had taken up a character which he was peculiarly ill qualified for supporting.

The absurdity in this case, we think, is palpable and glaring; but it is exactly of the same nature with that which infects the whole substance of the work, a puerile ambition of singularity engrafted on an unlucky predilection for truisms, and an affected passion for simplicity and humble life, most awkwardly combined with a taste for mystical refinements and all the gorgeousness of obscure phraseology. His taste for simplicity is evinced by sprinkling up and down his interminable declamations a few descriptions of baby-houses, and of old hats with wet brims; and his amiable partiality for humble life, by assuring us that a wordy rhetorician, who talks about Thebes and allegorizes all the heathen mythology, was once a peddler, and making him break in upon his magnificent orations with two or three awkward notices of something that he had seen when selling winter raiment about the country, or of the changes in the state of society which had almost annihilated his former calling.

BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE

COLERIDGE'S "BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA"

1817

[Written by John Wilson; published in the October number.]

It is impossible to read many pages of this work without thinking that Mr. Coleridge conceives himself to be a far greater man than the public is likely to admit; and we wish to waken him from what seems to us a most ludicrous delusion. He seems to believe that every tongue is wagging in his praise, that every ear is open to imbibe the oracular breathings of his inspiration. Even when he would fain convince us that his soul is wholly occupied with some other illustrious character, he breaks out into laudatory exclamations concerning himself; no sound is so sweet to him as that of his own voice; the ground is hallowed on which his footsteps tread; and there seems to him

something more than human in his very shadow. He will read no books that other people read; his scorn is as misplaced and extravagant as his admiration; opinions that seem to tally with his own wild ravings are holy and inspired, and, unless agreeable to his creed, the wisdom of ages is folly, and wits whom the world worship dwarfed when they approach his venerable side. His admiration of nature or of man we had almost said his religious feelings towards his God - are all narrowed, weakened and corrupted and poisoned by inveterate and diseased egotism; and instead of his mind reflecting the beauty and glory of nature, he seems to consider the mighty universe itself as nothing better than a mirror in which, with a grinning and idiot self-complacency, he may contemplate the physiognomy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge...

The truth is that Mr. Coleridge is but an obscure name in English literature. In London he is well known in literary society, and justly admired for his extraordinary loquacity; he has his own little circle of devoted worshipers, and he mistakes their foolish babbling for the voice of the world. His name, too, has been often foisted into Reviews, and accordingly is known to many who never saw any of his works. In Scotland few know or care anything about him; and perhaps no man who has spoken and written so much, and occasionally with so much genius and ability, ever made so little impression on the public mind. Few people know how to spell or pronounce his name; and were he to drop from the clouds among any given number of well-informed and intelligent men north of the Tweed, he would find it impossible to make any intelligible communication respecting himself, for of him and his writings there would prevail only a perplexing dream, or the most untroubled ignorance. We cannot see in what the state of literature would have been different, had he been cut off in childhood, or had he never been born; for, except a few wild and fanciful ballads, he has produced nothing worthy remembrance. Yet, insignificant as he assuredly is, he cannot put pen to paper without a feeling that millions of eyes are fixed upon him; and he scatters his Sibylline Leaves around him with as majestical an air as if a

1 Coleridge published a collection of poems under this title, in the same year with the Biographia.

crowd of enthusiastic admirers were rushing forward to grasp the divine promulgations, instead of their being, as in fact they are, coldly received by the accidental passenger, like a lying lottery puff or a quack advertisement.

This most miserable arrogance seems, in the present age, confined almost exclusively to the original members of the Lake School, and is, we think, worthy of especial notice, as one of the leading features of their character. It would be difficult to defend it either in Southey or Wordsworth, but in Coleridge it is altogether ridiculous. Southey has undoubtedly written four noble poems, Thalaba, Madoc, Kehama, and Roderick; and if the poets of this age are admitted by the voice of posterity to take their places by the side of the mighty of former times in the Temple of Immortality, he will be one of that sacred company. Wordsworth, too, with all his manifold errors and defects, has, we think, won to himself a great name, and in point of originality will be considered as second to no man of this age. They are entitled to think highly of themselves, in comparison with their most highly gifted contemporaries, and therefore, though their arrogance may be offensive, as it often is, it is seldom or ever utterly ridiculous. But Mr. Coleridge stands on much lower ground, and will be known to future times only as a man who overrated and abused his talents, who saw glimpses of that glory which he could not grasp, who presumptuously came forward to officiate as High Priest at mysteries beyond his ken, and who carried himself as if he had been familiarly admitted into the penetralia of Nature, when in truth he kept perpetually stumbling at the very threshold.

This absurd self-elevation forms a striking contrast with the dignified deportment of all the other great living poets. Throughout all the works of Scott, the most original-minded man of this generation of poets, scarcely a single allusion is made to himself, and then it is with a truly delightful simplicity, as if he were not aware of his immeasurable superiority to the ordinary run of mankind. From the rude songs of our forefathers he has created a kind of poetry which at once brought over the dull scenes of this our unimaginative life all the pomp, and glory, and magnificence of a chivalrous age. He speaks to us like some ancient bard awakened from his tomb, and singing

of visions not revealed in dreams, but contemplated in all the freshness and splendour of reality. Since he sung his bold and wild and romantic lays, a more religious solemnity breathes from our mouldering abbeys, and a sterner grandeur frowns over our time-shattered castles. He has peopled our hills with heroes, even as Ossian peopled them, and, like a presiding spirit, his image haunts the magnificent cliffs of our lakes and seas. And if he be, as every heart feels, the author of those noble prose works that continue to flash upon the world, to him exclusively belongs the glory of wedding Fiction and History in delighted union, and of embodying in imperishable records the manners, character, soul, and spirit of Caledonia.... What has Campbell ever obtruded on the public of his private history? Yet his is a name that will be hallowed forever in the souls of pure and aspiring and devout youth. . . . Byron indeed speaks of himself often, but his is like the voice of an angel heard crying in the storm or the whirlwind, and we listen with a kind of mysterious dread to the tones of a being whom we scarcely believe to be kindred to ourselves, while he sounds the depths of our nature and illuminates them with the lightnings of his genius.... We could easily add to the illustrious list; but suffice it to say that our poets do in general bear their faculties meekly and manfully, trusting to their conscious powers and the susceptibility of generous and enlightened natures, not yet extinct in Britain, whatever Mr. Coleridge may think.. But we need not speak of poets alone (though we have done so at present to expose the miserable pretensions of Mr. Coleridge), but look through all the bright ranks of men distinguished by mental power, in whatever department of human science. . . . Look at the most inventive spirits of this country, those whose intellects have achieved the most memorable triumphs. Take, for example, Leslie 1 in physical science, and what airs of majesty does he ever assume? What is Samuel Coleridge compared to such a man? What is an ingenious and fanciful versifier to him who has, like a magician, gained command over the very elements of nature, who has realized the fictions of poetry, and to whom frost and fire are ministering and obedient spirits? But of this enough. It is a position that doubtless might require 1 Sir John Leslie, a distinguished physicist and mathematician.

...

some modification, but in the main it is and must be true that real greatness, whether in intellect, genius, or virtue, is dignified and unostentatious, and that no potent spirit ever whimpered over the blindness of the age to his merits, and, like Mr. Coleridge, or a child blubbering for the moon, with clamorous outcries implored and imprecated reputation. . . .

...

We have felt it our duty to speak with severity of this book and its author, and we have given our readers ample opportunities to judge of the justice of our strictures. We have not been speaking in the cause of literature only, but, we conceive, in the cause of morality and religion. For it is not fitting that he should be held up as an example to the rising generation (but on the contrary it is most fitting that he should be exposed as a most dangerous model) who has alternately embraced, defended, and thrown aside all systems of philosophy and all creeds of religion; who seems to have no power of retaining an opinion, no trust in the principles he defends, but who fluctuates from theory to theory, according as he is impelled by vanity, envy, or diseased desire of change, and who, while he would subvert and scatter into dust those structures of knowledge reared by the wise men of this and other generations, has nothing to erect in their room but the baseless and air-built fabrics of a dreaming imagination.

THE COCKNEY SCHOOL OF POETRY

1817-18

[A savage series of articles under this title, attacking Leigh Hunt and his friends, began to appear in Blackwood's in the October number, 1817. They were signed "Z," and the authorship has never been discovered; it has been attributed to Scott, John Wilson, John Gibson Lockhart, and others, — perhaps most plausibly to Lockhart. The following extracts are from the first article and the fourth; the latter appeared in August, 1818. Aside from their interest in connection with Keats, the articles are significant as exhibiting the connection between the political and the literary animosities of the period; see especially, for the Toryism of this critic, the sentence: "His works exhibit no reverence either for God or man; neither altar nor throne have any dignity in his eyes."]

WHILE the whole critical world is occupied with balancing the merits, whether in theory or in execution, of what is com