Review; that the hisses were at the author, because his " daily prose" was understood to be dedicated to the support of all that courtiers think should be supported:" what Mr. Coleridge endeavored to support being first the war against the would-be invader and subjugator of his country; secondly, the Church of England. No matter for the "compliments;" now in 1847; no, nor the disparagements either; "not of a pin ;"—as the tedious man says in Measure for Measure. I do not recur to them on their own account. Perhaps an editor may "lawfully" make himself pleasant to gentlemen whom afterwards he shall be obliged to expose as "whining and hypochondriacal poets" in his review; but it does seem rather a special, and somewhat pliant and elastic law, that can permit a gentleman to be sociable and friendly in his private behavior towards persons, whom, some years afterwards, casting his eye back on their literary and political career, it will be his duty to stigmatize, not only as men of "inordinate vanity and habitual effeminacy,"—that is a trifle,—but―upon whose heads he is bound to pour that dark flood of politico-personal accusations which may be seen and analysed at this day in pages 314-15 of vol. xxviii. of the Ed. Review. Utter disre By this test my Father's writings must be tried, and perhaps they will be found to stand it better than those of many an author, who has carefully abstained from any formal or avoidable borrowing. That his are "the works of one who requires something from another whereon to hang whatever he may himself have to say," is just such a specious objection as the former. But it should be considered that every writer, in moral or religious disquisition, starts in fact from previous thought, whether he expressly produces it or not. In the Aids to Reflection and in the Remains my Father has given his thoughts in the form of comments on passages in the works of other men; and this he did, not from want of originality of mind, but from physical languor,—the want of continuous energy, -together with the exhaustive intensity, with which he entered into that particular portion of a subject to which his attention was directed. I do not believe, however, that the value of what he has left behind is so much impaired by its immethodical form as people at first sight imagine. The method and general plan of a literary work are often quite arbitrary, and sometimes, for the sake of preserving regularity of structure in the architecture of a book, a writer is obliged to say a great deal which is but introductory to that of his own which he has to impart. 5 Ed. Review, vol. xxvii., p. 67. • This fine specimen of a modern Philippic,—an Edinboro' Anti-Lakıad, gard of consequences to the public,-vanity and effeminacy,violence and vulgarity,-fantastic trickery,-a morbid appetite for infamy with an ardent love of corruption,-folly that reels with a sickening motion from one absurdity to another,-adherence to notions that are audacious and insane, revolting and nonsensical, entire want of charity, common sense, wisdom, and humanity, romantic servility,-heartless vice,-these are attributes of the man-they cannot be confined solely to the politician. We may charitably presume, indeed, that he who penned this tirade (one stroke of which I have passed by as too "rank" for my pen), never imagined that the characters he was blackening in effigy would look a single shade the darker to any one who beheld them as a neighbor of flesh and blood in actual life-the life of truth and reality; but is it not a strange state of things, when we must believe respecting an organ of public opinion, that it is not most unconscientious only because it is out of the domain of conscience altogether, and declaims upon virtue and vice, wisdom and folly, the vice and folly of individuals—without any earnest feeling or belief on subjects, which demand the utmost earnestness and carefulness from all who think or speak of them? Thirty years ago many things were done by honorable men which honorable men would not do now, or would gain great dishonor by doing; money intended for the benefit of the public, especially for making men living members of the Church and followers of Christ, public functionaries too often thought they might employ according to their own private fancies; and such -is contained in the review of the Literary Life of August, 1817. I would wish any reader who has opportunity, to compare it with the language, tone, and character of Remarks on the present mode of conducting Critical Journals, contained in the second volume of this work. The reviewer adds, "This is the true history of our reformed Anti-Jacobin poets, the life of one of whom is here recorded;" and then takes up Mr. C. by himself again, still more in that style, which is described in the B. L., where it speaks of the critic losing himself in the pasquillant. The readers of the E. R. of that day were not fond of subtleties or finedrawn sketches; otherwise we might say of the writers: Νήπιοι, οὐκ ἴσασιν ὅσῳ πλέον ἥμισυ πάντος. Such criticism prevents the assailed from seeing their real faults, while it precludes others from any knowledge of their excellences. a notion has ever been acted on by men undoubtedly publicspirited and disinterested. A dimness of vision on the subject of duty prevailed among the servants of the public in general; and reviewers were not more clear-sighted than the rest; they thought themselves quite at liberty to make the public taste in literature subservient to their own purposes as members of a party; to choke up with rubbish and weeds the streams of Parnassus, if a political adversary might be annoyed thereby, though all parties alike had an interest in the water ;—to bring the most sweeping and frightful charges against their opponents in general terms, whether they had or had not the slightest power to verify them in particulars. Against this system the Biographia Literaria contains a strong protest, a protest to which private feeling has given a piquancy, but which in the main it has not corrupted or falsified. I regret that my Father, in exposing what he held to be wrong methods of acting on the public mind, should have been betrayed into any degree of discomposure in his own; but I feel confident, that he would not have given way to indignation on these subjects, if he had not believed his cause to be the cause of the public also; that the things of which he complained were parts-of a system, the offences of which against principle it was matter of principle to point out. I have not brought forward these grounds of complaint out of any resentment against those who showed so much against my Father, or (I say it for my own sake, not as deeming it important to others) in any feeling of disrespect for their characters in the main. I make no doubt of their possessing all the wit, worth, and wisdom, which their friends ascribe to them, and am better pleased to think that my Father was beset and hindered on his way by lions than by assailants of a more ignoble kind. I have recurred to those grounds of complaint in justification of the language used in this work on the "present mode of conducting public journals," and also to justify the children of Coleridge in republishing it, aware as we are, that it will have an interest and even an importance as a voice from the grave of one whom, now that he is removed from all eyes in this world, many desire to have heard and looked upon, which it had not when the author was still struggling through his earthly career. Some persons will say, that hostility which so little succeeded in its object of casting my Father's works into general contempt and oblivion, is unworthy of present regard. But there is a little anachronism in this. It is like saying, that because a few storms or an inclement season did not ruin a nascent colony, and years afterwards the colony is in a flourishing state, it was therefore of no consequence to the colonist and not worth mentioning in his history. The colony lives and blooms, like the baytree by the river side, while the poor worn colonist moulders in the grave. What is literary reputation now to the author of Christabel and the Lay Sermon ?" Those works are read by many at this time with as much pleasure as if they had never been declared worse than waste paper by the E. Review; they could not be slain by arrows of criticism if they had any vitality of their own; if they had it not, who would wish to give them a galvanized life-the only life which some productions ever have to sustain them-a mere emanation from the hot orb of party spirit? But he who wrote those works wanted a "little here below" ere he went hence and was no more seen: he wanted a little encouragement from friends, a little fair play from adversaries, a little sympathy, and a little money. That he wanted these things was at least a grievance, whether it was most the fault of others or chiefly his own. But I think it will be granted by impartial persons, that there was some fault and deficiency on this score in others; an honest argumentative review, if ever so severe, would have done my Father's works good, had the reviewer strained every nerve to convict them of absurdity. But he was reviewed in a way not to expose his errors, but to prevent people from attending to him at all; not to make him understood, but to stamp upon him a character of hopeless unintelligibility; with an artful show of contempt, and a sort of ridicule, that might have been employed with equal success upon Plato or 7 My Father has observed, that an insignificant work was sometimes reviewed for the sake of attacking the author; on the other hand, the more important works of obnoxious authors were often absolutely unnoticed. Some of his own were never reviewed in any leading journal; but Christabel, the Lay Sermon, and the Biographia, were caught up and violently twisted into whipcord to lash him who had written them, and drive him if possible out of the temple. upon Shakspeare. A searching criticism, even from a determined opponent, would have been to him like that excellent oil of reproof, concerning which the Psalmist says that it breaks not the head nor depresses it." A few words in conclusion on Mr. Coleridge's "abuse of his contemporaries ;" for on this score he was assailed in the review of the Biographia, with a particular reference to his critique on Bertram; though without a syllable to show that the censures it contained were unjust, or not rather a service to his contemporaries in general. This "abuse" was not, I think, of the same nature as that which he condemned in others. It was of two or three different kinds: the first, to which belong the Letters to Fox, Letters to Fletcher, strictures on Lord Grenville, character of Pitt, sketches of Buonaparte, consists in examinations of the public conduct and published opinions of eminent men under the light of principles; not a prejudging of their acts and opinions by supposed circumstances made to cast their coloring upon the former, as stained lamps dye the radiance of the flames they inclose; but an examination of the acts and opinions themselves, and only in due subordination to the former, if at all, a notice of circumstances which may have tended to produce their peculiar character. These treatises are chiefly composed of close reasoning 8 The same method of shooting at him from a distance and declining close fight is practised even now by writers of a newer school, who dispose of him en passant, in their way to other objects of attack, by settling that he was certainly a man of some genius, and had a modicum of light to dispense, going before the torch-bearers of their party with his little fancy lamp in his hand; but that he is by no means a safe or sound writer; though where, how, and why, he is unsafe and unsound, they are far too much in a hurry to state. They seem, indeed, to consider him not only unsafe, but so dangerous, that prudence requires them to keep a good way off; as if the poor old steed, though unsound and superannuated, might still give an uncomfortable kick, if you came too close to his heels. 9 The Character of Pitt, which I like the least of my Father's political writings, except certain passages against the same minister in his youthful Conciones ad Populum, the general drift of which, however, he has shown to be strictly in consonance with all his later politics,-and in these passages it is the tone and language not the opinions that he would ever have wished to retract,-commences with an account of Mr. Pitt's education and its effect on the formation of his mind; "he was cast," my Father |