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perating national quarrels. Like most political visionaries, he either did not or would not see his own changes of opinion. In the long passages of self-justification which occur in so many of his works, he always treats his opponents as unable to comprehend or estimate his character; and never for a moment allows that his own versatility may have exposed him to such misunderstanding. In the Friend,' written at a period when he breathed fire and vengeance against all political reformers whatever, he reprints with much complacency, in order to prove his own consistency, one of his Jacobin lectures delivered at Bristol; in which the audience are addressed as sufficiently possessed of natural sense 'to despise the Priest, and of natural feeling, to hate the OppresIn fact, he had through life no real party connexion. Conservative and Anglican' as he was in his latter days, he seemed to find more agreeable nourishment in the works of the old Commonwealth's men-of Milton, Sydney, and Harrington—than in those of any other class of political writers. And, consistently with his own eccentric turn of mind, he attached himself most exclusively to whatever was impracticable and visionary in their speculations. He loved the high aristocratic principle which they had undertaken the fruitless task of marrying with democratic institutions. Like theirs, his reasonings were of too refined and metaphysical a nature to suit the comprehension of the multitude. But they deceived themselves in imagining that the multitude might, at least in practice, be brought to understand them; he, whom the experience of two additional centuries had only imbued with fear and distrust, held, that the multitude must be wholly excluded-not admitted, even as proselytes of the gate, to the mysteries of government. He altogether denied democracy as an active principle of the British Constitution; and had brought himself to the conclusion that the only true Commonwealth was one which experience warrants us in pronouncing impossible;-one where the people are wholly excluded from all active share in the management of their own interests, and yet exercise such influence from without as to cause those interests to be uniformly respected.

It has never yet been seen,' he says, or clearly announced, that democracy, as such, is no proper element in the constitution of a state. The idea of a state is undoubtedly a government in Tŵy άgory; an aristocracy. Democracy is the healthful life-blood which circulates through the veins and arteries, which supports the system, but which ought never to appear externally, and as the mere blood itself. A state, in idea, is the opposite of a church. A state regards classes, and not individuals and it estimates classes, not by internal merit, but external accidents, as property, birth, &c. But a church does the reverse of all

this; disregards all external accidents, and looks at men as individual persons, allowing no gradations of ranks, but such as greater or less wisdom, holiness, and learning ought to confer. A church is, therefore, in idea, the only pure democracy. The church, so considered, and the state exclusively of the church, constitute together the idea of a state in its largest sense.'-(Vol. I. p. 200.)

As he reverenced the church far more as a spiritual mother than a political ally, and neither possessed nor affected any of the historical feeling of loyalty towards kings and hereditary monarchy (see Vol. I. p. 198), so on this score also these old republicans gave him little or no offence.

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Yet, at the same time, being philosophically a strict and stern theorist in politics, and practically desirous of the success of a party in the empire, and exceedingly subject to that nervous fear of change which distorts the principles of the wisest men (in 'politics,' says he, in one of his happiest aphorisms, what begins in fear usually ends in folly'), he was led by his opposite tendencies into contradictions, which are obvious enough in the work before us, and still more so when it is compared with former works of his own. For example, there is no principle more eloquently inculcated throughout his writings than the absolute sanctity of Truth, in political as well as individual morality. No favourite system, in his view, ought to be maintained, no defects palliated, by falsehood.

There is the love of the good for the good's sake, and the love of the truth for the truth's sake. I have known many, especially women, love the good for the good's sake; but very few indeed, and scarcely one woman, love the truth for the truth's sake. To see clearly that the love of the good and the true is ultimately identical, is given only to those who love both sincerely, and without any foreign ends.'-Vol. I. p. 247.*

Yet the practical application of this high principle fails him, as soon as it is brought in collision with his reluctance to alter old institutions. Those who have confessed and exposed the admit

There are sundry odd sayings in these volumes respecting love and women, which seem dictated half by gallantry and half by masculine contemptuousness. The following is more profound. The desire of the

man is for the woman; but the desire of the woman is rarely other than for the desire of the man.' But it is not Coleridge's. It is far better expressed by Swift; and he, again, says he had it from some lady of quality and intrigue, we forget who. Such women are, after all, the best judges of human nature.

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Swift himself is characterised by Coleridge as anima Rabelaisii habitans in sicco,' the soul of Rabelais inhabiting in a dry place.

ted abuses of the constitution to the people, are accused of beckoninglike Ham the accursed, with grinning faces, to a vulgar mob, to come and exult over the nakedness of a parent.'-(Vol. II. p. 11.) The unequivocal falsehoods and perversions of the old system of representation are gently termed accommodations, 'which the necessity of the case had worked out.' So again in the case of the Irish Church. We have said already, that no man was more fully aware of the monstrous practical fallacy of assuming that revenues destined, in the idea of government, for affording the people such moral or physical means of improvement as they cannot procure themselves, are so employed, when spent on the maintenance of an establishment political, not spiritual, among a population of strangers to its doctrines. Yet who ever inveighed with more vehement reprobation against those who have the boldness to propose a remedy, while at the same time he refuted those who deny the defect?

Dislike, moreover, towards the governing party in the British Empire (beginning with the advent of Mr Canning to power) seems to have produced in Coleridge somewhat of that querulous discontent with Government itself that proneness to flatter the poor in their prejudices against law and the constitution of society, which are so frequently discoverable in disappointed and gloomy politicians. There are passages in these volumes so inconsistent with the manlier and better views becoming an elevated mind, so commonplace, moreover, so trivially false in morality, that we can only account them casual blotches, produced by an overflowing of political acrimony in the system. Take for instance the following passage on smuggling:

That legislation is iniquitous, which sets law in conflict with the common and unsophisticated feelings of our nature. If I were a clergyman in a smuggling town, I would not preach against smuggling. I would not be made a sort of clerical revenue officer. Let the Government which by absurd duties fosters smuggling, prevent it itself, if it can. How could I show my hearers the immorality of going twenty miles in a boat and honestly buying with their money a keg of brandy, except by a long deduction which they could not understand? were I in a place where wrecking went on, see if I would preach on any thing else!'-Vol. I. p. 192.

But

All duties are equally absurd in the eyes of the smuggler. It would be a singular rule of morality, which should make right or wrong depend on the correctness in political economy of the violated law. All taxation, all Government set law in conflict 'with the unsophisticated feelings of our nature.' He who resists the payment of direct taxes is not a whit the less the

object of mistaken popular sympathy, than he who evades the payment of those which are indirect. Yet the first step in such resistance leads in one direction to rebellion, in another to murder. And what has religion done, but add her stern and uncompromising sanction to the holiness of law, independent of the moral nature of its precepts? The preacher who enforces individual purity and private honesty has an easy task: all will commend his advice, whether they follow it or no. Far more difficult is the duty of persuading men to abandon malpractices, which they justify by a convenient sophistry. It should be the great object of all, in whatever capacity, with whom the instruction of the people rests, to enforce the duty of subordination, not to their own wild principles of right and wrong, but to the essential Truth and Necessity which hold society together. They should show how infinitely the poor are indebted as well as the rich, whatever their flatterers may tell them, to the laws which alone prevent the cultivated earth from reassuming the garb of the wilderness; and should endeavour, as far as possible, to extinguish that false morality, which in this country renders all, from the highest to the lowest, as careless of their positive duty to the state, as they are scrupulous in their private dealings with each other. Compare the feeble and sickly sophistry of our last extract, with the inspiration of Mr Coleridge's own better genius, in one of the most striking passages in our language.

Who dares struggle with an invisible combatant? with an enemy that exists, and makes us know its existence; but where it is, we ask in vain? No space contains it; time promises no control over it; it has no ears for my threats; it has no substance that my hands can grasp, or my weapons find vulnerable: it commands, and cannot be commanded; it acts, and is unsusceptible of any reaction; the more I strive to subdue it, the more am I compelled to think of it; and the more I think of it the more do I find it to possess a reality out of myself, and not to be a phantom of my own imagination; that all but the most abandoned men acknowledge its authority, and that the whole strength and majesty of my country are pledged to support it; and yet that for me its power is the same with that of my own permanent self, and that all the choice which is permitted to me, consists in having it for my guardian angel, or my avenging fiend! This is the spirit of law.' (The Friend, Vol. I. p. 295.)

But all who are conversant with the writings of this distinguished individual, and still more those who have personally known him, and admired the meek and charitable spirit which usually guided his judgment on men's motives and actions ;-all these, whether or no they partake in his political sympathies and aversions, will acknowledge, that no one ever entered that arena

of exciting discussion with less malicious intentions, or left it with a more unruffled temper. All his readers will remember the apologetic preface' to the well-known ode, Fire, Famine and Slaughter, in which, although we may smile at the poet's eagerness to justify himself from his former sins, in the eyes of his new associates, we recognise a sound and finely drawn distinction between the violent figurative language of a hearty disputant, and the cool, quiet malignity of a real enemy. And, as the 6 letters four which formed the name' of Pitt seemed to his youthful eyes the symbols of all that deserved abhorrence, so in later times one or two other individuals of celebrity appeared to be constantly present to his imagination as the root of all the evils, physical and moral, of the present generation; yet in speaking of them he never overstepped the delicate line between public hostility and personal abuse. He does himself great injustice in one unmeaning saying, unworthily recorded in these volumes. If an inscription be put upon my tomb, it may be that I was 6 an enthusiastic lover of the church; and as enthusiastic a hater ' of those who have betrayed it, be they who they may!' Impersonations, not men, were the ideal objects of his enmity. He was easily led by impulse or prejudice; but most inaccessible to violent emotions of any kind, and especially of the malignant class;-partly from goodness of heart, partly from dreamy indolence of disposition. A long and attentive observation,' he says, in the introduction to one of his lay sermons, has convinced me that formerly men were worse than their principles; but that at present the principles are worse than the men.' Whether the aphorism be true or not, it strongly illustrates the author's real views of the political and social world.

A thinker, whose tastes and feelings were so much coloured by his extensive acquaintance with the wits and divines of former days who regarded the present as an age of sciolists and experimentalists-could not be expected to pronounce very favourable judgments on the writers, orators, or statesmen of his own times. We have not found much valuable remark under this head, or, indeed, much of any kind, beyond slight and contemptuous notices of his principal contemporaries. If the world in some degree neglected the philosopher, he repaid its inattention by a very general scorn of the world and its opinion. He lived so much in the atmosphere of his own peculiar ideas, that we do not suppose there ever was a literary man of equal notoriety who was, in unfeigned truth, less solicitous of popularity. It chafed and harassed his natural indolence of disposition to exert himself in any way to obtain applause; and applause thus became at last a matter of indifference. Many of his criticisms on others appear to