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after, forget whose property it was, especially when he had made it in some measure his own, by transfusing it into his own English. That this may happen I know from my own experience, having myself been lately puzzled by a passage which I had translated from Kant some years ago, and which cost me a good deal of search before I ascertained that it was not my own. Yet my memory in such minutiæ is tolerably accurate, while Coleridge's was notoriously irretentive. That this solution is the true one may, I think, be collected from the references to Schelling, in pp. 247 and 250. In both these places we find a couple of pages translated, with some slight changes and additions, from the latter part of Schelling's Abhandlungen zur Erläuterung des Idealismus der Wissenschaftslehre. In neither place are we told that we are reading a translation. Yet that the author cannot be conscious of any intentional plagiarism is clear, from his mentioning Schelling's name, and, in the latter place, even that of this particular work. Here again I would conjecture that the passages must have been transcribed from some old note-book; only in these instances Schelling's name was marked down at the end of the first extract and at the beginning of the second; and so the end of the first extract is ascribed to him, and he is cited at the beginning of the second. There is also another passage about the mystics, in pp. 140, 141, acknowledged to be translated from a recent continental writer, which comes from Schelling's pamphlet against Fichte. In this case, Coleridge knew that he was setting forth what he had borrowed from another: for he had not been long acquainted with this work of Schelling's, as may be gathered from his way of speaking of it in p. 153, and from his saying, in p. 150, that Schelling has lately avowed his affectionate reverence for Behmen.' Schelling's pamphlet had appeared eleven years before: but perhaps it did not find its way to England till the peace; and Coleridge, having read it but recently, inferred that it was a recent publication. These passages form well-nigh the sum of Coleridge's loans from Schelling; and with regard to these, on the grounds here stated, though I do not presume to rank myself among the foremost of his admirers, I readily acquit him of all suspicion of "ungenerous concealment or intentional plagiarism."

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Of the other alleged instances of plagiarism I will not speak. The Opiumeater himself admits that, as such, they "amount to nothing ;" and that the only thing reprehensible about them was Coleridge's "seeking to decline the very slight acknowledgments required." So that the pith of these charges lies not in the plagiarism, but in the denial of it; and of this we have no record except the Opium-eater's statement, to which, after such an exposure of its worthlessness in a grave accusation, few will attach much weight in lesser ones. Even when there is no conceivable motive to mislead his memory, his carelessness is perpetually letting it go astray. Thus he says, in p. 688, that Coleridge had been "personally acquainted, or connected as a pupil, with Eichhorn and Michaelis." Now this is incorrect with regard to both. Michaelis died in 1791, and Coleridge did not go to Göttingen till 1799. Nor was he Eichhorn's pupil: his own account in the Biographia is, that "Eichhorn's lectures on the New Testament were repeated to him from notes by a student from Ratzeburg." The latter difference indeed is so small, it would be captious to mention it, except as shewing the habitual inaccuracy of a writer who draws the matter of his tale from the recollection of conversations held a quarter of a century ago. How can such a person lay claim to credit in cases where a slight turn or shade of expression, a word or two more or less, may change the whole character of the story? Again, in p. 589, where he blurts out about German literature with the dashing ignorance he has often shewn on that subject, he says that its revival in the last century took place "upon the impulse of what cattle!-Bodmer on the one hand, and Gottsched on the other!" Ay! much as Sampson's revival took place upon the impulse of the Philistines, who called him to make them sport: much as Luther arose on the impulse of the Dominican sellers of indulgences.

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With the same truth might it be said, that the modern literature of England arose upon the impulse of Johnson and the Della Cruscans. Every body who knows anything about the matter, knows that the modern literature of Germany sprang up in opposition both to Bodmer and to Gottsched-that its fathers are Lessing, Klopfstock, and Winckelmann, and that Goethe and Kant are the master-minds who have poured their spirit into its limbs, and have guided and shaped its course. England," he adds, "for nineteen, and France for the twentieth, of all her capital works, has given the too servile law." What a "too servile law can be, might puzzle all the jurists from Lycurgus down to Savigny; but, waving this, to which of the two classes do Goethe and John Paul belong? As to the letters written during Coleridge's tour in Germany, of which the Opium-eater just after expresses his belief that they have never been printed, except in the first edition of the Friend, he may find them in the second volume of the Biographia Literaria.

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But to return a second very offensive passage about Coleridge is the coarse caricature of him, when he was living at the Courier Office; which, however, tickles the writer's fancy so that he cannot refrain from recurring to it in p. 685. Of the same cast is the account of the lectures which Coleridge delivered at the Royal Institution in 1808; in which this foremost of his admirers would fain persuade us that he exhibited no spark of his unquenchable genius; that there was "no heart, no soul, no strength of feeling, no power of originality; in which too even the pieces of poetry read by him are said to have produced little effect, with the exception of two or three from Ritson's Metrical Romances, chosen and marked out for him by the Opium-eater himself. What grand things we have been doing! cries the Clown, when Harlequin has been turning a hovel into a palace. Alexander's groom too was, no doubt, fully convinced that the victory of Arbela was mainly owing to him who had bridled Bucephalus, forgetting how that noble horse, though he bent his knees to the king, and seemed to feel whom he was carrying on his back, would let none but Alexander mount him. Is this an indecorous tone in speaking of a man whom I willingly acknowledge to be, perhaps, the most learned metaphysician, the closest logician, and one of the subtlest thinkers and most powerful writers in England? It would be so, but that, as all evil, from running counter to the laws of nature, by an inevitable doom, works its own destruction, so is this more rapidly the case with vanity, which is mostly baffled at the very moment of its outbreak. He who sets a trap to catch praise, is quite sure to catch blame and ridicule, and for the time forfeits the respect, which otherwise we might have been glad to pay him. With regard to the general effect of Coleridge's lectures in 1808, I happen, within the last few days, to have seen a lady of singularly delicate and cultivated taste, who attended the whole course, and who has assured me that, though it is true several interruptions occurred in consequence of Coleridge's ill health, her recollection of the lectures which he did deliver is entirely at variance with the description of them in Tait's Magazine. Nay, she cannot even call to mind the marvellous impression produced by the extracts from Ritson's Romances. But, even allowing that the Opium-eater's account were correct, how comes it that almost the only parts of Coleridge's life on which he dwells and enlarges are his failures, his weakness, his errors? Has he nothing to tell us about the Friend, beyond a tedious detail of the blunders which Coleridge made in publishing it at Penrith instead of at Kendal? Yet many and choice were the spirits to whom the Friend was as the dawning of a new life. Would he pass by Paradise Lost, content with giving us the invaluable piece of information, that Milton was so ill-trained in the school of Mammon, such a dolt in the arts of huckstering and higgling, that he could not get more than five pounds for a poem containing 10,565 lines? He" called upon Coleridge daily" in the Strand, and yet has nothing to record of the "subtlest and most comprehensive intellect that has yet existed among men," except that he "pitied his forlorn condition," and that Coleridge used to scream out," Mrs. Brain

bridge! I say, Mrs. Brainbridge!" He "saw Coleridge daily" for several months at Allan Bank; and again can find nothing worth telling of him, except that, when he borrowed a book, he used to write the owner's name in it. But I forget: he does tell us something more; he tells us that, in writing in the owner's name, he had a trick of dubbing him esquire. There is a story in one of Zelter's letters to Goethe, of two of Frederic's guards, one of whom said to the other, as the king went by, "Look what a bad hat the king has on!" "Stupid dog!" cried the other, "look what a head he has!" These speeches are typical of the two classes of mankind; but I should never have expected to see the Opium-eater in the more numerous one. In truth however, though here and there one meets with a fine passage, a great part of the three articles is so trashy, that one can hardly understand how such an able writer could fall so far below himself, so far below the greatness of his subject. The fact is, that it has hung all the while like a weight over his head, like the weight over the head of Tantalus, τὸν ἀιεὶ μενοινῶν κεφαλᾶς βαλεῖν εὐφροσύνας dara. It is remarkable, that Euripides represents this weight as the ball of the sun, swinging from heaven by its golden chains: thus, by a fine allegory, that which in itself is the source of light, and warmth, and joy, becomes an intolerable oppression to him who cannot look up to it with a free and open heart. Nor is the crime by which Tantalus incurred his punishment without its symbolical meaning. The popular tradition was, that he had served up his son at a banquet which he gave to the gods. He would, no doubt, have served up himself, in the prodigality of his ostentation, had he known how to do so without committing suicide: but the device of writing confessions had not been invented in those barbarous days; nor had it been discovered as yet that the seat of the gods is the one-shilling gallery. Euripides, however, whom we know to be a favorite poet with the Opium-eater, here again hit out a new explanation, no less to our purpose than the former. According to him, the sin of Tantalus was, that, having been admitted into the society of the gods, ἀκόλαστον εἶχε γλῶσσαν, αἰσχίστην νόσον, and went about blabbing what he had heard there.

The last of the three articles, headed with the name of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, that in the November number, is filled in great part with an account of Bishop Watson, whom I feel no calling to rescue from the Opium-eater's tender mercies. If he must be a man of prey, let him seek his prey among the children of earth. In the latter part, however, he returns to Coleridge; and, speaking in a very extravagant tone of the decay of his faculties, tries to account in this way for his having spent the last twenty-four years in the neighbourhood of London. The explanation is subtle, only too subtle. That Coleridge's poetical powers even were not "burnt out," is proved by the exquisite beauty of many of the short poems written in his latter years; though it is true that poetry then became to him little more than an occasional amusement. "You yourself," says Charles Lamb to him in his affectionate dedication," write no Christabels nor Ancient Mariners now." But the powers which he withdrew from poetry he threw into philosophy. That now became the great business of his life in all its highest forms:

"It swallowed up

His spiritual being: in it did he live,

And by it did he live: it was his life."

Philosophy in itself-the tracing the earth-piercing roots and the heaven-piercing branches of the tree of life; philosophy in its application to politics, and in its connexion with religion; the forwarding the great atonement of philosophy with religion, this was the task to which he devoted himself: and it was surely enough to afford ample employment, even for such a mighty intellect as Coleridge's. This was the habitation of his soul: and here he continued to the last,

"Springing from crystal step to crystal step
In the bright air, where none could follow him."

Those who knew Coleridge in his latter years will be quite as ready to believe that the setting sun is "burnt out," and that his glory passes away with his rays. That which was outward and accidental had passed away; but his spirit only reigned the more "in perfect kingliness." Among the motives which kept him so long near London, external ones were assuredly the strongest first, the res angusta domi, of which he speaks more than once; next, the state of his health, which rendered constant medical attendance almost an absolute necessity; and lastly, the affection of the admirable pair whose house was his home during the last eighteen years, and who richly deserve the earthly immortality bestowed on them in the dedication to the Friend.

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The Opium-eater, however, has not exhausted his tattle. He follows Coleridge to London, and tells us that he became "domesticated under Mr. Basil Montagu's roof-a connexion the most trying to friendship, and which, in this instance, led to a perpetual rupture of it." He then relates a story, after his fashion, about the cause of this rupture, "simply as the tale was then generally borne upon the breath, not of scandal, but of jest and merriment;" and concludes by adding that "the result, however, was no jest; for bitter words ensued-words that festered in the remembrance; and a rupture between the parties followed, which no reconciliation ever healed." Now, whether such a quarrel ever did take place, I know not; nor is it worth the trouble of inquiring. The best thing that can betide a quarrel is to be forgotten. Even the Opium-eater does not vouch for the truth of his anecdote: he merely reports it "as it was borne on the breath of jest and merriment." He is going through his exercises for taking his degree as eaves-dropper to the green-room. But there is one thing for which he does vouch twice over, that the rupture was perpetual, and that "no reconciliation ever healed it." Now this, I am happy to know, is utterly false for it would have been painful to think of such a gentle spirit as Coleridge's, which "altered not, even where it alteration found," separated by a life-long breach from a person with whom he had once lived as a friend. Whether there ever was a rupture, I say, I know not; but at all events the friendship was renewed, and restored to a footing of intimacy. I know this even from evidence which is before the world-from Mr. Irving's dedication of the second volume of his Sermons to Mr. Basil Montagu, which contains the following remarkable declaration: "I must ever acknowledge myself more beholden to our sage friend, Mr. Coleridge (whose acquaintance and friendship I owe to you), than to all men besides, for the knowledge of the truth as it is in Jesus." This was written in 1828 and it may further serve to shew that Coleridge, when he went to London, did not “fly away," as the Opium-eater asserts, "from all commerce with his own soul, and bury himself in the profoundest abstractions from life and human sensibilities." He, of whom Mr. Irving, in the maturity of his manhood, after years spent in the ministry in the same town with Dr. Chalmers, could say, that "to him more than to all men besides, he was beholden for the knowledge of the truth as it is in Jesus," had not been taking refuge in profound abstractions from the prospect of his own decayed powers, but had been mounting from one pinnacle of knowledge, from one peak of truth to a higher, leaving the flowers of earth indeed below him, to shed their bloom and fragrance around the track of his former footsteps, while he trod "on shadowy ground, sinking deep, and aloft ascending, till he breathed in worlds to which the heaven of heavens is but a veil." A like generous and affectionate acknowledgment of his obligations to Coleridge, as having been "more profitable to his faith in orthodox doctrine, to his spiritual understanding of the word of God, and to his right conception of the Christian church, than any or all of the men with whom he had entertained friendship or conversation," we find, in 1825, in Mr. Irving's noble dedication to him of his Orations for Missionaries after the Apostolical School. When he made him this "offering of a heart which loved his heart, and of a mind which looked up with reverence to his mind," he must already have

been some time his friend and disciple: and, at the time when this acquaintance began, Mr. Basil Montagu must have been enjoying the happiness of being Coleridge's friend. So he was in 1829: and knowing how to prize that happiness, he was then in the habit of attending Coleridge's Thursday evening conversations, where one of my own friends met him. And one of the six mourning rings which Coleridge bequeathes in his will, is "to his old and very kind friend, Basil Montagu, Esq.”

But I desist. Although I could not withstand the temptation to expose some of the misrepresentations and falsehoods about Coleridge in the Opiumeater's articles, I did not sit down with any purpose of answering them. That, indeed, is needless: they answer themselves. All the persons I have met with who have read them, have risen from them with the same disgust. From Tait's advertisements, I see that this is not the opinion of the newspaper critics, who seem to be quite bewitched with them. So the writer knew the palates he was catering for, and will probably plume himself on his success; although, if Phocion were living in these days, and were by any strange chance to fall under the applause of the public press, he would still cry, with more bitterness than ever, What have I been doing that is so very foolish or wrong? To those who knew Coleridge, to those-and not a few there are-whose hearts glow with gratitude and love toward him, as their teacher and master, the establisher of their faith, and the emancipater of their spiritual life from the bondage of the carnal understanding-to such persons a Vatican all libels against him would be of no moment; except so far as it filled them with pain and sorrow, to see that great gift, which enables the wise and good to endow their thoughts with a life coeval and co-extensive with the earth, turned into a means of slander, and a tool of malice. My object in taking up my pen was to remind those from whose memory it may have slipped, among others the Opium-eater himself, of an admirable passage in the Friend, which he must have read formerly, but must have entirely forgotten-a passage in which Coleridge inveighs, with his usual thoughtful and fervid eloquence, against all such tell-tales and anecdote-mongers as gather up what their betters let drop and sweep away, to vend the contents of their dust-pan under the name of biography. Never before did a dead man lift up an arm of such power to smite the defacer of his tomb. Had the Opium-eater's articles been lying before him, he could not have described them more accurately. The Opiumeater must assuredly have seen this passage, must have read it, must have admired it when he read it. But his heart did not impel him to speak worthily of his glorious master; wherefore Nemesis sponged it out of his memory, lest it should frighten him, and thus save him from falling into the condemnation he merited. May it raise him out of it! May it stir him to make a full and generous atonement to the great man whom he has been treating thus dishonorably. Else it will pursue him like that which, he will call to mind, is the most horrible of all curses, "the curse in a dead man's eye."

The passage I refer to occurs in the introduction to the Life of Sir Alexander Ball; and, as I have said already, if the Opium-eater's articles had been lying before Coleridge, he could not have given a more complete analysis of the feelings which inspired and dictated them :

"An inquisitiveness into the minutest circumstances and casual sayings of eminent contemporaries is indeed quite natural: but so are all our follies; and the more natural they are, the more caution should we exert in guarding against them. To scribble trifles, even on the perishable glass of an inn window, is the mark of an idler but to engrave them on the marble monument sacred to the memory of the departed great, is something worse than idleness. The spirit of genuine biography is in nothing more conspicuous than in the firmness with which it withstands the cravings of worthless curiosity, as distinguished from the thirst after useful knowledge, For in the first place, such anecdotes as derive their whole and sole interest from the great name of VOL. VII.-Jan. 1835.

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