slow to utter-of Coleridge's vast intellectual power; declaring him to have been, in his judgment, "the largest and most spacious intellect, the subtlest and the most comprehensive, that has yet existed amongst men." This, to be sure, is enough. Coleridge's most devout disciple could not wish for more. After such an opening, he would expect that the rest of the article would be of a piece with it; that Coleridge's claims to this high praise would be duly set forth and established; and that a writer, who has often shewn such acuteness and discernment in speaking of inferior men, would on this occasion rise above himself—that the very grandeur of his subject would lift him up. Has it done so? We have heard of an eagle bearing a tortoise up aloft, that it may be the surer of dashing it to pieces; and this is an example which men too, when they have wished to destroy a great reputation, have not seldom had the craft to follow. We have read of "a jewel of gold in a swine's snout;" and we are now and then reminded of this image, when we see an invective tipped with a flaming eulogium.

The Opium-eater's essay on Coleridge, in the September Number of "Tait's Magazine," has been continued in the October and November Numbers, and the conclusion is still to come. May it be totally different in tone and spirit from the parts which have hitherto appeared! Never before did an able man, in speaking of a great man, who had been his friend, betray less of friendship. "For it is not an open enemy that has done him this dishonour; for then we could have borne it." In no part of the three articles now before us is there any trace of that reverence which is due to God's noblest gifts, when employed upon the worthiest objects. In no part of them do we see any mark of that affectionate love which Coleridge won from all about him, even from such as could least appreciate his genius. As to the solemn feelings which are wont to rise from the grave even of the meanest, when dust is let down to dust, the writer must needs have cast them behind him, if indeed he has ever heard that there are such. Nay, after reading all he has said, one might be left in doubt whether he had even heard of Coleridge's death; except that, had Coleridge been alive, he would not have dared thus to prate and chatter about him. As yet he has made no attempt to portray Coleridge, or to give an estimate of him, either as a poet or as a philosopher, either as he was in himself, or as he stands before the world in the fragmentary image of his works-an image in which the Opium-eater's intimate acquaintance with him might have enabled him to supply many of the finer features. It may be that this is reserved for the conclusion. I heartily hope it is; though the character of the three articles already published does not encourage such an expectation. These are doubly offensive; both negatively, from the absence of all right and seasonable feeling; and positively, from the nature of the materials of which they are made up. No one, who was not aware of the Opium-eater's voracity for what he has called anecdotage, would conceive it possible that, with such a subject as Coleridge, and at the very moment when his mortal had just put on immortality, and death was thus drawing away our thoughts from that which was perishable in him to that which was undying, he, himself a lover of poetry, himself a metaphysician, should have scribbled three articles, one after another, with Coleridge's name at the head of them, and should have stuffed them mainly with wretched petty anecdotes, of no importance or interest to any thing above tea-table curiosity, Nor are these impertinences strung together solely with reference to the great philosopher himself. His venerable name serves as a pretext for scraping up rubbish of the same sort about such other persons as happen to be mentioned; and we find, as might well be expected, that a writer who has stripped himself naked before the eyes of the world, and made such a parade of his infirmities in his Confessions, has no very nice discernment as to what is fit for the public ear or not. Even women, as well as men, fall under the lash of his loquacity. Poor Mary of Buttermere has to pay for her hapless celebrity, by becoming the subject of a story charging her with a brutish

want of feeling, a story which, at the very time he is repeating it, the writer expresses his hope may be exaggerated. Why on earth then does he repeat it? In order that Mary of Buttermere may have an opportunity of contradicting it? Is it so very material to the well-being of mankind, that no illnatured tale should sink into oblivion?

About Mrs. Coleridge there is a long passage, in which domestic trifles are detailed, such as a discarded chambermaid would be thought worse of for telling. All that was necessary on this subject might have been said discreetly in a couple of sentences, without a wound to any feeling that we are bound to respect, and without any pandering to the baneful lust of prying into the privacies of family life. What makes this passage still worse, is the apology offered for it. Without that apology, it might have been supposed that the writer said what he said from deeming it requisite for Coleridge's vindication. But personal animosity mixes up with his motives. "An insult," he tells us, "once offered by Mrs. Coleridge to a female relative of his, as much superior to Mrs. Coleridge in the spirit of courtesy and kindness which ought to preside in the intercourse between females, as she was in the splendour of her beauty, would have given me a dispensation from all terms of consideration beyond the restraints of strict justice." Pity that this female relative did not inoculate her male relative with some portion of that spirit of courtesy and kindness which ought to preside in the intercourse with females ! Had she done so, it is possible he might not have given vent to his spleen, by telling any woman in print, that another woman is far superior to her both in courtesy and in the splendour of her beauty. For what other purpose can such an assertion be meant to answer, except that very manly and courteous one of mortifying Mrs. Coleridge? Surely it cannot be designed for the edification or the instruction of the readers of Tait's Magazine. They do not even know the name of this lady, who is so much handsomer than Mrs. Coleridge; nor, if they did, would the information profit them much. This female relative might also have taught her male relative, that, even though a lady of our acquaintance should, once in a way, betray an infirmity of temper in her intercourse with some member of our family, she is not thereby outlawed all at once from the humanities of social life; nor do we thereby forthwith acquire the right of spreading out the whole story of her life on the table of the public press, and trumpeting all her foibles in the ears of every scandalmonger in the island. Another lesson too might have been given, and perhaps not without advantage, namely, that, when an offence of this sort is of many, probably of some twenty years standing, the raking it forth is not an infallible mark of a sweet and placable disposition.

Again, opinions expressed in conversation by Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Southey are brought forward, no way discreditable to either indeed, but which would seem to have been repeated with no other view than that of disturbing the harmony of their friendship; and which the writer would no more have been allowed to hear, had he been esteemed capable of seasoning an article in a magazine with them, than he would have been allowed to exhibit those illustrious men, along with their wives and children, at Bartholomew Fair. We are told what Mr. Wordsworth thought of Mr. Southey twenty years ago, and what Mr. Southey said of Mr. Wordsworth in August 1812. We are told that "up to 1815 they viewed each other with mutual dislike, almost with mutual disgust." The word will do. Both of them can feel it both those pure-souled men recoil with instinctive disgust from every violation of the sanctuary of private life; and both most assuredly have felt disgust, or will feel it, even to loathing, if the articles which have called forth these remarks ever come under their eyes. I can well imagine the indignation with which Wordsworth would view them. As to the Opium-eater's statement, the reader will soon be better able to judge how much credit is due to an assertion which has nothing beyond his word to rest on. In the present instance, one may feel sure that he misrepresents the truth, at least by omission, VOL. VII.-Jan. 1835.

D

if not by actual exaggeration. Everybody knows that, in speaking of others to those who are acquainted with and concur in our general opinion of them, expressions of partial disapprobation will often drop, which may be quite consistent with the sincerest admiration and esteem. No one who does not deem himself, not merely faultless, but so manifestly and indisputably so, that his faultlessness cannot even be called in question by others, would look for the contrary. Yet, if a person to whom we have spoken of a friend in this way, with a certain degree of qualification, goes to that friend, and tells him of the evil we may have said of him, suppressing all the rest,-why, Fielding has shewn us the regard and respect which a Blifil is entitled to. And is such a betrayal of confidence much mended, when the public is called in to witness in what an ungentle spirit one friend may blame another?

These are incidental offences. The main one, that which disfigures the whole of the three articles, is the unworthy, degrading representation given in them of Coleridge himself. Not indeed of his intellect; that is spoken of several times in the same strain of admiration as in the first sentence. For intellect-many kinds of it, at least-the Opium-eater knows how to appreciate and admire; though nothing seems so to sharpen and embitter his animosity, especially when he is stung by the consciousness of owing anything to its possessor; witness his attack on Kant, in p. 515. Yet, even toward Coleridge's intellect his admiration is rather for an antenatal state of it, and he seldom talks of it but as “a wreck,” as "dark," "extinct,” “burnt out." The aim, however, which he has set himself in these articles, is not to delineate Coleridge's intellect, or his character, or to mark out the place he fills in the map of the human mind, or to determine the value of his labours in untwisting the gordian knot of thought, or to lead us to those spots in the dark forest of nature on which he has shed the sunshine of truth, or even to ascertain the influence which his writings, full of seeds as they are, have exercised, and are likely to exercise, on his countrymen-an influence which, though in the first instance it may have been felt by few, is not therefore slight or powerless, inasmuch as among those few there is no small portion of such as are designed to be the teachers and enlighteners of their brethren. These are subjects which well deserved the Opium eater's best pen; but he has turned away from them to ransack the Monmouth-street of his memory for all the tattered tinsel he could pick up there-black patches and white, red patches and grey-which he has stitched together and furbished up as he best could; never scrupling to draw from his invention, when he wanted gall to dye a piece with. Among the anecdotes related of Coleridge there are very few, of which the tendency is not to lower him in some way or other, to impair his claims to respect, to display his weaknesses, his failings, his distresses. The very first thing we are told about him, even before he comes on the stage-the theme of two long, almost folio, pages, immediately after the first paragraph, which is principally taken up with a picture of the writer's own mild and amiable temper-is, that he was not very regardful of truth, and often guilty of plagiarism. Be it so suppose that all the Opium-eater says on this head is strictly, accurately true: grant that in a just and complete estimate of Coleridge's character it was necessary and fitting that all his sins, down to the minutest peccadillo, should be diligently scored up-that no ephemeron should be let die, without being pinned and ticketed in the cabinet of history for the instruction of after ages: was it necessary and fitting that these matters should be thus stuck in the van, as if they were the most prominent things about him, the things that rise uppermost in the minds of all who knew him the moment his name is mentioned? Would it be a fair account of Cicero, that he was a wonderfully great orator, that he had a vetch on his nose-an anecdote which, for its truth and importance, is well worthy of a place in the Opium-eater's budget, and which no doubt is now lying treasured up there, and will probably be pulled out of it before long-and that he behaved with great weakness in the affair of his friend

Milo? Would a man, in speaking of Bacon, begin by setting forth his love of money, and all the evils it led him into? Would a generous and right-minded man do so at any time? Would a man, whose heart was not cankered by vanity, or some other reckless passion, do it before the sound of his knell had died away? Verily, at such a time, it well behoves the person, who calls himself the foremost of Coleridge's admirers,' to step forward in the face of the world, and play the part of the advocatus diaboli. For, unless he had done so, no one would: Coleridge's enemies, if he had any, could not: they were awed into silence.

I have been speaking on the supposition that the charges of plagiarism and insincerity brought by the Opium-eater against Coleridge are strictly, accurately true that Coleridge is guilty to the full amount and tale of the offences imputed to him. Even in this case, it indicates a singular obliquity of feeling' thus to drag them forth and thrust them forward. But are they true? Doubtless, seeing that he who thrusts them forward can only do it out of a painful and rankling love of truth and justice; seeing that the voice which comes forth from his opium-eating mask proclaims him to be the foremost of Coleridge's admirers.' Reader, be not deluded and put to sleep by a name : look into the charges; sift them. Among them the accuser himself acknowledges that there is only one of any moment, the others having been lugged in to swell the counts of the indictment, through a somewhat over-anxious feara fear which would have been deemed malicious in any one but the foremost of his admirers-lest any tittle that could tell against Coleridge should be forgotten. One case, however, there is, he assures us, of real and palpable plagiarism' so, lest some cursed reviewer eight hundred or a thousand years hence' should make the discovery,' he determines to prevent him by forestalling him, and states it in full, as in admirership bound. The dissertation in the Biographia Literaria on the reciprocal relations of the esse and the cogitare' is asserted to be a translation from an essay in the volume of Schelling's Philosophische Schriften. True: the Opium-eater is indeed. mistaken in the name of the book; but that is of little moment, except as an additional mark of audacious carelessness in impeaching a great man's honour. The dissertation, as it stands in the Biographia Literaria, vol. i. pp. 254-261, is a literal translation from the introduction to Schelling's System of Transcendental Idealism: and though the assertion that there is no attempt in a single instance to appropriate the paper, by developing the arguments, or by diversifying the illustrations,' is not quite borne out by the fact, Coleridge's additions are few and slight. But the Opium-eater further says, that' Coleridge's essay is prefaced by a few words, in which, aware of his coincidence with Schelling, he declares his willingness to acknowledge himself indebted to so great a man, in any case where the truth would allow him to do so; but in this particular case, insisting on the impossibility that he could have borrowed arguments which he had first seen some years after he had thought out the whole hypothesis proprio marte.' That Coleridge never can have been guilty of such a piece of scandalous dishonesty, is clear even on the face of the charge: he never could apply the word hypothesis to that which has nothing hypothetical in it. The Opium-eater also is much too precise in his use of words to have done so, if he had known or considered what he was talking about. But he did not; and owing to this slovenly rashness of assertion, he has brought forward a heavy acccusation, which is utterly false and groundless, the distorted offspring of a benighted memory under the incubus of what shall we say? an ardent admiration. Not a single word does Coleridge say about the originality of his essay, one way or other. It is not prefaced by any remark. No mention is made of Schelling within a hundred pages of it, further than a quotation from him, in page 247, and a reference to him, in page 250. In an earlier part of the work, however, where Coleridge is giving an account of his philosophical education, there does occur a passage (pp. 149-153) about his obligations to Schelling, and his coincidences with him.

This no

doubt is the passage which the Opium-eater had in his head; but strangely indeed has he metamorphosed it. For Coleridge's vindication, it is necessary to quote it somewhat at length. It would be a mere act of justice to myself, were I to warn my readers, that an identity of thought, or even similarity of phrase, will not be at all times a certain proof that the passage has been borrowed from Schelling, or that the conceptions were originally learnt from him. Many of the most striking resemblances, indeed all the main and fundamental ideas, were born and matured in my mind, before I had ever seen a page of the German philosopher. God forbid that I should be suspected of a wish to enter into a rivalry with Schelling for the honours so unequivocally his right, not only as a great and original genius, but as the founder of the Philosophy of Nature, and as the most successful improver of the Dynamic system! To Schelling we owe the completion, and the most important victories, of this revolution in philosophy. To me it will be happiness and honour enough, should I succeed in rendering the system itself intelligible to my countrymen, and in the application of it to the most awful of subjects for the most important of purposes. Whether a work is the offspring of a man's own spirit, and the product of original thinking, will be discovered by those who are its sole legitimate judges, by better tests than the mere reference to dates. For readers in general, let whatever shall be found in this or any future work of mine, that resembles, or coincides with, the doctrines of my German predecessor, though contemporary, be wholly attributed to him: provided that the absence of distinct references to his books, which I could not at all times make with truth, as designating citations or thoughts actually derived from him, and which, I trust, would, after this general acknowledgment, be superfluous, be not charged on me as an ungenerous concealment or intentional plagiarism.' Yet the charge, which he thus earnestly deprecates, has been brought against him, and that too by a person entitling himself the foremost of his admirers.' Heaven preserve all honest men from such forward admirers ! The boy who rendered nil admirari, not to be admired, must have had something of prophecy in him, when he pronounced this to be an indispensable recipe for happiness. Coleridge, we see, was so far from denying or shuffling about his debts to Schelling, that he makes over every passage to him on which the stamp of his mind could be discovered. Of a truth too, if he had been disposed to purloin, he never would have stolen half a dozen pages from the head and front of that very work of Schelling's which was the likeliest to fall into his reader's hands, and the first sentence of which one could not read without detecting the plagiarism. Would any man think of pilfering a column from the porch of St. Paul's? The high praise which Coleridge bestows on Schelling would naturally excite a wish in such of his readers as felt an interest in his philosophy to know more of the great German. The first books of his they would take up would be his Naturphilosophie and his Transcendental Idealism: these are the works which Coleridge himself mentions; and the latter, from its subject, would attract them the most. For the maturer exposition of Schelling's philosophy in the Zeitschrift für spekulative Physik is hardly to be met with in England, having never been published except in that journal, and being still no more than a fragment. Indeed Coleridge himself does not seem to have known it; and Germany has for thirty years been looking in vain expectation for the doctrine of the greatest of her philosophers.

But even with the fullest conviction that Coleridge cannot have been guilty of intentional plagiarism, the reader will probably deem it strange that he should have transferred half a dozen pages of Schelling into his volume without any reference to their source. And strange it undoubtedly is. The only way I see of accounting for it is from his practice of keeping note-books, or journals of his thoughts, filled with observations and brief dissertations on such matters as happened to strike him, with a sprinkling now and then of extracts and abstracts from the books he was reading. If the name of the author from whom he took an extract was left out, he might easily, years