SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.

[1772-1834.]

[The tendency to social grouping of leaders of an epochmaking literary school is illustrated in the close association and friendship between Wordsworth and Coleridge. They were mutually appreciative and stimulating, and some of the most critical months of their poetical lives were passed in almost constant companionship. By virtue of his moral strength and seriousness Wordsworth's accomplished work easily outranks his friend's, but Coleridge's natural poetic instincts were broader and more ideal. Accordingly his criticism of the Wordsworthian theory of poetry is of especial value, both for his sympathetic insight into its greatness and beauty, and not less for his recognition of its limitations. The following selections are interesting, aside from their importance as a discussion of the question of poetic diction, from their relation to the famous Lake school chapter of poetical history. Three other extracts from Coleridge's critical writings are also given, which amply justify the rank that has long been assigned him at the head of philosophical literary criticism. Though his metrical style is perhaps the most perfect of any of our modern poets, the diction of his prose is less to be commended. Nor in prose any more than in poetry did Coleridge ever build up to his own plans, and the Biographia Literaria, from which these passages come, is not the work that he might have made it. But the literary student finds mingled with its metaphysics many additional literary and æsthetic discussions of great value. His lectures on Shakspere and other dramatists and poets, though fragmentary, are full of thought and a great poet's appreciativeness.

Readers who are interested in comparative studies may find a suggestive topic in the relation of his criticism to that of German writers, especially Schlegel.]

From the Biographia Literaria. Chapter 1.

AT school I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very sensible, though at the same time a very severe, master.' He early moulded my taste to the preference of Demosthenes to Cicero, of Homer and Theocritus to Virgil, and again Virgil to Ovid. He habituated me to compare Lucretius (in such extracts as I then read), Terence, and, above all, the chaster poems of Catullus, not only with the Roman poets of the so-called silver and brazen ages, but with even those of the Augustan era; and on grounds of plain sense and universal logic, to see and assert the superiority of the former, in the truth and nativeness, both of their thoughts and diction. At the same time that we were studying the Greek tragic poets, he made us read Shakespeare and Milton as lessons: and they were lessons, too, which required most time and trouble to bring up, so as to escape his censure. I learnt from him that poetry, even that of the loftiest and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more and more fugitive causes. In the truly great poets, he would say, there is a reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of every word;

The Rev. James Boyer, many years Head Master of the Grammar School, Christ's Hospital.

and I well remember, that, availing himself of the synonymes to the Homer of Didymus, he made us attempt to show, with regard to each, why it would not have answered the same purpose, and wherein consisted the peculiar fitness of the word in the original text.

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In our own English compositions (at least for the last three years of our school education) he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might have been conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words. Lute, harp, and lyre; muse, muses, and inspirations; Pegasus, Parnassus, and Hippocrene,-were all an abomination to him. In fancy, I can almost hear him now, exclaiming, Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse, boy, Muse? Your Nurse's daughter, you mean! Pierian spring? Oh, ay! the cloisterpump, I suppose!" Nay, certain introductions, similes, and examples were placed by name on a list of interdiction. Among the similes there was, I remember, that of the Manchineel fruit, as suiting equally well with too many subjects; in which, however, it yielded the palm at once to the example of Alexander and Clytus, which was equally good and apt, whatever might be the theme. Was it Ambition? Alexander and Clytus! Flattery? Alexander and Clytus! Anger? Drunkenness? Pride? Friendship? Ingratitude? Late repentance? Still, still Alexander and Clytus! At length, the praises of agriculture having been exemplified in the

sagacious observation that, had Alexander been holding the plough, he would not have run his friend Clytus through with a spear, this tried and serviceable old friend was banished by public edict in secula seculorum. I have sometimes ventured to think that a list of this kind, or an index expurgatorius of certain well-known and ever-returning phrases, both introductory and transitional, including the large assortment of modest egotisms, and flattering illeisms, etc., etc., might be hung up in our law-courts, and both houses of parliament, with great advantage to the public, as an important saving of national time, an incalculable relief to his Majesty's ministers, but, above all, as ensuring the thanks of the country attorneys and their clients, who have private bills to carry through the house.

Be this as it may, there was one custom of our master which I cannot pass over in silence, because I think it imitable and worthy of imitation. He would often permit our theme exercises, under some pretext of want of time, to accumulate, till each lad had four or five to be looked over. Then placing the whole number abreast on his desk, he would ask the writer why this or that sentence might not have found as appropriate a place under this or that thesis and if no satisfying answer could be returned, and two faults of the same kind were found in one exercise, the irrevocable verdict followed; the exercise was torn up, and another on the same subject to be produced in addition to the tasks of the day. The reader will, I trust, excuse this

tribute of recollection to a man whose severities, even now, not seldom furnish the dreams by which the blind fancy would fain interpret to the mind the painful sensations of distempered sleep, but neither lessen nor dim the deep sense of my moral and intellectual obligations. He sent us to the University excellent Latin and Greek scholars, and tolerable Hebraists. Yet our classical knowledge was the least of the good gifts which we derived from his zealous and conscientious tutorage. He is now gone to his final reward, full of years, and full of honors, even of those honors which were dearest to his heart, as gratefully bestowed by that school, and still binding him to the interests of that school in which he had been himself educated, and to which during his whole life he was a dedicated thing.'

According to the faculty, or source, from which the pleasure given by any poem or passage was derived, I estimated the merit of such poem or passage. As the result of all my reading and meditation, I abstracted two critical aphorisms, deeming them to comprise the conditions and. criteria of poetic style; first, that not the poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine

'Coleridge spoke elsewhere in other terms of this famous schoolmaster. Lamb and Leigh Hunt were also in "Christ's Hospital," and have given their accounts of Mr. Boyer; Lamb in "Recollections of Christ's Hospital," where he speaks of him favorably, and in "Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago," where he describes him grimly enough; as does Hunt, in his Autobiography.