It is quite genuine, and deeply imbued with Schiller's own soul. After this he outgrew the composition of such plays as the Robbers, and at once took his true and only rightful stand in the grand historical drama--the Wallenstein;--not the intense drama of passion,--he was not master of that--but the diffused drama of history, in which alone he had ample scope for his varied powers. The Wallenstein is the greatest of his works; it is not unlike Shakspeare's historical plays--a species by itself. You may take up any scene, and it will please you by itself; just as you may in Don Quixote, which you read _through_ once or twice only, but which you read _in_ repeatedly. After this point it was, that Goethe and other writers injured by their theories the steadiness and originality of Schiller's mind; and in every one of his works after the Wallenstein you may perceive the fluctuations of his taste and principles of composition. He got a notion of re-introducing the characterlessness of the Greek tragedy with a chorus, as in the Bride of Messina, and he was for infusing more lyric verse into it. Schiller sometimes affected to despise the Robbers and the other works of his first youth; whereas he ought to have spoken of them as of works not in a right line, but full of excellence in their way. In his ballads and lighter lyrics Goethe is most excellent. It is impossible to praise him too highly in this respect. I like the Wilhelm Meister the best of his prose works. But neither Schiller's nor Goethe's prose style approaches to Lessing's, whose writings, for _manner_, are absolutely perfect.

Although Wordsworth and Goethe are not much alike, to be sure, upon the whole; yet they both have this peculiarity of utter non-sympathy with the subjects of their poetry. They are always, both of them, spectators _ab extra_,--feeling _for_, but never _with_, their characters. Schiller is a thousand times more _hearty_ than Goethe.

I was once pressed--many years ago--to translate the Faust; and I so far entertained the proposal as to read the work through with great attention, and to revive in my mind my own former plan of Michael Scott. But then I considered with myself whether the time taken up in executing the translation might not more worthily be devoted to the composition of a work which, even if parallel in some points to the Faust, should be truly original in motive and execution, and therefore more interesting and valuable than any version which I could make; and, secondly, I debated with myself whether it became my moral character to render into English--and so far, certainly, lend my countenance to language--much of which I thought vulgar, licentious, and blasphemous. I need not tell you that I never put pen to paper as a translator of Faust.

I have read a good deal of Mr. Hayward's version, and I think it done in a very manly style; but I do not admit the argument for prose translations. I would in general rather see verse attempted in so capable a language as ours. The French cannot help themselves, of course, with such a language as theirs.

[Footnote 1: "The poem was first published in 1790, and forms the commencement of the seventh volume of _Goethe's Schriften, Wien und Leipzig, bey J. Stahel and G. J. Goschen_, 1790. This edition is now before me. The poem entitled, _Faust, ein Fragment_ (not _Doktor Faust, ein Trauerspiel_, as Döring says), and contains no prologue or dedication of any sort. It commences with the scene in Faust's study, _antè_, p. 17., and is continued, as now, down to the passage ending, _antè_, p. 26. line 5. In the original, the line--

"Und froh ist, wenn er Regenwürmer findet,"

ends the scene.

The next scene is one between Faust and Mephistopheles, and begins thus:--

"Und was der ganzen Menschheit zugetheilt ist,"

_i. e._ with the passage (_antè_, p. 70.) beginning, "I will enjoy, in my own heart's core, all that is parcelled out among mankind," &c. All that intervenes, in later editions, is wanting. It is thenceforth continued, as now, to the end of the cathedral scene (_antè_, p. (170)), except that the whole scene, in which Valentine is killed, is wanting. Thus Margaret's prayer to the Virgin and the cathedral scene come together, and form the conclusion of the work. According to Düring's Verzeichniss, there was no new edition of Faust until 1807. According to Dr. Sieglitz, the first part of Faust first appeared, in its present shape, in the collected edition of Goethe's works, which was published in 1808.--_Hayward's Translation of Faust_, second edition, note, p. 215.]

_February_ 17. 1833.

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.--BEN JONSON.--MASSINGER.

In the romantic drama Beaumont and Fletcher are almost supreme. Their plays are in general most truly delightful. I could read the Beggar's Bush from morning to night. How sylvan and sunshiny it is! The Little French Lawyer is excellent. Lawrit is conceived and executed from first to last in genuine comic humour. Monsieur Thomas is also capital. I have no doubt whatever that the first act and the first scene of the second act of the Two Noble Kinsmen are Shakspeare's. Beaumont and Fletcher's plots are, to be sure, wholly inartificial; they only care to pitch a character into a position to make him or her talk; you must swallow all their gross improbabilities, and, taking it all for granted, attend only to the dialogue. How lamentable it is that no gentleman and scholar can he found to edit these beautiful plays![1] Did the name of criticism ever descend so low as in the hands of those two fools and knaves, Seward and Simpson? There are whole scenes in their edition which I could with certainty put back into their original verse, and more that could he replaced in their native prose. Was there ever such an absolute disregard of literary fame as that displayed by Shakspeare, and Beaumont and Fletcher?[2]

[Footnote 1: I believe Mr. Dyce could edit Beaumont and Fletcher as well as any man of the present or last generation; but the truth is, the limited sale of the late editions of Ben Jonson, Shirley, &c., has damped the spirit of enterprise amongst the respectable publishers. Still I marvel that some cheap reprint of B. and F. is not undertaken.--ED.]

[Footnote 2: "The men of the greatest genius, as far as we can judge from their own works, or from the accounts of their contemporaries, appear to have been of calm and tranquil temper, in all that related to themselves. In the inward assurance of permanent fame, they seem to have been either indifferent or resigned, with regard to immediate reputation."

* * * * *

"Shakspeare's evenness and sweetness of temper were almost proverbial in his own age. That this did not arise from ignorance of his own comparative greatness, we have abundant proof in his sonnets, which could scarcely have been known to Mr. Pope, when he asserted, that our great bard 'grew immortal in his own despite.'"--_Biog. Lit._ vol. i, p. 32.]

* * * * *

In Ben Jonson you have an intense and burning art. Some of his plots, that of the Alchemist, for example, are perfect. Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher would, if united, have made a great dramatist indeed, and yet not have come near Shakspeare; but no doubt Ben Jonson was the greatest man after Shakspeare in that age of dramatic genius.

The styles of Massinger's plays and the Sampson Agonistes are the two extremes of the arc within which the diction of dramatic poetry may oscillate. Shakspeare in his great plays is the midpoint. In the Samson Agonistes, colloquial language is left at the greatest distance, yet something of it is preserved, to render the dialogue probable: in Massinger the style is differenced, but differenced in the smallest degree possible, from animated conversation by the vein of poetry.

There's such a divinity doth hedge our Shakspeare round, that we cannot even imitate his style. I tried to imitate his manner in the Remorse, and, when I had done, I found I had been tracking Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger instead. It is really very curious. At first sight, Shakspeare and his contemporary dramatists seem to write in styles much alike: nothing so easy as to fall into that of Massinger and the others; whilst no one has ever yet produced one scene conceived and expressed in the Shakspearian idiom. I suppose it is because Shakspeare is universal, and, in fact, has no _manner_; just as you can so much more readily copy a picture than Nature herself.

_February_ 20. 1833.

HOUSE OF COMMONS APPOINTING THE OFFICERS OF THE ARMY AND NAVY.

I was just now reading Sir John Cam Hobhouse's answer to Mr. Hume, I believe, upon the point of transferring the patronage of the army and navy from the Crown to the House of Commons. I think, if I had been in the House of Commons, I would have said, "that, ten or fifteen years ago, I should have considered Sir J. C. H.'s speech quite unanswerable,--it being clear constitutional law that the House of Commons has not, nor ought to have, any share, directly or indirectly, in the appointment of the officers of the army or navy. But now that the King had been reduced, by the means and procurement of the Honourable Baronet and his friends, to a puppet, which, so far from having any independent will of its own, could not resist a measure which it hated and condemned, it became a matter of grave consideration whether it was not necessary to vest the appointment of such officers in a body like the House of Commons, rather than in a junta of ministers, who were obliged to make common cause with the mob and democratic press for the sake of keeping their places."

_March_ 9. 1833.

PENAL CODE IN IRELAND.--CHURCHMEN.

The penal code in Ireland, in the beginning of the last century, was justifiable, as a temporary mean of enabling government to take breath and look about them; and if right measures had been systematically pursued in a right spirit, there can be no doubt that all, or the greater part, of Ireland would have become Protestant. Protestantism under the Charter Schools was greatly on the increase in the early part of that century, and the complaints of the Romish priests to that effect are on record. But, unfortunately, the drenching-horn was itself substituted for the medicine.

* * * * *

There seems to me, at present, to be a curse upon the English church, and upon the governors of all institutions connected with the orderly advancement of national piety and knowledge; it is the curse of prudence, as they miscall it--in fact, of fear.

Clergymen are now almost afraid to explain in their pulpits the grounds of their being Protestants. They are completely cowed by the vulgar harassings of the press and of our Hectoring sciolists in Parliament. There should be no _party_ politics in the pulpit to be sure; but every church in England ought to resound with national politics,--I mean the sacred character of the national church, and an exposure of the base robbery from the nation itself--for so indeed it is[1]--about to be committed by these ministers, in order to have a sop to throw to the Irish agitators, who will, of course, only cut the deeper, and come the oftener. You cannot buy off a barbarous invader.

[Footnote 1: "That the maxims of a pure morality, and those sublime truths of the divine unity and attributes, which a Plato found it hard to learn, and more difficult to reveal; that these should have become the almost hereditary property of childhood and poverty, of the hovel and the workshop; that even to the unlettered they sound as _common-place_; this is a phenomenon which must withhold all but minds of the most vulgar cast from undervaluing the services even of the pulpit and the reading-desk. Yet he who should confine the efficiency of an established church to these, can hardly be placed in a much higher rank of intellect. That to every parish throughout the kingdom there is transplanted a germ of civilization; that in the remotest villages there is a nucleus, round which the capabilities of the place may crystallize and brighten; a model sufficiently superior to excite, yet sufficiently near to encourage and facilitate imitation; _this_ unobtrusive, continuous agency of a Protestant church establishment, _this_ it is, which the patriot and the philanthropist, who would fain unite the love of peace with the faith in the progressive amelioration of mankind, cannot estimate at too high a price. 'It cannot be valued with the gold of Ophir, with the precious onyx, or the sapphire. No mention shall be made of coral or of pearls; for the price of wisdom is above rubies.'--The clergyman is with his parishioners and among them; he is neither in the cloistered cell, nor in the wilderness, but a neighbour and family man, whose education and rank admit him to the mansion of the rich landholder, while his duties make him the frequent visitor of the farm-house and the cottage. He is, or he may become, connected with the families of his parish or its vicinity by marriage. And among the instances of the blindness, or at best of the short-sightedness, which it is the nature of cupidity to inflict, I know few more striking than the clamours of the farmers against church property. Whatever was not paid to the clergyman would inevitably at the next lease be paid to the landholder; while, as the case at present stands, the revenues of the church are in some sort the reversionary property of every family that may have a member educated for the church, or a daughter that may marry a clergyman. Instead of being _foreclosed_ and immovable, it is, in fact, the only species of landed property that is essentially moving and circulative. That there exist no inconveniences who will pretend to assert?--But I have yet to expect the proof, that the inconveniences are greater in this than in any other species; or that either the farmers or the clergy would be benefited by forcing the latter to become either _Trullibers_ or salaried _placemen_."--_Church and State_, p. 90.]

_March_ 12. 1833.

CORONATION OATHS.

Lord Grey has, in Parliament, said two things: first, that the Coronation Oaths only bind the King in his executive capacity; and, secondly, that members of the House of Commons are bound to represent by their votes the wishes and opinions of their constituents, and not their own. Put these two together, and tell me what useful part of the constitutional monarchy of England remains. It is clear that the Coronation Oaths would be no better than Highgate oaths. For in his executive capacity the King _cannot_ do any thing, against the doing of which the oaths bind him; it is _only_ in his legislative character that he possesses a free agency capable of being bound. The nation meant to bind _that_.

_March_ 14. 1833.

DIVINITY.--PROFESSIONS AND TRADES.

Divinity is essentially the first of the professions, because it is necessary for all at all times; law and physic are only necessary for some at some times. I speak of them, of course, not in their abstract existence, but in their applicability to man.

* * * * *

Every true science bears necessarily within itself the germ of a cognate profession, and the more you can elevate trades into professions the better.

_March_ 17. 1833.

MODERN POLITICAL ECONOMY.

What solemn humbug this modern political economy is! What is there true of the little that is true in their dogmatic books, which is not a simple deduction from the moral and religious _credenda_ and _agenda_ of any good man, and with which we were not all previously acquainted, and upon which every man of common sense instinctively acted? I know none. But what they truly state, they do not truly understand in its ultimate grounds and causes; and hence they have sometimes done more mischief by their half- ignorant and half-sophistical reasonings about, and deductions from, well- founded positions, than they could have done by the promulgation of positive error. This particularly applies to their famous ratios of increase between man and the means of his subsistence. Political economy, at the highest, can never be a pure science. You may demonstrate that certain properties inhere in the arch, which yet no bridge-builder _can_ ever reduce into brick and mortar; but an abstract conclusion in a matter of political economy, the premisses of which neither exist now, nor ever will exist within the range of the wildest imagination, is not a truth, but a chimera--a practical falsehood. For there are no theorems in political economy--but problems only. Certain things being actually so and so; the question is, _how_ to _do_ so and so with them. Political _philosophy_, indeed, points to ulterior ends, but even those ends are all practical; and if you desert the conditions of reality, or of common probability, you may show forth your eloquence or your fancy, but the utmost you can produce will be a Utopia or Oceana.

You talk about making this article cheaper by reducing its price in the market from 8_d_. to 6_d_. But suppose, in so doing, you have rendered your country weaker against a foreign foe; suppose you have demoralized thousands of your fellow-countrymen, and have sown discontent between one class of society and another, your article is tolerably dear, I take it, after all. Is not its real price enhanced to every Christian and patriot a hundred-fold?

* * * * *

_All_ is an endless fleeting abstraction; _the whole_ is a reality.

_March_ 31. 1833.

NATIONAL DEBT.--PROPERTY TAX.--DUTY OF LANDHOLDERS.

What evil results now to this country, taken at large, from the actual existence of the National Debt? I never could get a plain and practical answer to that question. I do not advert to the past loss of capital, although it is hard to see how that capital can be said to have been unproductive, which produces, in the defence of the nation itself, the conditions of the permanence and productivity of all other capital. As to taxation to pay the interest, how can the country suffer by a process, under which the money is never one minute out of the pockets of the people? You may just as well say that a man is weakened by the circulation of his blood. There may, certainly, be particular local evils and grievances resulting from the mode of taxation or collection; but how can that debt be in any proper sense a burthen to the nation, which the nation owes to itself, and to no one but itself? It is a juggle to talk of the nation owing the capital or the interest to the stockholders; it owes to itself only. Suppose the interest to be owing to the Emperor of Russia, and then you would feel the difference of a debt in the proper sense. It is really and truly nothing more in effect than so much moneys or money's worth, raised annually by the state for the purpose of quickening industry.[1]

I should like to see a well graduated property tax, accompanied by a large loan.

One common objection to a property tax is, that it tends to diminish the accumulation of capital. In my judgment, one of the chief sources of the bad economy of the country now is the enormous aggregation of capitals.

When shall we return to a sound conception of the right to property-- namely, as being official, implying and demanding the performance of commensurate duties! Nothing but the most horrible perversion of humanity and moral justice, under the specious name of political economy, could have blinded men to this truth as to the possession of land,--the law of God having connected indissolubly the cultivation of every rood of earth with the maintenance and watchful labour of man. But money, stock, riches by credit, transferable and convertible at will, are under no such obligations; and, unhappily, it is from the selfish autocratic possession of _such_ property, that our landholders have learnt their present theory of trading with that which was never meant to be an object of commerce.

[Footnote 1: See the splendid essay in the Friend (vol. ii, p. 47.) on the vulgar errors respecting taxes and taxation.

"A great statesman, lately deceased, in one of his anti-ministerial harangues against some proposed impost, said, 'The nation has been already bled in every vein, and is faint with loss of blood.' This blood, however, was circulating in the mean time through the whole body of the state, and what was received into one chamber of the heart was instantly sent out again at the other portal. Had he wanted a metaphor to convey the possible injuries of taxation, he might have found one less opposite to the fact, in the known disease of aneurism, or relaxation of the coats of particular vessels, by a disproportionate accumulation of blood in them, which sometimes occurs when the circulation has been suddenly and violently changed, and causes helplessness, or even mortal stagnation, though the total quantity of blood remains the same in the system at large.

"But a fuller and fairer symbol of taxation, both in its possible good and evil effects, is to be found in the evaporation of waters from the surface of the earth. The sun may draw up the moisture from the river, the morass, and the ocean, to be given back in genial showers to the garden, to the pasture, and the corn field; but it may, likewise, force away the moisture from the fields of tillage, to drop it on the stagnant pool, the saturated swamp, or the unprofitable sand-waste. The gardens in the south of Europe supply, perhaps, a not less apt illustration of a system of finance judiciously conducted, where the tanks or reservoirs would represent the capital of a nation, and the hundred rills, hourly varying their channels and directions under the gardener's spade, give a pleasing image of the dispersion of that capital through the whole population by the joint effect of taxation and trade. For taxation itself is a part of commerce, and the government maybe fairly considered as a great manufacturing house, carrying on, in different places, by means of its partners and overseers, the trades of the shipbuilder, the clothier, the iron-founder," &c. &c.--ED.]

_April_ 5. 1833.

MASSINGER.--SHAKSPEARE.--HIERONIMO.

To please me, a poem must be either music or sense; if it is neither, I confess I cannot interest myself in it.

* * * * *

The first act of the Virgin Martyr is as fine an act as I remember in any play. The Very Woman is, I think, one of the most perfect plays we have. There is some good fun in the first scene between Don John, or Antonio, and Cuculo, his master[1]; and can any thing exceed the skill and sweetness of the scene between him and his mistress, in which he relates his story?[2] The Bondman is also a delightful play. Massinger is always entertaining; his plays have the interest of novels.

But, like most of his contemporaries, except Shakspeare, Massinger often deals in exaggerated passion. Malefort senior, in the Unnatural Combat, however he may have had the moral will to be so wicked, could never have actually done all that he is represented as guilty of, without losing his senses. He would have been, in fact, mad. Regan and Goneril are the only pictures of the unnatural in Shakspeare; the pure unnatural--and you will observe that Shakspeare has left their hideousness unsoftened or diversified by a single line of goodness or common human frailty. Whereas in Edmund, for whom passion, the sense of shame as a bastard, and ambition, offer some plausible excuses, Shakspeare has placed many redeeming traits. Edmund is what, under certain circumstances, any man of powerful intellect might be, if some other qualities and feelings were cut off. Hamlet is, inclusively, an Edmund, but different from him as a whole, on account of the controlling agency of other principles which Edmund had not.

It is worth while to remark the use which Shakspeare always makes of his bold villains as vehicles for expressing opinions and conjectures of a nature too hazardous for a wise man to put forth directly as his own, or from any sustained character.

[Footnote 1: Act iii. sc. 2.]

[Footnote 2: Act iv. sc. 3.:--

"ANT. Not far from where my father lives, a lady, A neighbour by, bless'd with as great a beauty As nature durst bestow without undoing, Dwelt, and most happily, as I thought then, And bless'd the home a thousand times she dwelt in. This beauty, in the blossom of my youth, When my first fire knew no adulterate incense, Nor I no way to flatter, but my fondness; In all the bravery my friends could show me, In all the faith my innocence could give me, In the best language my true tongue could tell me, And all the broken sighs my sick heart lent me, I sued and served: long did I love this lady, Long was my travail, long my trade to win her; With all the duty of my soul, I served her.

ALM. How feelingly he speaks! (_Aside_.) And she loved you too? It must be so.

ANT. I would it had, dear lady; This story had been needless, and this place, I think, unknown to me.

ALM. Were your bloods equal?

ANT. Yes; and I thought our hearts too.

ALM. Then she must love.

ANT. She did--but never me; she could not love me, She would not love, she hated; more, she scorn'd me, And in so poor and base a way abused me, For all my services, for all my bounties, So bold neglects flung on me--

ALM. An ill woman! Belike you found some rival in your love, then?

ANT. How perfectly she points me to my story! (_Aside_.) Madam, I did; and one whose pride and anger, Ill manners, and worse mien, she doted on, Doted to my undoing, and my ruin. And, but for honour to your sacred beauty, And reverence to the noble sex, though she fall, As she must fall that durst be so unnoble, I should say something unbeseeming me. What out of love, and worthy love, I gave her, Shame to her most unworthy mind! to fools, To girls, and fiddlers, to her boys she flung, And in disdain of me.

ALM. Pray you take me with you. Of what complexion was she?

ANT. But that I dare not Commit so great a sacrilege 'gainst virtue, She look'd not much unlike--though far, far short, Something, I see, appears--your pardon, madam-- Her eyes would smile so, but her eyes could cozen; And so she would look sad; but yours is pity, A noble chorus to my wretched story; Hers was disdain and cruelty.

ALM. Pray heaven, Mine be no worse! he has told me a strange story, (_Aside_.)" &c.--ED.]

* * * * *

The parts pointed out in Hieronimo as Ben Jonson's bear no traces of his style; but they are very like Shakspeare's; and it is very remarkable that every one of them re-appears in full form and development, and tempered with mature judgment, in some one or other of Shakspeare's great pieces.[1]

[Footnote 1: By Hieronimo Mr. Coleridge meant The Spanish Tragedy, and not the previous play, which is usually called The First Part of Jeronimo. The Spanish Tragedy is, upon the authority of Heywood, attributed to Kyd. It is supposed that Ben Jonson originally performed the part of Hieronimo, and hence it has been surmised that certain passages and whole scenes connected with that character, and not found in some of the editions of the play, are, in fact, Ben Jonson's own writing. Some of these supposed interpolations are amongst the best things in the Spanish Tragedy; the style is singularly unlike Jonson's, whilst there are turns and particular images which do certainly seem to have been imitated by or from Shakspeare. Mr. Lamb at one time gave them to Webster. Take this, passage, in the fourth act:--

"HIERON. What make you with your torches in the dark?

PEDRO. You bid us light them, and attend you here.

HIERON. No! you are deceived; not I; you are deceived. Was I so mad to bid light torches now? Light me your torches at the mid of noon, When as the sun-god rides in all his glory; Light me your torches then.

PEDRO. Then we burn day-light.

HIERON. _Let it be burnt; Night is a murd'rous slut, That would not have her treasons to be seen; And yonder pale-faced Hecate there, the moon, Doth give consent to that is done in darkness; And all those stars that gaze upon her face Are aglets on her sleeve, pins on her train; And those that should be powerful and divine, Do sleep in darkness when they most should shine._

PEDRO. Provoke them not, fair sir, with tempting words. The heavens are gracious, and your miseries and sorrow Make you speak you know not what

HIERON. _Villain! thou liest, and thou dost nought But tell me I am mad: thou liest, I am not mad; I know thee to be Pedro, and he Jaques; I'll prove it thee; and were I mad, how could I? Where was she the same night, when my Horatio was murder'd! She should have shone then; search thou the book: Had the moon shone in my boy's face, there was a kind of grace, That I know--nay, I do know, had the murderer seen him, His weapon would have fallen, and cut the earth, Had he been framed of nought but blood and death," &c._

Again, in the fifth act:--

"HIERON. But are you sure that they are dead?

CASTILE. Ay, slain, too sure.

HIERON. What, and yours too?

VICEROY. Ay, all are dead; not one of them survive.

HIBRON. Nay, then I care not--come, we shall be friends; Let us lay our heads together. See, here's a goodly noose will hold them all.

VICEROY. O damned devil! how secure he is!

HIERON. Secure! why dost thou wonder at it? _I tell thee, Viceroy, this day I've seen Revenge, d in that sight am grown a prouder monarch Than ever sate under the crown of Spain. Had I as many lives at there be stars,_, _As many heavens to go to as those lives, I'd give them all, ay, and my soul to boot, But I would see thee ride in this red pool. Methinks, since I grew inward with revenge, I cannot look with scorn enough on death._

KING. What! dost thou mock us, slave? Bring tortures forth.

HIERON. _Do, do, do; and meantime I'll torture you. You had a son as I take it, and your son Should have been married to your daughter: ha! was it not so? You had a son too, he was my liege's nephew. He was proud and politic--had he lived, He might have come to wear the crown of Spain: I think 't was so--'t was I that killed him; Look you--this same hand was it that stabb'd His heart--do you see this hand? For one Horatio, if you ever knew him-- A youth, one that they hang'd up in his father's garden-- One that did force your valiant son to yield_," &c.--ED. ]

_April_ 7. 1833.

LOVE'S LABOUR LOST.--GIFFORD'S MASSINGER.--SHAKSPEARE.--THE OLD DRAMATISTS.

I think I could point out to a half line what is really Shakspeare's in Love's Labour Lost, and some other of the not entirely genuine plays. What he wrote in that play is of his earliest manner, having the all-pervading sweetness which he never lost, and that extreme condensation which makes the couplets fall into epigrams, as in the Venus and Adonis, and Rape of Lucrece. [1] In the drama alone, as Shakspeare soon found out, could the sublime poet and profound philosopher find the conditions of a compromise. In the Love's Labour Lost there are many faint sketches of some of his vigorous portraits in after-life--as for example, in particular, of Benedict and Beatrice.[2]

[Footnote 1: "In Shakspeare's _Poems_ the creative power and the intellectual energy wrestle as in a war embrace. Each in its excess of strength seems to threaten the extinction of the other. At length, in the drama, they were reconciled, and fought each with its shield before the breast of the other. Or like two rapid streams, that, at their first meeting within narrow and rocky banks, mutually strive to repel each other, and intermix reluctantly, and in tumult; but soon finding a wider channel and more yielding shores, blend, and dilate, and flow on in one current, and with one voice."--_Biog. Lit._ vol. ii. p. 21.]

[Footnote 2: Mr. Coleridge, of course, alluded to Biron and Rosaline; and there are other obvious prolusions, as the scene of the masque with the courtiers, compared with the play in A Midsummer Night's Dream.--ED.]

* * * * *

Gifford has done a great deal for the text of Massinger, but not as much as might easily be done. His comparison of Shakspeare with his contemporary dramatists is obtuse indeed.[1]

[Footnote 1: See his _Introduction to Massinger, vol_.i. p. 79., in which, amongst other most extraordinary assertions, Mr. Gifford pronounces that _rhythmical modulation is not one of Shakspeare's merits!_--ED.]

* * * * *

In Shakspeare one sentence begets the next naturally; the meaning is all inwoven. He goes on kindling like a meteor through the dark atmosphere; yet, when the creation in its outline is once perfect, then he seems to rest from his labour, and to smile upon his work, and tell himself that it is very good. You see many scenes and parts of scenes which are simply Shakspeare's, disporting himself in joyous triumph and vigorous fun after a great achievement of his highest genius.

* * * * *

The old dramatists took great liberties in respect of bringing parties in scene together, and representing one as not recognizing the other under some faint disguise. Some of their finest scenes are constructed on this ground. Shakspeare avails himself of this artifice only twice, I think,--in Twelfth Night, where the two are with great skill kept apart till the end of the play; and in the Comedy of Errors, which is a pure farce, and should be so considered. The definition of a farce is, an improbability or even impossibility granted in the outset, see what odd and laughable events will fairly follow from it!

_April _8. 1833.

STATESMEN.--BURKE.

I never was much subject to violent political humours or accesses of feelings. When I was very young, I wrote and spoke very enthusiastically, but it was always on subjects connected with some grand general principle, the violation of which I thought I could point out. As to mere details of administration, I honestly thought that ministers, and men in office, must, of course, know much better than any private person could possibly do; and it was not till I went to Malta, and had to correspond with official characters myself, that I fully understood the extreme shallowness and ignorance with which men of some note too were able, after a certain fashion, to carry on the government of important departments of the empire. I then quite assented to Oxenstiern's saying, _Nescis, mi fili, quam parva sapientia regitur mundus_.

* * * * *

Burke was, indeed, a great man. No one ever read history so philosophically as he seems to have done. Yet, until he could associate his general principles with some sordid interest, panic of property, jacobinism, &c., he was a mere dinner bell. Hence you will find so many half truths in his speeches and writings. Nevertheless, let us heartily acknowledge his transcendant greatness. He would have been more influential if he had less surpassed his contemporaries, as Fox and Pitt, men of much inferior minds in all respects.

* * * * *

As a telegraph supposes a correspondent telescope, so a scientific lecture requires a scientific audience.

_April _9. 1833.

PROSPECT OF MONARCHY OR DEMOCRACY.--THE REFORMED HOUSE OF COMMONS.

I have a deep, though paradoxical, conviction that most of the European nations are more or less on their way, unconsciously indeed, to pure monarchy; that is, to a government in which, under circumstances of complicated and subtle control, the reason of the people shall become efficient in the apparent will of the king.[1] As it seems to me, the wise and good in every country will, in all likelihood, become every day more and more disgusted with the representative form of government, brutalized as it is, and will be, by the predominance of democracy in England, France, and Belgium. The statesmen of antiquity, we know, doubted the possibility of the effective and permanent combination of the three elementary forms of government; and, perhaps, they had more reason than we have been accustomed to think.

[Footnote 1: This is backing Vico against Spinosa. It must, however, be acknowledged that at present the prophet of democracy has a good right to be considered the favourite.--ED.]

* * * * *

You see how this House of Commons has begun to verify all the ill prophecies that were made of it--low, vulgar, meddling with every thing, assuming universal competency, flattering every base passion, and sneering at every thing noble, refined, and truly national! The direct and personal despotism will come on by and by, after the multitude shall have been gratified with the ruin and the spoil of the old institutions of the land. As for the House of Lords, what is the use of ever so much fiery spirit, if there be no principle to guide and to sanctify it?

_April _10. 1833.

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.--CAPTAIN B. HALL.--NORTHERN AND SOUTHERN STATES. --DEMOCRACY WITH SLAVERY.--QUAKERS.

The possible destiny of the United States of America,--as a nation of a hundred millions of freemen,--stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, living under the laws of Alfred, and speaking the language of Shakspeare and Milton, is an august conception. Why should we not wish to see it realized? America would then be England viewed through a solar microscope; Great Britain in a state of glorious magnification! How deeply to be lamented is the spirit of hostility and sneering which some of the popular books of travels have shown in treating of the Americans! They hate us, no doubt, just as brothers hate; but they respect the opinion of an Englishman concerning themselves ten times as much as that of a native of any other country on earth. A very little humouring of their prejudices, and some courtesy of language and demeanour on the part of Englishmen, would work wonders, even as it is, with the public mind of the Americans.

* * * * *

Captain Basil Hall's book is certainly very entertaining and instructive; but, in my judgment, his sentiments upon many points, and more especially his mode of expression, are unwise and uncharitable. After all, are not most of the things shown up with so much bitterness by him mere national foibles, parallels to which every people has and must of necessity have?

* * * * *

What you say about the quarrel in the United States is sophistical. No doubt, taxation may, and perhaps in some cases must, press unequally, or apparently so, on different classes of people in a state. In such cases there is a hardship; but, in the long run, the matter is fully compensated to the over-taxed class. For example, take the householders of London, who complain so bitterly of the house and window taxes. Is it not pretty clear that, whether such householder be a tradesman, who indemnifies himself in the price of his goods,--or a letter of lodgings, who does so in his rent, --or a stockholder, who receives it back again in his dividends,--or a country gentleman, who has saved so much fresh levy on his land or his other property,--one way or other, it comes at last pretty nearly to the same thing, though the pressure for the time may be unjust and vexatious, and fit to be removed? But when New England, which may be considered a state in itself, taxes the admission of foreign manufactures in order to cherish manufactures of its own, and thereby forces the Carolinians, another state of itself, with which there is little intercommunion, which has no such desire or interest to serve, to buy worse articles at a higher price, it is altogether a different question, and is, in fact, downright tyranny of the worst, because of the most sordid, kind. What would you think of a law which should tax every person in Devonshire for the pecuniary benefit of every person in Yorkshire? And yet that is a feeble image of the actual usurpation of the New England deputies over the property of the Southern States.

* * * * *

There are two possible modes of unity in a State; one by absolute coordination of each to all, and of all to each; the other by subordination of classes and offices. Now, I maintain that there never was an instance of the first, nor can there be, without slavery as its condition and accompaniment, as in Athens. The poor Swiss cantons are no exception.

The mistake lies in confounding a state which must be based on classes and interests and unequal property, with a church, which is founded on the person, and has no qualification but personal merit. Such a community _may_ exist, as in the case of the Quakers; but, in order to exist, it must be compressed and hedged in by another society--_mundus mundulus in mundo immundo_.

* * * * *

The free class in a slave state is always, in one sense, the most patriotic class of people in an empire; for their patriotism is not simply the patriotism of other people, but an aggregate of lust of power and distinction and supremacy.

_April _11. 1833.

LAND AND MONEY.

Land was the only species of property which, in the old time, carried any respectability with it. Money alone, apart from some tenure of land, not only did not make the possessor great and respectable, but actually made him at once the object of plunder and hatred. Witness the history of the Jews in this country in the early reigns after the Conquest.

* * * * *

I have no objection to your aspiring to the political principles of our old Cavaliers; but embrace them all fully, and not merely this and that feeling, whilst in other points you speak the canting foppery of the Benthamite or Malthusian schools.

_April _14. 1833.

METHODS OF INVESTIGATION.

There are three ways of treating a subject:--

In the first mode, you begin with a definition, and that definition is necessarily assumed as the truth. As the argument proceeds, the conclusion from the first proposition becomes the base of the second, and so on. Now, it is quite impossible that you can be sure that you have included all the necessary, and none but the necessary, terms in your definition; as, therefore, you proceed, the original speck of error is multiplied at every remove; the same infirmity of knowledge besetting each successive definition. Hence you may set out, like Spinosa, with all but the truth, and end with a conclusion which is altogether monstrous; and yet the mere deduction shall be irrefragable. Warburton's "Divine Legation" is also a splendid instance of this mode of discussion, and of its inability to lead to the truth: in fact, it is an attempt to adopt the mathematical series of proof, in forgetfulness that the mathematician is sure of the truth of his definition at each remove, because he _creates _it, as he can do, in pure figure and number. But you cannot _make _any thing true which results from, or is connected with, real externals; you can only _find _it out. The chief use of this first mode of discussion is to sharpen the wit, for which purpose it is the best exercitation.

2. The historical mode is a very common one: in it the author professes to find out the truth by collecting the facts of the case, and tracing them downwards; but this mode is worse than the other. Suppose the question is as to the true essence and character of the English constitution. First, where will you begin your collection of facts? where will you end it? What facts will you select, and how do you know that the class of facts which you select are necessary terms in the premisses, and that other classes of facts, which you neglect, are not necessary? And how do you distinguish phenomena which proceed from disease or accident from those which are the genuine fruits of the essence of the constitution? What can be more striking, in illustration of the utter inadequacy of this line of investigation for arriving at the real truth, than the political treatises and constitutional histories which we have in every library? A Whig proves his case convincingly to the reader who knows nothing beyond his author; then comes an old Tory (Carte, for instance), and ferrets up a hamperful of conflicting documents and notices, which proves _his _case _per contra_. A. takes this class of facts; B. takes that class: each proves something true, neither proves _the_ truth, or any thing like _the _truth; that is, the whole truth.

3. You must, therefore, commence with the philosophic idea of the thing, the true nature of which you wish to find out and manifest. You must carry your rule ready made, if you wish to measure aright. If you ask me how I can know that this idea--my own invention--is the truth, by which the phenomena of history are to be explained, I answer, in the same way exactly that you know that your eyes were made to see with; and that is, because you _do _see with them. If I propose to you an idea or self-realizing theory of the constitution, which shall manifest itself as in existence from the earliest times to the present,--which shall comprehend within it _all _the facts which history has preserved, and shall give them a meaning as interchangeably causals or effects;--if I show you that such an event or reign was an obliquity to the right hand, and how produced, and such other event or reign a deviation to the left, and whence originating,--that the growth was stopped here, accelerated there,--that such a tendency is, and always has been, corroborative, and such other tendency destructive, of the main progress of the idea towards realization;--if this idea, not only like a kaleidoscope, shall reduce all the miscellaneous fragments into order, but shall also minister strength, and knowledge, and light to the true patriot and statesmen for working out the bright thought, and bringing the glorious embryo to a perfect birth;--then, I think, I have a right to say that the idea which led to this is not only true, but the truth, the only truth. To set up for a statesman upon historical knowledge only, is as about as wise as to set up for a musician by the purchase of some score flutes, fiddles, and horns. In order to make music, you must know how to play; in order to make your facts speak truth, you must know what the truth is which _ought_ to be proved,--the ideal truth,--the truth which was consciously or unconsciously, strongly or weakly, wisely or blindly, intended at all times.[1]

[Footnote 1: I have preserved this passage, conscious, the while, how liable it is to be misunderstood, or at least not understood. The readers of Mr. Coleridge's works generally, or of his "Church and State" in particular, will have no difficulty in entering into his meaning; namely, that no investigation in the non-mathematical sciences can be carried on in a way deserving to be called philosophical, unless the investigator have in himself a mental initiative, or, what comes to the same thing, unless he set out with an intuition of the ultimate aim or idea of the science or aggregation of facts to be explained or interpreted. The analysis of the Platonic and Baconian methods in "The Friend," to which I have before referred, and the "Church and State," exhibit respectively a splendid vindication and example of Mr. Coleridge's mode of reasoning on this subject.--ED.]

_April _18. 1833.

CHURCH OF ROME.--CELIBACY OF THE CLERGY.

In my judgment, Protestants lose a great deal of time in a false attack when they labour to convict the Romanists of false doctrines. Destroy the _Papacy_, and help the priests to wives, and I am much mistaken if the doctrinal errors, such as there really are, would not very soon pass away. They might remain _in terminis_, but they would lose their sting and body, and lapse back into figures of rhetoric and warm devotion, from which they, most of them,--such as transubstantiation, and prayers for the dead and to saints,--originally sprang. But, so long as the Bishop of Rome remains Pope, and has an army of Mamelukes all over the world, we shall do very little by fulminating against mere doctrinal errors. In the Milanese, and elsewhere in the north of Italy, I am told there is a powerful feeling abroad against the Papacy. That district seems to be something in the state of England in the reign of our Henry the Eighth.

How deep a wound to morals and social purity has that accursed article of the celibacy of the clergy been! Even the best and most enlightened men in Romanist countries attach a notion of impurity to the marriage of a clergyman. And can such a feeling be without its effect on the estimation of the wedded life in general? Impossible! and the morals of both sexes in Spain, Italy, France, &c. prove it abundantly.

The Papal church has had three phases,--anti-Caesarean, extra-national, anti-Christian.

_April _20. 1833.

ROMAN CONQUEST OF ITALY.

The Romans would never have subdued the Italian tribes if they had not boldly left Italy and conquered foreign nations, and so, at last, crushed their next-door neighbours by external pressure.

_April _24. 1833.

WEDDED LOVE IN SHAKSPEARE AND HIS CONTEMPORARY DRAMATISTS.--TENNYSON'S POEMS.

Except in Shakspeare, you can find no such thing as a pure conception of wedded love in our old dramatists. In Massinger, and Beaumont and Fletcher, it really is on both sides little better than sheer animal desire. There is scarcely a suitor in all their plays, whose _abilities_ are not discussed by the lady or her waiting-woman. In this, as in all things, how transcendant over his age and his rivals was our sweet Shakspeare!

* * * * *

I have not read through all Mr. Tennyson's poems, which have been sent to me; but I think there are some things of a good deal of beauty in what I have seen. The misfortune is, that he has begun to write verses without very well understanding what metre is. Even if you write in a known and approved metre, the odds are, if you are not a metrist yourself, that you will not write harmonious verses; but to deal in new metres without considering what metre means and requires, is preposterous. What I would, with many wishes for success, prescribe to Tennyson,--indeed without it he can never be a poet in act,--is to write for the next two or three years in none but one or two well-known and strictly defined metres, such as the heroic couplet, the octave stanza, or the octo-syllabic measure of the Allegro and Penseroso. He would, probably, thus get imbued with a sensation, if not a sense, of metre without knowing it, just as Eton boys get to write such good Latin verses by conning Ovid and Tibullus. As it is, I can scarcely scan some of his verses.

_May _1. 1833.

RABELAIS AND LUTHER.--WIT AND MADNESS.

I think with some interest upon the fact that Rabelais and Luther were born in the same year.[1] Glorious spirits! glorious spirits!

----"Hos utinam inter Heroas natum me!"

[Footnote 1: They were both born within twelve months of each other, I believe; but Luther's birth was in November, 1484, and that of Rabelais is generally placed at the end of the year preceding.--ED.]

* * * * *

"Great wits are sure to madness near allied,"

says Dryden, and true so far as this, that genius of the highest kind implies an unusual intensity of the modifying power, which detached from the discriminative and reproductive power, might conjure a platted straw into a royal diadem: but it would be at least as true, that great genius is most alien from madness,--yea, divided from it by an impassable mountain,-- namely, the activity of thought and vivacity of the accumulative memory, which are no less essential constituents of "great wit."

_May _4. 1833.

COLONIZATION.--MACHINERY.--CAPITAL.

Colonization is not only a manifest expedient for, but an imperative duty on, Great Britain. God seems to hold out his finger to us over the sea. But it must be a national colonization, such as was that of the Scotch to America; a colonization of hope, and not such as we have alone encouraged and effected for the last fifty years, a colonization of despair.

* * * * *

The wonderful powers of machinery can, by multiplied production, render the mere _arte facta _of life actually cheaper: thus money and all other things being supposed the same in value, a silk gown is five times cheaper now than in Queen Elizabeth's time; but machinery cannot cheapen, in any thing like an equal degree, the immediate growths of nature or the immediate necessaries of man. Now the _arte facta _are sought by the higher classes of society in a proportion incalculably beyond that in which they are sought by the lower classes; and therefore it is that the vast increase of mechanical powers has not cheapened life and pleasure to the poor as it has done to the rich. In some respects, no doubt, it has done so, as in giving cotton dresses to maid-servants, and penny gin to all. A pretty benefit truly!

* * * * *

I think this country is now suffering grievously under an excessive accumulation of capital, which, having no field for profitable operation, is in a state of fierce civil war with itself.

_May _6. 1833.

ROMAN CONQUEST.--CONSTANTINE.--PAPACY AND THE SCHOOLMEN.

The Romans had no national clerisy; their priesthood was entirely a matter of state, and, as far back as we can trace it, an evident stronghold of the Patricians against the increasing powers of the Plebeians. All we know of the early Romans is, that, after an indefinite lapse of years, they had conquered some fifty or sixty miles round their city. Then it is that they go to war with Carthage, the great maritime power, and the result of that war was the occupation of Sicily. Thence they, in succession, conquered Spain, Macedonia, Asia Minor, &c., and so at last contrived to subjugate Italy, partly by a tremendous back blow, and partly by bribing the Italian States with a communication of their privileges, which the now enormously enriched conquerors possessed over so large a portion of the civilized world. They were ordained by Providence to conquer and amalgamate the materials of Christendom. They were not a national people; they were truly--

_Romanos rerum dominos--_

--and that's all.

* * * * *

Under Constantine the spiritual power became a complete reflex of the temporal. There were four patriarchs, and four prefects, and so on. The Clergy and the Lawyers, the Church and the State, were opposed.

* * * * *

The beneficial influence of the Papacy upon the whole has been much over- rated by some writers; and certainly no country in Europe received less benefit and more harm from it than England. In fact, the lawful kings and parliaments of England were always essentially Protestant in feeling for a national church, though they adhered to the received doctrines of the Christianity of the day; and it was only the usurpers, John, Henry IV., &c., that went against this policy. All the great English schoolmen, Scotus Erigena[1], Duns Scotus, Ockham, and others, those morning stars of the Reformation, were heart and soul opposed to Rome, and maintained the Papacy to be Antichrist. The Popes always persecuted, with rancorous hatred, the national clerisies, the married clergy, and disliked the universities which grew out of the old monasteries. The Papacy was, and is, essentially extra- national, and was always so considered in this country, although not believed to be anti-Christian.

[Footnote 1: John Scotus, or Erigena, was born, according to different authors, in Wales, Scotland, or Ireland; but I do not find any account making him an Englishman of Saxon blood. His death is uncertainly placed in the beginning of the ninth century. He lived in well-known intimacy with Charles the Bald, of France, who died about A. D. 874. He resolutely resisted the doctrine of transubstantiation, and was publicly accused of heresy on that account. But the king of France protected him--ED.]

_May_ 8. 1833.

CIVIL WAR OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.--HAMPDEN'S SPEECH.

I know no portion of history which a man might write with so much pleasure as that of the great struggle in the time of Charles I., because he may feel the profoundest respect for both parties. The side taken by any particular person was determined by the point of view which such person happened to command at the commencement of the inevitable collision, one line seeming straight to this man, another line to another. No man of that age saw _the_ truth, the whole truth; there was not light enough for that. The consequence, of course, was a violent exaggeration of each party for the time. The King became a martyr, and the Parliamentarians traitors, and _vice versâ_. The great reform brought into act by and under William the Third combined the principles truly contended for by Charles and his Parliament respectively: the great revolution of 1831 has certainly, to an almost ruinous degree, dislocated those principles of government again. As to Hampden's speech[1], no doubt it means a declaration of passive obedience to the sovereign, as the creed of an English Protestant individual: every man, Cromwell and all, would have said as much; it was the antipapistical tenet, and almost vauntingly asserted on all occasions by Protestants up to that time. But it implies nothing of Hampden's creed as to the duty of Parliament.

[Footnote 1: On his impeachment with the other four members, 1642. See the "Letter to John Murray, Esq. _touching_ Lord Nugent," 1833. It is extraordinary that Lord N. should not see the plain distinction taken by Hampden, between not obeying an unlawful command, and rebelling against the King because of it. He approves the one, and condemns the other. His words are, "to _yield obedience to_ the commands of a King, if against the true religion, against the ancient and fundamental laws of the land, is another sign of an ill subject:"--"To _resist_ the lawful power of the King; to raise insurrection against the King; admit him adverse in his religion; _to conspire against his sacred person, or any ways to rebel, though commanding things against our consciences in exercising religion, or against the rights and privileges of the subject_, is an absolute sign of the disaffected and traitorous subject."--ED.]

_May_ 10. 1833.

REFORMED HOUSE OF COMMONS.

Well, I think no honest man will deny that the prophetic denunciations of those who seriously and solemnly opposed the Reform Bill are in a fair way of exact fulfilment! For myself, I own I did not expect such rapidity of movement. I supposed that the first parliament would contain a large number of low factious men, who would vulgarize and degrade the debates of the House of Commons, and considerably impede public business, and that the majority would be gentlemen more fond of their property than their politics. But really the truth is something more than this. Think of upwards of 160 members voting away two millions and a half of tax on Friday[1], at the bidding of whom, shall I say? and then no less than 70 of those very members rescinding their votes on the Tuesday next following, nothing whatever having intervened to justify the change, except that they had found out that at least seven or eight millions more must go also upon the same principle, and that the revenue was cut in two! Of course I approve the vote of rescission, however dangerous a precedent; but what a picture of the composition of this House of Commons!

[Footnote 1: On Friday, the 26th of April, 1833, Sir William Ingilby moved and carried a resolution for reducing the duty on malt from 28s. 8d. to l0s. per quarter. One hundred and sixty-two members voted with him. On Tuesday following, the 30th of April, seventy-six members only voted against the rescission of the same resolution.--ED.]

_May_ 13. 1833.

FOOD.--MEDICINE.--POISON.--OBSTRUCTION.

1. That which is digested wholly, and part of which is assimilated, and part rejected, is--Food.

2. That which is digested wholly, and the whole of which is partly assimilated, and partly not, is--Medicine.

3. That which is digested, but not assimilated, is--Poison.

4. That which is neither digested nor assimilated is--Mere Obstruction.

As to the stories of slow poisons, I cannot say whether there was any, or what, truth in them; but I certainly believe a man may be poisoned by arsenic a year after he has taken it. In fact, I think that is known to have happened.

May 14. 1833.

WILSON.--SHAKSPEARE'S SONNETS.--LOVE.

Professor Wilson's character of Charles Lamb in the last Blackwood, _Twaddle on Tweed-side_[1], is very sweet indeed, and gratified me much. It does honour to Wilson, to his head and his heart.

[Footnote 1: "Charles Lamb ought really not to abuse Scotland in the pleasant way he so often does in the sylvan shades of Enfield; for Scotland loves Charles Lamb; but he is wayward and wilful in his wisdom, and conceits that many a Cockney is a better man even than Christopher North. But what will not Christopher forgive to genius and goodness! Even Lamb, bleating libels on his native land. Nay, he learns lessons of humanity even from the mild malice of Elia, and breathes a blessing on him and his household in their bower of rest."

Some of Mr. Coleridge's poems were first published with some of C. Lamb's at Bristol in 1797. The remarkable words on the title-page have been aptly cited in the New Monthly Magazine for February, 1835, p. 198.: "Duplex nobis vinculum, et amicitiae et similium junctarumque Camcoenarum,--quod utinam neque mors solvat, neque temporis longinquitas." And even so it came to pass after thirty seven years more had passed over their heads,--ED.]

* * * * *

How can I wish that Wilson should cease to write what so often soothes and suspends my bodily miseries, and my mental conflicts! Yet what a waste, what a reckless spending, of talent, ay, and of genius, too, in his I know not how many years' management of Blackwood! If Wilson cares for fame, for an enduring place and prominence in literature, he should now, I think, hold his hand, and say, as he well may,--

"Militavi non sine gloria: Nunc arma defunctumque bello Barbiton hic paries habebit."

Two or three volumes collected out of the magazine by himself would be very delightful. But he must not leave it for others to do; for some recasting and much condensation would be required; and literary executors make sad work in general with their testators' brains.

* * * * *

I believe it possible that a man may, under certain states of the moral feeling, entertain something deserving the name of love towards a male object--an affection beyond friendship, and wholly aloof from appetite. In Elizabeth's and James's time it seems to have been almost fashionable to cherish such a feeling; and perhaps we may account in some measure for it by considering how very inferior the women of that age, taken generally, were in education and accomplishment of mind to the men. Of course there were brilliant exceptions enough; but the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher-- the most popular dramatists that ever wrote for the English stage--will show us what sort of women it was generally pleasing to represent. Certainly the language of the two friends, Musidorus and Pyrocles, in the Arcadia, is such as we could not now use except to women; and in Cervantes the same tone is sometimes adopted, as in the novel of the Curious Impertinent. And I think there is a passage in the New Atlantis[1] of Lord Bacon, in which he speaks of the possibility of such a feeling, but hints the extreme danger of entertaining it, or allowing it any place in a moral theory. I mention this with reference to Shakspeare's sonnets, which have been supposed, by some, to be addressed to William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, whom Clarendon calls[2] the most beloved man of his age, though his licentiousness was equal to his virtues.

I doubt this. I do not think that Shakespeare, merely because he was an actor, would have thought it necessary to veil his emotions towards Pembroke under a disguise, though he might probably have done so, if the real object had perchance been a Laura or a Leonora. It seems to me that the sonnets could only have come from a man deeply in love, and in love with a woman; and there is one sonnet which, from its incongruity, I take to be a purposed blind. These extraordinary sonnets form, in fact, a poem of so many stanzas of fourteen lines each; and, like the passion which inspired them, the sonnets are always the same, with a variety of expression,--continuous, if you regard the lover's soul,--distinct, if you listen to him, as he heaves them sigh after sigh.

These sonnets, like the Venus and Adonis, and the Rape of Lucrece, are characterized by boundless fertility and laboured condensation of thought, with perfection of sweetness in rhythm and metre. These are the essentials in the budding of a great poet. Afterwards habit and consciousness of power teach more ease--_praecipitandum liberum spiritum_.

[Footnote 1: I cannot fix upon any passage in this work, to which it can be supposed that Mr. Coleridge alluded, unless it be the speech of Joabin the Jew; but it contains nothing coming up to the meaning in the text. The only approach to it seems to be:--"As for masculine love, they have no touch of it; and yet there are not so faithful and inviolate friendships in the world again as are there; and to speak generally, as I said before, I have not read of any such chastity in any people as theirs."--ED.]

[Footnote 2: "William Earl of Pembroke was next, a man of another mould and making, and of another fame and reputation with all men, being the most universally beloved and esteemed of any man of that age." ......."He indulged to himself the pleasures of all kinds, almost in all excesses."--_Hist. of the Rebellion_, book i. He died in 1630, aged fifty years. The dedication by T. T. (Thomas Thorpe) is to "the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets, Mr. W. H." and Malone is inclined to think that William Hughes is meant. As to Mr. W. H. being the _only_ begetter of these sonnets, it must be observed, that at least the last twenty-eight are beyond dispute addressed to a woman. I suppose the twentieth sonnet was the particular one conceived by Mr. C. to be a blind; but it seems to me that many others may be so construed, if we set out with a conviction that the real object of the poet was a woman.--ED.]

* * * * *

Every one who has been in love, knows that the passion is strongest, and the appetite weakest, in the absence of the beloved object, and that the reverse is the case in her presence.

_May_ 15. 1833.

WICLIFFE.--LUTHER.--REVERENCE FOR IDEAL TRUTHS.--JOHNSON THE WHIG.-- ASGILL.--JAMES I.

Wicliffe's genius was, perhaps, not equal to Luther's; but really the more I know of him from Vaughan and Le Bas, both of whose books I like, I think him as extraordinary a man as Luther upon the whole. He was much sounder and more truly catholic in his view of the Eucharist than Luther. And I find, not without some pleasure, that my own view of it, which I was afraid was original, was maintained in the tenth century, that is to say, that the body broken had no reference to the human body of Christ, but to the Caro Noumenon, or symbolical Body, the Rock that followed the Israelites.

Whitaker beautifully says of Luther;--_Felix ille, quem Dominus eo honore dignatus est, ut homines nequissimos suos haberet inimicos_.

* * * * *

There is now no reverence for any thing; and the reason is, that men possess conceptions only, and all their knowledge is conceptional only. Now as, to conceive, is a work of the mere understanding, and as all that can be conceived may be comprehended, it is impossible that a man should reverence that, to which he must always feel something in himself superior. If it were possible to conceive God in a strict sense, that is, as we conceive a horse or a tree, even God himself could not excite any reverence, though he might excite fear or terror, or perhaps love, as a tiger or a beautiful woman. But reverence, which is the synthesis of love and fear, is only due from man, and, indeed, only excitable in man, towards ideal truths, which are always mysteries to the understanding, for the same reason that the motion of my finger behind my back is a mystery to you now--your eyes not being made for seeing through my body. It is the reason only which has a sense by which ideas can be recognized, and from the fontal light of ideas only can a man draw intellectual power.

* * * * *

Samuel Johnson[1], whom, to distinguish him from the Doctor, we may call the Whig, was a very remarkable writer. He may be compared to his contemporary De Foe, whom he resembled in many points. He is another instance of King William's discrimination, which was so much superior to that of any of his ministers, Johnson was one of the most formidable advocates for the Exclusion Bill, and he suffered by whipping and imprisonment under James accordingly. Like Asgill, he argues with great apparent candour and clearness till he has his opponent within reach, and then comes a blow as from a sledge-hammer. I do not know where I could put my hand upon a book containing so much sense and sound constitutional doctrine as this thin folio of Johnson's Works; and what party in this country would read so severe a lecture in it as our modern Whigs!

A close reasoner and a good writer in general may be known by his pertinent use of connectives. Read that page of Johnson; you cannot alter one conjunction without spoiling the sense. It is a linked strain throughout. In your modern books, for the most part, the sentences in a page have the same connection with each other that marbles have in a bag; they touch without adhering.

Asgill evidently formed his style upon Johnson's, but he only imitates one part of it. Asgill never rises to Johnson's eloquence. The latter was a sort of Cobbett-Burke.

James the First thought that, because all power in the state seemed to proceed _from_ the crown, all power therefore remained in the crown;--as if, because the tree sprang from the seed, the stem, branches, leaves, and fruit were all contained in the seed. The constitutional doctrine as to the relation which the king bears to the other components of the state is in two words this:--He is a representative of the whole of that, of which he is himself a part.

[Footnote 1: Dryden's Ben Jochanan, in the second part of Absalom and Achitophel. He was born in 1649, and died in 1703. He was a clergyman. In 1686, when the army was encamped on Hounslow Heath, he published "A humble and hearty Address to all English Protestants in the present Army." For this he was tried and sentenced to be pilloried in three places, pay a fine, and be whipped from Newgate to Tyburn. An attempt was also made to degrade him from his orders, but this failed through an informality. After the Revolution he was preferred.--ED.]

_May_ 17. 1833.

SIR P. SIDNEY.--THINGS ARE FINDING THEIR LEVEL.

When Sir Philip Sidney saw the enthusiasm which agitated every man, woman, and child in the Netherlands against Philip and D'Alva, he told Queen Elizabeth that it was the spirit of God, and that it was invincible. What is the spirit which seems to move and unsettle every other man in England and on the Continent at this time? Upon my conscience, and judging by St. John's rule, I think it is a special spirit of the devil--and a very vulgar devil too!

* * * * *

Your modern political economists say that it is a principle in their science--that all things _find_ their level;--which I deny; and say, on the contrary, that the true principle is, that all things are _finding_ their level like water in a storm.

_May_ 18. 1833.

GERMAN.--GOETHE.--GOD'S PROVIDENCE.--MAN'S FREEDOM.

German is inferior to English in modifications of expression of the affections, but superior to it in modifications of expression of all objects of the senses.

* * * * *

Goethe's small lyrics are delightful. He showed good taste in not attempting to imitate Shakspeare's Witches, which are threefold,--Fates, Furies, and earthly Hags o' the caldron.

* * * * *

Man does not move in cycles, though nature does. Man's course is like that of an arrow; for the portion of the great cometary ellipse which he occupies is no more than a needle's length to a mile.

In natural history, God's freedom is shown in the law of necessity. In moral history, God's necessity or providence is shown in man's freedom.

_June_ 8. 1833.

DOM MIGUEL AND DOM PEDRO.--WORKING TO BETTER ONE'S CONDITION.--NEGRO EMANCIPATION.--FOX AND PITT.--REVOLUTION.

There can be no doubt of the gross violations of strict neutrality by this government in the Portuguese affair; but I wish the Tories had left the matter alone, and not given room to the people to associate them with that scoundrel Dom Miguel. You can never interest the common herd in the abstract question; with them it is a mere quarrel between the men; and though Pedro is a very doubtful character, he is not so bad as his brother; and, besides, we are naturally interested for the girl.

* * * * *

It is very strange that men who make light of the direct doctrines of the Scriptures, and turn up their noses at the recommendation of a line of conduct suggested by religious truth, will nevertheless stake the tranquillity of an empire, the lives and properties of millions of men and women, on the faith of a maxim of modern political economy! And this, too, of a maxim true only, if at all, of England or a part of England, or some other country;--namely, that the desire of bettering their condition will induce men to labour even more abundantly and profitably than servile compulsion,--to which maxim the past history and present state of all Asia and Africa give the lie. Nay, even in England at this day, every man in Manchester, Birmingham, and in other great manufacturing towns, knows that the most skilful artisans, who may earn high wages at pleasure, are constantly in the habit of working but a few days in the week, and of idling the rest. I believe St.

Monday is very well kept by the workmen in London. The love of indolence is universal, or next to it.

* * * * *

Must not the ministerial plan for the West Indies lead necessarily to a change of property, either by force or dereliction? I can't see any way of escaping it.

* * * * *

You are always talking of the _rights_ of the negroes. As a rhetorical mode of stimulating the people of England _here_, I do not object; but I utterly condemn your frantic practice of declaiming about their rights to the blacks themselves. They ought to be forcibly reminded of the state in which their brethren in Africa still are, and taught to be thankful for the providence which has placed them within reach of the means of grace. I know no right except such as flows from righteousness; and as every Christian believes his righteousness to be imputed, so must his right be an imputed right too. It must flow out of a duty, and it is under that name that the process of humanization ought to begin and to be conducted throughout.

* * * * *

Thirty years ago, and more, Pitt availed himself, with great political dexterity, of the apprehension, which Burke and the conduct of some of the clubs in London had excited, and endeavoured to inspire into the nation a panic of property. Fox, instead of exposing the absurdity of this by showing the real numbers and contemptible weakness of the disaffected, fell into Pitt's trap, and was mad enough to exaggerate even Pitt's surmises. The consequence was, a very general apprehension throughout the country of an impending revolution, at a time when, I will venture to say, the people were more heart-whole than they had been for a hundred years previously. After I had travelled in Sicily and Italy, countries where there were real grounds for fear, I became deeply impressed with the difference. Now, after a long continuance of high national glory and influence, when a revolution of a most searching and general character is actually at work, and the old institutions of the country are all awaiting their certain destruction or violent modification--the people at large are perfectly secure, sleeping or gambolling on the very brink of a volcano.

_June_ 15. 1833.

VIRTUE AND LIBERTY.--EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS.--ERASMUS.----LUTHER.

The necessity for external government to man is in an inverse ratio to the vigour of his self-government. Where the last is most complete, the first is least wanted. Hence, the more virtue the more liberty.

* * * * *

I think St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans the most profound work in existence; and I hardly believe that the writings of the old Stoics, now lost, could have been deeper. Undoubtedly it is, and must be, very obscure to ordinary readers; but some of the difficulty is accidental, arising from the form in which the Epistle appears. If we could now arrange this work in the way in which we may be sure St. Paul would himself do, were he now alive, and preparing it for the press, his reasoning would stand out clearer. His accumulated parentheses would be thrown into notes, or extruded to the margin. You will smile, after this, if I say that I think I understand St. Paul; and I think so, because, really and truly, I recognize a cogent consecutiveness in the argument--the only evidence I know that you understand any book. How different is the style of this intensely passionate argument from that of the catholic circular charge called the Epistle to the Ephesians!--and how different that of both from the style of the Epistles to Timothy and Titus, which I venture to call [Greek: epistolal panloeideiz]

Erasmus's paraphrase of the New Testament is clear and explanatory; but you cannot expect any thing very deep from Erasmus. The only fit commentator on Paul was Luther--not by any means such a gentleman as the Apostle, but almost as great a genius.

_June_ 17. 1833.

NEGRO EMANCIPATION.

Have you been able to discover any principle in this Emancipation Bill for the Slaves, except a principle of fear of the abolition party struggling with a dread of causing some monstrous calamity to the empire at large? Well! I will not prophesy; and God grant that this tremendous and unprecedented act of positive enactment may not do the harm to the cause of humanity and freedom which I cannot but fear! But yet, what can be hoped, when all human wisdom and counsel are set at nought, and religious faith-- the only miraculous agent amongst men--is not invoked or regarded! and that most unblest phrase--the Dissenting _interest_--enters into the question!

_June_ 22. 1833.

HACKET'S LIFE OF ARCHBISHOP WILLIAMS.--CHARLES I.--MANNERS UNDER EDWARD III., RICHARD II., AND HENRY VIII.

What a delightful and instructive hook Bishop Hacket's Life of Archbishop Williams is! You learn more from it of that which is valuable towards an insight into the times preceding the Civil War than from all the ponderous histories and memoirs now composed about that period.

* * * * *

Charles seems to have been a very disagreeable personage during James's life. There is nothing dutiful in his demeanour.

* * * * *

I think the spirit of the court and nobility of Edward III. and Richard II. was less gross than that in the time of Henry VIII.; for in this latter period the chivalry had evaporated, and the whole coarseness was left by itself. Chaucer represents a very high and romantic style of society amongst the gentry.

_June_ 29. 1833.

HYPOTHESIS.--SUFFICTION.--THEORY.--LYELL'S GEOLOGY.--GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE. --GERARD DOUW's "SCHOOLMASTER" AND TITIAN'S "VENUS."--SIR J. SCARLETT.

It seems to me a great delusion to call or suppose the imagination of a subtle fluid, or molecules penetrable with the same, a legitimate hypothesis. It is a mere _suffiction_. Newton took the fact of bodies falling to the centre, and upon that built up a legitimate hypothesis. It was a subposition of something certain. But Descartes' vortices were not an hypothesis; they rested on no fact at all; and yet they did, in a clumsy way, explain the motions of the heavenly bodies. But your subtle fluid is pure gratuitous assumption; and for what use? It explains nothing.

Besides, you are endeavouring to deduce power from mass, in which you expressly say there is no power but the _vis inertiae_: whereas, the whole analogy of chemistry proves that power produces mass.

* * * * *

The use of a theory in the real sciences is to help the investigator to a complete view of all the hitherto discovered facts relating to the science in question; it is a collected view, [Greek: the_orhia], of all he yet knows in _one_. Of course, whilst any pertinent facts remain unknown, no theory can be exactly true, because every new fact must necessarily, to a greater or less degree, displace the relation of all the others. A theory, therefore, only helps investigation; it cannot invent or discover. The only true theories are those of geometry, because in geometry all the premisses are true and unalterable. But, to suppose that, in our present exceedingly imperfect acquaintance with the facts, any theory in chemistry or geology is altogether accurate, is absurd:--it cannot be true.

Mr. Lyell's system of geology is just half the truth, and no more. He affirms a great deal that is true, and he denies a great deal which is equally true; which is the general characteristic of all systems not embracing the whole truth. So it is with the rectilinearity or undulatory motion of light;--I believe both; though philosophy has as yet but imperfectly ascertained the conditions of their alternate existence, or the laws by which they are regulated.

* * * * *

Those who deny light to be matter do not, therefore, deny its corporeity.

* * * * *

The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable. It is no doubt a sublimer effort of genius than the Greek style; but then it depends much more on execution for its effect. I was more than ever impressed with the marvellous sublimity and transcendant beauty of King's College Chapel.[1] It is quite unparalleled.

I think Gerard Douw's "Schoolmaster," in the Fitzwilliam Museum, the finest thing of the sort I ever saw;--whether you look at it at the common distance, or examine it with a glass, the wonder is equal. And that glorious picture of the Venus--so perfectly beautiful and perfectly innocent--as if beauty and innocence could not be dissociated! The French thing below is a curious instance of the inherent grossness of the French taste. Titian's picture is made quite bestial.

[Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge visited Cambridge upon the occasion of the scientific meeting there in June, 1833.--"My emotions," he said, "at revisiting the university were at first, overwhelming. I could not speak for an hour; yet my feelings were upon the whole very pleasurable, and I have not passed, of late years at least, three days of such great enjoyment and healthful excitement of mind and body. The bed on which I slept--and slept soundly too--was, as near as I can describe it, a couple of sacks full of potatoes tied together. I understand the young men think it hardens them. Truly I lay down at night a man, and arose in the morning a bruise." He told me "that the men were much amused at his saying that the fine old Quaker philosopher Dalton's face was like All Souls' College." The two persons of whom he spoke with the greatest interest were Mr. Faraday and Mr. Thirlwall; saying of the former, "that he seemed to have the true temperament of genius, that carrying-on of the spring and freshness of youthful, nay, boyish feelings, into the matured strength of manhood!" For, as Mr. Coleridge had long before expressed the same thought,--"To find no contradiction in the union of old and new; to contemplate the Ancient of Days and all his works with feelings as fresh as if all had then sprung forth at the first creative fiat, this characterizes the mind that feels the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it. To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which everyday for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar;

'With sun and moon and stars throughout the year, And man and woman;'--

this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish genius from talent. And therefore is it the prime merit of genius, and its most unequivocal mode of manifestation, so to represent familiar objects as to awaken in the minds of others a kindred feeling concerning them, and that freshness of sensation which is the constant accompaniment of mental, no less than of bodily, convalescence. Who has not a thousand times seen snow fall on water? Who has not watched it with a new feeling, from the time that he has read Burns's comparison of sensual pleasure

'To snow that falls upon a river, A moment white--then gone for ever!'"

_Biog. Lit_. vol. i, p. 85.--ED.]

* * * * *

I think Sir James Scarlett's speech for the defendant, in the late action of Cobbett v. The Times, for a libel, worthy of the best ages of Greece or Rome; though, to be sure, some of his remarks could not have been very palatable to his clients.

* * * * *

I am glad you came in to punctuate my discourse, which I fear has gone on for an hour without any stop at all.

_July_ 1. 1833.

MANDEVILLE'S FABLE OF THE BEES.--BESTIAL THEORY.--CHARACTER OF BERTRAM.-- BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER'S DRAMAS.--ÆSCHYLUS, SOPHOCLES, EURIPIDES,--MILTON.

If I could ever believe that Mandeville really meant any thing more by his Fable of the Bees than a _bonne bouche_ of solemn raillery, I should like to ask those man-shaped apes who have taken up his suggestions in earnest, and seriously maintained them as bases for a rational account of man and the world--how they explain the very existence of those dexterous cheats, those superior charlatans, the legislators and philosophers, who have known how to play so well upon the peacock-like vanity and follies of their fellow mortals.

By the by, I wonder some of you lawyers (_sub rosa_, of course) have not quoted the pithy lines in Mandeville upon this registration question:--

"The lawyers, of whose art the basis Was raising feuds and splitting cases, _Oppos'd all Registers_, that cheats Might make more work with dipt estates; As 'twere unlawful that one's own Without a lawsuit should be known! They put off hearings wilfully, To finger the refreshing fee; And to defend a wicked cause Examined and survey'd the laws, As burglars shops and houses do, To see where best they may break through."

There is great Hudibrastic vigour in these lines; and those on the doctors are also very terse.

* * * * *

Look at that head of Cline, by Chantrey! Is that forehead, that nose, those temples and that chin, akin to the monkey tribe? No, no. To a man of sensibility no argument could disprove the bestial theory so convincingly as a quiet contemplation of that fine bust.

* * * * *

I cannot agree with the solemn abuse which the critics have poured out upon Bertram in "All's Well that ends Well." He was a young nobleman in feudal times, just bursting into manhood, with all the feelings of pride of birth and appetite for pleasure and liberty natural to such a character so circumstanced. Of course he had never regarded Helena otherwise than as a dependant in the family; and of all that which she possessed of goodness and fidelity and courage, which might atone for her inferiority in other respects, Bertram was necessarily in a great measure ignorant. And after all, her _prima facie_ merit was the having inherited a prescription from her old father the doctor, by which she cures the king,--a merit, which supposes an extravagance of personal loyalty in Bertram to make conclusive to him in such a matter as that of taking a wife. Bertram had surely good reason to look upon the king's forcing him to marry Helena as a very tyrannical act. Indeed, it must be confessed that her character is not very delicate, and it required all Shakspeare's consummate skill to interest us for her; and he does this chiefly by the operation of the other characters,--the Countess, Lafeu, &c. We get to like Helena from their praising and commending her so much.

* * * * *

In Beaumont and Fletcher's tragedies the comic scenes are rarely so interfused amidst the tragic as to produce a unity of the tragic on the whole, without which the intermixture is a fault. In Shakspeare, this is always managed with transcendant skill. The Fool in Lear contributes in a very sensible manner to the tragic wildness of the whole drama. Beaumont and Fletcher's serious plays or tragedies are complete hybrids,--neither fish nor flesh,--upon any rules, Greek, Roman, or Gothic: and yet they are very delightful notwithstanding. No doubt, they imitate the ease of gentlemanly conversation better than Shakspeare, who was unable _not_ to be too much associated to succeed perfectly in this.

When I was a boy, I was fondest of Æschylus; in youth and middle age I preferred Euripides; now in my declining years I admire Sophocles. I can now at length see that Sophocles is the most perfect. Yet he never rises to the sublime simplicity of Æschylus--simplicity of design, I mean--nor diffuses himself in the passionate outpourings of Euripides. I understand why the ancients called Euripides the most tragic of their dramatists: he evidently embraces within the scope of the tragic poet many passions,-- love, conjugal affection, jealousy, and so on, which Sophocles seems to have considered as incongruous with the ideal statuesqueness of the tragic drama. Certainly Euripides was a greater poet in the abstract than Sophocles. His choruses may be faulty as choruses, but how beautiful and affecting they are as odes and songs! I think the famous [Greek: Euippoy Xene], in Oedipus Coloneus[1] cold in comparison with many of the odes of Euripides, as that song of the chorus in the Hippolytus--[Greek: "Eoos," Eoos[2]] and so on; and I remember a choric ode in the Hecuba, which always struck me as exquisitely rich and finished; I mean, where the chorus speaks of Troy and the night of the capture.[3]

There is nothing very surprising in Milton's preference of Euripides, though so unlike himself. It is very common--very natural--for men to _like_ and even admire an exhibition of power very different in kind from any thing of their own. No jealousy arises. Milton preferred Ovid too, and I dare say he admired both as a man of sensibility admires a lovely woman, with a feeling into which jealousy or envy cannot enter. With Aeschylus or Sophocles he might perchance have matched himself.

In Euripides you have oftentimes a very near approach to comedy, and I hardly know any writer in whom you can find such fine models of serious and dignified conversation.

[Footnote 1: Greek: Euíppoy, Xége, tmsde chosas Tchoy tà chzátista gãs esaula tdn àxgaeta Kolanón'--ch. t. l. v. 668]

[Footnote 2: Greek: "Exos" Exos, ó chat' ômmátton s tázeos póthon eisagog glycheïan Psuchä cháriu oûs èpithtzateúsei mae moi totè sèn chachõ phaneiaes maeô ãrruthmos ëlthois--x.t.l v.527]

[Footnote 3: I take it for granted that Mr. Coleridge alluded to the chorus,--

[Greek: Su men, _o patrhis Ilias t_on aporhth_et_on polis ouketi lexei toion El- lan_on nephos amphi se krhuptei, dorhi d_e, dorhi perhsan--k. t. l.] v. 899.

Thou, then, oh, natal Troy! no more The city of the unsack'd shalt be, So thick from dark Achaia's shore The cloud of war hath covered thee. Ah! not again I tread thy plain-- The spear--the spear hath rent thy pride; The flame hath scarr'd thee deep and wide; Thy coronal of towers is shorn, And thou most piteous art--most naked and forlorn!

I perish'd at the noon of night! When sleep had seal'd each weary eye; When the dance was o'er, And harps no more Rang out in choral minstrelsy. In the dear bower of delight My husband slept in joy; His shield and spear Suspended near, Secure he slept: that sailor band Full sure he deem'd no more should stand Beneath the walls of Troy. And I too, by the taper's light, Which in the golden mirror's haze Flash'd its interminable rays, Bound up the tresses of my hair, That I Love's peaceful sleep might share.

I slept; but, hark! that war-shout dread, Which rolling through the city spread; And this the cry,--"When, Sons of Greece, When shall the lingering leaguer cease; When will ye spoil Troy's watch-tower high, And home return?"--I heard the cry, And, starting from the genial bed, Veiled, as a Doric maid, I fled, And knelt, Diana, at thy holy fane, A trembling suppliant--all in vain.]

JULY 3. 1833.

STYLE.--CAVALIER SLANG.--JUNTOS.--PROSE AND VERSE.--IMITATION AND COPY.

The collocation of words is so artificial in Shakspeare and Milton, that you may as well think of pushing a[1] brick out of a wall with your forefinger, as attempt to remove a word out of any of their finished passages.[2]

A good lecture upon style might he composed, by taking on the one hand the slang of L'Estrange, and perhaps, even of Roger North,[3] which became so fashionable after the Restoration as a mark of loyalty; and on the other, the Johnsonian magniloquence or the balanced metre of Junius; and then showing how each extreme is faulty, upon different grounds.

It is quite curious to remark the prevalence of the Cavalier slang style in the divines of Charles the Second's time. Barrow could not of course adopt such a mode of writing throughout, because he could not in it have communicated his elaborate thinkings and lofty rhetoric; but even Barrow not unfrequently lets slip a phrase here and there in the regular Roger North way--much to the delight, no doubt, of the largest part of his audience and contemporary readers. See particularly, for instances of this, his work on the Pope's supremacy. South is full of it.

The style of Junius is a sort of metre, the law of which is a balance of thesis and antithesis. When he gets out of this aphorismic metre into a sentence of five or six lines long, nothing can exceed the slovenliness of the English. Horne Tooke and a long sentence seem the only two antagonists that were too much for him. Still the antithesis of Junius is a real antithesis of images or thought; but the antithesis of Johnson is rarely more than verbal.

The definition of good prose is--proper words in their proper places;--of good verse--the most proper words in their proper places. The propriety is in either case relative. The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning, and no more; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in general, a fault. In the very best styles, as Southey's, you read page after page, understanding the author perfectly, without once taking notice of the medium of communication;--it is as if he had been speaking to you all the while. But in verse you must do more;--there the words, the _media_, must be beautiful, and ought to attract your notice--yet not so much and so perpetually as to destroy the unity which ought to result from the whole poem. This is the general rule, but, of course, subject to some modifications, according to the different kinds of prose or verse. Some prose may approach towards verse, as oratory, and therefore a more studied exhibition of the _media_ may be proper; and some verse may border more on mere narrative, and there the style should be simpler. But the great thing in poetry is, _quocunque modo_, to effect a unity of impression upon the whole; and a too great fulness and profusion of point in the parts will prevent this. Who can read with pleasure more than a hundred lines or so of Hudibras at one time? Each couplet or quatrain is so whole in itself, that you can't connect them. There is no fusion,--just as it is in Seneca.

[Footnote 1:

They led me to the sounding shore-- Heavens! as I passed the crowded way, My bleeding lord before me lay-- I saw--I saw--and wept no more, Till, as the homeward breezes bore The bark returning o'er the sea, My gaze, oh Ilion, turn'd on thee! Then, frantic, to the midnight air, I cursed aloud the adulterous pair:-- "They plunge me deep in exile's woe; They lay my country low: Their love--no love! but some dark spell, In vengeance breath'd, by spirit fell. Rise, hoary sea, in awful tide, And whelm that vessel's guilty pride; Nor e'er, in high Mycene's hall, Let Helen boast in peace of mighty Ilion's fall."

The translation was given to me by Mr. Justice Coleridge.--ED.]

[Footnote 2: "The amotion or transposition will alter the thought, or the feeling, or at least the tone. They are as pieces of mosaic work, from which you cannot strike the smallest block without making a hole in the picture."-- _Quarterly Review_, No. CIII. p. 7.]

[Footnote 3: But Mr. Coleridge took a great distinction between North and the other writers commonly associated with him. In speaking of the Examen and the Life of Lord North, in the Friend, Mr. C. calls them "two of the most interesting biographical works in our language, both for the weight of the matter, and the _incuriosa felicitas_ of the style. The pages are all alive with the genuine idioms of our mother tongue. A fastidious taste, it is true, will find offence in the occasional vulgarisms, or what we now call _slang_, which not a few of our writers, shortly after the Restoration of Charles the Second, seem to have affected as a mark of loyalty. These instances, however, are but a trifling drawback. They are not _sought for_, as is too often and too plainly done by L'Estrange, Collyer, Tom Brown, and their imitators. North never goes out of his way, either to seek them, or to avoid them; and, in the main, his language gives us the very nerve, pulse, and sinew of a hearty, healthy, conversational _English_."--Vol. ii. p. 307.--ED.]

* * * * *

Imitation is the mesothesis of likeness and difference. The difference is as essential to it as the likeness; for without the difference, it would be copy or facsimile. But to borrow a term from astronomy, it is a librating mesothesis: for it may verge more to likeness as in painting, or more to difference, as in sculpture.

JULY 4. 1833.

DR. JOHNSON.--BOSWELL.--BURKE.--NEWTON.--MILTON.

Dr. Johnson's fame now rests principally upon Boswell. It is impossible not to be amused with such a book. But his _bow-wow_ manner must have had a good deal to do with the effect produced;--for no one, I suppose, will set Johnson before Burke,--and Burke was a great and universal talker;--yet now we hear nothing of this except by some chance remarks in Boswell. The fact is, Burke, like all men of genius who love to talk at all, was very discursive and continuous; hence he is not reported; he seldom said the sharp short things that Johnson almost always did, which produce a more decided effect at the moment, and which are so much more easy to carry off.[1] Besides, as to Burke's testimony to Johnson's powers, you must remember that Burke was a great courtier; and after all, Burke said and wrote more than once that he thought Johnson greater in talking than writing, and greater in Boswell than in real life.[2]

[Footnote 1: Burke, I am persuaded, was not so continuous a talker as Coleridge. Madame de Stael told a nephew of the latter, at Coppet, that Mr. C. was a master of monologue, _mais qu'il ne savait pas le dialogue_. There was a spice of vindictiveness in this, the exact history of which is not worth explaining. And if dialogue must be cut down in its meaning to small talk, I, for one, will admit that Coleridge, amongst his numberless qualifications, possessed it not. But I am sure that he could, when it suited him, converse as well as any one else, and with women he frequently did converse in a very winning and popular style, confining them, however, as well as he could, to the detail of facts or of their spontaneous emotions. In general, it was certainly otherwise. "You must not be surprised," he said to me, "at my talking so long to you--I pass so much of my time in pain and solitude, yet everlastingly thinking, that, when you or any other persons call on me, I can hardly help easing my mind by pouring forth some of the accumulated mass of reflection and feeling, upon an apparently interested recipient." But the principal reason, no doubt, was the habit of his intellect, which was under a law of discoursing upon all subjects with reference to ideas or ultimate ends. You might interrupt him when you pleased, and he was patient of every sort of conversation except mere personality, which he absolutely hated.--ED.]

[Footnote 2: This was said, I believe, to the late Sir James Mackintosh.--ED.]

* * * * *

Newton _was_ a great man, but you must excuse me if I think that it would take many Newtons to make one Milton.

_July_ 6. 1833.

PAINTING.----MUSIC.----POETRY.

It is a poor compliment to pay to a painter to tell him that his figure stands out of the canvass, or that you start at the likeness of the portrait. Take almost any daub, cut it out of the canvass, and place the figure looking into or out of a window, and any one may take it for life. Or take one of Mrs. Salmon's wax queens or generals, and you will very sensibly feel the difference between a copy, as they are, and an imitation, of the human form, as a good portrait ought to be. Look at that flower vase of Van Huysum, and at these wax or stone peaches and apricots! The last are likest to their original, but what pleasure do they give? None, except to children.[1]

Some music is above me; most music is beneath me. I like Beethoven and Mozart--or else some of the aërial compositions of the elder Italians, as Palestrina[2] and Carissimi.--And I love Purcell.

The best sort of music is what it should be--sacred; the next best, the military, has fallen to the lot of the Devil.

Good music never tires me, nor sends me to sleep. I feel physically refreshed and strengthened by it, as Milton says he did.

I could write as good verses now as ever I did, if I were perfectly free from vexations, and were in the _ad libitum_ hearing of fine music, which has a sensible effect in harmonizing my thoughts, and in animating and, as it were, lubricating my inventive faculty. The reason of my not finishing Christabel is not, that I don't know how to do it--for I have, as I always had, the whole plan entire from beginning to end in my mind; but I fear I could not carry on with equal success the execution of the idea, an extremely subtle and difficult one.

Besides, after this continuation of Faust, which they tell me is very poor, who can have courage to attempt[3] a reversal of the judgment of all criticism against continuations? Let us except Don Quixote, however, although the second part of that transcendant work is not exactly _uno flatu_ with the original conception.

[Footnote 1: This passage, and those following, will evidence, what the readers even of this little work must have seen, that Mr. Coleridge had an eye, almost exclusively, for the ideal or universal in painting and music. He knew nothing of the details of handling in the one, or of rules of composition in the other. Yet he was, to the best of my knowledge, an unerring judge of the merits of any serious effort in the fine arts, and detected the leading thought or feeling of the artist, with a decision which used sometimes to astonish me. Every picture which I have looked at in company with him, seems now, to my mind, translated into English. He would sometimes say, after looking for a minute at a picture, generally a modern one, "There's no use in stopping at this; for I see the painter had no idea. It is mere mechanical drawing. Come on; _here_ the artist _meant_ something for the mind." It was just the same with his knowledge of music. His appetite for what he thought good was literally inexhaustible. He told me he could listen to fine music for twelve hours together, and go away _refreshed_. But he required in music either thought or feeling; mere addresses to the sensual ear he could not away with; hence his utter distaste for Rossini, and his reverence for Beethoven and Mozart--ED.]

[Footnote 2: Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was born about 1529, and died in 1594. I believe he may be considered the founder or reformer of the Italian church music. His masses, motets, and hymns are tolerably well known amongst lovers of the old composers; but Mr. Coleridge used to speak with delight of some of Palestrina's madrigals which he heard at Rome.

Giacomo Carissimi composed about the years 1640--1650. His style has been charged with effeminacy; but Mr. C. thought it very graceful and chaste. Henry Purcell needs no addition in England.--ED.]

[Footnote 3: "The thing attempted in Christabel is the most difficult of execution in the whole field of romance--witchery by daylight--and the success is complete."--_Quarterly Review_, No. CIII. p. 29.]

_July 8. 1833._

PUBLIC SCHOOLS.

I am clear for public schools as the general rule; but for particular children private education may be proper. For the purpose of moving at ease in the best English society,--mind, I don't call the London exclusive clique the best English society,--the defect of a public education upon the plan of our great schools and Oxford and Cambridge is hardly to be supplied. But the defect is visible positively in some men, and only negatively in others. The first _offend_ you by habits and modes of thinking and acting directly attributable to their private education; in the others you only regret that the freedom and facility of the established and national mode of bringing up is not _added_ to their good qualities.

* * * * *

I more than doubt the expediency of making even elementary mathematics a part of the routine in the system of the great schools. It is enough, I think, that encouragement and facilities should be given; and I think more will be thus effected than by compelling all. Much less would I incorporate the German or French, or any modern language, into the school labours. I think that a great mistake.[1]

[Footnote 1: "One constant blunder"--I find it so pencilled by Mr. C. on a margin--"of these New-Broomers--these Penny Magazine sages and philanthropists, in reference to our public schools, is to confine their view to what schoolmasters teach the boys, with entire oversight of all that the boys are excited to learn from each other and of themselves--with more geniality even because it is not a part of their compelled school knowledge. An Eton boy's knowledge of the St. Lawrence, Mississippi, Missouri, Orellana, &c. will be, generally, found in exact proportion to his knowledge of the Ilissus, Hebrus, Orontes, &c.; inasmuch as modern travels and voyages are more entertaining and fascinating than Cellarius; or Robinson Crusoe, Dampier, and Captain Cook, than the Periegesis. Compare the _lads_ themselves from Eton and Harrow, &c. with the alumni of the New-Broom Institution, and not the lists of school-lessons; and be that comparison the criterion.--ED.]

August 4, 1833.

SCOTT AND COLERIDGE.

Dear Sir Walter Scott and myself were exact, but harmonious, opposites in this;--that every old ruin, hill, river, or tree called up in his mind a host of historical or biographical associations,--just as a bright pan of brass, when beaten, is said to attract the swarming bees;--whereas, for myself, notwithstanding Dr. Johnson, I believe I should walk over the plain of Marathon without taking more interest in it than in any other plain of similar features. Yet I receive as much pleasure in reading the account of the battle, in Herodotus, as any one can. Charles Lamb wrote an essay [1] on a man who lived in past time:--I thought of adding another to it on one who lived not in time at all, past, present, or future,--but beside or collaterally.

[Footnote 1: I know not when or where; but are not all the writings of this exquisite genius the effusions of one whose spirit lived in past time? The place which Lamb holds, and will continue to hold, in English literature, seems less liable to interruption than that of any other writer of our day.--ED.]

August 10. 1833.

NERVOUS WEAKNESS.----HOOKER AND BULL.-----FAITH.----A POET'S NEED OF PRAISE.

A PERSON, nervously weak, has a sensation of weakness which is as bad to him as muscular weakness. The only difference lies in the better chance of removal.

* * * * *

The fact, that Hooker and Bull, in their two palmary works respectively, are read in the Jesuit Colleges, is a curious instance of the power of mind over the most profound of all prejudices.

There are permitted moments of exultation through faith, when we cease to feel our own emptiness save as a capacity for our Redeemer's fulness.

* * * * *

There is a species of applause scarcely less genial to a poet, than the vernal warmth to the feathered songsters during their nest-breeding or incubation; a sympathy, an expressed hope, that is the open air in which the poet breathes, and without which the sense of power sinks back on itself, like a sigh heaved up from the tightened chest of a sick man.

_August_ 14. 1833.

QUAKERS.--PHILANTHROPISTS.--JEWS.

A quaker is made up of ice and flame. He has no composition, no mean temperature. Hence he is rarely interested about any public measure but he becomes a fanatic, and oversteps, in his irrespective zeal, every decency and every right opposed to his course.

* * * * *

I have never known a trader in philanthropy who was not wrong in heart somewhere or other. Individuals so distinguished are usually unhappy in their family relations,--men not benevolent or beneficent to individuals, but almost hostile to them, yet lavishing money and labour and time on the race, the abstract notion. The cosmopolitism which does not spring out of, and blossom upon, the deep-rooted stem of nationality or patriotism, is a spurious and rotten growth.

* * * * *

When I read the ninth, tenth, and eleventh chapters of the Epistle to the Romans to that fine old man Mr. ----, at Ramsgate, he shed tears. Any Jew of sensibility must be deeply impressed by them.

* * * * *

The two images farthest removed from each other which can be comprehended under one term, are, I think, Isaiah [1]--"Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth!"--and Levi of Holywell Street--"Old clothes!"--both of them Jews, you'll observe. _Immane quantum discrepant!_

[Footnote 1: I remember Mr. Coleridge used to call Isaiah his ideal of the Hebrew prophet. He studied that part of the Scripture with unremitting attention and most reverential admiration. Although Mr. C. was remarkably deficient in the technical memory of words, he could say a great deal of Isaiah by heart, and he delighted in pointing out the hexametrical rhythm of numerous passages in the English version:--

"Hear, O heavens, and give ear, | O earth: for the Lord hath spoken. I have nourished and brought up children, | and they have rebelled against me. The ox knoweth his owner, | and the ass his master's crib: But Israel doth not know, | my people doth not consider."--ED.]

_August_ 15. 1833.

SALLUST.--THUCYDIDES.--HERODOTUS.--GIBBON.--KEY TO THE DECLINE OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE.

I consider the two works of Sallust which have come down to us entire, as romances founded on facts; no adequate causes are stated, and there is no real continuity of action. In Thucydides, you are aware from the beginning that you are reading the reflections of a man of great genius and experience upon the character and operation of the two great political principles in conflict in the civilized world in his time; his narrative of events is of minor importance, and it is evident that he selects for the purpose of illustration. It is Thucydides himself whom you read throughout under the names of Pericles, Nicias, &c. But in Herodotus it is just the reverse. He has as little subjectivity as Homer, and, delighting in the great fancied epic of events, he narrates them without impressing any thing as of his own mind upon the narrative. It is the charm of Herodotus that he gives you the spirit of his age--that of Thucydides, that he reveals to you his own, which was above the spirit of his age.

The difference between the composition of a history in modern and ancient times is very great; still there are certain principles upon which the history of a modern period may be written, neither sacrificing all truth and reality, like Gibbon, nor descending into mere biography and anecdote.

Gibbon's style is detestable, but his style is not the worst thing about him. His history has proved an effectual bar to all real familiarity with the temper and habits of imperial Rome. Few persons read the original authorities, even those which are classical; and certainly no distinct knowledge of the actual state of the empire can be obtained from Gibbon's rhetorical sketches. He takes notice of nothing but what may produce an effect; he skips on from eminence to eminence, without ever taking you through the valleys between: in fact, his work is little else but a disguised collection of all the splendid anecdotes which he could find in any book concerning any persons or nations from the Antonines to the capture of Constantinople. When I read a chapter in Gibbon, I seem to be looking through a luminous haze or fog:--figures come and go, I know not how or why, all larger than life, or distorted or discoloured; nothing is real, vivid, true; all is scenical, and, as it were, exhibited by candlelight. And then to call it a History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire!

Was there ever a greater misnomer? I protest I do not remember a single philosophical attempt made throughout the work to fathom the ultimate causes of the decline or fall of that empire. How miserably deficient is the narrative of the important reign of Justinian! And that poor scepticism, which Gibbon mistook for Socratic philosophy, has led him to misstate and mistake the character and influence of Christianity in a way which even an avowed infidel or atheist would not and could not have done. Gibbon was a man of immense reading; but he had no philosophy; and he never fully understood the principle upon which the best of the old historians wrote. He attempted to imitate their artificial construction of the whole work--their dramatic ordonnance of the parts--without seeing that their histories were intended more as documents illustrative of the truths of political philosophy than as mere chronicles of events.

The true key to the declension of the Roman empire--which is not to be found in all Gibbon's immense work--may be stated in two words:--the _imperial_ character overlaying, and finally destroying, the _national_ character. Rome under Trajan was an empire without a nation.

_August_ 16. 1833.

DR. JOHNSON'S POLITICAL PAMPHLETS.--TAXATION.-DIRECT REPRESENTATION.--- UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE.---RIGHT OF WOMEN TO VOTE----HORNE TOOKE.----ETYMOLOGY OF THE FINAL IVE.

I like Dr. Johnson's political pamphlets better than any other parts of his works:-particularly his "Taxation no Tyranny" is very clever and spirited, though he only sees half of his subject, and that not in a very philosophical manner. Plunder--Tribute--Taxation--are the three gradations of action by the sovereign on the property of the subject. The first is mere violence, bounded by no law or custom, and is properly an act only between conqueror and conquered, and that, too, in the moment of victory. The second supposes law; but law proceeding only from, and dictated by, one party, the conqueror; law, by which he consents to forego his right of plunder upon condition of the conquered giving up to him, of their own accord, a fixed commutation. The third implies compact, and negatives any right to plunder,--taxation being professedly for the direct benefit of the party taxed, that, by paying a part, he may through the labours and superintendence of the sovereign be able to enjoy the rest in peace. As to the right to tax being only commensurate with direct representation, it is a fable, falsely and treacherously brought forward by those who know its hollowness well enough. You may show its weakness in a moment, by observing that not even the universal suffrage of the Benthamites avoids the difficulty;--for although it may be allowed to be contrary to decorum that women should legislate; yet there can be no reason why women should not choose their representatives to legislate;--and if it be said that they are merged in their husbands, let it be allowed where the wife has no separate property; but where she has a distinct taxable estate, in which her husband has no interest, what right can her husband have to choose for her the person whose vote may affect her separate interest?--Besides, at all events, an unmarried woman of age, possessing one thousand pounds a year, has surely as good a moral right to vote, if taxation without representation is tyranny, as any ten-pounder in the kingdom. The truth, of course, is, that direct representation is a chimera, impracticable in fact, and useless or noxious if practicable.

Johnson had neither eye nor ear; for nature, therefore, he cared, as he knew, nothing. His knowledge of town life was minute; but even that was imperfect, as not being contrasted with the better life of the country.

Horne Tooke was once holding forth on language, when, turning to me, he asked me if I knew what the meaning of the final _ive_ was in English words. I said I thought I could tell what he, Horne Tooke himself, thought. "Why, what?" said he. "_Vis_," I replied; and he acknowledged I had guessed right. I told him, however, that I could not agree with him; but believed that the final _ive_ came from _ick_--_vicus_, [Greek: --] a'txaq; the root denoting collectivity and community, and that it was opposed to the final _ing_, which signifies separation, particularity, and individual property, from _ingle_, a hearth, or one man's place or seat: [Greek: --] oi'xo?, _vicus_, denoted an aggregation of _ingles_. The alteration of the _c_ and _k_ of the root into the _v_ was evidently the work of the digammate power, and hence we find the _icus_ and _ivus_ indifferently as finals in Latin. The precise difference of the etymologies is apparent in these phrases:--- The lamb is spor_tive;_ that is, has a nature or habit of sporting: the lamb is sport_ing;_ that is, the animal is now performing a sport. Horne Tooke upon this said nothing to my etymology; but I believe he found that he could not make a fool of me, as he did of Godwin and some other of his butts.

August 17. 1833.

"THE LORD" IN THE ENGLISH VERSION OF THE PSALMS, ETC.----SCOTCH KIRK AND IRVING.

It is very extraordinary that, in our translation of the Psalms, which professes to be from the Hebrew, the name Jehovah--[Hebrew: --] 'O -- The Being, or God--should be omitted, and, instead of it, the [Hebrew: --] Ktlpio?, or Lord, of the Septuagint be adopted. The Alexandrian Jews had a superstitious dread of writing the name of God, and put [Greek: Kurhios] not as a translation, but as a mere mark or sign--every one readily understanding for what it really stood. We, who have no such superstition, ought surely to restore the Jehovah, and thereby bring out in the true force the overwhelming testimony of the Psalms to the divinity of Christ, the Jehovah or manifested God.[1]

[Footnote 1: I find the same remark in the late most excellent Bishop Sandford's diary, under date 17th December, 1827:--"[Greek: CHairhete en t_o Kurhi_o Kurhios] idem significat quod [Hebrew: --] apud Hebraeos. Hebraei enim nomine [Hebrew: --] sanctissimo nempe Dei nomine, nunquam in colloquio utebantur, sed vice ejus [Hebrew: --] pronuntiabant, quod LXX per [Greek: Kurhios] exprimebant."--_Remains of Bishop Sandford_, vol. i. p. 207.

Mr. Coleridge saw this work for the first time many months after making the observation in the text. Indeed it was the very last book he ever read. He was deeply interested in the picture drawn of the Bishop, and said that the mental struggles and bodily sufferings indicated in the Diary had been his own for years past. He conjured me to peruse the Memoir and the Diary with great care:--"I have received," said he, "much spiritual comfort and strength from the latter. O! were my faith and devotion, like my sufferings, equal to that good man's! He felt, as I do, how deep a depth is prayer in faith."

In connection with the text, I may add here, that Mr. C. said, that long before he knew that the late Bishop Middleton was of the same opinion, he had deplored the misleading inadequacy of our authorized version of the expression, [Greek: pr_ototokos pas_es ktise_os] in the Epistle to the Colossians, i. 15.: [Greek: hos estin eik_on tou THeou tou aoratou, pr_ototokos pas_es ktise_os.] He rendered the verse in these words:--"Who is the manifestation of God the invisible, the begotten antecedently to all creation;" observing, that in [Greek: pr_ototokos] there was a double superlative of priority, and that the natural meaning of "_first-born of every creature_,"--the language of our version,--afforded no premiss for the causal [Greek: hoti] in the next verse. The same criticism may be found in the Stateman's Manual, p. 56. n.; and see Bishop Sandford's judgment to the same effect, vol. i. p. 165.--ED.]

* * * * *

I cannot understand the conduct of the Scotch Kirk with regard to poor Irving. They might with ample reason have visited him for the monstrous indecencies of those exhibitions of the spirit;--perhaps the Kirk would not have been justified in overlooking such disgraceful breaches of decorum; but to excommunicate him on account of his language about Christ's body was very foolish. Irving's expressions upon this subject are ill judged, inconvenient, in had taste, and in terms false: nevertheless his apparent meaning, such as it is, is orthodox. Christ's body--as mere body, or rather carcass (for body is an associated word), was no more capable of sin or righteousness than mine or yours;--that his humanity had a capacity of sin, follows from its own essence. He was of like passions as we, and was tempted. How could he be tempted, if he had no formal capacity of being seduced?

It is Irving's error to use declamation, high and passionate rhetoric, not introduced and pioneered by calm and clear logic, which is--to borrow a simile, though with a change in the application, from the witty-wise, but not always wisely-witty, Fuller--like knocking a nail into a board, without wimbling a hole for it, and which then either does not enter, or turns crooked, or splits the wood it pierces.

August 18. 1833.

MILTON'S EGOTISM.--CLAUDIAN.--STERNE.

In the Paradise Lost--indeed in every one of his poems--it is Milton himself whom you see; his Satan, his Adam, his Raphael, almost his Eve--are all John Milton; and it is a sense of this intense egotism that gives me the greatest pleasure in reading Milton's works. The egotism of such a man is a revelation of spirit.

* * * * *

Claudian deserves more attention than is generally paid to him. He is the link between the old classic and the modern way of thinking in verse. You will observe in him an oscillation between the objective poetry of the ancients and the subjective mood of the moderns. His power of pleasingly reproducing the same thought in different language is remarkable, as it is in Pope. Read particularly the Phoenix, and see how the single image of renascence is varied.[1]

[Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge referred to Claudian's first Idyll:--"Oceani summo circumfluus cequore lucus Trans Indos Eurumque viret," &c. See the lines--

"Hic neque concepto fetu, nec semine surgit; Sed pater est prolesque sibi, nulloque creante Emeritos artus foecunda morte reformat, Et petit alternam totidem per funera vitam. ... Et cumulum texens pretiosa fronde Sabaeum Componit bustumque sibi partumque futurum. ... O senium positure rogo, falsisque sepulcris Natales habiture vices, qui saepe renasci Exitio, proprioque soles pubescere leto, Accipe principium rursus. ... Parturiente rogo-- ... Victuri cineres-- ... Qm fuerat genitor, natus nunc prosilit idem, Succeditque novus--- ... O felix, haeresque tui! quo solvimur omnes, Hoc tibi suppeditat vires; praebetur origo Per cinerem; moritur te non pereunte senectus."--ED.]

* * * * *

I think highly of Sterne--that is, of the first part of Tristram Shandy: for as to the latter part about the widow Wadman, it is stupid and disgusting; and the Sentimental Journey is poor sickly stuff. There is a great deal of affectation in Sterne, to be sure; but still the characters of Trim and the two Shandies[1] are most individual and delightful. Sterne's morals are bad, but I don't think they can do much harm to any one whom they would not find bad enough before. Besides, the oddity and erudite grimaces under which much of his dirt is hidden take away the effect for the most part; although, to be sure, the book is scarcely readable by women.

[Footnote 1: Mr. Coleridge considered the character of the father, the elder Shandy, as by much the finer delineation of the two. I fear his low opinion of the Sentimental Journey will not suit a thorough Sterneist; but I could never get him to modify his criticism. He said, "The oftener you read Sterne, the more clearly will you perceive the _great_ difference between Tristram Shandy and the Sentimental Journey. There is truth and reality in the one, and little beyond a clever affectation in the other."--ED.]

August 20. 1833.

HUMOUR AND GENIUS.--GREAT POETS GOOD MEN.--DICTION OF THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENT VERSION.--HEBREW.--VOWELS AND CONSONANTS.

Men of humour are always in some degree men of genius; wits are rarely so, although a man of genius may amongst other gifts possess wit, as Shakspeare.

* * * * *

Genius must have talent as its complement and implement, just as in like manner imagination must have fancy. In short, the higher intellectual powers can only act through a corresponding energy of the lower.

* * * * *

Men of genius are rarely much annoyed by the company of vulgar people, because they have a power of looking _at_ such persons as objects of amusement of another race altogether.

* * * * *

I quite agree with Strabo, as translated by Ben Jonson in his splendid dedication of the Fox[1]--that there can be no great poet who is not a good man, though not, perhaps, a _goody_ man. His heart must be pure; he must have learned to look into his own heart, and sometimes to look _at_ it; for how can he who is ignorant of his own heart know any thing of, or be able to move, the heart of any one else?

[Footnote 1: [Greek: 'H de (arhet_e) poi_etou synezeyktai t_e tou anthrh_opou kai ouch oion te agathon genesthai poi_et_en, m_e prhoterhon gen_ethenta angrha agathon.]--Lib. I. p. 33. folio.

"For, if men will impartially, and not asquint, look toward the offices and function of a poet, they will easily conclude to themselves the impossibility of any man's being the good poet without first being a good man."]

* * * * *

I think there is a perceptible difference in the elegance and correctness of the English in our versions of the Old and New Testament. I cannot yield to the authority of many examples of usages which may be alleged from the New Testament version. St. Paul is very often most inadequately rendered, and there are slovenly phrases which would never have come from Ben Jonson or any other good prose writer of that day.

* * * * *

Hebrew is so simple, and its words are so few and near the roots, that it is impossible to keep up any adequate knowledge of it without constant application. The meanings of the words are chiefly traditional. The loss of Origen's Heptaglott Bible, in which he had written out the Hebrew words in Greek characters, is the heaviest which biblical literature has ever experienced. It would have fixed the sounds as known at that time.

* * * * *

Brute animals have the vowel sounds; man only can utter consonants. It is natural, therefore, that the consonants should be marked first, as being the framework of the word; and no doubt a very simple living language might be written quite intelligibly to the natives without any vowel sounds marked at all. The words would be traditionally and conventionally recognized as in short hand--thus--_Gd crtd th Hvn nd th Rth_. I wish I understood Arabic; and yet I doubt whether to the European philosopher or scholar it is worth while to undergo the immense labour of acquiring that or any other Oriental tongue, except Hebrew.

_August_ 23. 1833.

GREEK ACCENT AND QUANTITY.

The distinction between accent and quantity is clear, and was, no doubt, observed by the ancients in the recitation of verse. But I believe such recitation to have been always an artificial thing, and that the common conversation was entirely regulated by accent. I do not think it possible to _talk_ any language without confounding the quantity of syllables with their high or low tones[1]; although you may _sing_ or _recitative_ the difference well enough. Why should the marks of accent have been considered exclusively necessary for teaching the pronunciation to the Asiatic or African Hellenist, if the knowledge of the acuted syllable did not also carry the stress of time with it? If _[Greek: **anthropos]_ was to be pronounced in common conversation with a perceptible distinction of the length of the penultima as well as of the elevation of the antepenultima, why was not that long quantity also marked? It was surely as important an ingredient in the pronunciation as the accent. And although the letter omega might in such a word show the quantity, yet what do you say to such words as [Greek: lelonchasi, tupsasa], and the like--the quantity of the penultima of which is not marked to the eye at all? Besides, can we altogether disregard the practice of the modern Greeks? Their confusion of accent and quantity in verse is of course a barbarism, though a very old one, as the _versus politici_ of John Tzetzes [2] in the twelfth century and the Anacreontics prefixed to Proclus will show; but these very examples prove _a fortiori_ what the common pronunciation in prose then was.

[Footnote 1: This opinion, I need not say, is in direct opposition to the conclusion of Foster and Mitford, and scarcely reconcilable with the apparent meaning of the authorities from the old critics and grammarians. Foster's opponent was for rejecting the accents and attending only to the syllabic quantity;--Mr. C. would, _in prose_, attend to the accents only as indicators of the quantity, being unable to conceive any practical distinction between time and tone in common speech. Yet how can we deal with the authority of Dionysius of Halicarnassus alone, who, on the one hand, discriminates quantity so exquisitely as to make four degrees of _shortness_ in the penultimates of _[Greek: --hodos hr odos, tz opos]_ and _[Greek: --stz ophos]_, and this expressly _[Greek: --eu logois psilois]_, or plain prose, as well as in verse; and on the other hand declares, according to the evidently correct interpretation of the passage, that the difference between music and ordinary speech consists in the number only, and not in the quality, of tones:--_[Greek: **to Poso diallattousa taes su odais kahi oznauois, kahi ouchi to Poio_. (Pezhi Sun. c. 11.?]) The extreme sensibility of the Athenian ear to the accent in prose is, indeed, proved by numerous anecdotes, one of the most amusing of which, though, perhaps, not the best authenticated as a fact, is that of Demosthenes in the Speech for the Crown, asking, "Whether, O Athenians, does Aeschines appear to you to be the mercenary (_[Greek: **misthothos]_} of Alexander, or his guest or friend (_[Greek: **xenos]_)?" It is said that he pronounced _[Greek: **misthothos]_ with a false accent on the antepenultima, as _[Greek: **misthotos]_, and that upon the audience immediately crying out, by way of correction, _[Greek: **misthothos]_, with an emphasis, the orator continued coolly,--_[Greek: **achoueis a legousi]_--"You yourself hear what they say!" Demosthenes is also said, whether affectedly, or in ignorance, to have sworn in some speech by _[Greek: Asklaepios]_, throwing the accent falsely on the antepenultima, and that, upon being interrupted for it, he declared, in his justification, that the pronunciation was proper, for that the divinity was _[Greek: aepios]_, mild. The expressions in Plutarch are very striking:--"[Greek: **Thozuxon ekinaesen, omnue dhe kahi thon' Asklaepion, pzopasoxunon' Asklaepion, kai pazedeiknuen autohn ozthos legonta' einai gahz tohn thehon aepion' kahi epi outo polakis hethozuzaethae." Dec. Orat._--Ed.]

[Footnote 2: See his Chiliads. The sort of verses to which Mr. Coleridge alluded are the following, which those who consider the scansion to be accentual, take for tetrameter catalectic iambics, like--

[Greek: ----] (

_Chil_. I.

I 'll climb the frost | y mountains high |, and there I 'll coin | the weather; I'll tear the rain | bow from the sky |, and tie both ends | together.

Some critics, however, maintain these verses to be trochaics, although very loose and faulty. See Foster, p. 113. A curious instance of the early confusion of accent and quantity may be seen in Prudentius, who shortens the penultima in _eremus_ and _idola_, from [Greek: ezaemos] and [Greek: eidola].

Cui jejuna _eremi_ saxa loquacibus Exundant scatebris, &c. _Cathemer_. V. 89.

--cognatumque malum, pigmenta, Camoenas, _Idola_, conflavit fallendi trina potestas. _Cont. Symm_. 47.--ED.]

_August 24. 1833._

CONSOLATION IN DISTRESS.---MOCK EVANGELICALS.--AUTUMN DAY.

I am never very forward in offering spiritual consolation to any one in distress or disease. I believe that such resources, to be of any service, must be self-evolved in the first instance. I am something of the Quaker's mind in this, and am inclined to _wait_ for the spirit.

* * * * *

The most common effect of this mock evangelical spirit, especially with young women, is self-inflation and busy-bodyism.

* * * * *

How strange and awful is the synthesis of life and death in the gusty winds and falling leaves of an autumnal day!

August 25. 1833.

ROSETTI ON DANTE.--LAUGHTER: FARCE AND TRAGEDY.

Rosetti's view of Dante's meaning is in great part just, but he has pushed it beyond all bounds of common sense. How could a poet--and such a poet as Dante--have written the details of the allegory as conjectured by Rosetti? The boundaries between his allegory and his pure picturesque are plain enough, I think, at first reading.

* * * * *

To resolve laughter into an expression of contempt is contrary to fact, and laughable enough. Laughter is a convulsion of the nerves; and it seems as if nature cut short the rapid thrill of pleasure on the nerves by a sudden convulsion of them, to prevent the sensation becoming painful. Aristotle's definition is as good as can be:--surprise at perceiving any thing out of its usual place, when the unusualness is not accompanied by a sense of serious danger. _Such_ surprise is always pleasurable; and it is observable that surprise accompanied with circumstances of danger becomes tragic. Hence farce may often border on tragedy; indeed, farce is nearer tragedy in its essence than comedy is.

August 28. 1833.

BARON VON HUMBOLDT.--MODERN DIPLOMATISTS.

Baron von Humboldt, brother of the great traveller, paid me the following compliment at Rome:--"I confess, Mr. Coleridge, I had my suspicions that you were here in a political capacity of some sort or other; but upon reflection I acquit you. For in Germany and, I believe, elsewhere on the Continent, it is generally understood that the English government, in order to divert the envy and jealousy of the world at the power, wealth, and ingenuity of your nation, makes a point, as a _ruse de guerre_, of sending out none but fools of gentlemanly birth and connections as diplomatists to the courts abroad. An exception is, perhaps, sometimes made for a clever fellow, if sufficiently libertine and unprincipled." Is the case much altered now, do you know?

* * * * *

What dull coxcombs your diplomatists at home generally are. I remember dining at Mr. Frere's once in company with Canning and a few other interesting men. Just before dinner Lord ---- called on Frere, and asked himself to dinner. From the moment of his entry he began to talk to the whole party, and in French--all of us being genuine English--and I was told his French was execrable. He had followed the Russian army into France, and seen a good deal of the great men concerned in the war: of none of those things did he say a word, but went on, sometimes in English and sometimes in French, gabbling about cookery and dress and the like. At last he paused for a little--and I said a few words remarking how a great image may be reduced to the ridiculous and contemptible by bringing the constituent parts into prominent detail, and mentioned the grandeur of the deluge and the preservation of life in Genesis and the Paradise Lost [1], and the ludicrous effect produced by Drayton's description in his Noah's Flood:--

"And now the beasts are walking from the wood, As well of ravine, as that chew the cud. The king of beasts his fury doth suppress, And to the Ark leads down the lioness; The bull for his beloved mate doth low, And to the Ark brings on the fair-eyed cow," &c.

Hereupon Lord ---- resumed, and spoke in raptures of a picture which he had lately seen of Noah's Ark, and said the animals were all marching two and two, the little ones first, and that the elephants came last in great majesty and filled up the fore-ground. "Ah! no doubt, my Lord," said Canning; "your elephants, wise fellows! staid behind to pack up their trunks!" This floored the ambassador for half an hour.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries almost all our ambassadors were distinguished men. [2] Read Lloyd's State Worthies. The third-rate men of those days possessed an infinity of knowledge, and were intimately versed not only in the history, but even in the heraldry, of the countries in which they were resident. Men were almost always, except for mere compliments, chosen for their dexterity and experience--not, as now, by parliamentary interest.

[Footnote 1: Genesis, c. vi. vii. Par. Lost, book xi. v. 728, &c.]

[Footnote 2: Yet Diego de Mendoza, the author of Lazarillo de Tormes, himself a veteran diplomatist, describes his brethren of the craft, and their duties, in the reigns of Charles the Emperor and Philip the Second, in the following terms:--

O embajadores, puros majaderos, Que si los reyes quieren engañar, Comienzan por nosotros los primeros. _Nuestro mayor negocio es, no dañar, Y jamas hacer cosa, ni dezilla, Que no corramos riesgo de enseñar._

What a pity it is that modern diplomatists, who, for the most part, very carefully observe the precept contained in the last two lines of this passage, should not equally bear in mind the importance of the preceding remark--_that their principal business is just to do no mischief_.--ED.]

* * * * *

The sure way to make a foolish ambassador is to bring him up to it. What can an English minister abroad really want but an honest and bold heart, a love for his country and the ten commandments? Your art diplomatic is stuff:--no truly greatly man now would negotiate upon any such shallow principles.

August 30. 1833.

MAN CANNOT BE STATIONARY.--FATALISM AND PROVIDENCE.--SYMPATHY IN JOY.

If a man is not rising upwards to be an angel, depend upon it, he is sinking downwards to be a devil. He cannot stop at the beast. The most savage of men are not beasts; they are worse, a great deal worse.

* * * * *

The conduct of the Mohammedan and Western nations on the subject of contagious plague illustrates the two extremes of error on the nature of God's moral government of the world. The Turk changes Providence into fatalism; the Christian relies upon it--when he has nothing else to rely on. He does not practically rely upon it at all.

* * * * *

For compassion a human heart suffices; but for full and adequate sympathy with joy an angel's only. And ever remember, that the more exquisite and delicate a flower of joy, the tenderer must be the hand that plucks it.

_September_ 2. 1833.

CHARACTERISTIC TEMPERAMENT OF NATIONS.--GREEK PARTICLES.--LATIN COMPOUNDS.- -PROPERTIUS.--TIBULLUS.--LUCAN.--STATIUS.--VALERIUS FLACCUS.--CLAUDIAN.-- PERSIUS.------PRUDENTIUS.--HERMESIANAX.

The English affect stimulant nourishment--beef and beer. The French, excitants, irritants--nitrous oxide, alcohol, champagne. The Austrians, sedatives--hyoscyamus. The Russians, narcotics--opium, tobacco, and beng.

* * * * *

It is worth particular notice how the style of Greek oratory, so full, in the times of political independence, of connective particles, some of passion, some of sensation only, and escaping the classification of mere grammatical logic, became, in the hands of the declaimers and philosophers of the Alexandrian era, and still later, entirely deprived of this peculiarity. So it was with Homer as compared with Nonnus, Tryphiodorus, and the like. In the latter there are in the same number of lines fewer words by one half than in the Iliad. All the appoggiaturas of time are lost.

All the Greek writers after Demosthenes and his contemporaries, what are they but the leavings of tyranny, in which a few precious things seem sheltered by the mass of rubbish! Yet, whenever liberty began but to hope and strive, a Polybius appeared. Theocritus is almost the only instance I know of a man of true poetic genius nourishing under a tyranny.

The old Latin poets attempted to compound as largely as the Greek; hence in Ennius such words as _belligerentes_, &c. In nothing did Virgil show his judgment more than in rejecting these, except just where common usage had sanctioned them, as _omnipotens_ and a few more. He saw that the Latin was too far advanced in its formation, and of too rigid a character, to admit such composition or agglutination. In this particular respect Virgil's Latin is very admirable and deserving preference. Compare it with the language of Lucan or Statius, and count the number of words used in an equal number of lines, and observe how many more short words Virgil has.

* * * * *

I cannot quite understand the grounds of the high admiration which the ancients expressed for Propertius, and I own that Tibullus is rather insipid to me. Lucan was a man of great powers; but what was to be made of such a shapeless fragment of party warfare, and so recent too! He had fancy rather than imagination, and passion rather than fancy. His taste was wretched, to be sure; still the Pharsalia is in my judgment a very wonderful work for such a youth as Lucan[1] was.

I think Statius a truer poet than Lucan, though he is very extravagant sometimes. Valerius Flaccus is very pretty in particular passages. I am ashamed to say, I have never read Silius Italicus. Claudian I recommend to your careful perusal, in respect of his being properly the first of the moderns, or at least the transitional link between the Classic and the Gothic mode of thought.

I call Persius hard--not obscure. He had a bad style; but I dare say, if he had lived[2], he would have learned to express himself in easier language. There are many passages in him of exquisite felicity, and his vein of thought is manly and pathetic.

Prudentius[3] is curious for this,--that you see how Christianity forced allegory into the place of mythology. Mr. Frere [Greek: ho philokalos, ho kalokagathos] used to esteem the Latin Christian poets of Italy very highly, and no man in our times was a more competent judge than he.

[Footnote 1: Lucan died by the command of Nero, A.D. 65, in his twenty-sixth year. I think this should be printed at the beginning of every book of the Pharsalia.--ED.]

[Footnote 2: Aulus Persius Flaccus died in the 30th year of his age, A.D. 62.--ED.]

[Footnote 3: Aurelius Prudentius Clemens was born A.D. 348, in Spain.--ED.]

* * * * *

How very pretty are those lines of Hermesianax in Athenaeus about the poets and poetesses of Greece![1]

[Footnote 1: See the fragment from the Leontium:--

[Greek: HOi_en men philos huios an_egagen Oiagrhoio Agrhiop_en, THr_essan steilamenos kithar_en Aidothen k. t. l.] _Athen_. xiii. s. 71--ED]

September 4. 1833.

DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM.--EPIC POEM.--GERMAN AND ENGLISH.--MODERN TRAVELS.--PARADISE LOST.

I have already told you that in my opinion the destruction of Jerusalem is the only subject now left for an epic poem of the highest kind. Yet, with all its great capabilities, it has this one grand defect--that, whereas a poem, to be epic, must have a personal interest,--in the destruction of Jerusalem no genius or skill could possibly preserve the interest for the hero from being merged in the interest for the event. The fact is, the event itself is too sublime and overwhelming.

* * * * *

In my judgment, an epic poem must either be national or mundane. As to Arthur, you could not by any means make a poem on him national to Englishmen. What have _we_ to do with him? Milton saw this, and with a judgment at least equal to his genius, took a mundane theme--one common to all mankind. His Adam and Eve are all men and women inclusively. Pope satirizes Milton for making God the Father talk like a school divine.[1] Pope was hardly the man to criticize Milton. The truth is, the judgment of Milton in the conduct of the celestial part of his story is very exquisite. Wherever God is represented as directly acting as Creator, without any exhibition of his own essence, Milton adopts the simplest and sternest language of the Scriptures. He ventures upon no poetic diction, no amplification, no pathos, no affection. It is truly the Voice or the Word of the Lord coming to, and acting on, the subject Chaos. But, as some personal interest was demanded for the purposes of poetry, Milton takes advantage of the dramatic representation of God's address to the Son, the Filial Alterity, and in _those addresses_ slips in, as it were by stealth, language of affection, or thought, or sentiment. Indeed, although Milton was undoubtedly a high Arian in his mature life, he does in the necessity of poetry give a greater objectivity to the Father and the Son, than he would have justified in argument. He was very wise in adopting the strong anthropomorphism of the Hebrew Scriptures at once. Compare the Paradise Lost with Klopstock's Messiah, and you will learn to appreciate Milton's judgment and skill quite as much as his genius.

[Footnote 1:

"Milton's strong pinion now not Heav'n can bound, Now, serpent-like, in prose he sweeps the ground; In quibbles angel and archangel join, And God the Father turns a school divine."

1 Epist. 2d book of Hor. v. 99.]

* * * * *

The conquest of India by Bacchus might afford scope for a very brilliant poem of the fancy and the understanding.

* * * * *

It is not that the German can express external imagery more _fully_ than English; but that it can flash more images _at once_ on the mind than the English can. As to mere power of expression, I doubt whether even the Greek surpasses the English. Pray, read a very pleasant and acute dialogue in Schlegel's Athenaeum between a German, a Greek, a Roman, Italian, and a Frenchman, on the merits of their respective languages.

* * * * *

I wish the naval and military officers who write accounts of their travels would just spare us their sentiment. The Magazines introduced this cant. Let these gentlemen read and imitate the old captains and admirals, as Dampier, &c.

October 15. 1833.

THE TRINITY.--INCARNATION.--REDEMPTION.--EDUCATION.

The Trinity is the idea: the Incarnation, which implies the Fall, is the fact: the Redemption is the mesothesis of the two--that is--the religion.

* * * * *

If you bring up your children in a way which puts them out of sympathy with the religious feelings of the nation in which they live, the chances are, that they will ultimately turn out ruffians or fanatics--and one as likely as the other.

October 23. 1833.

ELEGY.--LAVACRUM PALLADOS.--GREEK AND LATIN PENTAMETER.--MILTON'S LATIN POEMS.--POETICAL FILTER.--GRAY AND COTTON.

Elegy is the form of poetry natural to the reflective mind. It _may_ treat of any subject, but it must treat of no subject _for itself_; but always and exclusively with reference to the poet himself. As he will feel regret for the past or desire for the future, so sorrow and love become the principal themes of elegy. Elegy presents every thing as lost and gone, or absent and future. The elegy is the exact opposite of the Homeric epic, in which all is purely external and objective, and the poet is a mere voice.

The true lyric ode is subjective too; but then it delights to present things as actually existing and visible, although associated with the past, or coloured highly by the subject of the ode itself.

* * * * *

I think the Lavacrum Pallados of Callimachus very beautiful indeed, especially that part about the mother of Tiresias and Minerva.[1] I have a mind to try how it would bear translation; but what metre have we to answer in feeling to the elegiac couplet of the Greeks?

I greatly prefer the Greek rhythm of the short verse to Ovid's, though, observe, I don't dispute his taste with reference to the genius of his own language. Augustus Schlegel gave me a copy of Latin elegiacs on the King of Prussia's going down the Rhine, in which he had almost exclusively adopted the manner of Propertius. I thought them very elegant.

[Footnote 1: Greek: Paides, Athanaia numphan mian en poka Th_ezais po_olu ti kai pezi d_e philato tan hetezan, mateza Teizesiao, kai oupoka ch_ozis egento k.t.l. v 57, &c.]

* * * * *

You may find a few minute faults in Milton's Latin verses; but you will not persuade me that, if these poems had come down to us _as_ written in the age of Tiberius, we should not have considered them to be very beautiful.

* * * * *

I once thought of making a collection,--to be called "The Poetical Filter,"--upon the principle of simply omitting from the old pieces of lyrical poetry which we have, those parts in which the whim or the bad taste of the author or the fashion of his age prevailed over his genius. You would be surprised at the number of exquisite _wholes_ which might be made by this simple operation, and, perhaps, by the insertion of a single line or half a line, out of poems which are now utterly disregarded on account of some odd or incongruous passages in them;--just as whole volumes of Wordsworth's poems were formerly neglected or laughed at, solely because of some few wilfulnesses, if I may so call them, of that great man--whilst at the same time five sixths of his poems would have been admired, and indeed popular, if they had appeared without those drawbacks, under the name of Byron or Moore or Campbell, or any other of the fashionable favourites of the day. But he has won the battle now, ay! and will wear the crown, whilst English is English.

* * * * *

I think there is something very majestic in Gray's Installation Ode; but as to the Bard and the rest of his lyrics, I must say I think them frigid and artificial. There is more real lyric feeling in Cotton's Ode on Winter.[1]

[Footnote 1: Let me borrow Mr. Wordsworth's account of, and quotation from, this poem:--

"Finally, I will refer to Cotton's 'Ode upon Winter,' an admirable composition, though stained with some peculiarities of the age in which he lived, for a general illustration of the characteristics of Fancy. The middle part of this ode contains a most lively description of the entrance of Winter, with his retinue, as 'a palsied king,' and yet a military monarch, advancing for conquest with his army; the several bodies of which, and their arms and equipments, are described with a rapidity of detail, and a profusion of _fanciful_ comparisons, which indicate, on the part of the poet, extreme activity of intellect, and a correspondent hurry of delightful feeling. He retires from the foe into his fortress, where--

a magazine Of sovereign juice is cellared in; Liquor that will the siege maintain Should Phoebus ne'er return again."

Though myself a water-drinker, I cannot resist the pleasure of transcribing what follows, as an instance still more happy of Fancy employed in the treatment of feeling than, in its preceding passages, the poem supplies of her management of forms.

'Tis that, that gives the Poet rage, And thaws the gelly'd blood of Age; Matures the Young, restores the Old, And makes the fainting coward bold.

It lays the careful head to rest, Calms palpitations in the breast, Renders our lives' misfortune sweet;

* * * * *

Then let the _chill_ Scirocco blow, And gird us round with hills of snow; Or else go whistle to the shore, And make the hollow mountains roar:

Whilst we together jovial sit Careless, and crowned with mirth and wit; Where, though bleak winds confine us home, Our fancies round the world shall roam.

We'll think of all the friends we know, And drink to all worth drinking to; When, having drunk all thine and mine, We rather shall want healths than wine.

But where friends fail us, we'll supply Our friendships with our charity; Men that remote in sorrows live Shall by our lusty brimmers thrive.

We'll drink the wanting into wealth, And those that languish into health, Th' afflicted into joy, th' opprest Into security and rest.

The worthy in disgrace shall find Favour return again more kind, And in restraint who stifled lie Shall taste the air of liberty.

The brave shall triumph in success, The lovers shall have mistresses, Poor unregarded virtue, praise, And the neglected poet, bays.

Thus shall our healths do others good, Whilst we ourselves do all we would; For, freed from envy and from care, What would we be but what we are?

_Preface to the editions of Mr. W.'s Poems, in_ 1815 and 1820.--ED.]

_November_ 1. 1833.

HOMERIC HEROES IN SHAKSPEARE.--DRYDEN.--DR. JOHNSON.--SCOTT'S NOVELS.-- SCOPE OF CHRISTIANITY.

Compare Nestor, Ajax, Achilles, &c. in the Troilus and Cressida of Shakspeare with their namesakes in the Iliad. The old heroes seem all to have been at school ever since. I scarcely know a more striking instance of the strength and pregnancy of the Gothic mind.

Dryden's genius was of that sort which catches fire by its own motion; his chariot wheels _get_ hot by driving fast.

* * * * *

Dr. Johnson seems to have been really more powerful in discoursing _vivâ voce_ in conversation than with his pen in hand. It seems as if the excitement of company called something like reality and consecutiveness into his reasonings, which in his writings I cannot see. His antitheses are almost always verbal only; and sentence after sentence in the Rambler may be pointed out to which you cannot attach any definite meaning whatever. In his political pamphlets there is more truth of expression than in his other works, for the same reason that his conversation is better than his writings in general. He was more excited and in earnest.

* * * * *

When I am very ill indeed, I can read Scott's novels, and they are almost the only books I can then _read_. I cannot at such times read the Bible; my mind reflects on it, but I can't bear the open page.

* * * * *

Unless Christianity be viewed and felt in a high and comprehensive way, how large a portion of our intellectual and moral nature does it leave without object and action!

* * * * *

Let a young man separate I from Me as far as he possibly can, and remove Me till it is almost lost in the remote distance. "I am me," is as bad a fault in intellectuals and morals as it is in grammar, whilst none but one--God-- can say, "I am I," or "That I am."

_November_ 9. 1833.

TIMES OF CHARLES I.

How many books are still written and published about Charles the First and his times! Such is the fresh and enduring interest of that grand crisis of morals, religion, and government! But these books are none of them works of any genius or imagination; not one of these authors seems to be able to throw himself back into that age; if they did, there would be less praise and less blame bestowed on both sides.

_December_ 21. 1833.

MESSENGER OF THE COVENANT--PROPHECY.--LOGIC OF IDEAS AND OF SYLLOGISMS.

When I reflect upon the subject of the messenger of the covenant, and observe the distinction taken in the prophets between the teaching and suffering Christ,--the Priest, who was to precede, and the triumphant Messiah, the Judge, who was to follow,--and how Jesus always seems to speak of the Son of Man in a future sense, and yet always at the same time as identical with himself; I sometimes think that our Lord himself in his earthly career was the Messenger; and that the way is _now still preparing_ for the great and visible advent of the Messiah of Glory. I mention this doubtingly.

* * * * *

What a beautiful sermon or essay might be written on the growth of prophecy!--from the germ, no bigger than a man's hand, in Genesis, till the column of cloud gathers size and height and substance, and assumes the shape of a perfect man; just like the smoke in the Arabian Nights' tale, which comes up and at last takes a genie's shape.[1]

[Footnote 1: The passage in Mr. Coleridge's mind was, I suppose, the following:--"He (the fisherman) set it before him, and while he looked upon it attentively, there came out a very thick smoke, which obliged him to retire two or three paces from it. The smoke ascended to the clouds, and extending itself along the sea, and upon the shore, formed a great mist, which, we may well imagine, did mightily astonish the fisherman. When the smoke was all out of the vessel, it reunited itself, and became a solid body, of which there was formed a genie twice as high as the greatest of giants." _Story of the Fisherman_. Ninth Night.--ED.]

* * * * *

The logic of ideas is to that of syllogisms as the infinitesimal calculus to common arithmetic; it proves, but at the same time supersedes.

_January_ 1. 1834.

LANDOR'S POETRY.--BEAUTY.--CHRONOLOGICAL ARRANGEMENT OF WORKS.

What is it that Mr. Landor wants, to make him a poet? His powers are certainly very considerable, but he seems to be totally deficient in that modifying faculty, which compresses several units into one whole. The truth is, he does not possess imagination in its highest form,--that of stamping _il più nell' uno_. Hence his poems, taken as wholes, are unintelligible; you have eminences excessively bright, and all the ground around and between them in darkness. Besides which, he has never learned, with all his energy, how to write simple and lucid English.

* * * * *

The useful, the agreeable, the beautiful, and the good, are distinguishable. You are wrong in resolving beauty into expression or interest; it is quite distinct; indeed it is opposite, although not contrary. Beauty is an immediate presence, between (_inter_) which and the beholder _nihil est_. It is always one and tranquil; whereas the interesting always disturbs and is disturbed. I exceedingly regret the loss of those essays on beauty, which I wrote in a Bristol newspaper. I would give much to recover them.

* * * * *

After all you can say, I still think the chronological order the best for arranging a poet's works. All your divisions are in particular instances inadequate, and they destroy the interest which arises from watching the progress, maturity, and even the decay of genius.

_January_ 3. 1834.

TOLERATION.--NORWEGIANS.

I have known books written on Tolerance, the proper title of which would be--intolerant or intolerable books on tolerance. Should not a man who writes a book expressly to inculcate tolerance learn to treat with respect, or at least with indulgence, articles of faith which tens of thousands ten times told of his fellow-subjects or his fellow-creatures believe with all their souls, and upon the truth of which they rest their tranquillity in this world, and their hopes of salvation in the next,--those articles being at least maintainable against his arguments, and most certainly innocent in themselves?--Is it fitting to run Jesus Christ in a silly parallel with Socrates--the Being whom thousand millions of intellectual creatures, of whom I am a humble unit, take to be their Redeemer, with an Athenian philosopher, of whom we should know nothing except through his glorification in Plato and Xenophon?--And then to hitch Latimer and Servetus together! To be sure there was a stake and a fire in each case, but where the rest of the resemblance is I cannot see. What ground is there for throwing the odium of Servetus's death upon Calvin alone?--Why, the mild Melancthon wrote to Calvin[1], expressly to testify his concurrence in the act, and no doubt he spoke the sense of the German reformers; the Swiss churches _advised_ the punishment in formal letters, and I rather think there are letters from the English divines, approving Calvin's conduct!-- Before a man deals out the slang of the day about the great leaders of the Reformation, he should learn to throw himself back to the age of the Reformation, when the two great parties in the church were eagerly on the watch to fasten a charge of heresy on the other. Besides, if ever a poor fanatic thrust, himself into the fire, it was Michael Servetus. He was a rabid enthusiast, and did every thing he could in the way of insult and ribaldry to provoke the feeling of the Christian church. He called the Trinity _triceps monstrum et Cerberum quendam tripartitum_, and so on.

Indeed, how should the principle of religious toleration have been acknowledged at first?--It would require stronger arguments than any which I have heard as yet, to prove that men in authority have not a right, involved in an imperative duty, to deter those under their control from teaching or countenancing doctrines which they believe to be damnable, and even to punish with death those who violate such prohibition. I am sure that Bellarmine would have had small difficulty in turning Locke round his fingers' ends upon this ground. A _right_ to protection I can understand; but a _right_ to toleration seems to me a contradiction in terms. Some criterion must in any case be adopted by the state; otherwise it might be compelled to admit whatever hideous doctrine and practice any man or number of men may assert to be his or their religion, and an article of his or their faith. It was the same Pope who commanded the Romanists of England to separate from the national church, which previously their own consciences had not dictated, nor the decision of any council,--and who also commanded them to rebel against Queen Elizabeth, whom they were bound to obey by the laws of the land; and if the Pope had authority for one, he must have had it for the other. The only true argument, as it seems to me, apart from Christianity, for a discriminating toleration is, that _it is of no use_ to attempt to stop heresy or schism by persecution, unless, perhaps, it be conducted upon the plan of direct warfare and massacre. You _cannot_ preserve men in the faith by such means, though you may stifle for a while any open appearance of dissent. The experiment has now been tried, and it has failed; and that is by a great deal the best argument for the magistrate against a repetition of it.

I know this,--that if a parcel of fanatic missionaries were to go to Norway, and were to attempt to disturb the fervent and undoubting Lutheranism of the fine independent inhabitants of the interior of that country, I should be right glad to hear that the busy fools had been quietly shipped off--any where. I don't include the people of the seaports in my praise of the Norwegians;--I speak of the agricultural population. If that country could be brought to maintain a million more of inhabitants, Norway might defy the world; it would be [Greek: autarhk_as] and impregnable; but it is much under-handed now.

[Footnote 1: Melancthon's words are:--"Tuo judicio prorsus assentior. Affirmo etiam vestros magistratus juste fecisse quod hominem blasphemum, re ordine judicata, _interfecerunt_." 14th Oct. 1554.--ED.]

_January_ 12. 1834.

ARTICLES OF FAITH.--MODERN QUAKERISM.--DEVOTIONAL SPIRIT.--SECTARIANISM.--ORIGEN.

I have drawn up four or perhaps five articles of faith, by subscription, or rather by assent, to which I think a large comprehension might take place. My articles would exclude Unitarians, and I am sorry to say, members of the church of Rome, but with this difference--that the exclusion of Unitarians would be necessary and perpetual; that of the members of the church of Rome depending on each individual's own conscience and intellectual light. What I mean is this:--that the Romanists hold the faith in Christ,--but unhappily they also hold certain opinions, partly ceremonial, partly devotional, partly speculative, which have so fatal a facility of being degraded into base, corrupting, and even idolatrous practices, that if the Romanist will make _them_ of the essence of his religion, he must of course be excluded. As to the Quakers, I hardly know what to say. An article on the sacraments would exclude them. My doubt is, whether Baptism and the Eucharist are properly any _parts_ of Christianity, or not rather Christianity itself;--the one, the initial conversion or light,--the other, the sustaining and invigorating life;--both together the [Greek: ph_os ahi z_oh_a], which are Christianity. A line can only begin once; hence, there can be no repetition of baptism; but a line may be endlessly prolonged by continued production; hence the sacrament of love and life lasts for ever.

But really there is no knowing what the modern Quakers are, or believe, excepting this--that they are altogether degenerated from their ancestors of the seventeenth century. I should call modern Quakerism, so far as I know it as a scheme of faith, a Socinian Calvinism. Penn himself was a Sabellian, and seems to have disbelieved even the historical fact of the life and death of Jesus;--most certainly Jesus of Nazareth was not Penn's Christ, if he had any. It is amusing to see the modern Quakers appealing now to history for a confirmation of their tenets and discipline--and by so doing, in effect abandoning the strong hold of their founders. As an _imperium in imperio_, I think the original Quakerism a conception worthy of Lycurgus. Modern Quakerism is like one of those gigantic trees which are seen in the forests of North America,--apparently flourishing, and preserving all its greatest stretch and spread of branches; but when you cut through an enormously thick and gnarled bark, you find the whole inside hollow and rotten. Modern Quakerism, like such a tree, stands upright by help of its inveterate bark alone. _Bark_ a Quaker, and he is a poor creature.

* * * * *

How much the devotional spirit of the church has suffered by that necessary evil, the Reformation, and the sects which have sprung up subsequently to it! All our modern prayers seem tongue-tied. We appear to be thinking more of avoiding an heretical expression or thought than of opening ourselves to God. We do not pray with that entire, unsuspecting, unfearing, childlike profusion of feeling, which so beautifully shines forth in Jeremy Taylor and Andrewes and the writings of some of the older and better saints of the Romish church, particularly of that remarkable woman, St. Theresa.[1] And certainly Protestants, in their anxiety to have the historical argument on their side, have brought down the origin of the Romish errors too late. Many of them began, no doubt, in the Apostolic age itself;--I say errors-- not heresies, as that dullest of the fathers, Epiphanius, calls them. Epiphanius is very long and fierce upon the Ebionites. There may have been real heretics under that name; but I believe that, in the beginning, the name was, on account of its Hebrew meaning, given to, or adopted by, some poor mistaken men--perhaps of the Nazarene way--who sold all their goods and lands, and were then obliged to beg. I think it not improbable that Barnabas was one of these chief mendicants; and that the collection made by St. Paul was for them. You should read Rhenferd's account of the early heresies. I think he demonstrates about eight of Epiphanius's heretics to be mere nicknames given by the Jews to the Christians. Read "Hermas, or the Shepherd," of the genuineness of which and of the epistle of Barnabas I have no doubt. It is perfectly orthodox, but full of the most ludicrous tricks of gnostic fancy--the wish to find the New Testament in the Old. This gnosis is perceptible in the Epistle to the Hebrews, but kept exquisitely within the limit of propriety. In the others it is rampant, and most truly "puffeth up," as St. Paul said of it.

What between the sectarians and the political economists, the English are denationalized. England I see as a country, but the English nation seems obliterated. What could redintegrate us again? Must it be another threat of foreign invasion?

[Footnote 1: She was a native of Avila in Old Castile, and a Carmelite nun. Theresa established an order which she called the "Reformed," and which became very powerful. Her works are divided into ten books, of which her autobiography forms a remarkable part. She died in 1582, and was canonised by Gregory XV. in 1622--ED.]

* * * * *

I never can digest the loss of most of Origen's works: he seems to have been almost the only very great scholar and genius combined amongst the early Fathers. Jerome was very inferior to him.

_January_ 20. 1834.

SOME MEN LIKE MUSICAL GLASSES.--SUBLIME AND NONSENSE.--ATHEIST.

Some men are like musical glasses;--to produce their finest tones, you must keep them wet.

* * * * *

Well! that passage is what I call the sublime dashed to pieces by cutting too close with the fiery four-in-hand round the corner of nonsense.

* * * * *

How did the Atheist get his idea of that God whom he denies?

_February_ 22. 1834.

PROOF OF EXISTENCE OF GOD.--KANT'S ATTEMPT.--PLURALITY OF WORLDS.

Assume the existence of God,--and then the harmony and fitness of the physical creation may be shown to correspond with and support such an assumption;--but to set about _proving_ the existence of a God by such means is a mere circle, a delusion. It can be no proof to a good reasoner, unless he violates all syllogistic logic, and presumes his conclusion.

Kant once set about proving the existence of God, and a masterly effort it was.* But in his later great work, the "Critique of the Pure Reason," he saw its fallacy, and said of it--that _if_ the existence could he _proved_ at all, it must be on the grounds indicated by him.

* * * * *

I never could feel any force in the arguments for a plurality of worlds, in the common acceptation of that term. A lady once asked me--"What then could be the intention in creating so many great bodies, so apparently useless to us?" I said--I did not know, except perhaps to make dirt cheap. The vulgar inference is _in alio genere_. What in the eye of an intellectual and omnipotent Being is the whole sidereal system to the soul of one man for whom Christ died?

_March_ 1. 1834.

A REASONER.

I am by the law of my nature a reasoner. A person who should suppose I meant by that word, an arguer, [1] would not only not understand me, but would understand the contrary of my meaning. I can take no interest whatever in hearing or saying any thing merely as a fact--merely as having happened. It must refer to something within me before I can regard it with any curiosity or care. My mind is always energic--I don't mean energetic; I require in every thing what, for lack of another word, I may call _propriety_,--that is, a reason why the thing _is_ at all, and why it is _there_ or _then_ rather than elsewhere or at another time.

[Footnote 1: In his essay, "_Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseyns Gottes_."--"The only possible argument or ground of proof for a demonstration of the existence of God." It was published in 1763; the "Critique" in 1781.--ED.]

_March_ 5. 1834.

SHAKSPEARE'S INTELLECTUAL ACTION.--CRABBE AND SOUTHEY.--PETER SIMPLE AND TOM CRINGLE'S LOG.

Shakspeare's intellectual action is wholly unlike that of Ben Jonson or Beaumont and Fletcher. The latter see the totality of a sentence or passage, and then project it entire. Shakspeare goes on creating, and evolving B. out of A., and C. out of B., and so on, just as a serpent moves, which makes a fulcrum of its own body, and seems for ever twisting and untwisting its own strength.

* * * * *

I think Crabbe and Southey are something alike; but Crabbe's poems are founded on observation and real life--Southey's on fancy and books. In facility they are equal, though Crabbe's English is of course not upon a level with Southey's, which is next door to faultless. But in Crabbe there is an absolute defect of the high imagination; he gives me little or no pleasure: yet, no doubt, he has much power of a certain kind, and it is good to cultivate, even at some pains, a catholic taste in literature. I read all sorts of books with some pleasure except modern sermons and treatises on political economy.

* * * * *

I have received a great deal of pleasure from some of the modern novels, especially Captain Marryat's "Peter Simple." That book is nearer Smollett than any I remember. And "Tom Cringle's Log" in Blackwood is also most excellent.

_March_ 15. 1834.

CHAUCER.--SHAKSPEARE.--BEN JONSON.--BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.--DANIEL.--MASSINGER.

I take unceasing delight in Chaucer. His manly cheerfulness is especially delicious to me in my old age.[1] How exquisitely tender he is, and yet how perfectly free from the least touch of sickly melancholy or morbid drooping! The sympathy of the poet with the subjects of his poetry is particularly remarkable in Shakspeare and Chaucer; but what the first effects by a strong act of imagination and mental metamorphosis, the last does without any effort, merely by the inborn kindly joyousness of his nature. How well we seem to know Chaucer! How absolutely nothing do we know of Shakspeare!

I cannot in the least allow any necessity for Chaucer's poetry, especially the Canterbury Tales, being considered obsolete. Let a few plain rules be given for sounding the final _è_ of syllables, and for expressing the termination of such words as _ocëan_, and _natiön_, &c. as dissyllables,-- or let the syllables to be sounded in such cases be marked by a competent metrist. This simple expedient would, with a very few trifling exceptions, where the errors are inveterate, enable any reader to feel the perfect smoothness and harmony of Chaucer's verse.

[Footnote 1: Eighteen years before, Mr. Coleridge entertained the same feelings towards Chaucer:--"Through all the works of Chaucer there reigns a cheerfulness, a manly hilarity, which makes it almost impossible to doubt a correspondent habit of feeling in the author himself." _Biog. Lit_., vol. i. p. 32.--ED.]

* * * * *

As to understanding his language, if you read twenty pages with a good glossary, you surely can find no further difficulty, even as it is; but I should have no objection to see this done:--Strike out those words which are now obsolete, and I will venture to say that I will replace every one of them by words still in use out of Chaucer himself, or Gower his disciple. I don't want this myself: I rather like to see the significant terms which Chaucer unsuccessfully offered as candidates for admission into our language; but surely so very slight a change of the text may well be pardoned, even by black--_letterati_, for the purpose of restoring so great a poet to his ancient and most deserved popularity.

* * * * *

Shakspeare is of no age. It is idle to endeavour to support his phrases by quotations from Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, &c. His language is entirely his own, and the younger dramatists imitated him. The construction of Shakspeare's sentences, whether in verse or prose, is the necessary and homogeneous vehicle of his peculiar manner of thinking. His is not the style of the age. More particularly, Shakspeare's blank verse is an absolutely new creation. Read Daniel[1]--the admirable Daniel--in his "Civil Wars," and "Triumphs of Hymen."

The style and language are just such as any very pure and manly writer of the present day--Wordsworth, for example--would use; it seems quite modern in comparison with the style of Shakspeare. Ben Jonson's blank verse is very masterly and individual, and perhaps Massinger's is even still nobler. In Beaumont and Fletcher it is constantly slipping into lyricisms.

I believe Shakspeare was not a whit more intelligible in his own day than he is now to an educated man, except for a few local allusions of no consequence. As I said, he is of no age--nor, I may add, of any religion, or party, or profession. The body and substance of his works came out of the unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind: his observation and reading, which was considerable, supplied him with the drapery of his figures.[2]

[Footnote 1: "This poet's well-merited epithet is that of the '_well-languaged Daniel_;' but, likewise, and by the consent of his contemporaries, no less than of all succeeding critics, the 'prosaic Daniel.' Yet those who thus designate this wise and amiable writer, from the frequent incorrespondency of his diction with his metre, in the majority of his compositions, not only deem them valuable and interesting on other accounts, but willingly admit that there are to be found throughout his poems, and especially in his _Epistles_ and in his _Hymen's Triumph_, many and exquisite specimens of that style, which, as the neutral ground of prose and verse, is common to both."--_Biog. Lit_., vol. ii. p. 82.]

[Footnote 2: Mr. Coleridge called Shakspeare "_the myriad-minded man_," [Greek: au_az muzioyous]--" a phrase," said he, "which I have borrowed from a Greek monk, who applies it to a patriarch of Constantinople. I might have said, that I have _reclaimed_, rather than borrowed, it, for it seems to belong to Shakspeare _de jure singulari, et ex privilegio naturae." See Biog. Lit., vol. ii. p. 13.--ED.]

* * * * *

As for editing Beaumont and Fletcher, the task would be one _immensi laboris_. The confusion is now so great, the errors so enormous, that the editor must use a boldness quite unallowable in any other case. All I can say as to Beaumont and Fletcher is, that I can point out well enough where something has been lost, and that something so and so was probably in the original; but the law of Shakspeare's thought and verse is such, that I feel convinced that not only could I detect the spurious, but supply the genuine, word.

_March_ 20. 1834.

LORD BYRON AND H. WALPOLE'S "MYSTERIOUS MOTHER."--LEWIS'S "JAMAICA JOURNAL."

Lord Byron, as quoted by Lord Dover[1], says, that the "Mysterious Mother" raises Horace Walpole above every author living in his, Lord Byron's, time. Upon which I venture to remark, first, that I do not believe that Lord Byron spoke sincerely; for I suspect that he made a tacit exception in favour of himself at least;--secondly, that it is a miserable mode of comparison which does not rest on difference of kind. It proceeds of envy and malice and detraction to say that A. is higher than B., unless you show that they are _in pari materia_;--thirdly, that the "Mysterious Mother" is the most disgusting, vile, detestable composition that ever came from the hand of man. No one with a spark of true manliness, of which Horace Walpole had none, could have written it. As to the blank verse, it is indeed better than Rowe's and Thomson's, which was execrably bad:--any approach, therefore, to the manner of the old dramatists was of course an improvement; but the loosest lines in Shirley are superior to Walpole's best.

[Footnote 1: In the memoir prefixed to the correspondence with Sir H. Mann. Lord Byron's words are:--"He is the _ultimus Romanorum_, the author of the 'Mysterious Mother,' a tragedy of the highest order, and not a puling love play. He is the father of the first romance, and of the last tragedy, in our language; and surely worthy of a higher place than any living author, be he who he may."--_Preface to Marino Faliero_. Is not "Romeo and Juliet" a love play? --But why reason about such insincere, splenetic trash?--ED.]

* * * * *

Lewis's "Jamaica Journal" is delightful; it is almost the only unaffected book of travels or touring I have read of late years. You have the man himself, and not an inconsiderable man,--certainly a much finer mind than I supposed before from the perusal of his romances, &c. It is by far his best work, and will live and be popular. Those verses on the Hours are very pretty; but the Isle of Devils is, like his romances,--a fever dream-- horrible, without point or terror.

_April_ 16. 1834.

SICILY.--MALTA--SIR ALEXANDER BALL.

I found that every thing in and about Sicily had been exaggerated by travellers, except two things--the folly of the government and the wretchedness of the people. _They_ did not admit of exaggeration.

Really you may learn the fundamental principles of political economy in a very compendious way, by taking a short tour through Sicily, and simply reversing in your own mind every law, custom, and ordinance you meet with. I never was in a country in which every thing proceeding from man was so exactly wrong. You have peremptory ordinances _against_ making roads, taxes on the passage of common vegetables from one miserable village to another, and so on.

By the by, do you know any parallel in modern history to the absurdity of our giving a legislative assembly to the Sicilians? It exceeds any thing I know. This precious legislature passed two bills before it was knocked on the head: the first was, to render lands inalienable; and the second, to cancel all debts due before the date of the bill.

And then consider the gross ignorance and folly of our laying a tax upon the Sicilians! Taxation in its proper sense can only exist where there is a free circulation of capital, labour, and commodities throughout the community. But to tax the people in countries like Sicily and Corsica, where there is no internal communication, is mere robbery and confiscation. A crown taken from a Corsican living in the sierras would not get back to him again in ten years.

* * * * *

It is interesting to pass from Malta to Sicily--from the highest specimen of an inferior race, the Saracenic, to the most degraded class of a superior race, the European.

* * * * *

No tongue can describe the moral corruption of the Maltese when the island was surrendered to us. There was not a family in it in which a wife or a daughter was not a kept mistress. A marquis of ancient family applied to Sir Alexander Ball to be appointed his valet. "My valet!" said Ball, "what can you mean, Sir?" The marquis said, he hoped he should then have had the honour of presenting petitions to his Excellency. "Oh, that is it, is it!" said Sir Alexander: "my valet, Sir, brushes my clothes, and brings them to me. If he dared to meddle with matters of public business, I should kick him down stairs."

In short, Malta was an Augean stable, and Ball had all the inclination to be a Hercules.[1] His task was most difficult, although his qualifications were most remarkable. I remember an English officer of very high rank soliciting him for the renewal of a pension to an abandoned woman who had been notoriously treacherous to us. That officer had promised the woman as a matter of course--she having sacrificed her daughter to him. Ball was determined, as far as he could, to prevent Malta from being made a nest of home patronage. He considered, as was the fact, that there was a contract between England and the Maltese. Hence the government at home, especially Dundas, disliked him, and never allowed him any other title than that of Civil Commissioner. We have, I believe, nearly succeeded in alienating the hearts of the inhabitants from us. Every officer in the island ought to be a Maltese, except those belonging to the immediate executive: 100_l_. per annum to a Maltese, to enable him to keep a gilt carriage, will satisfy him where an Englishman must have 2000_l_.

[Footnote 1: I refer the reader to the five concluding essays of the third volume of the "Friend," as a specimen of what Mr. C. might have done as a biographer if an irresistible instinct had not devoted him to profounder labours. As a sketch--and it pretends to nothing more--is there any thing more perfect in our literature than the monument raised in those essays to the memory of Sir Alexander Ball?--and there are some touches added to the character of Nelson, which the reader, even of Southey's matchless Life of our hero, will find both new and interesting.--ED.]

_May_ 1. 1834.

CAMBRIDGE PETITION TO ADMIT DISSENTERS.

There are, to my grief, the names of some men to the Cambridge petition for admission of the Dissenters to the University, whose cheeks I think must have burned with shame at the degrading patronage and befouling eulogies of the democratic press, and at seeing themselves used as the tools of the open and rancorous enemies of the church. How miserable to be held up for the purpose of inflicting insult upon men, whose worth and ability and sincerity you well know,--and this by a faction banded together like obscene dogs and cats and serpents, against a church which you profoundly revere! The _time_--the _time_--the _occasion_ and the _motive_ ought to have been argument enough, that even if the measure were right or harmless in itself, not _now_, nor with such as _these_, was it to be effected!

_May_ 3. 1834.

CORN LAWS.

Those who argue that England may safely depend upon a supply of foreign corn, if it grow none or an insufficient quantity of its own, forget that they are subjugating the necessaries of life itself to the mere luxuries or comforts of society. Is it not certain that the price of corn abroad will be raised upon us as soon as it is once known that we _must_ buy?--and when that fact is known, in what sort of a situation shall we be? Besides this, the argument supposes that agriculture is not a positive good to the nation, taken in and by itself, as a mode of existence for the people, which supposition is false and pernicious; and if we are to become a great horde of manufacturers, shall we not, even more than at present, excite the ill will of all the manufacturers of other nations? It has been already shown, in evidence which is before all the world, that some of our manufacturers have acted upon the accursed principle of deliberately injuring foreign manufactures, if they can, even to the ultimate disgrace of the country and loss to themselves.

_May_ 19. 1834.

CHRISTIAN SABBATH.

How grossly misunderstood the genuine character of the Christian sabbath, or Lord's day, seems to be even by the church! To confound it with the Jewish sabbath, or to rest its observance upon the fourth commandment, is, in my judgment, heretical, and would so have been considered in the primitive church. That cessation from labour on the Lord's day could not have been absolutely incumbent on Christians for two centuries after Christ, is apparent; because during that period the greater part of the Christians were either slaves or in official situations under Pagan masters or superiors, and had duties to perform for those who did not recognize the day. And we know that St. Paul sent back Onesimus to his master, and told every Christian slave, that, being a Christian, he was free in his mind indeed, but still must serve his earthly master, although he might laudably seek for his personal freedom also. If the early Christians had refused to work on the Lord's day, rebellion and civil war must have been the immediate consequences. But there is no notice of any such cessation.

The Jewish sabbath was commemorative of the termination of the great act of creation; it was to record that the world had not been from eternity, nor had arisen as a dream by itself, but that God had created it by distinct acts of power, and that he had hallowed the day or season in which he rested or desisted from his work. When our Lord arose from the dead, the old creation was, as it were, superseded, and the new creation then began; and therefore the first day and not the last day, the commencement and not the end, of the work of God was solemnized.

Luther, in speaking of the _good by itself_, and the good _for its expediency alone_, instances the observance of the Christian day of rest,-- a day of repose from manual labour, and of activity in spiritual labour,--a day of joy and co-operation in the work of Christ's creation. "Keep it holy"--says he--"for its use' sake,--both to body and soul! But if any where the day is made holy for the mere day's sake,--if any where any one sets up its observance upon a Jewish foundation, then I order you to work on it, to ride on it, to dance on it, to feast on it--to do any thing that shall reprove this encroachment on the Christian spirit and liberty."

The early church distinguished the day of Christian rest so strongly from a fast, that it was unlawful for a man to bewail even _his own sins_, as such only, on that day. He was to bewail the sins of _all_, and to pray as one of the whole of Christ's body.

And the English Reformers evidently took the same view of the day as Luther and the early church. But, unhappily, our church, in the reigns of James and Charles the First, was so identified with the undue advancement of the royal prerogative, that the puritanical Judaizing of the Presbyterians was but too well seconded by the patriots of the nation, in resisting the wise efforts of the church to prevent the incipient alteration in the character of the day of rest. After the Restoration, the bishops and clergy in general adopted the view taken and enforced by their enemies.

By the by, it is curious to observe, in this semi-infidel and Malthusian Parliament, how the Sabbatarian spirit unites itself with a rancorous hostility to that one institution, which alone, according to reason and experience, can insure the continuance of any general religion at all in the nation at large. Some of these gentlemen, who are for not letting a poor labouring man have a dish of baked potatoes on a Sunday, _religionis gratia_--(God forgive that audacious blasphemy!)--are foremost among those who seem to live but in vilifying, weakening, and impoverishing the national church. I own my indignation boils over against such contemptible fellows.

I sincerely wish to preserve a decent quiet on Sunday. I would prohibit compulsory labour, and put down operas, theatres, &c., for this plain reason--that if the rich be allowed to play, the poor will be forced, or, what comes to the same thing, will be induced, to work. I am not for a Paris Sunday. But to stop coaches, and let the gentleman's carriage run, is monstrous.

_May_ 25. 1834.

HIGH PRIZES AND REVENUES OF THE CHURCH.

Your argument against the high prizes in the church might be put strongly thus:--Admit that in the beginning it might have been fairly said, that some eminent rewards ought to be set apart for the purpose of stimulating and rewarding transcendant merit; what have you to say now, after centuries of experience to the contrary?--_Have_ the high prizes been given to the highest genius, virtue, or learning? Is it not rather the truth, as Jortin said, that twelve votes in a contested election will do more to make a man a bishop than an admired commentary on the twelve minor prophets?--To all which and the like I say again, that you ought not to reason from the abuse, which may be rectified, against the inherent uses of the thing. _Appoint_ the most deserving--and the prize _will_ answer its purpose. As to the bishops' incomes,--in the first place, the net receipts--that which the bishops may spend--have been confessedly exaggerated beyond measure; but, waiving that, and allowing the highest estimate to be correct, I should like to have the disposition of the episcopal revenue in any one year by the late or the present Bishop of Durham, or the present Bishops of London or Winchester, compared with that of the most benevolent nobleman in England of any party in politics. I firmly believe that the former give away in charity of one kind or another, public, official, or private, three times as much in proportion as the latter. You may have a hunks or two now and then; but so you would much more certainly, if you were to reduce the incomes to 2000_l_. per annum. As a body, in my opinion the clergy of England do in truth act as if their property were impressed with a trust to the utmost extent that can be demanded by those who affect to believe, ignorantly or not, that lying legend of a tripartite or quadripartite division of the tithe by law.

_May 31. 1834._

SIR C. WETHERELL'S SPEECH.--NATIONAL CHURCH.--DISSENTERS.--PAPACY.---- UNIVERSITIES.

I think Sir Charles Wetherell's speech before the Privy Council very effective. I doubt if any other lawyer in Westminster Hall could have done the thing so well.

* * * * *

The National Church requires, and is required by, the Christian Church, for the perfection of each. For if there were no national Church, the mere spiritual Church would either become, like the Papacy, a dreadful tyranny over mind and body;--or else would fall abroad into a multitude of enthusiastic sects, as in England in the seventeenth century. It is my deep conviction that, in a country of any religion at all, liberty of conscience can only be permanently preserved by means and under the shadow of a national church--a political establishment connected with, but distinct from, the spiritual Church.

* * * * *

I sometimes hope that the undisguised despotism of temper of the Dissenters may at last awaken a jealousy in the laity of the Church of England. But the apathy and inertness are, I fear, too profound--too providential.

* * * * *

Whatever the Papacy may have been on the Continent, it was always an unqualified evil to this country. It destroyed what was rising of good, and introduced a thousand evils of its own. The Papacy was and still is essentially extra-national;--it affects, _temporally_, to do that which the spiritual Church of Christ can alone do--to break down the natural distinctions of nations. Now, as the Roman Papacy is in itself local and peculiar, of course this attempt is nothing but a direct attack on the political independence of other nations.

The institution of Universities was the single check on the Papacy. The Pope always hated and maligned the Universities. The old coenobitic establishments of England were converted--perverted, rather--into monasteries and other monking receptacles. You see it was at Oxford that Wicliffe alone found protection and encouragement.

_June_ 2. 1834.

SCHILLER'S VERSIFICATION.--GERMAN BLANK VERSE.

Schiller's blank verse is bad. He moves in it as a fly in a glue bottle. His thoughts have their connection and variety, it is true, but there is no sufficiently corresponding movement in the verse. How different from Shakspeare's endless rhythms!

There is a nimiety--a too-muchness--in all Germans. It is the national fault. Leasing had the best notion of blank verse. The trochaic termination of German words renders blank verse in that language almost impracticable. We have it in our dramatic hendecasyllable; but then we have a power of interweaving the iambic close _ad libitum._

_June_ 14. 1834.

ROMAN CATHOLIC EMANCIPATION.--DUKE OF WELLINGTON.--CORONATION OATH.

The Roman Catholic Emancipation Act--carried in the violent, and, in fact, unprincipled manner it was--was in effect a Surinam toad;--and the Reform Bill, the Dissenters' admission to the Universities, and the attack on the Church, are so many toadlets, one after another detaching themselves from their parent brute.

* * * * *

If you say there is nothing in the Romish religion, sincerely felt, inconsistent with the duties of citizenship and allegiance to a territorial Protestant sovereign, _cadit quæstio_. For if _that_ is once admitted, there can be no answer to the argument from numbers. Certainly, if the religion of the majority of the _people_ be innocuous to the interests of the _nation_, the majority have a natural right to be trustees of the nationalty--that property which is set apart for the nation's use, and rescued from the gripe of private hands. But when I say--_for the nation's use_.--I mean the very reverse of what the Radicals mean. They would convert it to relieve taxation, which I call a private, personal, and perishable use. A nation's uses are immortal.

* * * * *

How lamentable it is to hear the Duke of Wellington expressing himself doubtingly on the abominable sophism that the Coronation Oath only binds the King as the executive power--thereby making a Highgate oath of it. But the Duke is conscious of the ready retort which his language and conduct on the Emancipation Bill afford to his opponents. He is hampered by that affair.

_June_ 20. 1834.

CORN LAWS.--MODERN POLITICAL ECONOMY.

In the argument on the Corn Laws there is a [Greek: metazasis eis allo gevos]. It may be admitted that the great principles of commerce require the interchange of commodities to be free; but commerce, which is barter, has no proper range beyond luxuries or conveniences;--it is properly the complement to the full existence and development of a state. But how can it be shown that the principles applicable to an interchange of conveniences or luxuries apply also to an interchange of necessaries? No state can be such properly, which is not self-subsistent at least; for no state that is not so, is essentially independent. The nation that cannot even exist without the commodity of another nation, is in effect the slave of that other nation. In common times, indeed, pecuniary interest will prevail, and prevent a ruinous exercise of the power which the nation supplying the necessary must have over the nation which has only the convenience or luxury to return; but such interest, both in individuals and nations, will yield to many stronger passions. Is Holland any authority to the contrary? If so, Tyre and Sidon and Carthage were so! Would you put England on a footing with a country, which can be overrun in a campaign, and starved in a year?

* * * * *

The entire tendency of the modern or Malthusian political economy is to denationalize. It would dig up the charcoal foundations of the temple of Ephesus to burn as fuel for a steam-engine!

_June_ 21. 1834.

Mr. ----, in his poem, makes trees coeval with Chaos;--which is next door to Hans Sachse[1] who, in describing Chaos, said it was so pitchy dark, that even the very _cats_ ran against each other!

[Footnote 1: Hans Sachse was born 1494, and died 1576.--ED],

_June_ 23. 1834.

SOCINIANISM.--UNITARIANISM.--FANCY AND IMAGINATION.

Faustus Socinus worshipped Jesus Christ, and said that God had given him the power of being omnipresent. Davidi, with a little more acuteness, urged that mere audition or creaturely presence could not possibly justify worship from men;--that a man, how glorified soever, was no nearer God in essence than the vulgarest of the race. Prayer, therefore, was inapplicable. And how could a _man_ be a mediator between God and man? How could a _man_ with sins himself offer any compensation for, or expiation of, sin, unless the most arbitrary caprice were admitted into the counsels of God?--And so, at last, you see, it was discovered by the better logicians amongst the Socinians, that there was no such thing as sin at all.

It is wonderful how any Socinian can read the works of Philo Judæus without some pause of doubt in the truth of his views as to the person of Christ. Whether Philo wrote on his own ground as a Jew, or borrowed from the Christians, the testimony as to the then Jewish expectation and belief, is equally strong. You know Philo calls the Logos [Greek: yios Theoy], the _Son of God_, and [Greek: agap_athon te non], _beloved Son_. He calls him [Greek: arhchierheus], _high priest_, [Greek: deuterhos Thehos], _second divinity_, [Greek: ei an Theoy], _image of God_, and describes him as [Greek: eggutat_o m_adenhos ovtos methorhioy diast_amatos], the _nearest possible to God without any intervening separation_. And there are numerous other remarkable expressions of the same sort.

My faith is this:--God is the Absolute Will: it is his Name and the meaning of it. It is the Hypostasis. As begetting his own Alterity, the Jehovah, the Manifested--He is the Father; but the Love and the Life--the Spirit-- proceeds from both.

I think Priestley must be considered the author of the modern Unitarianism. I owe, under God, my return to the faith, to my having gone much further than the Unitarians, and so having come round to the other side. I can truly say, I never falsified the Scripture. I always told them that their interpretations of the Scripture were intolerable upon any principles of sound criticism; and that, if they were to offer to construe the will of a neighbour as they did that of their Maker, they would be scouted out of society. I said then plainly and openly, that it was clear enough that John and Paul were not Unitarians. But at that time I had a strong sense of the repugnancy of the doctrine of vicarious atonement to the moral being, and I thought nothing could counterbalance that. "What care I," I said, "for the Platonisms of John, or the Rabbinisms of Paul?-- My conscience revolts!" That was the ground of my Unitarianism.

Always believing in the government of God, I was a fervent Optimist. But as I could not but see that the present state of things was not the best, I was necessarily led to look forward to some future state.

* * * * *

You may conceive the difference in kind between the Fancy and the Imagination in this way,--that if the check of the senses and the reason were withdrawn, the first would become delirium, and the last mania. The

Fancy brings together images which have no connection natural or moral, but are yoked together by the poet by means of some accidental coincidence; as in the well-known passage in Hudibras:

"The sun had long since in the lap Of Thetis taken out his nap, And like a lobster boyl'd, the morn From black to red began to turn."[1]

The Imagination modifies images, and gives unity to variety; it sees all things in one, _il più nell' uno_. There is the epic imagination, the perfection of which is in Milton; and the dramatic, of which Shakspeare is the absolute master. The first gives unity by throwing back into the distance; as after the magnificent approach of the Messiah to battle[2], the poet, by one touch from himself--

--"far off their coming shone!"--

makes the whole one image.

And so at the conclusion of the description of the appearance of the entranced angels, in which every sort of image from all the regions of earth and air is introduced to diversify and illustrate,--the reader is brought back to the single image by--

"He call'd so loud, that all the hollow deep Of Hell resounded."[3]

The dramatic imagination does not throw back, but brings close; it stamps all nature with one, and that its own, meaning, as in Lear throughout.

[Footnote 1: Part II. c. 2. v.29.]

[Footnote 2: ----"Forth rush'd with whirlwind sound The chariot of Paternal Deity, Flashing thick flames, wheel within wheel undrawn, Itself instinct with spirit, but convoy'd By four cherubic shapes; four faces each Had wonderous; as with stars their bodies all And wings were set with eyes; with eyes the wheels Of beryl, and careering fires between; Over their heads a crystal firmament, Whereon a sapphire throne, inlaid with pure Amber, and colours of the showery arch. He, in celestial panoply all arm'd Of radiant Urim, work divinely wrought, Ascended; at his right hand Victory Sat eagle-wing'd; beside him hung his bow And quiver, with three-bolted thunder stored; And from about him fierce effusion roll'd Of smoke, and bickering flame, and sparkles dire; Attended with ten thousand thousand saints, He onward came; _far off their coming shone;_ And twenty thousand (I their number heard) Chariots of God, half on each hand, were seen: He on the wings of cherub rode sublime On the crystalline sky, in sapphire throned, Illustrious far and wide; but by his own First seen."--P. L. b. vi. v. 749, &c.]

[Footnote 3: ----"and call'd His legions, angel forms, who lay intranced Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks In Vallombrosa, where th' Etrurian shades, High over arch'd, embower; or scatter'd sedge Afloat, when with fierce winds Orion arm'd Hath vex'd the Red Sea coast, whose waves o'erthrew Busiris, and his Memphian chivalry, While with perfidious hatred they pursued The sojourners of Goshen, who beheld From the safe shore their floating carcasses And broken chariot wheels; so thick bestrewn, Abject and lost lay these, covering the flood, Under amazement of their hideous change. _He call'd so loud, that all the hollow deep Of Hell resounded_."--P. L. b. i. v. 300, &c.]

* * * * *

At the very outset, what are we to think of the soundness of this modern system of political economy, the direct tendency of every rule of which is to denationalize, and to make the love of our country a foolish superstition?

_June_ 28. 1834.

MR. COLERIDGE'S SYSTEM.--BIOGRAPHIA LITERAHIA.--DISSENTERS.

You may not understand my system, or any given part of it,--or by a determined act of wilfulness, you may, even though perceiving a ray of light, reject it in anger and disgust:--but this I will say,--that if you once master it, or any part of it, you cannot hesitate to acknowledge it as the truth. You cannot be sceptical about it.

The metaphysical disquisition at the end of the first volume of the "Biographia Literaria" is unformed and immature;--it contains the fragments of the truth, but it is not fully thought out. It is wonderful to myself to think how infinitely more profound my views now are, and yet how much clearer they are withal. The circle is completing; the idea is coming round to, and to be, the common sense.

* * * * *

The generation of the modern worldly Dissenter was thus: Presbyterian, Arian, Socinian, and last, Unitarian.

* * * * *

Is it not most extraordinary to see the Dissenters calling themselves the descendants of the old Nonconformists, and yet clamouring for a divorce of Church and State? Why--Baxter, and the other great leaders, would have thought a man an atheist who had proposed such a thing. _They_ were rather for merging the State _in_ the Church. But these our modern gentlemen, who are blinded by political passion, give the kiss of alliance to the harlot of Rome, and walk arm in arm with those who deny the God that redeemed them, if so they may but wreak their insane antipathies on the National Church! Well! I suppose they have counted the cost, and know what it is they would have, and can keep.

_July_ 5. 1834.

LORD BROOKE.--BARROW AND DRYDEN.--PETER WILKINS AND STOTHARD.--FIELDING AND RICHARDSON.--BISHOP SANDFORD.--ROMAN CATHOLIC RELIGION.

I do not remember a more beautiful piece of prose in English than the consolation addressed by Lord Brooke (Fulke Greville) to a lady of quality on certain conjugal infelicities. The diction is such that it might have been written now, if we could find any one combining so thoughtful a head with so tender a heart and so exquisite a taste.

* * * * *

Barrow often debased his language merely to evidence his loyalty. It was, indeed, no easy task for a man of so much genius, and such a precise mathematical mode of thinking, to adopt even for a moment the slang of L'Estrange and Tom Brown; but he succeeded in doing so sometimes. With the exception of such parts, Barrow must be considered as closing the first great period of the English language. Dryden began the second. Of course there are numerous subdivisions.

* * * * *

Peter Wilkins is to my mind a work of uncommon beauty; and yet Stothard's illustrations have _added_ beauties to it. If it were not for a certain tendency to affectation, scarcely any praise could be too high for Stothard's designs. They give me great pleasure. I believe that Robinson Crusoe and Peter Wilkins could only have been written by islanders. No continentalist could have conceived either tale. Davis's story is an imitation of Peter Wilkins; but there are many beautiful things in it; especially his finding his wife crouching by the fireside--she having, in his absence, plucked out all her feathers--to be like him!

It would require a very peculiar genius to add another tale, _ejusdem generis_, to Robinson Crusoe and Peter Wilkins. I once projected such a thing; but the difficulty of a pre-occupied ground stopped me. Perhaps La Motte Fouqué might effect something; but I should fear that neither he, nor any other German, could entirely understand what may be called the "_desert island_" feeling. I would try the marvellous line of Peter Wilkins, if I attempted it, rather than the _real_ fiction of Robinson Crusoe.

* * * * *

What a master of composition Fielding was! Upon my word, I think the Oedipus Tyrannus, the Alchemist, and Tom Jones the three most perfect plots ever planned. And how charming, how wholesome, Fielding always is! To take him up after Richardson, is like emerging from a sick room heated by stoves, into an open lawn, on a breezy day in May.

* * * * *

I have been very deeply interested in the account of Bishop Sandford's life, published by his son. He seems to have been a thorough gentleman upon the model of St. Paul, whose manners were the finest of any man's upon record.

* * * * *

I think I could have conformed to the then dominant Church before the Reformation. The errors existed, but they had not been riveted into peremptory articles of faith before the Council of Trent. If a Romanist were to ask me the question put to Sir Henry Wotton, [1]I should content myself by answering, that I could not exactly say when my religion, as he was pleased to call it, began--but that it was certainly some sixty or seventy years before _his_, at all events--which began at the Council of Trent.

[Footnote 1: "Having, at his being in Rome, made acquaintance with a pleasant priest, who invited him, one evening, to hear their vesper music at church; the priest, seeing Sir Henry stand obscurely in a corner, sends to him by a boy of the choir this question, writ in a small piece of paper;--'Where was your religion to be found before Luther?' To which question Sir Henry presently underwrit;--'My religion was to be found then, where yours is not to be found now--in the written word of God.'"--_Isaak Walton's Life of Sir Henry Wotton_.]

_July_ 10. 1834.

_EUTHANASIA._

I am, dying, but without expectation of a speedy release. Is it not strange that very recently by-gone images, and scenes of early life, have stolen into my mind, like breezes blown from the spice-islands of Youth and Hope-- those twin realities of this phantom world! I do not add Love,--for what is Love but Youth and Hope embracing, and so seen as _one?_ I say _realities_; for reality is a thing of degrees, from the Iliad to a dream; [Greek: *ai g_or t onar e Di s esti]. Yet, in a strict sense, reality is not predicable at all of aught below Heaven. "Es enim _in coelis_, Pater noster, qui tu vere _es!_" Hooker wished to live to finish his Ecclesiastical Polity;--so I own I wish life and strength had been spared to me to complete my Philosophy. For, as God hears me, the originating, continuing, and sustaining wish and design in my heart were to exalt the glory of his name; and, which is the same thing in other words, to promote the improvement of mankind. But _visum aliter Deo_, and his will be done.

* * * * *

** This note may well finish the present specimens. What followed was for the memory of private friends only. Mr. Coleridge was then extremely ill; but certainly did not believe his end to be quite so near at hand as it was.--ED.

The following Recollections of Mr. Coleridge, written in May, 1811, have been also communicated to me by my brother, Mr. Justice Coleridge:--

"20_th April_, 1811, _at Richmond_.

"We got on politics, and he related some curious facts of the Prince and Perceval. Then, adverting to the present state of affairs in Portugal, he said that he rejoiced not so much in the mere favourable turn, as in the end that must now be put to the base reign of opinion respecting the superiority and invincible skill of the French generals. Brave as Sir John Moore was, he thought him deficient in that greater and more essential manliness of soul which should have made him not hold his enemy in such fearful respect, and which should have taught him to care less for the opinion of the world at home.

"We then got, I know not how, to German topics. He said that the language of their literature was entirely factitious, and had been formed by Luther from the two dialects, High and Low German; that he had made it, grammatically, most correct, more so, perhaps, than any other language; it was equal to the Greek, except in harmony and sweetness. And yet the Germans themselves thought it sweet;--Klopstock had repeated to him an ode of his own to prove it, and really had deceived himself, by the force of association, into a belief that the harsh sounds, conveying, indeed, or being significant of, sweet images or thoughts, were themselves sweet. Mr. C. was asked what he thought of Klopstock. He answered, that his fame was rapidly declining in Germany; that an Englishman might form a correct notion of him by uniting the moral epigram of Young, the bombast of Hervey, and the minute description of Richardson. As to sublimity, he had, with all Germans, one rule for producing it;--it was, to take something very great, and make it very small in comparison with that which you wish to elevate. Thus, for example, Klopstock says,--'As the gardener goes forth, and scatters from his basket seed into the garden; so does the Creator scatter worlds with his right hand.' Here _worlds_, a large object, are made small in the hands of the Creator; consequently, the Creator is very great. In short, the Germans were not a poetical nation in the very highest sense. Wieland was their best poet: his subject was bad, and his thoughts often impure; but his language was rich and harmonious, and his fancy luxuriant. Sotheby's translation had not at all caught the manner of the original. But the Germans were good metaphysicians and critics: they criticised on principles previously laid down; thus, though they might be wrong, they were in no danger of being self-contradictory, which was too often the case with English critics.

"Young, he said, was not a poet to be read through at once. His love of point and wit had often put an end to his pathos and sublimity; but there were parts in him which must be immortal. He (Mr. C.) loved to read a page of Young, and walk out to think of him.

"Returning to the Germans, he said that the state of their religion, when he was in Germany, was really shocking. He had never met one clergyman a Christian; and he found professors in the universities lecturing against the most material points in the Gospel. He instanced, I think, Paulus, whose lectures he had attended. The object was to resolve the miracles into natural operations; and such a disposition evinced was the best road to preferment. He severely censured Mr. Taylor's book, in which the principles of Paulus were explained and insisted on with much gratuitous indelicacy. He then entered into the question of Socinianism, and noticed, as I recollect, the passage in the Old Testament; 'The people bowed their faces, and _worshipped_ God and the king.' He said, that all worship implied the presence of the object worshipped: the people worshipped, bowing to the sensuous presence of the one, and the conceived omnipresence of the other. He talked of his having constantly to defend the Church against the Socinian Bishop of Llandaff, Watson. The subject then varied to Roman Catholicism, and he gave us an account of a controversy he had had with a very sensible priest in Sicily on the worship of saints. He had driven the priest from one post to another, till the latter took up the ground, that though the saints were not omnipresent, yet God, who was so, imparted to them the prayers offered up, and then they used their interference with Him to grant them. 'That is, father, (said C. in reply)--excuse my seeming levity, for I mean no impiety--that is; I have a deaf and dumb wife, who yet understands me, and I her, by signs. You have a favour to ask of me, and want my wife's interference; so you communicate your request to me, who impart it to her, and she, by signs back again, begs me to grant it.' The good priest laughed, and said, '_Populus milt decipi, et decipiatur!_'

"We then got upon the Oxford controversy, and he was decidedly of opinion that there could be no doubt of Copleston's complete victory. He thought the Review had chosen its points of attack ill, as there must doubtless be in every institution so old much to reprehend and carp at. On the other hand, he thought that Copleston had not been so severe or hard upon them as he might have been; but he admired the critical part of his work, which he thought very highly valuable, independently of the controversy. He wished some portion of mathematics was more essential to a degree at Oxford, as he thought a gentleman's education incomplete without it, and had himself found the necessity of getting up a little, when he could ill spare the time. He every day more and more lamented his neglect of them when at Cambridge,

"Then glancing off to Aristotle, he gave a very high character of him. He said that Bacon objected to Aristotle the grossness of his examples, and Davy now did precisely the same to Bacon: both were wrong; for each of those philosophers wished to confine the attention of the mind in their works to the _form_ of reasoning only, by which other truths might be established or elicited, and therefore the most trite and common-place examples were in fact the best. He said that during a long confinement to his room, he had taken up the Schoolmen, and was astonished at the immense learning and acute knowledge displayed by them; that there was scarcely any thing which modern philosophers had proudly brought forward as their own, which might not be found clearly and systematically laid down by them in some or other of their writings. Locke had sneered at the Schoolmen unfairly, and had raised a foolish laugh against them by citations from their _Quid libet_ questions, which were discussed on the eyes of holydays, and in which the greatest latitude was allowed, being considered mere exercises of ingenuity. We had ridiculed their _quiddities_, and why? Had we not borrowed their _quantity_ and their _quality_, and why then reject their _quiddity_, when every schoolboy in logic must know, that of every thing may be asked, _Quantum est? Quale est?_ and _Quid est?_ the last bringing you to the most material of all points, its individual being. He afterwards stated, that in a History of Speculative Philosophy which he was endeavouring to prepare for publication, he had proved, and to the satisfaction of Sir James Mackintosh, that there was nothing in Locke which his best admirers most admired, that might not be found more clearly and better laid down in Descartes or the old Schoolmen; not that he was himself an implicit disciple of Descartes, though he thought that Descartes had been much misinterpreted.

"When we got on the subject of poetry and Southey, he gave us a critique of the Curse of Kehama, the fault of which he thought consisted in the association of a plot and a machinery so very wild with feelings so sober and tender: but he gave the poem high commendation, admired the art displayed in the employment of the Hindu monstrosities, and begged us to observe the noble feeling excited of the superiority of virtue over vice; that Kehama went on, from the beginning to the end of the poem, increasing in power, whilst Kailyal gradually lost her hopes and her protectors; and yet by the time we got to the end, we had arrived at an utter contempt and even carelessness of the power of evil, as exemplified in the almighty Rajah, and felt a complete confidence in the safety of the unprotected virtue of the maiden. This he thought the very great merit of the poem.

"When we walked home with him to the inn, he got on the subject of the English Essay for the year at Oxford, and thought some consideration of the corruption of language should he introduced into it.

[Footnote: On Etymology.] It originated, he thought, in a desire to abbreviate all expression as much as possible; and no doubt, if in one word, without violating idiom, I can express what others have done in more, and yet be as fully and easily understood, I have manifestly made an improvement; but if, on the other hand, it becomes harder, and takes more time to comprehend a thought or image put in one word by Apuleius than when expressed in a whole sentence by Cicero, the saving is merely of pen and ink, and the alteration is evidently a corruption."

_"April_ 21.--Richmond._

"Before breakfast we went into Mr. May's delightful book-room, where he was again silent in admiration of the prospect. After breakfast, we walked to church. He seemed full of calm piety, and said he always felt the most delightful sensations in a Sunday church-yard,--that it struck him as if God had given to man fifty-two springs in every year. After the service, he was vehement against the sermon, as common-place, and invidious in its tone towards the poor. Then he gave many texts from the lessons and gospel of the day, as affording fit subjects for discourses. He ridiculed the absurdity of refusing to believe every thing that you could not understand; and mentioned a rebuke of Dr. Parr's to a man of the name of Frith, and that of another clergyman to a young man, who said he would believe nothing which he could not understand:--'Then, young man, your creed will be the shortest of any man's I know.'

"As we walked up Mr. Cambridge's meadows towards Twickenham, he criticised Johnson and Gray as poets, and did not seem to allow them high merit. The excellence of verse, he said, was to be untranslatable into any other words without detriment to the beauty of the passage;--the position of a single word could not be altered in Milton without injury. Gray's personifications, he said, were mere printer's devils' personifications-- persons with a capital letter, abstract qualities with a small one. He thought Collins had more genius than Gray, who was a singular instance of a man of taste, poetic feeling, and fancy, without imagination. He contrasted Dryden's opening of the 10th satire of Juvenal with Johnson's:--

"'Let observation, with extensive view, Survey mankind from Ganges to Peru.'

which was as much as to say,--

"'Let observation with extensive observation observe mankind.'

"After dinner he told us a humorous story of his enthusiastic fondness for Quakerism, when he was at Cambridge, and his attending one of their meetings, which had entirely cured him. When the little children came in, he was in raptures with them, and descanted upon the delightful mode of treating them now, in comparison with what he had experienced in childhood. He lamented the haughtiness with which Englishmen treated all foreigners abroad, and the facility with which our government had always given up any people which had allied itself to us, at the end of a war; and he particularly remarked upon our abandonment of Minorca. These two things, he said, made us universally disliked on the Continent; though, as a people, most highly respected. He thought a war with America inevitable; and expressed his opinion, that the United States were unfortunate in the prematureness of their separation from this country, before they had in themselves the materials of moral society--before they had a gentry and a learned class,--the former looking backwards, and giving the sense of stability--the latter looking forwards, and regulating the feelings of the people.

"Afterwards, in the drawing-room, he sat down by Professor Rigaud, with whom he entered into a discussion of Kant's System of Metaphysics. The little knots of the company were speedily silent: Mr. C.'s voice grew louder; and abstruse as the subject was, yet his language was so ready, so energetic, and so eloquent, and his illustrations so very neat and apposite, that the ladies even paid him the most solicitous and respectful attention. They were really entertained with Kant's Metaphysics! At last I took one of them, a very sweet singer, to the piano-forte; and, when there was a pause, she began an Italian air. She was anxious to please him, and he was enraptured. His frame quivered with emotion, and there was a titter of uncommon delight on his countenance. When it was over, he praised the singer warmly, and prayed she might finish those strains in heaven!

"This is nearly all, except some anecdotes, which I recollect of our meeting with this most interesting, most wonderful man. Some of his topics and arguments I have enumerated; but the connection and the words are lost. And nothing that I can say can give any notion of his eloquence and manner,--of the hold which he soon got on his audience--of the variety of his stores of information--or, finally, of the artlessness of his habits, or the modesty and temper with which he listened to, and answered arguments, contradictory to his own."--J. T. C.

The following address has been printed before; but it cannot be too widely circulated, and it will form an appropriate conclusion to this volume.

_To Adam Steinmetz K----._

MY DEAR GODCHILD,

I offer up the same fervent prayer for you now, as I did kneeling before the altar, when you were baptized into Christ, and solemnly received as a living member of his spiritual body, the Church.

Years must pass before you will be able to read, with an understanding heart, what I now write. But I trust that the all-gracious God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Mercies, who, by his only-begotten Son, (all mercies in one sovereign mercy!) has redeemed you from the evil ground, and willed you to be born out of darkness, but into light--out of death, but into life--out of sin, but into righteousness, even into the Lord our Righteousness; I trust that He will graciously hear the prayers of your dear parents, and be with you as the spirit of health and growth in body and mind!

My dear Godchild!--You received from Christ's minister at the baptismal font, as your Christian name, the name of a most dear friend of your father's, and who was to me even as a son, the late Adam Steinmetz, whose fervent aspiration, and ever-paramount aim, even from early youth, was to be a Christian in thought, word, and deed--in will, mind, and affections.

I too, your Godfather, have known what the enjoyments and advantages of this life are, and what the more refined pleasures which learning and intellectual power can bestow; and with all the experience that more than threescore years can give, I now, on the eve of my departure, declare to you, (and earnestly pray that you may hereafter live and act on the conviction,) that health is a great blessing,--competence obtained by honourable industry a great blessing,--and a great blessing it is to have kind, faithful, and loving friends and relatives; but that the greatest of all blessings, as it is the most ennobling of all privileges, is to be indeed a Christian. But I have been likewise, through a large portion of my later life, a sufferer, sorely afflicted with bodily pains, languors, and manifold infirmities; and, for the last three or four years, have, with few and brief intervals, been confined to a sick-room, and, at this moment, in great weakness and heaviness, write from a sick-bed, hopeless of a recovery, yet without prospect of a speedy removal; and I, thus on the very brink of the grave, solemnly bear witness to you, that the Almighty Redeemer, most gracious in his promises to them that truly seek him, is faithful to perform what he hath promised, and has preserved, under all my pains and infirmities, the inward peace that passeth all understanding, with the supporting assurance of a reconciled God, who will not withdraw his spirit from me in the conflict, and in his own time will deliver me from the Evil One!

O, my dear Godchild! eminently blessed are those who begin early to seek, fear, and love their God, trusting wholly in the righteousness and mediation of their Lord, Redeemer, Saviour, and everlasting High Priest, Jesus Christ!

O preserve this as a legacy and bequest from your unseen Godfather and friend,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

_Grove, Highgate, July_ 13. 1834.

He died on the 25th day of the same month.

INDEX.

* * * * *

A.

Abraham. Abuse, Eloquence of. Acoustics. Acts, Origin of. Adiaphori. Advocate, Duties and Needs of an. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Alchemy. All and the Whole. America, United States of. American Union, Northern and Southern States of the. Americans, the. Anarchy, Mental. Ancient Mariner. Animal Being, Scale of. Ant and Bee. Architecture, Gothic. Ariosto and Tasso. Aristotle. Army and Navy, House of Commons appointing the Officers of the. Article, Ninth. Asgill. -----and Defoe. Astrology. Atheist. Autumn Day.

B.

Bacon. Ball, Sir Alexander. Baptismal Service. Barrow and Dryden. _Bartram's Travels_. Baxter. Beaumont and Fletcher. ----'s Dramas. Beauty. Behmen, Jacob. Bentley. Berkeley. Bertram, Character of. Bestial Theory. Bible, Study of the. ----, Version of the. Biblical Commentators. Biographia Literaria. Bitters and Tonics. Black. Black, Colonel. Blumenbach and Kant's Races. Books of Moses, Genuineness of. Boswell. Bourrienne. Bowyer. British Schoolmen. Brooke, Lord. Brown and Darwin. Bull and Waterland. Burke. Burnet. Buonaparte. Byron, Lord. ----and H. Walpole's "Mysterious Mother." ----, his Versification, and Don Juan.

C.

Caesarean Operation. Cambridge Petition to admit Dissenters. Canning. Capital. Catholicity. Cavalier Slang. Character, Differences of. Charles I. Chaucer. Children, Gracefulness of, Chillingworth, Christ, Divinity of, Christ's Hospital, Christian Sabbath, Christianity, ----, Scope of, Church, ----, High Prizes and Revenues of the, ----, National, ----of England, ----of Rome, Churchmen, Church Singing, Citizens and Christians, Claudian, Clergy, Celibacy of the, Coleridge's (Mr.) System, Colonization, Colours, ----, Non-perception of, Commons, House of, ----, the Reformed House of, Compounds, Latin, Consolation in Distress, Constantine, Constitution, English, Corn Laws, Coronation Oaths, Crabbe and Southey, Cramp, Charm for, Craniology, Crisis,

D.

Dancing, English and Greek, Daniel, Davy, Sir H., Democracy, ----, with Slavery, Devotional Spirit, De vi Minimorum, Dictation and Inspiration, Diction of the Old and New Testament Version, Diplomatists, modern, Disfranchisement, Dissenters, Diversions of Purley, Divines, old, Divinity, Dobrizhoffer, Dog, Don Quixote, Douw's (Gerard) "Schoolmaster," and Titian's "Venus," Dramatists, the Old, Drayton and Daniel, Dreams, ----and Ghosts, Difference between Stories of, Dryden, ----and Pope, Dual, Neuter plural, and Verb singular,

E.

Education, Egyptian Antiquaries, Eldon's (Lord) Doctrine as to Grammar Schools, Electricity, Elegy, Energy of Man and other Animals, England, ----and Holland, English and German, Envy, Epidemic Disease, Epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians, ----to the Hebrews, ----to the Romans, Erasmus, Etymology of the final _Ive_, Eucharist, the, Euripides, Euthanasia, Evangelicals, Mock,

F.

Faith, ----, Articles of, ----and Belief Fantasy and Imagination, Fatalism and Providence, Fathers, the, Faust, Fees, Barristers' and Physicians', Fielding and Richardson, Fine Arts, Patronage of the, Flaccus, Valerius, Flogging, Food, Fox and Pitt, French, the, ----Gendarmerie, ----Hereditary Peerage, Abolition of the,

G.

Galileo, Newton, Kepler, Bacon, Galvanism, Gas, Hydro-carbonic, Gender of the Sun in German, Genius, Genius, Criterion of. ----, Feminine. ----, Metaphysical. ----of the Spanish and Italians. German. ----Blank Verse. ----and English. Ghosts, Gibbon, Gifford's Massier, Giotto, Gnosis, God, Proof of Existence of, ----'s Providence, Goethe, Good and the True, the, Government, Grammar, Gray and Cotton Great Minds androgynous, ----Poets, good Men, Greek, ----, Italian, and English, pure Ages of, ----Accent and Quantity, ----Drama, ----Particles, Grey, Earl,

H.

Hacket's Life of Archbishop Williams, Hahnemann, Hall, Captain B., ----and the Americans, Hamlet, Hampden's Speech, Harmony, Heat, Hebrew, Hermesianax, Herodotus, Hesiod, Hieronimo, History, ----, Jewish, Hobbism, Holland and Belgium, ----and the Dutch, Homer, Homeric Heroes in Shakspeare, Hooker, Hooker and Bull, Horner, Humour and Genius, Hypothesis, Hysteria,

I.

Iapetic and Semitic, Ideal Tory and Whig, Ideal Truths, Reverence for, Ideas, Imitation and Copy, Incarnation, Inherited Disease, Insects, Interest, Monied, Investigation, Methods of, Ireland, Union with, Irish Church, Iron, Irving, Isaac, Italy, Roman Conquest of,

J.

Jacob, Jacobins, James I, Jerusalem, Destruction of, Jews, ----, Conversion of the, ----, Division of the Scripture, ----, in Poland, Job, Book of, Johnson, Dr., ----, his Political Pamphlets, ----, the Whig, Jonson, Ben, Junius, Juries,

K.

Kant's Attempt, Kant's Races of Mankind, Kean, Keats, Keenness and Subtlety, Kemble, John, Kepler, Knowledge, Kotzebue,

L.

Lakes, Scotch and English, Lamb, C., Land and Money, Landholders, Duty of, Landor's (W. S.) Poetry, Laud, Laughter, Farce and Tragedy, Lavacrum Pallados, Legislation, Iniquitous, Leo X., Lewis's Jamaica Journal, Life, Constitutional and Functional, Liturgy, English, Logic, ----, Character of the Age for, Logic of Ideas and of Syllogisms. Logos, the. "Lord, the," in the English Version of the Psalms. Love. ----and Friendship opposed. Love's Labour Lost. Lucan. Luther. Lyell's Geology.

M.

Machinery. Mackintosh, Sir James. Madness. Magnetism. Malta. Man cannot be stationary. ----Fall of. ----'s Freedom. Mandeville's Fable of the Bees. Manners under Edward III., Richard II., and Henry VIII. Marriage. ----Parental Control in. ----of Cousins. Martin. Mason's Poetry. Massier. Materialism. Mathews. Measure for Measure. Medicine. Medicines, Specific. Men. Messenger of the Covenant. Messiah. Metre, Modern. Miguel, Dom, and Dom Pedro. Milesian Tales. Milton. ----and Sydney. ----'s disregard of Painting. ----'s Egotism. ----'s Latin Poems. Ministers and the Reform Bill. Monarchy or Democracy, Prospect of. Monro, Sir T. Mosaic Miracles. ----Prophecies. Motives and Impulses. Music. ----, Ear and Taste for, different. Musical Glasses, some Men like.

N.

Napier. National Colonial Character and Naval Discipline. ----Debt. Nations, Characteristic Temperament of. Negro Emancipation. Nervous Weakness. New Testament Canon. Newton. Nitrous Oxide. Nominalists and Realists. Northern and Southern States. Norwegians.

O.

Oath, Coronation. Oaths. Obstruction. Origen. Othello, Character of.

P.

Painting. Pantheism. ----and Idolatry. Papacy. ----, the, and the Reformation. ----and the Schoolmen. Paradise Lost. Park, Professor. Parliamentary Privilege. Party Spirit. Penal Code in Ireland. Penn, Granville, and the Deluge. Pentameter, Greek and Latin. Permanency and Progression of Nations. Persius. Persons and Things. Peter Simple, and Tom Cringle's Log. Phantom Portrait. Philanthropists. Philosopher's ordinary Language. Philosophy, Greek. ----, Moral. ----, Mr. Coleridge's System of. ----of young Men of the present Day. Pictures. Pilgrim's Progress. Pirates. Plants. Plato. ----and Xenophon. Plotinus. Poem, Epic. Poetic Promise. Poetical Filter. Poetry. ----, Persian and Arabic. Poison. Polarity, Moral Law of. Political Action, the two Modes of. Political Economy, Modern. Polonius. Poor Laws. Popedom. Prayer. Preaching extempore. Presbyterians, Independents, and Bishops. Principle, Greatest Happiness. Principles and Facts. ----and Maxims. Professions and Trades. Propertius. Property Tax. Prophecies of the Old Testament. Prophecy. Prose and Poetry. ----and Verse. Prudentius. Psalms, Translation of the. Puritans and Cavaliers. ----and Jacobins.

Q.

Quacks. Quakerism, Modern. Quakers. Quarantine.

R.

Rabelais. ----and Luther. Raffles, Sir S. Rainbow. Reason and Understanding. Reasoner, a. Redemption. Reform of the House of Commons. ----Bill. ----, Conduct of Ministers on the. Reformation. ----, English. Religion. Religion gentilizes. ----of the Greeks. -----, Roman Catholic. -----, Romish Representation, Popular. ----, Direct. Restoration. Review, Principles of a. Revolution. ----, Belgian. ----, French. ----, Intellectual. Rhenferd. Roman Conquest. ----Empire. Key to the Decline of the. ----Mind. ----Catholics. ----Catholic Emancipation. Rosetti on Dante.

S.

Sallust. Sandford, Bishop. Sanskrit. Sarpi, Paul. Scanderbeg. Scarlett, Sir J. Schemes, Spinozistic and Hebrew. Schiller. ----'s Robbers. ----'s Versification. Schmidt. Schools, Infant. ----, Public. Scotch and English. ----Kirk and Irving. ----Novels. Scott, Michael. ----and Coleridge. ----'s Novels. Sectarianism. Seneca. Shakspeare. ----, _in Minimis_. ----'s Intellectual Action. ----'s Sonnets. Sicily. Sidney, Sir P. Sin and Sins. Smith, Robert. Society, best State of. Socinianism. Socrates. Solomon. Sophocles. Southey. ----'s Life of Bunyan. Speech, Parts of. Spenser. Spinosa. Spurzheim. Spurzheim and Craniology. St. John. ----'s Gospel. ----, Chap. xix. Ver. 11. ----, Chap. iii. Ver. 4. St. Paul's Melita. State. ----, a. ----, Idea of a. Statesmen. Statius. Steinmetz. Stella. Sterne. Style. ----, Algernon Sydney's. ----, Modern. Sublime and Nonsense. Sublimity. Suffiction. Superstition of Maltese, Sicilians, and Italians. Swift. Sympathy of old Greek and Latin with English, 168.

T.

Talent and Genius. Talented. Taxation. Taylor, Jeremy. Tennyson's Poems. Tertullian. Thelwall. Theory. Theta. Things are finding their Level. Thomas à Becket. Thucydides. ----and Tacitus. Tibullus. Times of Charles I. Toleration. Tooke, Horne. Travels, Modern. Trinity, the. Truths and Maxims.

U.

Understanding, the. Undine. Unitarianism. Universal Suffrage. Universities.

V.

Valcknaer. Varro. Vico. Virgil. Virtue and Liberty. Von Humboldt, Baron. Vote, Right of Women to. Vowels and Consonants. Vox Populi, Vox Dei.

W.

Walkerite Creed. War. ----, Civil, of the Seventeenth Century. Wedded Love in Shakspeare and his contemporary Dramatists. Wellington, Duke of. Wetherell's (Sir Charles) Speech. Whigs, Conduct of the. Wicliffe. Wilkins, Peter, and Stothard. William III. Wilson. Wit and Madness. Witch of Endor. Women, Characterlessness of. ----, Old. ----and Men. Words and Names of Things. Wordsworth. Works, Chronological Arrangement of. Working to better one's condition. Worlds, Plurality of.

Z.

Zendavesta.

THE END.